Tuesday 29 January 2008






Link

Press Release: Scotland Yard to investigate Tony Blair and ex-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith for war crimes


Press Conference,
Room C, 1 Parliament Street
Tuesday 15th January 2008 3pm

John McDonnell MP, Chris Coverdale: International War Law Expert and Annie Machon of the Campaign to Make War History brief MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain's former Prime Minister and former Attorney General.

Officers from Scotland Yard have commenced a criminal investigation into the deaths of Iraqi citizens killed during the armed invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Metropolitan Police are acting in response to crimes reported by peace activists from We Are Change UK and The Campaign to Make War History. In an unprecedented step, the case was handed to the War Crimes division of the Counter Terrorism branch who are now investigating allegations of 14 criminal offences committed by Tony Blair, Lord Goldsmith and others. The offences are under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which came into effect under English common law, just two days before 9/11.

Two Members of We Are Change UK and a representative from the Campaign to Make War History were interviewed for six hours at Belgravia Police station on the 20th December 2007. Evidence was provided to the police relating to the crimes of:-

• genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and conduct ancillary to these crimes under Sections 51 and 52 of The International Criminal Court Act 2001.

• a crime against peace and complicity in a crime against peace under Articles 6 and 7 of The Nuremburg Principles.

• murder, incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

• conspiracy to commit genocide, a crime against humanity and war crimes under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

For more information, please contact:

press@wearechange.org.uk

____________________

Rory's Comment: Hardly surprising but still worthy of note: this parliamentary press conference was ignored entirely by the British MSM which is itself deeply complicit in the war crimes committed by the UK's political leaders and military. Blair continues to be feted by a fawning press.

We must assume that his reason for converting to Roman Catholicism was to afford himself the convenience of confessing his crimes, a desperate attempt perhaps to wash the blood off his hands. And what of earthly laws?

The Rule of Law recognizes that no one is immune from the law. Everyone is supposedly equal before the law ... except in reality, in the Animal Farm that is Britain in 2008, some remain more equal than others.

So it remains to be seen just how far this police investigation will be allowed to progress before being quashed from on high.



Latest Ben Fulford Conversation
With Jeff Rense
Benjamin Fulford With Jeff Rense
Program Interview Of 1-21-8
Transcript Courtesy Of David Wilcock
1-26-8

RENSE: OK, Welcome back. It's time to go to Tokyo this hour to spend a little very interesting conversational time with Benjamin Fulford, who is with us once a month. Ben has become quite a familiar face on this program, so to speak. He has a large following, and people pay close attention to what he says. This is not just on the basis of the fact that he was the Asia-Pacific bureau chief for Forbes Magazine for eight years. His overall worldview and contact with a pan-Asian secret society which, as many of you know, issued ultimatums through Mr. Fulford to the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergers of the planet to cool it, change their tune...or else. It's a fascinating story. He's a remarkable man and we're happy to have him back with us tonight -- especially on the eve of what they're calling over here, Ben, Black Tuesday -- when the Dow Jones and New York Stock Exchange go at it in the morning after the holiday off today. How are you?

FULFORD: Fine, fine! Yeah, I've been doing a little bit of financial research. Now, I could be wrong, but it seems to be that the United States has gone completely bankrupt.

RENSE: (Laughs) Well, yes, yes. It seems that you're quite right.

FULFORD: You've got a GDP of about 13 or 14 trillion...

RENSE: At least!

FULFORD: And as far as I can tell, your debts are 120 trillion.

RENSE: There you go!

FULFORD: So, say you're only earning 13 thousand dollars a year and you owe 120 thousand. Federally, the bank says, "Hey, you've got to pay it back right now." That's basically the situation the US has found itself in.

RENSE: I don't know where it's going to end, but it's sure going to hell fast. It's like a runaway train, and it's got one wheel left on the track. Let me read some headlines to all of you. And, Ben, pull the phone a little further back from your mouth and I think we'll get a little clearer signal. You sound fine, but just pull that mouthpiece back.

Here's something from World Financial Disaster, the featured story at Rense.com. Let me read some of these headlines. In case you folks have been out of town or disconnected, or in case you wish to remain disconnected from all this, turn your volume down... Bond insurers demise threatens 2.6 trillion dollar bond market. Stocks plummet in Germany, Hong Kong, India and Brazil. 120 Billion lost in European stock crash today -- Black Tuesday set for US tomorrow. TSS Canadian stocks plunge 600 points today. Global markets plunge on US recession fears. Day of Reckoning in the United States -- Glass House coming.

It's wild, and it's getting crazier. Tomorrow, the projection is -- depending on who you care to pay attention to -- that the US stock market may lose up to a thousand points. It's 12,000 something now. Let me just put my two cents on the table. I don't pretend to be an economist, never have, never will -- wouldn't want to be either. I think the stock market has been so overinflated, so oversold, so overbought, so overvalued for so long that it's far past time that something like this happens, and it probably ought to be chopped down 30 percent to get to somewhere reasonable. How do you see it, Ben?

FULFORD: Oh, I figure it's going to fall at least 50 percent, probably more.

RENSE: Fifty!

FULFORD: I was a witness to the Japanese bubble, and they had all sorts of what they called PKOs then, which was a Price Keeping Operation. No matter how much money they threw at it, they could not stop it.

RENSE: That's like the Plunge Protection Team. Same thing.

FULFORD: Yeah. They tried it in 1929 and it didn't work either, right?

RENSE: Right.

FULFORD: Anyway, here's what's really going on. The essence of the situation is this. Remember what Nathan Rothschild famously said?

RENSE: Mm hmm.

FULFORD: "I don't care what fool sits on the Throne of England. Whoever controls the currency of England controls England -- and I control the currency of England." Okay?

RENSE: Sure.

FULFORD: Now, it's the people of Asia -- the Southeast Asians, the Chinese, people together who are 65 percent of the world's population -- who control the world's money now. And so, they can decide how it's going to be spent. And this is what they have decided to do. So, that's why you see Bush suddenly talking about Martin Luther King; what he did for this crusade, and how they assassinated him, and now they suddenly have an effort to make it up. You have the British chancellor saying, "Oh, maybe we should invite Yueng Biao and Brazil and African delegates into the Security Council. Well, they're running scared! Their whole gig is up, and they're trying to show a nice face. It's kind of too late. I mean, what they did to the Iraqi people... they murdered 1.2 million people in order to steal their oil.

RENSE: Yes sir.

FULFORD: They cannot be forgiven for that. Now they try to put on a nice face. They spent all this money -- what did they spend it on? Some sort of expense of a satellite that your friend photographed, that's designed for mass murder.

RENSE: Right.

FULFORD: Diseases that are tailored to kill individual races, specific peoples...

RENSE: You got it.

FULFORD: ...you know, military-industrial mass murder!

RENSE: Genocide on a scale unprecedented. And as you all know, if you've been listening to this program, or others which care about these things -- THEY, the controllers, the Bilderbergs, the CFR types -- have written about reducing the world population by four fifths. That's 80 percent. And they're going to do it. What they want is a feudal system on this planet with a skeleton middle class to interface between them and the serf class so they don't have to get their hands dirty. That's what they're after.

FULFORD: Well, they're not going to get it. They're lucky they're still alive, as I keep repeating. It's not going to happen. They are criminally insane, and the rest of the world has finally figured this out.

RENSE: Well, they ARE criminally insane.

FULFORD: We don't listen to the things they say, we just look at their actions -- and the actions speak for themselves.

RENSE: Speech writers are paid, the ultimate whores, probably, and the mouthpieces like the Bushes and the Browns and the other cretins out there who occupy places of public visibility don't talk about the human misery and death. If the United States -- and God knows, none of us want this to happen -- is the target of one or two or more nuclear bombs, the world at large is not going to mourn and lament that attack. The United States -- not you and I, folks...you know who: the people who have run the coup d'etat in this country, who now are literally driving this nation as an engine of death around the world -- those are the evil ones, but WE are going to pay the price. Don't we always?

FULFORD: I don't think you're going to pay the price at the end of the day. Here's what's going to happen, I believe. This is what I recommended to the society, and they have basically said that they will take this as their policy. Japan is very likely to have a change of government this year. The Democratic Party of Japan is projected to win power according to all the opinion polls. The election is due possibly as early as April, but maybe a bit later -- they'll try to delay it.

RENSE: What will that mean, Ben? What will that mean?

FULFORD: It will mean an end to Japanese slavery and occupation. It will mean an end to the raping and looting of Japan. In other words, it's their money, and they don't want them to use it the way they think it ought to be used. I'm going to ask the Democratic Party of Japan to give me the job, if they win power, of Deputy Finance Minister in charge of Japanese overseas assets. If I get this job, I will have five trillion dollars to play with. And what I'm going to do with that money, or what they're going to do -- I'm hoping, I'm recommending, I believe they're going to do this -- first of all, they're going to make sure that every single human being on the planet has access to a road if they wish it; good information and knowledge about the state of the planet; proper nutrition, and an Internet connection.

It will be a crash campaign on the planet to get everyone on the planet -- every single person -- aware and connected, and fed. Once that's done, we will ask them what their wishes are. Then we'll hire the top brains of the planet, and do everything in our power to make sure those wishes come true. (Voice breaking up -- tears) That's how the Japanese people, I believe, are going to spend their money. (Recovers) And that's a much better way of spending it than on genocide and mass murder. Plus, of course, they will spend it on protecting the environment, so that no more anonymous creatures disappear from the planet forever.

RENSE: It would be nice if the Japanese stopped killing whales, just as a token gesture.

FULFORD: I agree on that one. I will certainly push for that. They have an argument, which is that "you kill cows, and other animals."

RENSE: Two wrongs don't make a right. I don't care what culture you're in.

FULFORD: Sure, sure. I understand. What I would suggest, though, is they have some extraordinarily delicious vegetarian meat now here. It's so real you can't believe it's made from plants. And I'm going to recommend that if they wish to get on a high horse and preach, they should all become vegetarians first.

RENSE: Would you be the first Caucasian in the Japanese parliament -- or the Japanese government, not just parliament?

FULFORD: No. There is a member of parliament with Finnish ancestry now in the parliament. I would be the second.

RENSE: So, this is coming up fairly soon. You obviously have some connections with whom you can deal. You can make this suggestion and you obviously would be happy to serve the Japanese interests on a world stage, or advise it.

(Bumper music) It would be fascinating -- they would be silly not to use your expertise. It would be interesting!

FULFORD: I spent a long time talking to the leaders of that party over many years. They know me quite well. They read my books. They know what the plan is. Now that they realize they don't have to be scared of being murdered by right-wing gangsters anymore, and now that they realize that Japan really can be free again, they're ready to turn it around.

RENSE: Well, that's music to many, many ears, for sure. Stand by, Ben, we'll be right back. Benjamin Fulford is my guest, live from Tokyo. He's here once a month with us, and we shall continue right after this.

[Break]

RENSE: Wherever you look in the world now, you see not just ripples but major fractures in the actual structure of the financial engines of our countries, corporations and fiscal networks. They're calling it Miserable Monday in London -- the biggest crash since September 11th. It wiped off more than 150 billion dollars' worth of value from the stock market in London. They call it a meltdown. That's an understatement. That was the UK's 100 biggest companies. Tomorrow (Tuesday), I'm expecting a 500 to 1000-point drop on the Dow. The stage is set -- the Plunge Protection Team is burning the midnight oil, but there's not a whole lot they can do. The momentum of this thing now, if I am correct, is really unprecedented. I've never seen anything like it. From your background as an economics expert, have you ever seen anything like this? Did you expect to see something like this? It's like it got out of control and now it's running amok.

FULFORD: I have seen things like this before. I watched the collapse of the Japanese bubble. The difference, though, with the bubble and the US-European problem is that the Japanese only owed the money to each other. What's happening in the US is more like the collapse of Argentina or Mexico or the countries in the Asian crisis like Korea.

RENSE: That's an interesting analogy.

FULFORD: They owed the money to people outside their country, so it's not in their hands. They cannot make the decisions. The rest of the world will have to decide what the US needs to do if it wants to be rescued. And I believe they're going to say, "Look, you guys, you're spending too much money on killing people. And we want you to change your ways. Then we will continue to finance you again."

RENSE: Now, of course, Ben, the village idiot was just over in the Middle East, talking about what a terrible enemy Iran was to the human race, how Iran needed to be neutralized. Meanwhile, the Russians delivered the fourth shipment of nuclear fuel to the Iranian Buseher (ph) reactor, and I'm not sure, but it seems to me that there is an impasse of sorts developing. The Russian general staff has said they will not tolerate any threat to Russian sovereignty or to the sovereignty of any of Russia's allies and friends - which would seem to include Iran. I don't know, but it looks like Bush is under orders from his handlers to continue to press for a spring or summer offensive against Iran. And the Russians are saying, "Not a good idea."

FULFORD: It would be suicide for America, and the American people -- and for Israel. And for every single member of the elite families. You know who you are. Another thing I'd like to say to these petro-kings out there, especially the monarchs who rule Saudi Arabia, they should go back and read their Koran. If they continue to support these evil murderers who are killing their fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will very surely go to hell. They had better beware. Their days of evil are either going to end, or their families will be torn and uprooted from their countries.

RENSE: Interestingly enough, the Wahabi family was a creation of Zionism in the first place. And of course, as most of you know, those little sheikdoms around the Middle East were the creation of British Petroleum after World War I. In fact, BP drew the current map of the Middle East after World War I, and they dismembered what was left of Turkey.

FULFORD: Just think of the name Saudi Arabia. It's like saying "Bush America," you know?

RENSE: That's a very, very good point. Well put. Good.

FULFORD: And these people are really, really decadent and nasty. My father used to be the Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I got to meet a lot of these people firsthand. They're not nice people, and they do very nasty things to their own countrymen. One of the things I remember being told is if you ever got into a car accident in Saudi Arabia, you have to pretend to be injured. If the police take you, they might put you in a cell and forget they put you there. You might be there for years or dozens of years. That's the sort of country they run.

RENSE: It's something I've heard before. I concur with you. The whole situation over there is not good. Let's get back to this Russian thing. I'm not sure of the relationship between Japan and Russia. That's not really a topic of discussion now, but you did say that you, if you were somehow appointed to the position you talked about, would have five trillion dollars with which to potentially maneuver and manipulate and, shall we say, buy a lot of very valuable American assets cheaply. Now that would be quite a shopping spree!

FULFORD: There are a lot of nice American assets to be bought. More important than buying up individual American companies is redirecting the American economy away from war. It's kind of a military-industrial socialism. More important would be to hire Americans and American companies to go out and save the world. (Bumper music) In other words, pay the Americans to do good things. That would rescue America, and America would once again be as prosperous and as loved by the people of the planet as it was during the time of Kennedy. That's the ultimate goal.

RENSE: I would suggest that the place where that kind of an effort would be launched would be Iraq, where the country lies in utter ruin and devastation. Depleted uranium, of course, has destroyed it forever.

FULFORD: I think the important thing now is to eliminate oil as a source of energy.

RENSE: Well, it could be done. We've got to take a break here. For those of you who reviewed the Stanley Meyer story on YouTube, you understand that water has been made available as a fuel. We'll be back.

[Break]

RENSE: By this time tomorrow night, Black Tuesday will have come and gone. We will know the damage. If the American market dives tomorrow, will the rest of the world continue to founder and to plummet as it did today?

FULFORD: I'm going to try to call for an international meeting in Tokyo to come up with a new world financial system to replace the one now functioning, or dys-functioning, so to say. In other words, World Bank, IMF, BIF, and control by the Bank of England and Fed of the planet will be ended. A whole new system will have to be created. There will be a lot of discussion about what form it's going to take, but it's got to involve things like putting a value on nature -- making sure the financial system is fundamentally connected to the needs of the planet. It's the lifeblood of the planet, and it has to flow in a healthy manner. Right now it's turned into a system of very sophisticated thievery. There's a very simple psychological mechanism in humans. If you are poor, you take 50 dollars now rather than 100 dollars a month from now. If you're rich, you will wait a month. So what happens is over the years, people who are rich have said to the poor, "Here, we'll lend you money right now. You can pay us back later." They've created debt slaves. This is why the different religions over the years have banned usury. At a very high level, this is what has been going on. A group of 10,000 people or so have been cooking up very sophisticated forms of this technique to basically take money from the poor of the world and make themselves richer and richer. And that's why you've had asset inflations. These people are so rich that there's more money than they can spend on indulging themselves, so they buy stocks and real estate and push it up. And this is what's been going on. The system is fundamentally evil, put simply. There will be some kind of new rules to make sure that... right now, bankers don't need to have moral training. I think a banker needs to have better religious training than a rabbi, priest or imam. They are in a position where they have to have very, very strict ethical standards. And many do. My brother is a banker. He went to Rockefeller Univeristy, and when he graduated with his Ph.D., Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller asked him what he wanted to do. He said "I want to be rich." They sent him to work with James Wolfensen, Paul Volcker (ph). But, because he was stupidly honest - I think he made three million dollars a year - he refused and quit jobs many times, because ethical corners were being cut. There are many bankers like that. And these people are very important. We need their help to come up with a new system that fits our moral codes. I don't know exactly what that system will be, but you can guarantee...

RENSE: Well, you're talking about removing the Fed. If you can cut the Fed out of... it reminds me of a patient who has systemic cancer with tumors everywhere, interconnected. They say it's inoperable. I don't know how we can do it, given the current situation.

FULFORD: A lot of the bureaucrats and technocrats in the Fed and these other central banks are not evil people. They are technicians. They are just trying to adjust the amount of money to the size of the economy. It's the higher-ups, the people who own it and don't get involved in day-to-day management, who are the problem, for the most part. It's interesting that the Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis came up with a very persuasive paper -- I think a guy named Kristol wrote it. The paper said the United States was bankrupt. Treasury Secretary O'Neill wanted to put this out to the public. That is why O'Neill was fired, and the report was suppressed. Bush didn't want to have to deliver bad news, so they shot the messenger. So now you're bankrupt. You failed to listen to the warnings of your own Fed! That's the situation. The Federal Reserve Board, or the families that own them, will have to relinquish that power. That's the bottom line. I think that we need to have some sort of global asset redistribution. If you take all the excess funds from those 10,000 people, I think you'll find there will be about 10,000 dollars for every man, woman and child on Earth. Now that might not seem like a lot for rich Americans, but if you were an African peasant farmer earning less than a dollar a day, that's like winning the lottery. And that's how most of humanity lives. Once humanity is allowed to develop its potential, there will be so many benefits for everybody. It's hard to imagine how wonderful it will be! You would have five times more really good movies to watch, for example. Incredible advances we can't even begin to imagine! It's going to be incredible!

RENSE: Do you see over there, from your perspective, that America is... I kind of laugh at this... headed toward a recession? We're already in a recession here, as far as I can tell. Inflation is double-digit virtually across the board now, and pushing into the 20s in some key categories.

FULFORD: I think that depression would be a better word than recession.

RENSE: Well, the joke my friend just sent me goes like this: "What do you call somebody who believes there's going to be a recession?"

FULFORD: I don't know, what?

RENSE: "An optimist!"

FULFORD: (Laughs) You've got to remember: at the end of the day there's one thing you've always got to calculate. You still have your people, you still have your know-how, you still have your factories. So, it's just that you have to change the rules you operate on. Some people call it restructuring. That's all. It involves a lot of changing your system. And the most important change is to stop spending so much money on killing people.

RENSE: You're talking about not just changing a system but literally eviscerating an evil which has taken total charge of most of the actual viable ingredients that we have to offer as a society!

FULFORD: You have an infestation of evil at the very highest levels. That has to be rooted out. We have to put a system into place so that this never happens again. (Bumper music) So yeah, there are some very, very evil people at very high levels. They need to be purged from your system.

RENSE: That's an understatement. OK, hold on, we'll be right back with Benjamin Fulford in just a couple minutes, live from Tokyo.

[Break]

RENSE: OK, and we're back with Benjamin Fulford. Jim Jubak (ph) wrote in MSN Money, "So, the next banking crisis is on the way." The next one! He said, let me read just a bit of this interesting report:

"Citigroup announced it would take an 18.1 billion-dollar write-down..." I love that expression, a write-down... "on its portfolio of sub-prime mortgages..." Why can't they say losses anymore? "...and other risky debt. The bank cut its dividend to 41 percent." Bla, bla, bla. He says, "This kind of quarter always marks the bottom of a crisis like this." Nope. "The banks and other financials have more losses from the sub-prime mortgage mess on their books that they haven't even yet confessed to. Worse, the mortgage debacle has spread to other types of debt, with banks and other financial companies reporting mounting losses on their credit card and auto loan portfolios. And worst of all, the next big leg of the crisis, the one I think will mark the true bottom, has just begun. As the economy slows, the default rate is rising for corporate debt - especially for the high-risk, high-yield corporate debt called "junk" by many of us. That's the opening of a Pandora's Box of potential write-downs that could dwarf the losses in the current mortgage market."

So, (according to Jubak) we're not even close to plumbing the depths of this catastrophe.

FULFORD: What's happening now is that this may be the biggest historical change in hundreds of years. We're talking about a secret regime that has ruled the planet for 300 years coming to an end. That's what really is going on. It's truly going to be a wonderful thing for the people of humanity, and for the people of America and England! They will be free -- for the first time in a very long time! The newspapers will be filled with real news. They will have more money. There will be no more paranoid propaganda. You people have been trained to be some sort of warrior ants or warrior caste. Fifty percent of Hollywood's budget comes from the Pentagon! You're trained to be fighting machines from a very young age. This is going to end. People will say, "Wow! I don't have to be paranoid anymore. I don't have to be scared. I don't have to think about fighting all the time." This is the sort of change we're talking about.

RENSE: Let me ask you another question. There's a big story you were kind enough to send me a translation of. In the Japanese parliament, several people brought the issue of 9/11 up over there. Tell us about that. How was that received by the Japanese press?

FULFORD: The fight for Japan is still not over yet. Until the Yakuda (ph) government goes, there are still some elements that are fighting for the US-controlled secret government. That's coming to an end. The policy of the leading opposition party is to bring this up in parliament on national TV aired nationwide. And this guy is going to take over the government within a year. That will mean, of course, that they will be told the truth -- not just about 9/11, but all sorts of historical truths that have been hidden will be made open. The Japanese people will be free from colonial control. That's what's going to happen. Right now, the people at the top level all know what 9/11 was. All the politicians, everybody else, they know it was a faction of the US government murdering their own people to create an excuse to steal oil and kill Iraqis.

RENSE: So most of the Japanese public who are politically aware and astute understand that basic concept?

FULFORD: Yes. At the high levels, they all understand. They know what's really going on.

RENSE: That's good to hear.

FULFORD: The Americans and the puppetmasters really do not understand the Japanese people. They thought they had them under much greater control than they do. That's what's happening here. Japan is in the process of liberating itself, and the emperor is behind this as a symbol of the Japanese people. Like I said, they have the largest amount of money in federal assets of any country in the world. So really, they can decide, once they free themselves, what to do with that money. The Japanese like peace, they like prosperity and they like to protect the environment - so that's going to be the new focus. Instead of creating wars and new wars and then suppressing technology, you're going to find them doing stuff that's just common sense.

RENSE: Are there calls for this kind of revolution in the Japanese mainstream media? Do you see editorials talking like you're talking, or are you speaking...

FULFORD: No, no editorials. There are, on commercial television, prime-time TV shows about 9/11, OK? So it's not just a private debate on NHK. One of Japan's biggest and most famous TV personalities, Dee Takeshia (ph,) I think he won some prizes at Cannes and is well-known overseas too - he had a prime-time commercial show about 9/11.

RENSE: Wow. They don't even talk about 9/11 in the so-called debates over here in this phony campaign season. That's amazing.

FULFORD: Look. Getting back to that Rothschild quote, it doesn't matter what puppet system is in the Oval Office anymore, because you're bankrupt! That's what Bush did... he bankrupted America and put an end to American military terrorism of the planet.

RENSE: He literally has... well, he hasn't, but his handlers have ground the American military almost to the point where they're just barely able to function as a projection of strength anymore. They've just really been depleted. They're sending American men and women back into combat who are injured -- they're that short on troops. This is all being done, of course, by design.

FULFORD: Whatever their design was, it's failing. Like I said, they cannot run their scenarios anymore.

RENSE: I hope to hell that you're right, and that they're listening, because they still show no signs of giving up yet. Your analysis is something they don't want to hear.

FULFORD: They're not going to have a choice. It's just a matter of time. This is going to play itself out, I believe, probably this year -- we should see the end of Illuminati rule.

RENSE: I think 2008 is the pivotal year.

FULFORD: The Chinese like auspicious numbers; their Olympics start on August 8, 2008. (8/8/8). The Japanese people are also believers in this. There's a general feeling that it's Asia's turn to have more say. Right now, the planet is ruled by an apartheid system. It's actually not even apartheid -- it's 10,000 people controlling the planet and manipulating people's information. And that's not a healthy system. So it's coming to an end. Literally, the entire post-World War II order -- the United Nations, the way it's structured -- everything is going to change. It's not just a financial crisis.

RENSE: Not soon enough.

FULFORD: You will see. Events will prove that I am right. This is something that is not my decision; it is a decision by the people of Asia. I'm just a spokesman. This is something that is not in the power of the Illuminati to stop. They cannot. It will not work.

RENSE: Who is still laying claim, or trying to lay claim to Japan? Is it the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds?

FULFORD: I think it's now the Rothschilds who are trying to show a nicer face and get back to the traditional, good side of the Anglo-Saxon world. There's a lot of good about Anglo-Saxon culture. A sense of fairness, doing the right thing...

RENSE: Absolutely. There used to be some amazing values systems. You're right.

FULFORD: So they're trying to say, "Hey, look. We're going to change our ways, and we're going to be good now." These sorts of things are going on. There is such a huge literature about the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Illuminati. Hundreds and hundreds of books. All the intellectuals in Japan know this! RENSE: So there's no problem in talking about Zionism over there. They have no problem. It's all over the place.

FULFORD: It's all over the place.

RENSE: Hmm! Of course, Zionists don't own the Japanese media, so that makes it a little easier.

FULFORD: The tricky thing is to avoid being prejudiced against the Jewish peoples while criticizing Zionism. Sometimes some of the Japanese have mixed the two together. I've been trying very hard to tell them, "Hey, hey. This is not a Jewish thing." They use the word "Judiah-shihon," Jewish capital. I tell them you cannot use that word, it's wrong; change the word. And they get it. They know it's not a Jewish thing.

RENSE: I've been trying to do that same thing for many years. It's finally starting to stick, but we don't have access to the majority of Americans, so that makes it hard.

FULFORD: Again, the thing is that once you get the intelligent people, it will trickle down. The trickle-down works with information too. So people are finally starting to get it. We're talking about gangsters here. We're not talking about any ethnic group or anything; we're talking about a group of very powerful, very intelligent hoodlums. They're murderers. They have controlled the Japanese. The Japanese basically won World War III in the 1980s by taking over the majority of the world's money. To prevent the Japanese from realizing that they have the power to save the world, they've been murdering Prime Ministers, intimidating journalists, murdering journalists, and hiring gangsters to try to keep the Japanese people subdued. Now the gangsters themselves are saying, "Wait a minute! Why are we betraying our own people?" (Bumper music) And once the Asian gangsters turn against them, they've lost their secret power!

RENSE: That's true. That's true. Thanks, Ben, we're out of time already. We'll talk to you next month - maybe we'll get your views on the American political season as it staggers forward.

FULFORD: It's really a farce!

RENSE: Totally. We might have some laughs. I'd like to get the take on the whole scene from the Japanese media. All right, we'll talk to you then. Thank you very much, Ben.

FULFORD: Thank you.

RENSE: Good night. Benjamin Fulford, live from Tokyo.

That's our program for tonight, and we'll be right back to you in 21 hours. Take care of yourself, and we'll see you at Rense.com.


Sunday 27 January 2008



The Fear Factory


The FBI now has more than 100 task forces devoted exclusively to fighting terrorism. But is the government manufacturing ghosts?

GUY LAWSON, Rollingstone.com


"So, what you wanna do?" the friend asked. "A target?" the wanna-be jihadi replied. "I want some type of city-hall-type stuff, federal courthouses."

It was late November 2006, and twenty-two-year-old Derrick Shareef and his friend Jameel were hanging out in Rockford, Illinois, dreaming about staging a terrorist attack on America. The two men weren't sure what kind of assault they could pull off. All Shareef knew was that he wanted to cause major damage, to wreak vengeance on the country he held responsible for oppressing Muslims worldwide. "Smoke a judge," Shareef said. Maybe firebomb a government building.

But while Shareef harbored violent fantasies, he was hardly a serious threat as a jihadi. An American-born convert to Islam, he had no military training and no weapons. He had less than $100 in the bank. He worked in a dead-end job as a clerk in a video-game store. He didn't own a car. So dire were his circumstances, Shareef had no place to live. Then one day, Jameel, a fellow Muslim, had shown up at EB Games and offered him shelter. Within hours of meeting his new brother, Shareef had moved in with Jameel and his three wives and nine children. Living together, the pair fantasized about targets in Rockford, a Midwestern city of 150,000, with a minuscule Muslim population and the lone claim to fame of being the hometown of Cheap Trick.

The fact that Shareef was a loser with no means of living out his imagination didn't stop his friend from encouraging his delusions of grandeur. On the contrary, Jameel continually pushed Shareef to escalate his plans. "When you wanna plan on doing this?" he asked Shareef, talking about the plot to go after a government building. "Because we have to make specific plans and dates."

"I wanna case one first," Shareef said. There was only one problem: Jameel's car was in the garage getting repaired. "We can case one when you get the car back."

"What about time frame?" Jameel prodded.

"I like the holiday season," Shareef said, displaying an ambivalence unusual in a suicide bomber hellbent on murdering civilians. "Hell, we ain't gotta hit nobody —just blow the place up."

Finding a meaningful target to blow up in Rockford isn't easy. A hardscrabble town in the middle of America, the place is not much more than an intersection of interstates and railway lines, with little of note that might attract the attention of terrorists. So Jameel suggested the main attraction in town: CherryVale Mall, a sad-sack collection of clothing stores and sneaker shops on the outskirts of Rockford. "The mall's good," he told Shareef.

"I swear by Allah, man, I'm down for it too," Shareef said. "I'm down for the cause. I'm down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man."

When Jameel got his car back from the garage, the two men went to case the mall.

"If you ever wanna back out . . . 'cause, you gotta let me know," Jameel said. "I'm checking your heart now."

"I'm down," Shareef said.

"We ain't gonna get caught," Jameel assured him. "Don't worry."

"I'm not worried about getting caught," Shareef replied. "Not alive."

For all his bluster, Shareef was, by any objective measure, a pathetic and hapless jihadist — one of a new breed of domestic terrorists the federal government has paraded before the media since 9/11. The FBI, in a sense, elevated Shareef, working to transform him from a boastful store clerk into a suicidal mall-bomber. Like many other alleged extremists who have been targeted by the authorities, Shareef didn't know that his brand-new friend —the eager co-conspirator drawing him ever further into a terror plot —was actually an informant for the FBI.

As Shareef cursed America and Jews, he was under almost constant surveillance by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for the Northern District of Illinois. Since 9/11, the number of such outfits across the country has tripled. With more than 2,000 FBI agents now assigned to 102 task forces, the JTTFs have effectively become a vast, quasi-secret arm of the federal government, granted sweeping new powers that outstrip those of any other law-enforcement agency. The JTTFs consist not only of local police, FBI special agents and federal investigators from Immigration and the IRS, but covert operatives from the CIA. The task forces have thus effectively destroyed the "wall" that historically existed between law enforcement and intelligence-gathering.

Under the Bush administration, the JTTFs have been turned into a domestic spy agency, like Britain's MI5 —one with the powers of arrest. The expenditure of such massive resources to find would-be terrorists inevitably requires results. Plots must be uncovered. Sleeper cells must be infiltrated. Another attack must be prevented —or, at least, be seen to be prevented. But in backwaters like Rockford, the JTTFs don't have much to do. To find threats to thwart, the task forces have increasingly taken to using paid informants to cajole and inveigle targets like Shareef into pursuing their harebrained schemes. In the affidavit sworn by an FBI special agent in support of Shareef's indictment, the co-conspirator who called himself Jameel is known only as "CS" (Cooperating Source). In fact, CS was William Chrisman, a former crack dealer with a conviction for attempted robbery who was paid $8,500 by the JTTF and dispatched specifically to set up Shareef. Like other informants in terrorism cases, Chrisman had been "tasked" by federal agents to indulge and escalate Shareef's fantasies — while carefully ensuring that Shareef incriminated himself.

"The hope is that they will nab an actual terrorist or prevent a putative jihadi from becoming one," says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Less Safe, Less Free, a new book detailing the ways 9/11 has transformed domestic law enforcement.

"It makes sense in general —but when you're pressing people to undertake conduct they would have never undertaken without an informant pushing them along, there is a real question if you're creating crime, not preventing crime."

In Rockford, "Jameel" repeatedly urged Shareef to dream up gory details of the havoc they would cause at the mall. Chrisman had received a call, he told Shareef, from a man he called "Cap" —a contact willing to sell them weapons. They could buy "pineapples" —code for hand grenades —from Cap for fifty bucks each. Cap, of course, was an undercover agent. Eleven "pineapples" were available, Chrisman said. Walking around the mall —the Dippin' Dots, the Panda Express —Shareef suggested they toss the "pineapples" in garbage cans to create shrapnel. They would fast for three days beforehand. They would shave their bodies. They would meditate and pray.

"Don't forget, man, we should get the grenades sometime next week," Chrisman said. "So you should try to get as much flous [money] as you can get."

"I got a little change in the bank," Shareef said.

"All you need is, like, $100. That's two grenades."

But the resourceless Shareef couldn't even raise that much money. So with the JTTF determined to push the "plot" forward, Chrisman announced that Cap had agreed to exchange the grenades for some used stereo speakers Shareef owned. On the following Saturday, as snow blanketed Rockford, Chrisman and Shareef engaged in the ritual of suicide bombers, recording video statements of each other reciting their last wills and testaments. The JTTF's affidavit doesn't reveal whose idea it was to stare into the camera and swear vengeance against America, but the prejudicial impact it would have on a jury was huge.

"My name is Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef," Shareef said, using his self-created nom de guerre.

"I am from America, and this tape is to let you guys know, who disbelieve in Allah, to let the enemies of Islam know, and to let the Muslims alike know that the time for jihad is now."

The next Wednesday, the two men met with Cap in a parking lot under the gaze of agents from the JTTF. As Shareef swapped the used speakers for four nonfunctioning grenades and a 9mm handgun with neutered ammunition, he was swarmed by law enforcement. News of the bust traveled the world over. "It had all the makings of a holiday bloodbath," Fox News breathlessly reported. Shareef was charged with the ultimate crime in the so-called War on Terror: attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.

The arrest of Shareef was yet another JTTF success, with the homeland again saved from a savage attack, this time from a man the government branded a "lone wolf."

Or it was an illusion, a fictional plot developed in a self-fulfilling and self-serving cycle of chasing ghosts. For law enforcement, fear and the politics of fear have entwined to create a radical new paradigm. Even the term "law enforcement" has been rendered quaint by the Bush administration. These days, the term of art is "lawfare" —the confluence of police work and military tactics. With Joint Terrorism Task Forces set up across the country to coordinate the work of federal agencies and local cops, the FBI now devotes nearly two-thirds of its resources —some $4 billion —to waging war on terrorism. The approach today is not the traditional police work of investigating actual crimes but the far more slippery goal of preventing terrorist attacks before they occur.

To hear the Bush administration tell it, the JTTFs have been an unqualified success. The task forces have been credited with uncovering and busting up homegrown terrorist cells in Oregon, Seattle, Detroit, Miami, Buffalo and New Jersey. All told, the Feds have accused 619 people of "terrorist activity" since 9/11 —a record that the FBI insists has made America safer. In 2005 alone, more than 10 million terror inquiries were checked against the JTTF's Investigative Data Warehouse, a central repository for "terrorism-related documents." Such numbers create the sense that America is indeed under siege —and that the government is on top of the threat.

"These extremists are self-recruited, self-trained and self-executing," FBI Director Robert Mueller declared in 2006. "These homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al Qaeda, if not more so."

But a closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges —a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America. "The government releases selective figures," says Karen Greenberg, director of the center. "They have never even defined 'terrorism.' They keep us in the dark over statistics."

Indeed, Shareef is only one of many cases where the JTTFs have employed dubious means to reach even more dubious ends. In Buffalo, the FBI spent eighteen months tracking the "Lackawanna Six" —a half-dozen men from the city's large Muslim population who had been recruited by an Al Qaeda operative in early 2001 to undergo training in Afghanistan. Only two lasted the six-week course; the rest pretended to be hurt or left early. Despite extensive surveillance, the FBI found no evidence that the men ever discussed, let alone planned, an attack —but that didn't stop federal agents from arresting the suspects with great fanfare and accusing them of operating an "Al Qaeda-trained terrorist cell on American soil." Fearing they would be
designated as "enemy combatants" and disappeared into the legal void created by the Patriot Act, all six pleaded guilty to aiding Al Qaeda and were sentenced to at least seven years in prison.

In other cases, the use of informants has led the government to flirt with outright entrapment. In Brooklyn, a Guyanese immigrant and former cargo handler named Russell Defreitas was arrested last spring for plotting to blow up fuel tanks at JFK International Airport. In fact, before he encountered the might of the JTTF, Defreitas was a vagrant who sold incense on the streets of Queens and spent his spare time checking pay phones for quarters.

He had no hope of instigating a terrorist plot of the magnitude of the alleged attack on JFK —until he received the help of a federal informant known only as "Source," a convicted drug dealer who was cooperating with federal agents to get his sentence reduced. Backed by the JTTF, Defreitas suddenly obtained the means to travel to the Caribbean, conduct Google Earth searches of JFK's grounds and build a complex, multifaceted, international terror conspiracy —albeit one that was impossible to actually pull off. After Defreitas was arrested, U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf called it "one of the most chilling plots imaginable."

Using informants to gin up terrorist conspiracies is a radical departure from the way the FBI has traditionally used cooperating sources against organized crime or drug dealers, where a pattern of crime is well established before the investigation begins. Now, in new-age terror cases, the JTTFs simply want to establish that suspects are predisposed to be terrorists —even if they are completely unable or ill-equipped to act on that predisposition. High-tech video and audio evidence, coupled with anti-terror hysteria, has made it effectively impossible for suspects to use the legal defense of entrapment. The result in many cases has been guilty pleas —and no scrutiny of government conduct.

In most cases, because no trial is ever held, few details emerge beyond the spare and slanted descriptions in the indictments. When facts do come to light during a trial, they cast doubt on the seriousness of the underlying case. The "Albany Pizza" case provides a stark example. Known as a "sting case," the investigation began in June 2003 when U.S. soldiers raided an "enemy camp" in Iraq and seized a notebook containing the name of an imam in Albany — one Yassin Aref. To snare Aref, the JTTF dispatched a Pakistani immigrant named Shahed "Malik" Hussain, who was facing years in prison for a driver's-license scam.

Instead of approaching Aref directly, federal agents sent Malik to befriend Mohammed Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who went to the same mosque as Aref. Hossain, an American citizen who ran a place called Little Italy Pizzeria in Albany, had no connections whatsoever to terrorism or any form of radical Islam. After the attacks on 9/11, he had been quoted in the local paper saying, "I am proud to be an American."

But enticed by Malik, Hossain soon found himself caught up in a government-concocted terror plot. Posing as an arms dealer, Malik told Hossain that a surface-to-air missile was needed for an attack on a Pakistani diplomat in New York. He offered Hossain $5,000 in cash to help him launder $50,000 —a deal Hossain claims he never properly grasped. According to Muslim tradition, a witness is needed for significant financial transactions. Thus, the JTTF reached out for Hossain's imam and the true target of the sting —Aref.

At trial, the judge brushed aside questions about why the government was after Aref in the first place.

"The FBI had certain suspicions, good and valid suspicions, for looking into Mr. Aref," he told the jury. "But why they did that is not to be any concern of yours." For their role in a conspiracy confected entirely by the FBI, both Aref and Hossain were convicted of attempting to provide material support to terrorists and sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison.

"I am just a pizza man," the bewildered Hossain said at his sentencing. "I make good pizza."

Despite the rapid and widespread proliferation of JTTFs, very little has been reported about what goes on inside the War on Terror's domestic front.

The FBI building that houses the JTTF for the Northern District of Illinois has been moved from the middle of the city to a more spacious, fortresslike building on the industrial west side of Chicago, a place out of the city's Loop, literally and figuratively. The glass tower is surrounded by a tall metal fence, and layers upon layers of security inside and out add to the sense of siege. When Special Agent Robert Holley, who supervises the JTTF's Squad Counterterrorism 1, offers to escort me to his office on the eighth floor, we are stopped by his superior before we even reach the hallway. The entire floor, the supervisor declares, is considered secure — there are classified documents on desks —and therefore off-limits to outsiders.

Holley, an ex-military type who is built like a bullet, rolls his eyes but complies. There is no problem finding another room for a meeting. There are acres of empty offices and cubicles in the eerily futuristic building, the premises far larger than current requirements dictate but ready for expansion should the need arise with another terrorist attack.

Counterterrorism squads like the one overseen by Holley are assigned to monitor distant "Areas of Responsibility" —the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq. The six CT squads in Chicago are also divided into two categories: Five "substantive" groups like Holley's, which gather intelligence and conduct long-term investigations of specific individuals, and another squad that is charged with chasing down leads and determining the "threat profile" of suspects to decide if an investigation is merited. Holley's squad currently has some seventy-five open investigations — he won't give the precise number —in nearly every country under his purview. "A lot of our successes you don't see," he says. "We don't measure our success by the number of prosecutions."

When I ask what kinds of cases his CT squad has made, Holley cites the example of a local cab driver who came up on the JTTF's radar some time back —he won't say how or why. The man was East African, Holley says, a suspected Islamic extremist "connected to known bad guys overseas." After being interviewed by the JTTF, the cabbie decided to leave the country. Nothing criminal had occurred, and no charges were laid. The cab driver had simply come to the attention of the JTTF, and that in itself was enough to dispose of the matter.

"Can we consider that a success because we didn't put him in jail?" Holley asks. "Absolutely. This guy is no longer here. He is not a threat to one person in the United States."

"Was he ever a threat?" I ask.

"We opened up an investigation."

"But isn't that a circular argument?"

"Was he a bomb-thrower?" Holley concedes. "Probably not. Did he want to go into a mall and attack? No."

The next morning, I meet with three members of the Field Intelligence Group. The FIGs are designed to create a centralized approach to intelligence, both domestic and foreign. In northern Illinois, the group analyzes information from around the world, as well as that supplied courtesy of Operation Virtual Shield, the surveillance initiative designed to make Chicago one of the most-watched cities in the world. Thousands of cameras deployed on street corners, train platforms and buses now provide a nearly comprehensive visual record of all public movement in Chicago.

The unexceptional-seeming trio from the FIG dodge most of my questions on the grounds of national security. Mike Delejewski, a soft-spoken intelligence analyst, says that every call that comes into the JTTF is passed along to the FIG, which runs down every lead, no matter how improbable.

Delejewski mentions a call received regarding the Sears Tower and three suspicious-looking men seen in the vicinity. That was all the report said. The FIG and CT squads responded. The men turned out to be Mexican tourists.

"We get a lot of those calls," Delejewski says with a laugh.

Many of the callers who contact the JTTF are intentionally misleading, hoping to take revenge against a boyfriend, neighbor or co-worker. Such hoaxes are so routine, in fact, that the JTTF's public-relations officer keeps a separate file stuffed with press reports of invented pipe bombs and unattended suitcases and lunch trucks packed with explosives.

None of the three analysts in the FIG have Arabic-language skills or extensive experience in the countries they are supposed to monitor. To keep informed, they read newspapers and intelligence reports. They then issue bulletins to police departments about perceived threats.

"What is the biggest threat?" I ask.

There is a long pause.

"I think it's very dangerous if we start to identify that," an analyst named Julie Irvine says.

"The enemy is listening," Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gregory Fowler adds later. "I drill that into my people's heads every day. Foreign-intelligence agencies and terrorists are listening. The FBI is on a war footing."

When I express skepticism at the nature of the cases being brought by the JTTF, and the wild-goose chases that seem to occupy its time, Fowler says people don't understand the "threat stream" facing the nation. There are two reasons, he insists, that cases brought by the JTTF end up being discounted. First, defense attorneys manipulate the public to create the impression that the accused are hapless —but since very few cases actually go to trial, this explanation is unlikely at best. Second, Fowler says, the FBI itself minimizes threats to prevent panic. As an example, he cites the case of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, who pleaded guilty to terror-related charges. Reid, Fowler insists, was a much greater danger to America than is commonly appreciated —a refrain that requires the word of the JTTF be taken on faith.

"The public is never going to see the evidence we have," Fowler says. "We don't want to reveal our hand or tip our sources. You cannot judge the nature of the terrorist threat to the United States based on the public record."

"But with such strictures," I ask, "how does a citizen become informed about the threat?"

"I have access to the information," Fowler says. "I have a lot of faith in the judgment of the common citizen. A lot of people understand the nature of the threat."

To get a perspective on how the War on Terror is being waged by cops on the street, I meet with two local police officers assigned to the JTTF. Sgt. Paul DeRosa of the Chicago Police Department and Master Sgt. Carl Gutierrez of the Illinois State Police act as liaison officers for their respective forces. Both are on call 24/7 for 365 days of the year. Both are regularly summoned at three in the morning to investigate potential terrorist activity in Chicago.

"This weekend I had two calls," Gutierrez says.

When I ask what the calls were about, all Gutierrez will say is that they involved "suspicious incidents" which "could possibly have a terrorist nexus."

An example: People traveling on a train see someone taking photographs and acting suspiciously, and phone the police. "You have to understand we take those sort of calls very seriously," Gutierrez says. "We have to. If we don't, and something happens, and it comes back to us and lives are lost, who's to blame?"

To illustrate the kinds of cases the JTTF generates, Sgt. DeRosa cites an incident from three years ago. Two Middle Eastern men boarded a bus on Lake Shore Drive. They were bearded, dressed in traditional Arabic garb and sitting next to each other. As they rode the bus, one man was clicking a counter — the kind used at nightclubs to keep track of the crowd size. A passenger on the bus called 911.

"A report was made, and our CT squad was notified," DeRosa says. "We went and got the film from that bus. We reviewed it. We could see them clicking. We ask ourselves, 'Are they clicking passengers? Are they clicking when they go past buildings? Are they clicking on how many cars?' We put out a 'Bolo' —Be on the Lookout. We found where they got on the bus, and we did a stakeout. Seven or eight cars set up on the bus stop. On the third day, we spotted the guy. We talked to him." No one was arrested. There was no crime alleged. But DeRosa says proudly that the JTTF succeeded in finding the Man With the Clicker.

"Why was the man clicking?" I ask.

"They had to say a Muslim prayer 50,000 times," DeRosa says. "At first, we thought that was nonsense. Since then we've had a few of these incidents. Are these guys terrorists? Probably not. But in three days, they were identified and interviewed by the power of the JTTF — city and state police, FBI, Secret Service. Does that send a message to their community?"

Chicago has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country —some 400,000, DeRosa estimates. "Experts say that between five and ten percent of Muslims are extremists. So you take it down to one percent. What's one percent of 400,000? Forty thousand? Technically there could be 40,000 —"

"You mean 4,000," I say.

DeRosa pauses. "Right," he says. "Four thousand." He forges on. "Most people who come to America who are Middle Eastern come for a good reason. But there's still a percentage that may be here that don't like us. They are with the extremists."

Gutierrez offers another instance of the JTTF at work. A man of apparent Middle Eastern background came into a Chicago police station and said he worked for the Department of Defense and he had top-secret documents in his truck, which had been stolen. He also said his roommate was a terrorist.

The man appeared to be a kook. But an allegation had been made. The JTTF was contacted. Gutierrez was called out, and he interviewed the subject. He soon verified that the man was, in fact, nuts. But the matter didn't end there.

"We interviewed the roommate," Gutierrez says. "He was an Egyptian. We ran his name. He was here illegally. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] was there within two hours. I've never seen ICE react the way they did. They came out and took physical custody of the guy. They kept him until his court hearing, and he was sent overseas."

"Was there any evidence or suggestion that the man was actually a terrorist?" I ask.

"You never know," DeRosa says.

"Have you ever found a terrorist cell?" I ask.

"That's kind of a vague question," Gutierrez says. "There are certain things we can't talk about, because it leads to more."

"Do I believe there's a cell in Chicago?" DeRosa asks. "I bet you there is. Do I have any direct physical knowledge? No. But I think there is one, and that's why we're here."

The two officers tell me about a close call at the Taste of Chicago food festival last year. Millions attend the annual street feast, with Chicago-style sausage and pizza and tamales on sale in booths along the lakefront. As with all major public events, the JTTF helped plan the security profile. A JHAT —a Joint Hazardous Assessment Team —set up at the festival, dotting the area with devices that detect signs of a chemical or biological or radiological attack. Suddenly, one of the devices went off: There was a radiological hit on one of the sniffers near a row of porta-potties. For an hour, the JHAT frantically tried to determine if Chicago had been struck by a "dirty bomb" —a weapon that spreads lethal radioactive material mixed with conventional explosives. Finally, after an anxious hour, the hit was traced to a particular outhouse —and the cause of the positive alert was determined.

"Someone who had chemotherapy had just done a poop," DeRosa says.

There is considerable skepticism in local police departments in northern Illinois about the nature and extent of the threat posed by terrorism. There are 415 local law-enforcement agencies in the district, many of which remain unconvinced that the threat is as dire as the JTTF maintains. Many departments refuse to allocate even one or two officers to spend four hours on basic terror training. Rather than consider the idea that the cops closest to the ground might have a better perspective on their communities, the JTTF addressed the problem by forming a TLOC —Terrorism Liaison Officer's Committee. The point is to merchandise the menace of terrorism to the police.

"It's a matter of marketing strategy," says Mark Lundgren, a special agent who oversees the TLOC. "These terrorism acts are trending toward the homegrown, self-activated, self-radicalized — the sort of thing that could literally pop up in your back yard. The typical things we would use to detect terrorism don't work, because these people are off the charts, so to speak. Nine times out of ten, for the next decade, it's going to be the local cop who stops the terror attacks."

Lundgren, who resembles a young Gary Busey, fairly glistens with certainty about the value of his work. "What are you trying to sell to the local police departments?" I ask.

"Awareness. Motivation," he says. "It's a very hard sell. You walk into a chief of police in a crime-ridden district. The first thing he's going to tell you is, 'The guys in this area are killing people. The guys you're telling me about —it's not make-believe, I understand that — but they haven't killed anyone lately in my district.' "

"Or ever," I say.

"Exactly."

When Derrick Shareef was arrested by the JTTF, the police chief in Rockford complained that his force had been told very little about the investigation. The city has one of the highest murder rates in the state, as well as raging drug and juvenile delinquency woes. Dominic Iasparro is a senior investigator who is working the case of an addict found dead on the outskirts of town. He tells me he has no real leads. There is a small FBI outpost in Rockford, with ten or so agents, but it provides no assistance on a homicide. Local police have scant interaction with the JTTF, and Iasparro doesn't exactly see terrorism as a top priority in northern Illinois. "We're not a big enough target," he says.

A thirty-five-year veteran, Iasparro follows JTTF bulletins and updates online, and he doesn't doubt the good intentions of the agents involved in the task force. But he also understands that the pressure on the federal government to avoid another attack is enormous. To a local cop like Iasparro, the amount of resources the government devotes to the effort is staggering.

"Do you think the JTTF is jumping at ghosts?" I ask.

He shakes his head in wonder. "I have never seen anything like it in my career."

The attitude of local cops frustrates members of the TLOC. They want to train cops to watch out for "suspicious terroristlike behavior," without revealing what such behavior might look like.

"We're teaching police how to approach a suspicious person in a public place," Lundgren tells me.

"How to probe that person. How to look at the body language they exhibit, how they answer questions, to determine if they are a threat or not — in a way that doesn't leave that person feeling they've been ill-treated. There are detractors out there that think our cases are without merit. That's a philosophical question that's easy to ask until you're a body part.

"Without getting too philosophical, remember the whole Dick Cheney one percent solution," Lundgren continues. "If there is a one percent chance that a device can be constructed that will kill thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people, then we have to treat our response as if there were a 100 percent chance. That's a thing that gets lost in the view of the public when they see the intelligence-gathering of law enforcement. They get concerned about their civil liberties and the Constitution because of the way things are portrayed in the media."

In late November, Derrick Shareef pleaded guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Because of the video evidence against him, Shareef couldn't use a legal defense of entrapment. But in court, he said he had been "coerced into doing things and trapped into doing things." In Rockford, not long before his guilty plea, there was a "For Sale" sign on the small house where Shareef once lived. The house was empty, the furniture gone.

Members of the JTTF told me that they wished they could reveal the rest of the story, to prove that Shareef was a true bad guy. According to the indictment of another accused terrorist, Hassan Abu-Jihaad, Shareef was involved in a larger conspiracy to attack a military base in San Diego. In pretrial proceedings, however, it emerged that Abu-Jihaad was egged on by none other than William "Jameel" Chrisman, the same informant who set up Shareef. Abu-Jihaad not only refused to participate in the alleged plot but on surveillance tapes can be heard dismissing Shareef as an idiot and a liar.

"I ain't no jihadi," Abu-Jihaad told Jameel.

While real threats undoubtedly exist, what the Bush administration promotes as a nationwide pattern of terrorist activities is largely the result of its own policies in the age of lawfare. Last May, the FBI arrested the "Fort Dix Six," charging the men with conspiring to attack the New Jersey military base.

The supposed terror cell was discovered when a clerk at Circuit City was asked to transfer to DVD a video of the men allegedly training for jihad in the Pocono Mountains and shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" [God is great!] As in other cases, the FBI itself proved to be the mastermind behind the plot. The men —who included three roofers, a taxi driver and a former delivery boy for Super Mario's Pizza — had little money and no connections to real extremists. All were in their twenties and spent their weekends playing paintball. Under the guidance of two informants for the JTTF, the men planned an assault on Fort Dix using rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s —none of which actually existed.

There are signs, however, that judges and jurors are getting fed up with such concocted "threats." In December, the prosecution of the "Liberty City Seven" ended in one acquittal and a hung jury for the rest of the accused. The supposed cell was accused of preparing a "full ground war" against America by bringing down the Sears Tower and other buildings. At trial, however, it emerged that the men had no operational abilities, that the plots were dreamed up at the exhortation of two paid FBI informants while smoking dope and that the group had been provided its camera, military boots and warehouse by the JTTF.

Despite 15,000 surveillance recordings of the men, including one in which they swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the jury refused to convict. "This was all written, produced, directed, choreographed and stage-designed by the United States government," Albert Levin, an attorney for one of the accused, said in his closing argument.

Undeterred, the government is taking six of the men back to court. The retrial was scheduled to begin on January 22nd.

____________________

Rory's Comment: It's a shame that we have no one with the courage or the nous in the UK to do a similar investigation on how the British secret services use similar methods to entrap British Muslims into false-flag ops like 77, the Glasgow fire, and so many other incidents.

For you can be sure it's happening.

Saturday 26 January 2008



9-11 Truth And The Holocaust

By Wendy Campbell

24 January, 2008
Countercurrents.org

There is a website (http://911review.com/denial/holocaust.html) with a page entitled “Holocaust Denial Versus 9/11 Truth.”

That title gives away the real perspective of the writer as being a Zionist Jew however the writer declined to divulge his ethnicity or religion or even his/her name. (For the record, I am not Jewish by way of ethnicity nor religion. I am of Swedish, English and Irish ethnicity and of Christian background. I am a human rights activists who advocates for completely equal rights for all with no exceptions, especially here in the US and also in Israel, which is dependent on massive US financial and otherwise support.)

I am going to deconstruct this obvious Zionist Jewish writer’s article here.

First of all, most people who are supportive of the growing skepticism about the official Jewish version of what Jews have coined as “The Holocaust” prefer to call that skepticism “Holocaust Revisionism” rather than “Holocaust Denial”. The reason for that is that everyone knows that Jews were persecuted by the Nazis during WWII, which lasted from 1939 to 1945 (a total of six years). No one denies that. Please note that the Zionist Jews have been persecuting non-Jewish Palestinians in Palestine-Israel ever since the Jewish state was created in Palestine in 1948 (that’s 60 years of persecution). Unfortunately in general, Jews tend to deny that fact, even though it is well documented by some prominent Jewish writers and also in the booklet “Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict” written by Jews for Justice in the Middle East, at http://www.cactus48.com

In keeping with a true democracy, Holocaust Revisionism is completely legitimate just as any historical event must always be allowed to be further researched in a scholarly manner, especially with the modern forensic techniques, something which the Holocaust Fundamentalists/Obsessers have never bothered with. They rely only on conflicting eye-witness accounts.

Real 9-11 Truthers seek the Truth about all matters, especially with regards to politics related to the subjects at hand: US foreign policy, Israel, Palestine, Zionism, WW I and WWII, etc.

The Holocaust Fundamentalists are putting people in jail in some countries for publicly questioning the official Jewish version of “The Holocaust”, a term which they have basically trademarked for only Jewish use to try to suggest that Jewish suffering during WWII was unique above all other people’s suffering in all of humankind’s history. Closer scrutiny will reveal that this is the chauvinistic viewpoint put forth by Jews via their prolific output of books, articles, movies and TV specials via the newsmedia which they tend to dominate.

The fact is that even though at trials of such Holocaust Revisionists as Ernst Zundel, whose defense brought up significant truths with regards to certain aspects of the official Jewish Holocaust story, using forensic experts and cross-examining top Jewish Holocaust leaders such as Raul Hilberg, revealing many conflicting discrepancies in their stories, the judge found Ernst Zundel, who is a pacifist with no previous criminal record, guilty of “incitement to hatred” and he’s been in jail for years, first in Canada and now in Germany where he was extradited to. You can google him for the details. Remember there are always at least two sides to every story, so do your cross-referencing. So the end result was that the Truth about the Holocaust was/is completely irrelevant in his trial. The fact is that his powerful political enemies want him in jail. Period. It’s like the Grand Inquisition. Even his defense lawyer in Germany has now been put in jail.

Look at who “hates our freedoms” by the way. The Zionist Jews are the ones who are pushing the so-called “hate speech” laws in this country, with the help of the powerful Zionist Jewish group: the ADL. If they have their way, they will put in jail anyone who questions the Jewish version of The Holocaust, anyone who criticizes Israel as the Jewish supremacist state that it is, anyone who suggests that Israel had anything to do with 9-11, especially those who believe that Israel-firsters were the driving force behind making 9-11 happen. Meanwhile the ADL and their related Zionist groups are silent about the US mainstream media’s daily articles filled with what amounts to hate-speech against Muslims, Arabs and Iranians, and fully supports the so-called US war on terror, which is obviously something Israel fully supports as well.

Please remember that PNAC, written basically exclusively by Israeli-Americans (but endorsed by non-Israelis such as Cheney) called for a Pearl Harbor-style catastrophe to roll out a war against Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, starting with Iraq. Please remember that, according to the Jewish website Forward, former Israeli prime minister Netanhyahu is best friends with Larry Silverstein. Larry Silverstein has been the owner of the World Trade Center since six months before the 9-11 attacks which he had heavily insured for terrorist attacks. Please remember that Larry Silverstein said “they decided to pull it” with regards to WTC building 7, lingo meaning implode it, even though it takes weeks to set up such a demolition, which by the way, is how the WTC buildings 1 and 2 collapsed according to most experts unaffiliated with the government and impartial observers. Just re-watching the clips of the 9-11 attacks anyone can clearly see it was imploded/exploded—you can see the squibs exploding out the sides of the buildings and you can see that the buildings fell in a free-fall that lasts only a few seconds, basically into their footprints. This has never happened before in history, despite raging fires in buildings caused from jets, or whatever. The WTC buildings were specifically designed to withstand such occurrences as jets flying into them. There are also many videotaped interviews with survivors including NYFD firemen who heard the explosions. There were the warnings to the Israeli company Odigo that never reached authorities in the WTC, and there were the dancing Israeli spies filming the event while it happened and rejoicing with high fives.

I’m afraid it all adds up to one thing: 9-11 was an inside job with the help of the Mossad and the knowledge of key people inside and around the United States government. I believe that anyone who is suspicious of being involved with making 9-11 happen should be fully investigated by American authorities who are not Israeli-Americans nor Israel-firsters. These people have dual loyalties and/or are bought off. We need American-Americans who only have real Truth and America’s interests at heart, and not foxes watching the chicken coop.

Note that those who hate our freedoms such as Mark Weitzman of the Simon Weisanthal Center flubbed up on a video taped session (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5NJoZRYOJk) when he was making his pitch for a new law that would outlaw Americans from seeking 9-11 Truth no matter where it leads us. He wants legal action against “conspiracy theorists… blaming 9-11 as part of an outside job or job by outside groups such as the US government.” Was it a Freudian slip? Or did he substitute “US government” at the last minute to avoid publicly implicating Israel, since many Americans are still not fully aware of Israel’s role in 9-11, and he just wants those of us who do know about Israel’s role to figure out what he means.

After all, everyone in the 9-11 Truth Movement believes that it was an INSIDE JOB, meaning certain powerful people in the US government had either foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks and either LET it happen on purpose (LIHOP) or MADE it happen on purpose (MIHOP). And a certain percentage of people in the 9-11 Truth Movement believe that Israel either LET it happen on purpose or helped to orchestrate it, in other words, to MAKE it happen on purpose.

So for Weitzman to be concerned about 9-11 Truthers claiming that 9-11 was an “outside job” is rather strange, since we believe that it was an INSIDE JOB, with the help of OUTSIDE groups such as – no, NOT “the US government”, but yes, Israel and its Mossad.

Let’s face it. Weitzman and his ilk are insisting that we believe the Official 9-11 Report, that “outside groups” such as Al Queda made the 9-11 attacks. That’s the kosher version. Just like Weitzman and his ilk are insisting that we all believe the kosher Jewish version of the Holocaust without questioning, without further research. Or else! Oy vey!

EXACTLY WHO HATES OUR FREEDOMS? It’s obvious to me it’s the Zionist Jews, and their bought-out lackeys such as Bush, Cheney and most American politicians at this rate today. The Muslims and Arabs just want to be left alone to vote for who they want to vote for, such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and not have the Israeli army rolling into their territories willy-nilly, nor have the US taking over the oil resources in the Middle East so that Israel can have a free pipeline out of the deal, and so on. Who is paying for Israel and the so-called “war on terror”? The American people. We have the right and the duty to openly scrutinize and criticize what is happening as we see fit. This IS a democracy, right? And we better use our Freedom of Speech before people like Mark Weitzman and his ilk try to take it away to suit their war-mongering and greedy political agenda.

Back to the article “Holocaust Denial Versus 9/11 Truth” (http://911review.com/denial/holocaust.html)by the Zionist Jewish writer. He starts in by trying to discredit Christopher Bollyn, one of THE most courageous journalists on the subject of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and 9-11, bar none. He has, in fact, been harassed, tasered and arrested by the henchmen of his political enemies, and he and his family are now living outside of the country in Norway, where his wife is from, to escape further political persecution.

While I am sure that there are probably some errors in Bollyn’s articles here and there, I am sure they are not deliberate. As someone who has been written about both favorably and also smeared, and who is a writer herself, I know that errors happen. In my case, they are NEVER deliberate. You could call me a Truth Fundamentalist. I seek only the Truth and nothing but the Truth. I know Christopher Bollyn, have talked to him on the phone and via e-mail exchanges, and I’ve read most of his works, and I believe he is the same way. Just check out his website and just for yourself! It’s http://www.bollyn.com . Bollyn does NOT hide who he is, unlike the Zionist Jewish writer of the article I am deconstructing.

Then he goes on to try to discredit The American Free Press, which has always been a champion of 9-11 Truth, exposing the racist realities behind racist, apartheid Israel and its persecution of non-Jews in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the evils of Zionism, and the imperialistic, deceptive agenda of the Neo-Conservatives who are all Israel-firsters.

Then of course he brings out the “usual suspects” such as David Duke, who although he is racist, he is also quite on target with regards to pointing out the obvious racism of Zionist Jews who support the Jewish supremacist state of Israel which is NOT a real democracy, not by a long shot. This is predictably overlooked by the typically anonymous Jewish writer of this article, as well as the Zionized US media which continues to make the false claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

Anyway, you get the point. The Jewish author of the article clearly has his blinders on with regards to the inherent racism of Zionism and the Jewish state of Israel as well as the inherent racism of The Holocaust whose proponents obsessively seek to promote Jewish suffering above all others and use it as a propaganda tool to get Zionist Jews the carte blanche treatment, free of any criticism and free to do whatever it wants, including genociding and ethnically cleansing non-Jews from Palestine and stealing the resources, agricultural land, water and oil, from its neighboring countries. All of this immoral behavior is being financed with American taxpayers’ dollars. I don’t recall anyone asking for my permission to spend my tax dollars in such an immoral, wasteful way.

The anonymous Zionist author of the article also points to other genocides that Jews like to point to, but fails to include the current slow genocide that Jews have been perpetrating against non-Jews in Palestine since 1948, as the Jewish state continues its relentless, deceptive campaign to wipe Palestine off the map. The Zionist author also fails to acknowledge the twenty-plus million non-Jews who were killed during the Russian Bolshevik Revolution which was largely led by Jews.

At the end of the anonymous Jewish Zionist writer’s article entitled “Holocaust Denial and 9/11”, he asserts that “ The 9/11 truth movement should not be co-opted by those who want to pretend that one of the greatest crimes in history was oversold by Jews in order to justify a land grab in Palestine.”

First of all, we do not “pretend” anything. It’s about Truth. There have been many crimes in history and many crimes are still being committed against humanity, specifically the US war on Iraq and Israel’s on-going campaign of ethnic-cleansing against the non-Jewish Palestinian people. As anyone knows who talks to anyone at all or does any reading whatsoever, most Jews themselves will point to The Holocaust as the “reason” why the Jews should be allowed to steal and continue to steal the land from non-Jews in Palestine for the Jewish supremacist state of Israel.

Those of us in the 9-11 Truth Movement who truly seek the Truth and nothing but the Truth, will follow it wherever it goes, and will not be held back by certain gate-keepers who for their own reasons think there is a limit to where we can follow the Truth. It’s not about “blaming”the Jews”” for 9-11. It’s about finding seeking justice for the 9-11 crimes, whoever orchestrated it and whoever did it. Whoever put out the contract for death and war, and whoever actually did it. We Americans of good conscience will also seek a US foreign policy change, divorcing the US from racist, apartheid Israel, since Israel is indeed a “outside” foreign country which is based on the racist premise of a Jewish supremacist state.

In the final paragraph, the anonymous Zionist writer wrote: “It would not be surprising if many of the voices most loudly advocating Holocaust Denial were “false flag” operatives of the Israeli government – since the fact that some crazy people promote these lies make it more difficult to find political space to criticize Israeli human rights abuses (even though the two issues are quite separate).”

How hilarious. Really. It’s the typical Zionist smoke and mirrors game, the typical shell game. If anyone is paying attention you can see his real agenda all along—first of all he brands anyone who questions the Jewish version of the Holocaust as advocating “Holocaust Denial”, which really amounts to a smear word, and then referred to them as “crazy people” who promote “lies”. Then he fuzzily, unconvincingly, tries to say that there is no connection between Israeli human rights abuses and The Holocaust – he’s just fooling himself.

In essence, the Zionist Jewish writer of the article himself is obviously an operative of the Israeli government, by continuing to promote the Zionist dictum that one cannot question or further research the experience of Jews during WWII which Jews have proclaimed as “The Holocaust” as well as to try to shield the American public from the obvious Israeli connection to 9-11.

The Holocaust has been made into more of a religious dogma than historical fact, since there exists no original source materials to back up their claims which are all based on conflicting eye-witnesses. While Christians believe that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin mother, was crucified and resurrected from the dead on the third day, and sits at the right hand of the Father, there are no laws nor heavy pressure that others believe such. However, as Rabbi Kirshenbaum of the Neturei Karta explained to me, it is the “Jewish tradition to believe in The Holocaust”, the entire kosher Jewish version of it, without question. That’s fine, but this is America, and we get to decide what we believe after doing our own research, without fear of being imprisoned for it.

We must be vigilant about protecting our freedoms here in the United States. There are forces here in our government, as you may well know, who are doing everything they can to take away those freedoms. And they have their minions trolling websites and all 9-11 and anti-war yahoogroups at work as well. This is well documented.

One 9-11 yahoo-group that I have participated in had someone by the name of “Sean McBride” who first warned those of us from even mentioning any support for Holocaust Revisionists’ work, claiming others would damage us somehow and we would damage the movement somehow, blah blah. When the moderator did not completely kow tow to McBride’s warnings which he had first couched as what he feared others might do, he himself started making outrageous threats and accusations and smears, thus revealing his true mission, which is not 9-11 Truth but maintaining the status quo with regards to shielding the Jewish state of Israel from any sharp criticism, and maintaining unconditional US support for the Jewish supremacist state of Israel.

The American public’s passive support for allowing our government’s unconditional support for the Jewish supremacist state of Israel would surely be jeopardized and undermined if further investigation of 9-11Truth in fact reveals undeniable proof that not only did Israeli operatives LET it happen, they MADE it happen. Only the guilty need be worried.

It is in the best interests of all people of conscience to demand only Truth wherever it leads us because the Truth will set us free. To some people, the Truth is inconvenient to their agenda. But isn’t that just too bad.

In closing, I believe that all Americans of all creeds, religions, ethnicities and races, should demand that the US government treat racist, apartheid Israel in the exact same manner that racist, apartheid South Africa was – with boycotts and sanctions until Israel indeed transforms into a true secular democracy with completely equal rights for all regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, creed or gender, and that the Palestinian refugees’ inalienable Right to Return to their ancestral homeland of Palestine-Israel as complete equals be honored, and that Israel and the US must give Palestinians reparations as well.

This is in the best interest of the entire world.


Wendy Campbell is an American documentary film-maker and the editor of http://www.marwenmedia.com