TBR News February 4, 2012

Feb 04 2012

The Voice of the White House

          Washington, D.C., February 3, 2012: “I said it before and I repeat that it is not a good idea to poke fun at or disrupt Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Russia basicially controls Europe’s natural gas and most of its oil and now that a fierce winter, caused by the global weather changes, has eastern Europe locked in an icy death grip, suddenly Russia is turning off their natural gas and oil shipments to some countries. These are the so-called “Nato people’ that the American far right, aided and abetted by the vicious CIA that were trying to surround Russia with an iron curtain of their own, designed to get their hands on the same oil and gas they missed the boat on in 1992. It is well –known inside the Beltway that the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ was instigated and funded by the CIA and that as America’s grip on eastern Europe weakens, there is no question that the Ukraine will rejoin the Russian Republic. This will include the huge naval base at Sebastopol in the Crimea that Washington has lusted after for decades.”

 

Putin says thank you to ‘anti-Orange’ activists

February 4, 2012,
by Alexsey Druginyn)
RIA Novosti
 
            Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has thrown his support behind a pro-government rally to be held in Moscow on Saturday. The demo is in opposition to the USA sponsored protest march “For Fair Elections,” which is a Ukrainian-style “Orange” revolt.
            “People are heading to Poklonnaya Hill to state their sincere anti-Orange position. I am grateful to them and I share their views,” Putin told Interfax news agency on Friday.
            “It will be cold… so I call on everyone who shows up to take care of themselves, to be cautious and think about their health and at the very least not to take children with them,” the prime minister added.
            He said participants in the rally could be vulnerable to criticism that their loyalty is being bought by the government.
            “Organizing an event in support of the authorities is somewhat different from other similar actions. The people participating feel a threat to their interest, the threat of losing something. But that’s exactly why they come out to voice their position,” he said.
            Putin also dismissed allegations that people working in the public sector are being pressured by their superiors to attend the rally. He admitted the scenario was possible, but branded it deplorable. “There is certainly nothing good about it. But I would not overestimate how big a role this factor could play,” he said.
            The rally at Poklonnaya Hill aims to showcase the discontent of a section of the public with what the organizers call “an Orange movement,” in a reference to the Ukrainian Orange revolution of 2004-2005 which ended in the ouster of the government of the day. Supporters say Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was an example of people taking power into their own hands. Its critics, however, say it was a foreign-sponsored coup.
             Organizers of the Poklonnaya rally fall into the latter category, and believe a similar process is taking place in Russia. They say the organizers of the Bolotnaya Square rally want to use public discontent over December’s elections to overthrow the government. The draft resolution of the pro-government rally says the “Fair Elections” protest “undermines the very idea of democracy” and “wants to plunge the country into chaos, foreign intervention and violation of our sovereignty.”

 

Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Wiesel and the Anna Frank Diaries: Deceptions in a good cause?

January 30, 2011

by Craig Gottlieb

            Three of the greatest icons of the Jewish community; Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Wiesel and the ever-popular Anne Frank diaries share a common denominator: All of them are deliberate deceptions! Yes, shocking as that sounds, the trio of iconoclastic entities were deliberately created to excite sympathy for a Jewish community that had suffered persecutions by the so-called Christian communities in the Western world for thousands of years!  These are the major building blocks in a defensive wall around the Jewish community that will serve to not only shame their Christian persecutors but serve as a mighty fortification to prevent any further pogroms or Holocausts and thereby protect and serve the Jewish community!

With this positive thought well in mind, let us show the brilliant techniques by which we find both protection and gain moral superiority over out enemies!

            Simon Wiesenthal was born, December 31, 1908 in Buczacz, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria then part of Austria-Hungary, now Buchach, Ternopal oblast in Ukraine. Before World War I, most of the current Ternopil oblast was part of Austro-Hungarian province Galicia. Only the northern-most section was within the borders of Imperial Russia. In 1905, his father, Asher Wiesenthal fled from the anti-Semetic pogroms of Russia and became a resident of Bucsacz where he traded in sugar, beets and other commodoties. As the Wiesenthal family now lived inside the Austrian Empire, his father was drafted into the Imperial and Royal Austrian army and died in combat on the Eastern Front in 1917.

            When the Communists took control of Galacia, Wiesenthal and his family fled to Vienna where Wiesenthal and his brother went to school until the Russians left Galacia in 1917 at which time the family returned to  Buczacz. At the Humanistic Gymnasium, where Simon went to school during those years, he met his future wife Cyla Müller, whom he would marry in 1936. In 1925, his mother remarried and moved with his brother to the Carpathian Mountains. Simon opted to continue his studies in Buczacz, After Simon fgraudated from high school in 1927, he was subsequently denied admission to the Polish Lwów Polytechnic because of quota restrictions on Jewish students. Jews were very unpoular in Poland as well as Russia  In 1929, he attended the Czech Technical University in Prague where he was highly regarded as a “highly creative story-teller.” Although Wiesenthal claimed he graduated in 1932, he did not complete his degree.

Returning to Galicia in late 1935, Wiesenthal claimed he was finally allowed to enter Lwów Polytechnic and tried to earn the advanced degree that would allow him to practice architecture in Poland. However, Lwów archives have no record of his having studied there.

             According to Wiesenthal, following his marriage to Cyla in 1936, he opened his own architectural office in Lviv where he specialized in elegant villas, which wealthy Polish Jews were building, despite the threats of Nazism to the west. He repeatedly claimed he finished his final job a week before the German invasion, which began on September 1, 1939. However, a creful search of Polish records indicate he never registered or worked as a builder or architect and the résumé Wiesenthal himself wrote at the end of the war stated that he was working as a supervisor in a Lviv furniture factory from 1935 to December 1939

             Wiesenthal was living in Lwów (then part of Poland and now Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine), when World War II began in September of 1939 As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine were annexed by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939. Wiesenthal’s stepfather and stepbrother were killed by agents of the NKVD, the Soviet state security and secret police. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Wiesenthal and his family were captured and he and his family were sent to a ghetto. Wiesenthal later claimed that thanks to the intervention of a man named Bodnar, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who, on July 6, 1941, saved him from execution by the Nazis then occupying Lviv. This account is contradicted by documentation. In 1945, Wiesenthal testified to war-crimes investigators that he had been arrested on July 13, after the executions had ceased, and managed to escape “through a bribe” before the executions resumed The head SS soldier was Heinrich Gunthert, who asked Wiesenthal, on one occasion, where he was educated. Wiesenthal, remembering that an educated Jew was a dead Jew, lied and said he went to a trade school. Several men stated that he lied, and Gunthert confronted him. He asked Wiesenthal why he lied, and Wiesenthal confessed. Gunthert respected Wiesenthal for his education and gave him the job of architectural design and a comfortable office.

            There is no corroboration for the above account. In Wiesenthal’s testimony to the War crime investigators in May 1945, he does not mention these incidents or Kohlrautz’s part in them, and neither were the events included in an affidavit he made in August 1954, recounting his wartime experiences. He did, however, mention senior inspector Kohlrautz in both, stating that he was killed in the battle for Berlin in April 1945. Wiesenthal later told his biographers that Kohlrautz had been killed on the Russian front in 1944

            After the war and his liberation from his camp, Wiesenthal claimed he began working for the U.S. Army, gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials. Wiesenthal’s own résumé does not mention this work for the Americans, but lists his occupation at the time as the vice-chairman of the Jewish Central Committee for the U.S. zone, based in Linz, Austria

            During this time, Wiesenthal claimed to be instrumental in the capture and conviction of the transport manager of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. Wiesenthal was known to be helping in the manhunt for the former Nazi official, but the extent of his involvement with Eichmann’s capture remains disputed. He was invited by Yad Vashem to talk about his part in tracking Eichmann down, but he failed to mention that his whole correspondence had gone through the Israeli embassy and that Israeli intelligence had been involved. Wiesenthal’s claims angered Isser Harel, then-head of the Mossad, who published his own memoirs in 1971 in which he made no mention of Wiesenthal. Harel’s account has been disputed at book length, but Wiesenthal’s contributions to Eichmann’s capture have never been confirmed.

            In 1962, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, which began to focus on other cases which he used to gain considerable media notice. The Center was funded by the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency, who also paid Wiesenthal a monthly stipend of $300 for about 10 years.

            A number of historical writers have bluntly called Wiesenthal as “a liar” and one wrote that Wiesenthal would “concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career. There are so many inconsistencies between his three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous documents that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative from them. Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.”

            The Wiener Library supports the negative evaluation of Wiesenthal. The Library’s director Ben Barkow stated that “accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made”.

Although Wiesenthal later claimed to have been in 13 concentration camps, including five death camps, he had in fact been in no more than six camps

            Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel aka Wiesel Lázár; born September 30, 1928)[1] is a Romanian-born Jewish  writer, professor, political activist, In a recent California court case, Elie Wiesel, a self-styled eyewitness of the so called Holocaust, stated under oath in a court case that while at Auschwitz he was tattooed on his left arm with the number: A7713.
            Wiesel added that his father’s tattooed number was: A7712.
            But, according to a former prisoner at Auschwitz, Hungarian Jew Miklos Gruner, who was at the camp the same time claimed by Elie Wiesel, the number A7713 was assigned to a very different person, Gruner’s friend: a Lazar Wiesel, NOT Elie Wiesel.
            The first names “Elie” and “Lazar” are diminutives of the Hebrew name, Eleazar. Thus, Gruner contends, Elie Wiesel has committed a crass deception and imposture by pretending to be Gruner’s friend and former fellow prisoner, Lazar Wiesel.
            First of all, let’s take a close look at Elie Wiesel’s left arm. And while we’re at it, at his right arm as well. Evidently, no sign of an imprinted tattoo can be seen.
            Second, Gruner – who in his book “Identity Theft” sets out to prove that Elie Wiesel is a fraud – received a letter from the Auschwitz Museum in October of 2003, affirming that the number, A7713, claimed by Elie Wiesel as his, was indeed in fact assigned to Gruner’s friend, Lazar Wiesel, recorded as being born on September 4 1913, NOT September 30 1928, the birth date of Elie Wiesel.
            The Auschwitz Museum Letter also affirmed to Gruner that the number, A7712, which Elie Wiesel attributes to his father Shlomo, was actually given to Abraham Wiesel, Lazar’s older brother.
            In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel opens with the statement that upon arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in June of 1944 when Wiesel was only 15, he saw before him: “Gigantic flames leaping up from a ditch into which Jewish babies were thrown.”
            Gruner calls this an outright lie, asserting in his book, Identity Theft: “I had never seen ditches with open fire where children were burning.”
            This was later verified in 1988 by American Federal Court expert in execution technology, Fred Leuchter, who reported that Auschwitz, being built upon a swamp with a high water table, made it impossible for bodies to be burned in ditches.
            In January of 1945, the Auschwitz prisoners, which included Miklos Gruner and his friend, Lazar Wiesel, were transferred to Buchenwald.
             Liberated by the Americans that spring, a photo was taken by a US soldier that was later entitled, “Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald.”
            Elie Wiesel has referred to this photo as proof of his internment, and has pointed to a man on the second row as being himself.
            Again, Gruner says “No!” noting that the man Wiesel claims to be himself was a man in his thirties and not a boy of 16, the age Elie Wiesel would have been at the time.
            Notice that the man has an aquiline nose and has full lips while the teenage Wiesel’s nose is obviously concave and his lips, thin.
            The thirty-year-old looking man also has a receding hair line while the hairline of Wiesel when a teen is well up to the base of his forehead.
            In 1986, Miklos Gruner was invited to meet Elie Wiesel in Stockholm. The Swedish hosts informed him that this was the same person he knew in the camps under the name Lazar Wiesel.
            Upon meeting Elie Wiesel, Gruner said afterward: “I was stunned to see a man I didn’t recognize at all – he was certainly not my friend and fellow prisoner.”
            Gruner also recalled that he was surprised that Wiesel could not speak Hungarian but spoke English with a strong French accent even though Elie Wiesel claims he grew up in Sighet, Hungary.
            Gruner and all the other evidence makes a strong case that the Nobel Prize Laureate Wiesel is nothing less than an impostor!

            In 1934, Otto Frank, a German Jewish businessman,   and his family moved to Amsterdam where he bought a spice business, Opekta, which manufactures Pectin used in making household jellies.
            On May 1940, after the Germans occupied Amsterdam Otto remained in that city while his mother and brother moved to Switzerland. Otto remained in Amsterdam where his firm did business with the German Wehrmacht. From 1939 to 1944, Otto sold Opeka, and Pectin, to the German army. Pectin was a food preservative, and an anti infectant balm for wounds and as a thickener for raising blood volume in blood transfusions. Pectin was used as an emulsifier for petroleum, gelatized gasoline for fire bombing. By supplying the Wehrmacht, Otto Frank became, in the eyes of the Dutch, a Nazi collaborator.

            In 1980, Otto sued two Germans, Ernst Romer and Edgar Geiss, for distributing literature denouncing the diary as a forgery. The trial produced a study by official German handwriting experts that determined everything in the diary was written by the same person. The person that wrote the diaries had used a ballpoint pen throughout. Unfortunately for Herr Frank, the ballpoint pen was not available until 1951 whereas Anne was known to have died of typhus in 1944.
            Because of the lawsuit in a German court, the German state forensic bureau, the Bundes Kriminal Amt [BKA] forensically examined the manuscript, which at that point in time consisted of three hardbound notebooks and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, with special forensic equipment.
            The results of tests, performed at the BKA laboratories, showed that “significant” portions of the work, especially the fourth volume, were written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available before 1951, the BKA concluded those sections must have been added subsequently.
            In the end, BKA clearly determined that none of the diary handwriting matched known examples of Anne’s handwriting. The German magazine, Der Spiegel, published an account of this report alleging that (a) some editing postdated 1951; (b) an earlier expert had held that all the writing in the journal was by the same hand; and thus (c) the entire diary was a postwar fake.
            The BKA information, at the urgent request of the Jewish community, was redacted at the time but later inadvertently released to researchers in the United States.

The purported diary begins on June 12, 1942, and runs to December 5,1942 . It consists of a book that is six by four by a quarter inches. In addition to this first diary, Anne supplemented it with personal letters. Otto said Anne heard Gerrit Bolkestein in a broadcast say: ~ “Keep a diary, and he would publish after the war”, and that’s why Anne’s father claimed she rewrote her diaries second time in 1944.
            In this second edition, the new writer changed, rearranged and occasionally combined entries of various dates.
            When Anne allegedly rewrote the diaries, she used a ball point pen, which did not exist in 1945, and the book took on an extremely high literary standard, and read more like a professional documentary than a child’s diary. In Anne’s second edition her writing style, and handwriting, suddenly matured.
            The actual diary of Anne Frank contained only about 150 notes, according to The New York Times, of October 2 ,1955.
            In 1944, German authorities in occupied Holland determined that Otto Frank had been swindling then via his extensive and very lucrative Wehrmacht contracts. The German police then raided his apartment attic, and the eight Jews were sent to Westerbork work camp and forced to perform manual labor .Otto himself was sent to Auschwitz.. Anne, her sister Margot, and her mother, subsequently died of typhus in another camp.
            In 1945, after being liberated from German custody, Otto returned to Amsterdam, where he claimed he found Anne’s diary cleverly hidden in the Annex’s rafters. However, another version has a Dutch friend, Meip Geis finding Anne’s diary of fictional events, which she then gave to Otto Frank.
            Otto took what he claimed were Anne’s letters and notes, edited them into a book, which he then gave to his secretary, Isa Cauvern, to review. Isa Cauvern and her husband Albert Cauvern , a writer, authored the first diary.
            Questions were raised by some publishers as to whether Isa and Albert Cauvern, who assisted Otto in typing out the work used the original diaries or whether they took it directly from Mr. Frank’s personal transcription.
            American author, Meyer Levin wrote the third and final edition

Mr. Gottlieb is a founding member and part-owner of the ‘WAF’, Wehrmacht Awards Forum, a group that was set up with funding and support from several Jewish organizations to include the Wiesenthal Association and elements of the Israeli Mossad. It purpose has been to “locate and identify Americans and British individuals” who express an interest in Nazi doctrine and beliefs and are viewed as “both anti-Israel and anti-Semetic.’ Lists of members of this, and other ostensible “collector groups” are routinely supplied to both the American FBI and the DHS.

Syria “massacre” puts pressure on Moscow to back U.N.

February 4, 2012

by Mariam Karouny and Stephen Brown

Reuters

             BEIRUT/MUNICH – Syrian forces killed more than 200 people in an assault on the city of Homs, activists said, the bloodiest day of an 11-month uprising giving sudden urgency to a push for a U.N. resolution calling for President Bashar al-Assad to cede power. The Arab League, Europe and the United States leaned hard on Assad’s veto-wielding ally Russia to let the Security Council pass a resolution later on Saturday backing an Arab call for Assad to transfer powers to a deputy.

Moscow said the resolution was not “hopeless,” but it needed to be adjusted to avoid “taking sides in a civil war.”

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe called the killings in Homs a “massacre” and a “crime against humanity.” In remarks clearly aimed at Moscow, he said any country that blocked U.N. action would bear a “heavy responsibility in history.”

After what U.S. officials called “vigorous” talks between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Moscow announced that Lavrov would fly to Syria in three days to meet Assad.

Death tolls cited by activists and opposition groups ranged from 237 to 260, making the Homs attack the deadliest so far in Assad’s crackdown on protests and one of the bloodiest episodes in the “Arab Spring” of revolts that have swept the region.

Residents said Syrian forces began shelling the Khalidiya neighborhood at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Friday using artillery and mortars. They said at least 36 houses were completely destroyed with families inside.

“We were sitting inside our house when we started hearing the shelling. We felt shells were falling on our heads,” said Waleed, a resident of Khalidiya.

“The morning has come and we have discovered more bodies, bodies are on the streets,” he said. “Some are still under the rubble. Our movement is better but there is little we can do without ambulances and other things.”

An activist in the neighborhood contacted by Reuters said residents were using primitive tools to rescue people. They feared many were buried under rubble.

“We are not getting any help, there are no ambulances or anything. We are removing the people with our own hands,” he said, adding there were only two field hospitals treating the wounded. Each one had a capacity to deal with 30 people, but he estimated the total number of wounded at 500.

“We have dug out at least 100 bodies so far, they are placed in the two mosques.”

A third Khalidiya resident, speaking by telephone with wailing and cries of “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) audible in the background, said at least 40 corpses had been retrieved from streets and damaged buildings.

EMBASSIES STORMED

Syria denied shelling the area and said Internet video of corpses was staged. It is not possible to verify activist or state media reports as Syria restricts independent media access.

The official Syrian account was disregarded across the globe, where condemnation was thunderous.

France’s Juppe said: “Instead of stopping its policy of repression, the Syrian authorities have jumped a new hurdle in savagery: the massacre in Homs is a crime against humanity and those responsible will have to answer for it.”

Tunisia announced it was expelling the Syrian ambassador and revoking recognition of Assad’s government. The head of a committee of parliamentarians from Arab states said Arab countries should expel Syrian ambassadors and cut ties.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: “If the Syrian administration is given the understanding that the current situation of hundreds of people dying daily can continue and the U.N. will not take a stance against it, the atmosphere of clashes will increase more.”

As news of the violence spread, crowds of Syrians stormed their country’s embassies in Cairo, London and Kuwait in protest, and rallied outside Syrian missions in Germany, Greece and the United States.

It was not immediately clear what had prompted Syrian forces to launch such an intense bombardment, just as diplomats at the Security Council were discussing the draft resolution supporting the Arab League demand for Assad to give up powers.

The Security Council was due meet at 1500 GMT. Russia’s Lavrov made clear early on Saturday that Moscow would veto the resolution if it was presented without amendments.

“If they want another scandal for themselves in the Security Council, then we probably cannot stop them,” Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying in an interview.

But as events marched on during the day, with many of the world’s top security and foreign affairs officials gathered at a conference in Munich, Lavrov said: “We are not saying that this resolution is hopeless.”

Russia’s main objection was that the resolution contained measures against Assad, but not against armed groups opposing him, he said. “Unless you do it both ways, you are taking sides in a civil war.”

Clinton told the conference: “As a tyrant in Damascus brutalizes his own people, America and Europe stand shoulder to shoulder. We are united, alongside the Arab League, in demanding an end to the bloodshed and a democratic future for Syria.”

“And we are hopeful that … the Security Council will express the will of the international community.”

Russia has balked at any U.N. Security Council language that would open to door to “regime change” in Syria, a rare Middle East ally where Moscow operates a naval base and sells billions of dollars in advanced weapons.

Clinton and Lavrov met at the conference for what a U.S. State Department official called “a very vigorous discussion.”

“The secretary made clear that…the United States feels strongly that the U.N. Security Council should vote today.”

HOUSES ON FIRE

Video footage on the Internet showed at least eight bodies assembled in a room, one of them with the top half of its head blown off. A voice on the video said the bombardment was continuing as the footage was filmed.

Syria’s state SANA news agency denied Homs was shelled, accusing rebels of killing people and presenting them as casualties for propaganda purposes before the U.N. vote.

“The corpses displayed by some channels of incitement are martyrs, citizens kidnapped, killed and photographed by armed terrorist groups as if they are victims of the supposed shelling,” it quoted a “media source” as saying.

The Syrian government says it is facing a foreign-backed insurgency and that most of the dead have been its troops. SANA reported funerals of 20 members of the security forces.

Some Syrian activists said the violence was triggered by a wave of army defections in Homs, a stronghold of protests and of the armed insurgents Assad has vowed to crush.

Rami Abdulrahman, head of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters, the death toll had reached 237, with 60 people still missing.

“Syrian forces are shelling the district with mortars from several locations, some buildings are on fire. There are also buildings which got destroyed.”

The opposition Syrian National Council said 260 civilians were killed, describing it as “one of the most horrific massacres since the beginning of the uprising in Syria.”

Another group, the Local Coordination Committees, gave a death toll of more than 200. The opposition council said that it believed Assad’s forces were preparing for similar attacks around Damascus and in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour.

“It does not seem they get it. Even if they kill 10 million of us, the people will not stop until we topple him,” said an activist reached by Reuters in Hama, another restive city.

In Cairo, a crowd stormed the Syrian embassy, smashing furniture and setting fire to parts of the building in protest over the Homs bloodshed. The gate of the embassy was broken and furniture was smashed on the second floor of the building.

In London, 150 people hurled stones at the Syrian embassy, smashing windows and shouting slogans. Police said five men were arrested after breaking into the building and another held for assaulting police. Kuwait’s KUNA news agency said Syrians broke into the embassy there at dawn, tore down the flag and injured several security guards. Demonstrations also took place at embassies in the United States, Germany and Greece.

In the cities of Hama and Idlib, activists said hundreds of people took to the streets in solidarity. They chanted in Idlib: “Homs is bombarded, and you are still sleeping?”

 

             Additional reporting by Joseph Logan and Dominic Evans in Beirut, Louis Charbonneau at the U.N., Ahmed el-Shimy in Cairo, Katharine Jackson in Washington, Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Writing by Joseph Logan and Peter Graff

 

Exposed: The Arab agenda in Syria

February 3, 2012

by Pepe Escobar

Asia Times

            Here’s a crash course on the “democratic” machinations of the Arab League – rather the GCC League, as real power in this pan-Arab organization is wielded by two of the six Persian Gulf monarchies composing the Gulf Cooperation Council, also known as Gulf Counter-revolution Club; Qatar and the House of Saud.

             Essentially, the GCC created an Arab League group to monitor what’s going on in Syria. The Syrian National Council – based in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries Turkey and France – enthusiastically supported it. It’s telling that Syria’s neighbor Lebanon did not.

            When the over 160 monitors, after one month of enquiries, issued their report … surprise! The report did not follow the official GCC line – which is that the “evil” Bashar al-Assad government is indiscriminately, and unilaterally, killing its own people, and so regime change is in order.

            The Arab League’s Ministerial Committee had approved the report, with four votes in favor (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and GCC member Oman) and only one against; guess who, Qatar – which is now presiding the Arab League because the emirate bought their (rotating) turn from the Palestinian Authority.

            So the report was either ignored (by Western corporate media) or mercilessly destroyed – by Arab media, virtually all of it financed by either the House of Saud or Qatar. It was not even discussed – because it was prevented by the GCC from being translated from Arabic into English and published in the Arab League’s website.

            Until it was leaked. Here it is, in full.

            The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.

            Once again, the official NATOGCC version of Syria is of a popular uprising smashed by bullets and tanks. Instead, BRICS members Russia and China, and large swathes of the developing world see it as the Syrian government fighting heavily armed foreign mercenaries. The report largely confirms these suspicions.

            The Syrian National Council is essentially a Muslim Brotherhood outfit affiliated with both the House of Saud and Qatar – with an uneasy Israel quietly supporting it in the background. Legitimacy is not exactly its cup of green tea. As for the Free Syrian Army, it does have its defectors, and well-meaning opponents of the Assad regime, but most of all is infested with these foreign mercenaries weaponized by the GCC, especially Salafist gangs.

            Still NATOGCC, blocked from applying in Syria its one-size-fits-all model of promoting “democracy” by bombing a country and getting rid of the proverbial evil dictator, won’t be deterred. GCC leaders House of Saud and Qatar bluntly dismissed their own report and went straight to the meat of the matter; impose a NATOGCC regime change via the UN Security Council.

            So the current “Arab-led drive to secure a peaceful end to the 10-month crackdown” in Syria at the UN is no less than a crude regime change drive. Usual suspects Washington, London and Paris have been forced to fall over themselves to assure the real international community this is not another mandate for NATO bombing – a la Libya. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as “a path for a political transition that would preserve Syria’s unity and institutions”.

            But BRICS members Russia and China see it for what it is. Another BRICS member – India – alongside Pakistan and South Africa, have all raised serious objections to the NATOGCC-peddled draft UN resolution.

            There won’t be another Libya-style no fly zone; after all the Assad regime is not exactly deploying Migs against civilians. A UN regime change resolution will be blocked – again – by Russia and China. Even NATOGCC is in disarray, as each block of players – Washington, Ankara, and the House of Saud-Doha duo – has a different long-term geopolitical agenda. Not to mention crucial Syrian neighbor and trading partner Iraq; Baghdad is on the record against any regime change scheme.

            So here’s a suggestion to the House of Saud and Qatar; since you’re so seduced by the prospect of “democracy” in Syria, why don’t you use all your American weaponry and invade in the dead of night – like you did to Bahrain – and execute regime change by yourselves?

            Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Tttt   bbbbbb

 

NYPD document: Collect intelligence at mosques

February 2, 2012

by Adam Goldman, Chris Hawley, Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo

-Associated Press

            NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies.

The Associated Press has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods with plainclothes officers. The police department’s spying operations were begun after the 2001 terror attacks with help from the CIA in a highly unusual partnership.

The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, entitled “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations, including, “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.”

The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion. Under FBI guidelines, which the NYPD says it follows, many of the recommendations in the police document would be prohibited.

            The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites such as Wikipedia, was prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran’s nuclear ambition has increased again recently.

Police estimated the New York-area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians making up about 8,500. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.

“The Palestinian community, although not Shi’a, should also be assessed due to presence of Hamas members and sympathizers and the group’s relationship with the Iranian government,” analysts wrote.

The secret document stands in contrast to statements by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Commissioner Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.

The document also renews debate over how the NYPD privately views Muslims. Commissioner Kelly has faced calls for his resignation recently from some Muslim activists for participating in a video that says Muslims want to “infiltrate and dominate” the United States. The NYPD showed the video to nearly 1,500 officers during training.

Documents previously obtained by the AP show widespread NYPD infiltration of mosques. It’s not clear, however, whether the May 2006 report prompted police to infiltrate the mosques on the list. One former police official who has seen the report said that, generally, the recommendations were followed, but he could not say for sure whether these mosques were infiltrated.

A current law enforcement official, also familiar with the report, said that since it was issued, the NYPD learned that Hezbollah was more political than religious and concluded that it’s not effective to monitor Shiites.

Both insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.

Neither David Cohen, the NYPD‘s top intelligence officer, nor department spokesman Paul Browne responded to emails or phone calls from the Associated Press this week.

Iran is an overwhelmingly Shiite country, but Shiites are a small percentage of the U.S. Muslim population. By contrast, al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, and many U.S. leaders consider Shiite clerics as allies in the fight against home-grown extremism. Shiites often are oppressed overseas, and many have sought asylum in the West.

The document is dated just weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”

Even now, the U.S. remains particularly concerned with Iran, not only because Iran continues its nuclear research, but also because intelligence officials don’t believe they know how Iranian sympathizers inside the United States would respond if the two countries went to war.

By far, the largest group of Iranians in the U.S. lives in or around Los Angeles. Yet the NYPD, with a smaller Iranian population that police estimated, at about 8,500 in New York City, shared the concerns about reactions to an open military conflict.

Asad Sadiq, president of the Bait-ul-Qaim Mosque in the Philadelphia suburb of Delran, N.J., said the NYPD was being unfairly broad.

“If you attack Cuba, are all the Catholics going to attack here? This is called guilt by association,” Mr. Sadiq, a dentist, said after seeing his mosque in the NYPD document. “Just because we are the same religion doesn’t mean we’re going to stand up and harm the United States. It’s really absurd.”

The AP showed the document to several veteran counterterrorism analysts. None said they had seen anything like it.

“It’s really problematic if you make a jump from a possible international conflict to saying therefore we need to monitor Shiite mosques writ large,” said Brian Fishman, the former research director at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center. “It doesn’t follow.”

For instance, the NYPD analysts focused much of the report on the Alavi Foundation, a New York nonprofit group that the federal government since has accused of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government. Analysts then looked at a mosque at which Alavi members prayed and that police say may have been linked to an effort to buy information about rocket technology for Iran.

There is no explanation, however, for how those suspicions warranted expanding surveillance to other Shiite mosques, including those far outside the department’s jurisdiction in Connecticut and New Jersey.

“Any time that you begin to isolate certain communities from a policing perspective because you think there’s risk, you have the potential that somebody overreaches,” said Robert Riegle, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst who oversaw efforts to work with state and local agencies.

At the Al-Mahdi Foundation mosque in Brooklyn, worshippers intoned their prayers Wednesday while touching their foreheads to disks of clay on the floor, a Shiite tradition.

“After 1,400 years, the Shias are being targeted in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, everywhere,” Imam Malik Sakhawat Hussain said after being told that his mosque was in the NYPD document. “If U.S. authorities become suspicious of the Shias, I would say we are a very oppressed community of the world.”

At the Masjid Al-Rahman, a prayer hall in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment building, manager Abo Maher was surprised to see his mosque on the NYPD‘s list of Shiite locations.

“This isn’t even Shia,” he said. “Their information is wrong.”

The police department’s Demographics Unit, the secretive squad of plainclothes officers used to monitor restaurants, social clubs and other gathering spots, found similar issues in Iranian neighborhoods, one former NYPD official recalled.

             Muslims make up only a fraction of New York’s Iranian community, so squad members returned from their rounds in Iranian neighborhoods and reported finding Jews and Christians, the former official said.

Mr. Sadiq, the New Jersey mosque president, said about 250 families — mostly Pakistanis and Indians and few Iraqis — attend his mosque. Every few years, he said, an FBI agent stops by, introduces himself and asks whether there’s been any radical rhetoric in his mosque and whether he knows anyone with connections to Iran. The most recent meeting was just Wednesday, he said, and the NYPD would be welcome if it came openly.

The intelligence unit operates in secrecy with little outside oversight. The City Council is not told about secret intelligence programs. And though the unit operates under the auspices of a federal anti-drug task force and receives federal money, it is not overseen by Congress. The Obama administration, including the Justice Department, repeatedly has sidestepped questions about whether it endorses the NYPD‘s tactics.

“They think that they can do whatever they want and get away with it,” Mr. Sadiq said.

The document also suggests a broader international intelligence mission than the department previously has acknowledged. The NYPD has officers stationed in 11 foreign cities, including London, Paris, Madrid and Tel Aviv, where they work with local police and act as the NYPD‘s eyes and ears overseas.

In their recommendations for the foreign liaison unit, analysts wrote that officers should “[f]ocus international intelligence collection on the Iranian threat, to include the activities of the IIS, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. throughout Europe and the Middle East.”

NYPD officers abroad are not supposed to be spies and do not answer to the U.S. director of national intelligence or the CIA station chiefs who coordinate America’s efforts to gather intelligence on Iran. In fact, the NYPD‘s international officers aren’t even paid by the department. Rather, the program is paid for through a nonprofit foundation that raises money from corporate donors.

It has not previously been known that the NYPD would consider gathering overseas intelligence on Iranian intelligence services. The police department does not disclose details about the inner workings of the international program to the City Council, to Congress or to U.S. intelligence agencies.

 

Conversations with the Crow

            When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.          

             Crowley did not listen to them (no one else ever does, either) and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.

            Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:

http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm

 

Conversation No. 116

Date: Sunday , December 14, 1997

Commenced: 11:15 AM CST

Concluded: 11:38 AM CST

GD: I think Mueller’s real strength lay in his professional detachment and his organizing ability. You rarely, if ever saw his picture anywhere. He rarely attended official functions and when he was in his office, he wore civilian clothes and wished to be called ‘Herr Mueller’ instead of ‘General.’ Most of the Party officials loved to strut around in fancy uniforms but not Heini. They strutted and he worked. At the end, he had enormous power which he rarely showed off. He would issue orders to Himmler and, earlier, Heydrich and no one ever contradicted him. He set up an early computer system to keep card files on as many citizens as he could locate and so on. But he said his worst problem was not the systems he devised but the people who worked in these systems. You ran the clandestine services branch and just out of interest, did you have problems with your underlings?
RTC: Oh, yes, always. We are, were, so compartmentized that our right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. Official policy concerning a country was one thing but no one seemed to realize that the top level depended on those below them for input. And therein lay a real problem. Curious to know how your friend handled it.

GD: Name the problem and I will search for an answer.

RTC: Rigid bureaucracy works but only barely. For instance, let’s take Egypt. We have an Egypt desk. It has nothing to do with, and certainly no connection with, the South American desk. I’m sitting in my office and have no real idea what the hell is going on downstairs or down the hall either. A field agent in Cairo uncovers very important information about some official policy. Fine. He sends us a full report. Do I see it? No, I do not. The agent sends this to Langley where it goes, oddly enough, to the Egypt desk. Ah, but in this area, there is a blood feud going on between two top people so this vital report gets into the hands of one party who deliberately hides it from the other out of spite. Why? Because the two of them are at odds over some matter so one hides material that could support the theories of the other. And, of course, we never see something that is actually very important.

GD: And what happens later if some disaster occurs and…

RTC: I’ll just tell you that the vital information goes into a shredder and later, a burn bag. And no one knows about it, even if they did. Backstabbing and finger pointing are rampant and no one can do anything about it. In the beginning, we were much smaller and more of us cooperated but cooperation is a thing of the past. A larger office, a more important parking space take the place of cooperation. But I cannot exculpate the top brass, either. Say the ruling party in the White House wants this or that to be the case in aid of their foreign policy. Do our senior people forward real and important information to them over there that would make that case not only wrong but a disaster? No, let’s protect our jobs and send a report over by an unproven and dead-wrong source that supports whatever the ruling claque is looking for. A disaster follows, imperial fingers are pointed and some minor official is let go because he wants to spend more time with his family. How did Mueller handle this?

GD: By hiring genuine professionals and watching everything. Copies of all important reports were sent to him, personally, so he spent much of his time looking at incoming gen. But Mueller was quite the exception, I believe. That’s why the Swiss government hired him after the war, and this in spite of the frantic searchings for him. Here we have the head of the Gestapo, a top wanted man, living in great comfort just down the line and all of this well-known to some Americans. Hell, Critchfield and Gehlen both knew where Heini was and, shit, Critchfield actually hired him to work for your people. I can understand why the Langley people hate me. If the self-important Jews who think they run the government ever came to grips with this, there would be pure hell to pay. I can just see the editorial page of the New York times on this.

RTC: Actually, you would never see a reference to Mueller or other top Gestapo people we hired anywhere in the American media. They would not print this because we would tell them not to. And they would do as they were told, believe me. You know I met Mueller once, why I had dinner with him over at the Metropolitan once, and I was somewhat in awe of him. A very pleasant man but you could tell he was looking around inside you while he was enjoying the lunch. How did you cope with this?
GD: I know what you mean but it never bothered me. I liked him and I respected him (the two are not always the same, you know) so if he wanted to poke around in my psyche, let him do it. We got on well and I used to poke around inside him once in a while. Fouché was very effective but he was very cold and very cruel and Mueller was detached but quite decent. Joseph changed sides, betrayed one set of associates to facilitate his acceptance by more successful ones and became the richest man in Europe. Heini got quite rich selling off the CIA’s looted Nazi art. He kept most of the money and when you realize that a Monet sells for ten millions and he had twenty of them, you can see what I mean. I saw paintings in Piedmont which he could never sell. A Signorelli that was supposed to have been burnt at the end of the war and a Raphael picture of some fag in a white shirt that the Polacks are still screaming about. Ah, well, such is the way of the world.

RTC: Yes, so it is. But I do miss it, Gregory. Life is too peaceful and I am finding myself forgetting so many odd bits and pieces of my life. Well, I don’t know about where it will all end but it will end.

GD: Yes, we can all be sure of that. But the play is not over yet, Robert.

RTC: When it ends, I’ll be dead and forgotten. You can enjoy the final scenes.

GD: I only hope so, Robert.

(Concluded at 11:30 AM CST)

 

 

Dramatis personae:

           James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

            James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden, and fatal, “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

            William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

            John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight to the United States.

            James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organizaed the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.

            Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.

            Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley.) Lives comfortably in a nice house overlooking the Mediterranean.

            Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first, the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organization eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.

            Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired, lives in Florida, and works for the CIA as an “advisor.”

            Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.

            Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller  became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.

            Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this. Neither were his employers.

            Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarians and then failed them. First, a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.           

            Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Archives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers specializing in creative writing. Although he prefers to be called ‘Dr,’ in reality he has no PhD

No responses yet

Leave a Reply