Howard Beale's News Hour

7/7: Crime and Prejudice

2011-09-17T14:34:00.018+01:00

With the 7/7 inquests having concluded with the most ridiculous and predictable of judgments the responsibility of ordinary citizens to investigate and ask questions about the London bombings has grown. In solidarity with the July 7th Truth Campaign's excellent research and analysis on their dedicated 7/7 Inquests blog, Howard Beale's News Hour is pleased to present the sequel to 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction, 7/7: Crime and Prejudice.

The first film, 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction largely focused on the history of covert operations and official deceptions as a context for understanding the failings of the Home Office narrative, the aim in this film was slightly different. This two-hour production explores not only the crime of the bombings in London in July 2005, but also the police investigation of that crime. The context for this exploration is threefold: the role of the British police and security services in different kinds of covert actions; the post-7/7 miscarriages of justice and instances of police violence against predominantly Muslim 'terror suspects'; and the various simulations of terrorism both before and after 7/7 that helped conditioned people into accepting one or another narrative of what happened.

The film begins by looking at the case of Victorian Anarchism, in particular the tale of the Walsall Anarchists, who were set up by Special Branch via an agent provocateur. You can find further information in a previous essay on this blog. The plot appears to have been masterminded by William Melville, who went on to head up the Secret Service Bureau, which then became the original MI5. Through his proxy provocateur, Auguste Coulon, Melville succeeded in obtaining convictions of four innocent men, three of which were sentenced to ten years hard labour. At the trial the lawyers for the defence asked Melville about Coulon, but the Special Branch man refused to answer the questions, and the judge ruled in his favour. This is an early example of how the spying game, which at that time was reviled by the population as underhanded and not becoming of gentlemen, affects the integrity of the justice system.

Coulon was a police spy, paid from July 1890 until some time in 1904, with the Walsall case coming in the spring of 1892, when he received extra money. The suspicions were well-founded, and confirmation at the time could have exonerated the men on trial, but that was of less concern to the judge than preserving the ability of the police to run or 'handle' such spies. According to Andrew Cook's excellent book on Melville called M: MI5's First Spymaster, the Walsall case was the only time that Melville practised such dark arts but Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents illustrates how the anarchists were frequently infiltrated and manipulated. The Walsall case was not exceptional.

By the time of World War 2 MI5 had grown into a significant organisation, usurping the police Special Branches in secrecy, and hence in what they could get away with. 7/7: Crime and Prejudice details the example of Mutt and Jeff, two Norwegians who were sent to Britain by the Nazis to be spies and saboteurs. Upon arriving in this country they gave themselves up and quickly became double agents. They participated in deception operations, sending back disinformation to their Nazi handlers.

The security services also carried out false flag sabotage attacks, making the Nazis believe that Mutt and Jeff were still loyal and following orders. On one occasion a firebomb attack on a food depot was bungled. Security Service operatives snuck in and set off a couple of incendiary bombs, but the fire was quickly spotted by the local police, who were of course 'compartmentalised' and 'out of the loop'. The police called in the fire brigade, who put out the fire and discovered the remains of the bombs, which were of the type used by the British Security Services. The now-declassified files available at the National Archives record how 'This led to a very delicate situation in connection with the inquiry being made by Scotland Yard. Ultimately the inquiry died out.' Clearly MI5 trumped Scotland Yard by this time. Once again, the integrity of the justice system (the police, the prosecution service and the judiciary) was compromised so that the integrity of the secret National Security State could be maintained.

This same phenomenon was evident in Northern Ireland, where for years collusion between militants and the security services was a popularly believed 'conspiracy theory', now confirmed as historical fact. There is some reason to be cheerful - there have been a number of pretty hard-hitting inquiries into the issue of collusion, though there is still plenty of resistance to investigation and we're still waiting for even one member of the FBI, MI5, RUC Special Branch or FRU to be prosecuted for their role in the atrocities. The Pat Finucane Centre has obtained some very telling paperwork in this regard, detailing a meeting in 1971 between the Attorney General and 'J.M. Parkin, Head of C2' at the British army's Northern Ireland HQ. The documents note how Parkin had, 'no doubt the Attorney General is doing all within his power to protect the security forces against criminal proceedings in respect of actions on duty.'

We can see much the same process going on in today's War on Terror. Inasmuch as there is an international radical Islamist movement, some members of whom are willing to carry out acts of violence, it is riddled with informers, double agents and provocateurs. From Omar Saeed Sheikh to Ali Mohamed to Luai Sakra to Junaid Babar to David Headley to Edwin Angeles, from the Philippines to Algeria the unifying factor in these disparate militant and radical groups is the infiltration by those in the pay of the security services. The violence seen in Mumbai, Istanbul, Manila and beyond is one result of this covert policy. The other is miscarriages of justice.

Several significant incidents are examined in 7/7: Crime and Prejudice, all of which happened after 7/7. There are two reasons I chose post-7/7 events - firstly, to show how the attacks made it easier for the judiciary to obtain ridiculous and obscene convictions against innocent people, and also to show how whatever failings and corruption existed before 7/7 continued to exist after 7/7. Nothing has fundamentally changed. The murder of Jean Charles de Menezes by British security forces was followed by one of the most obvious attempts at a cover-up ever witnessed in this country. The have simply got away with gunning down an indisputably innocent man and then repeatedly lying about it.

Months later, in Forest Gate, the police shot another indisputably innocent man, Mohammed Abdulkahar. He survived, only to face accusations of being a terrorist. The police were forced to admit their 'mistake' but when the IPCC published a laughable disgrace of a report saying that the shooting was accidental, the police just so happened to choose that very same day to re-arrest Mr Abdulkahar on child pornography charges. These were also dropped due to lack of evidence. At no stage has anyone been held responsible for the 'intelligence failure' that led to the raid, which led to the shooting, which led to the trumped up charges. Indeed, we still have no real idea what information MI5 and Special Branch had in the weeks leading up the raid, or who took the decision to mount the 'robust operation'.

Though 7/7: Crime and Prejudice did not make this explicit, the case of Mohammed Hamid et al is in many ways comparable to that of the Walsall Anarchists. The defendants were (and are) fundamentally innocent, and yet one of them confessed for reasons that aren't particularly clear. The case against them was bolstered by the use of an undercover policeman known as 'Dawood. He made covert recordings of the defendants, Hamid in particular, saying some admittedly unwise and insensitive statements, though nothing substantially different to what anyone else has said in private conversation. By maintaining that the undercover policeman was not actually an undercover policeman when he met Hamid, the prosecution argued that Hamid's statements were effectively made in public and hence constituted incitement to murder.

The other part of the trial was the charge of providing or receiving terrorism training within the UK, which only became a crime after 7/7. Hamid was accused of running training camps during several trips he and his friends made to countryside areas, and on one trip paid for by the BBC where they went paintballing. As far as terrorism or guerrilla warfare goes, one could learn a lot more from playing games like Call of Duty: Black Ops than one could from going camping with Mohammed Hamid but that didn't stop the 'independent' judiciary deciding to prosecute a group of men for playing with sticks, jumping over rivers, and slicing a melon.

A wider issue that I have with this case is that even if Hamid were providing jihad training then prosecuting him would be an enormous hypocrisy, as the primary trainers of Islamic militants over the last 30 years or so have been the military and intelligence services of the Western powers. When Abu Hamza and 'ex' British army soldiers were training recruits in the Brecon Beacons in the 1990s to help fight the dirty wars in the Balkans, the authorities did nothing. But when one small and independent group of men who have nothing to do with the security services go to the woods and jump over rivers shouting 'Allah Akbar', somehow it is a crime.

7/7: Crime and Prejudice also covers the case of Khalid Khaliq, arrested and prosecuted because a terrorism training manual written by a CIA double agent was found in his house, and that of three men accused of being co-conspirators in the 7/7 plot. Waheed Ali, Sadeer Saleem and Mohammed Shakil were subjected to two trials, on the barely-even-circumstantial evidence of them having visited London about 8 months prior to the 7/7 bombings. The prosecution maintained that the sites they visited - The London Eye, the London Aquarium and the Natural History Museum - bore a 'striking similarity' to the targets on 7/7, which were of course three tube stations and a bus. How a 443 ft ferris wheel resembles an underground railway station is not clear to me, and obviously wasn't clear to the juries in the trials. The men were eventually found innocent, but like so many others will have to live with the stigma of accusation for the rest of their lives.

As such, the judiciary cannot be seen as independent from political influence, or from the machinations of the National Security State. For over a century, and continuing right up until the present day, innocent people have been wrongly convicted for serious crimes, or seriously convicted of trivial non-crimes. Those who are most consistently responsible for the most horrific crimes are almost invariably state actors and agents, and virtually without exception they have got away with it. And so, prospects for the 7/7 inquests did not look good. Five months of hearings recorded the testimony of hundreds of witnesses, and vast quantities of information was adduced as evidence. However, the most basic requirements of establishing who died, how and whether their deaths could have been prevented were ignored or categorically fudged.

The process by which bodies were recovered from the explosion sites and then identified was ruled to be 'outside of the scope of these proceedings'. This is extremely fortunate for proponents of the official narrative because of 56 people who died in the attacks, only 15 were pronounced dead at the scenes, and those 15 did not include any of the alleged bombers. The question of how the people died was inevitably answered with a verdict of 'unlawful killing' (a verdict denied to the jurors in the Menezes inquest), and the medical cause of death listed in each case as 'injuries caused by an explosion'. The problem is that precisely what exploded is not a question the inquests could answer, as no trace of primary explosive was found at any of the bomb sites. Nor were any bomb cases or bomb initiators found. Nor was any forensic evidence adduced that linked the alleged bombers to the tubs of allegedly explosive sludge found in the alleged bomb factory.

The question of preventability was dealt with by portraying the London emergency services as hopelessly incompetent and mismanaged, but failing to name even a single policy or budgetary decision or specific official as responsible. A few recommendations were made but even the mainstream media recognised that it is highly unlikely that any of them will be adopted. The other aspect to the 'preventability' issue is examined in some detail in 7/7: Crime and Prejudice. Among the findings outlined by J7 and presented in the film is that the security services did not tell the truth about the pre-7/7 intelligence when asked about it by the Intelligence and Security Committee. They had a phone number connected to alleged 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan several months before the ISC's report claims they had it. They came across the number during phone surveillance of Q, a supposed Al Qaeda facilitator who, like Auguste Coulon, the police refuse to answer questions about. According to a Security Service document made available at the inquests a subscriber check on the phone was carried out on March 11th 2003. According to the ISC's second report ('Could 7/7 have been prevented?') the British Security Services didn't start monitoring Q's phone until 'late March 2003' after receiving a tip-off from the National Security Agency about him. So where did they get the number from, and why were they doing a subscriber check on it before they had any reason to care about who was using it? The implication is that they were monitoring Mohammed Sidique Khan, and possibly others around him, more closely and for a longer timeframe than they've admitted.

Of course, this could just be covering-up for incompetence, but this is doubtful for two reasons. Firstly, it is not what the government and their friends have used as their excuse. According to them, and repeated in the inquest verdict, there was no intelligence failure. As far as they are concerned, they did everything right. Rather than make a half-assed confession of incompetence, but fail to fire anyone or change anything (the preferred PR response to questions about 9/11), the British cover-up strategy has been to deny that there's even been a cover-up, or that anything went wrong. This bizarre and implausible argument has, in the manner of doublethink, been used alongside the strategy to say that things did go wrong, that there was an intelligence failure, but that the only answer is to give more power, funding, resources and protection to the Security Services. So we go round and round, caught in a dialogue between two (likely) false propositions, having an argument that takes place in terms defined by the very people we're trying to hold to account. If we lack the vocabulary to even ask the questions in the right way then we've got no chance of ever getting a proper answer.

The same is true of the battle between conspiracy theories. The official conspiracy theory of 7/7 is a joke, indeed, it doesn't really exist. The conspiracy theory told by the police that they claim to have derived from investigating the crime contradicts the conspiracy theory told by the anonymous Home Office civil servant who wrote the official narrative. But many people take these two stories as being only one story, and reject it wholesale in favour of alternative narratives, usually revolving around terrorism training exercises and patsy suicide bombers. The 'independent' media has uncritically accepted and promulgated the alternative narratives, subjecting them to almost no scrutiny whatsoever, let alone the crackpot Jesus-freak cross-dressing intelligence agents who promote them.

In doing so, all of these supposedly independent researchers remained ignorant of the fact that in the couple of years before 7/7 there were numerous training exercises, films and TV shows that simulated terrorist attacks and helped establish this polarised dialogue about such attacks. The exercises are the only thing that have been considered, and only in the context of whether they were practice runs for the real attacks. The psychological effect of these attacks, their role as simulations (bridges between the real and the paranoid nightmares inflicted on us by the ruling class) has been under-examined, and 7/7: Crime and Prejudice seeks to put that right.

A quick run-down of events looked at in the film goes as follows:

17th June 2002 - Spooks episode shows MI5 staging a fake attack on a London train station.
9th June 2003 - Spooks episode shows Muslim suicide bombing.
7th July 2003 - Spooks episode shows bomb attack on London at the same time as a security service exercise.
7th September 2003 – 'Osiris II' exercise based around chemical attack on London underground.
3rd February 2004 – BBC broadcasts Crisis Command pilot episode featuring attack on Waterloo underground station and a plane crashing into the houses of Parliament.
11th March 2004 - 3/11 bombings in Madrid.
16th May 2004 - Panorama episode 'London Under Attack' features attacks on three underground stations and a large road vehicle.
16th May 2004 - 'Operation Transit Safe' exercise in New York based around multiple bombings on the subway.
24th September 2004 - BBC/HBO production 'Dirty War' is broadcast, featuring two pairs of Muslim suicide bombers, one pair attack Liverpool Street station in a suicide bombing, the other pair are shot dead by police.
13th December 2004 - Spooks episode shows Muslim 'proxy bomb' and shows terrorist mastermind being shot dead by special forces.
5th to 8th April 2005 - Atlantic Blue exercise based around bombings on London trains and buses. US exercise includes fake news footage and a fake terrorist suspect who is a Muslim.
June 2005 - Spooks episode filmed based around attack on London train station, also shows terrorist being shot dead by special forces.

12th June 2005 - Emergency service training exercise at Tower Hill underground station.
Early July 2005 - Tabletop exercises based on multiple bombings on the tube run by the Metropolitan Police and Deutsche Bank.
7th July 2005 - Actual attacks in London on multiple tube trains/stations and on a bus. Training exercise closely replicating real attacks takes place in London shortly after the tube train explosions. Training exercise based around attacks on subway take place in New York.

As detailed in 7/7: Crime and Prejudice, however, this conditioning did not end on 7/7. The simulations continued.

21st July 2005 - Four men set off fake bombs in rucksacks on three tube trains and a bus.
22nd July 2005 - 'Police' shoot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, apparently because they thought he was a suicide bomber.
8th January 2006 - 'Northstar V' exercise in Singapore, based on 7/7. News broadcasts carry images of the arrest of a mock suicide bomber.
25th September 2006 - Spooks episode features Islamic 'unwitting suicide bomber' duped by terrorist mastermind. Also features a terrorist being shot dead by police.
16th October 2007 - Spooks episode shows Muslim MI5 agent planting bomb underneath a train in a false flag attack.
30th October 2007 - Spooks episode features unwitting suicide bomber from Sept 2006 episode, who has been turned into an MI5 informant. He is again duped into being an unwitting suicide bomber by a terrorist mastermind.
5th November 2007 - Internet documentary 7/7 Ripple Effect claims 7/7 was a inside job, with patsies believing they were taking part in a training exercise who were then shot by police snipers, and that the bombs were planted underneath the train, probably by MI5.
28th October 2008 - Spooks episode features quadruple Muslim suicide bombings on London. Four men, one of whom is an undercover MI5 agent, are watched closely by the security services. An informant in Pakistan intelligence tells MI5 that the men are only doing a practise run, with dummy bombs, and that others will carry out the real attacks. The informant double crosses MI5 and the men are given real bombs, One of the would-be bombers is shot dead by police, two of the bombs are stopped, and the fourth bomb is detonated by remote.

When considering all this it may also be illuminating to throw in the cases of Nicky Reilly and Taimur al-Abdaly. Reilly is a young white convert to Islam who apparently attempted a suicide bombing in Exeter in May 2008. His mother has said that he must have been brainwashed and given help putting his device together, citing his having Aspergers syndrome, which would make him an obvious target for provocation. His device went off in the toilet of the restaurant he admits to having targeted, injuring him seriously, though not grievously, and causing no other injury or loss of life. Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly was 'Sweden's first suicide bomber', though as with 7/7, and Martial Bourdin, it is far from clear whether he intended to kill himself. In December 2010, right in the middle of the 7/7 inquests, there were two explosions in Stockholm. The first, in a car, caused two people minor injuries and didn't even destroy the vehicle. The second, about 12 minutes later, killed al-Abdaly and caused no other injuries. You can watch not-particularly-revealing CCTV of the second explosion here. What is obvious is that if al-Abdaly had been a conventional suicide bomber, i.e. one who is trying to kill members of the public as well as himself, then he failed miserably. Despite this, the mainstream media are unanimous in saying Reilly was a failed suicide bomber and al-Abdaly was Sweden's first suicide bomber. The independent media have had little to say about either case.

Looking to the future the hope for an official but independent public inquiry into 7/7 may be optimistic, but it remains a possibility. The Gladio case, and the investigations into the collusion in Northern Ireland both found that the suspicions about state involvement in terrorist crimes were well-founded. Many of those who were wrongly imprisoned during the Irish War on Terror and the Europe-wide Strategy of Tension are now freed and exonerated. Vindication and true investigation is possible. Rather than taking the easy and lazy route of propagating our favourite conspiracy theories we should find ways to apply pressure on the state and to feed information to the growing number of sceptical people.

The Headley-Rana Drama

2011-06-13T13:57:00.019+01:00

Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims. Terrorism is a theater - Brian Jenkins, RAND corporation

The trial of Tahawwur Rana concluded a couple of days ago with the Pakistani-Canadian found guilty of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Toiba and of supporting a conspiracy to carry out a terrorist attack against the offices of the Jyllands-Posten. Rana was found innocent of conspiring with David Headley to enable Headley's role in the 2008 26/11 massacre in Mumbai. The background to this trial is extraordinarily complex and intricate, and there are many questions that can't yet be answered. Several things are certain.

Rana was accused of helping David Headley, a lifelong friend, set up a branch of Rana's business in Mumbai to provide cover for Headley's surveillance missions. Rana ran a travel business/immigration advice company. He was accused of providing similar help for the proposed attack on the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper who caused a storm by publishing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. The trial exhibits, available at least for a while on the US Justice Department website, include videos and transcripts of Rana's interrogation by the FBI, emails between Rana, Headley, and members of the ISI and LeT, and Headley's surveillance videos and photos.

The 26/11 Mumbai slaughter was more a paramilitary act of low-intensity warfare than it was a terrorist attack. For one thing, it was clearly state-sponsored by the Pakistani ISI, using the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) group as a proxy. The massacre was highly sophisticated - Headley made over half a dozen trips to India to carry out surveillance. The attack was not a crude bombing, but a brutal, closely targeted commando raid that lasted nearly three days. The perpetrators landed by boat, which is difficult to detect and impossible to stop. LeT gunmen stalked the streets, directed to specific GPS co-ordinates by handlers on the phone hundreds of miles away in Lahore. They gunned people down indiscriminately and set off numerous bombs. They killed over 160 people, and injured over 300. 9 of the terrorists were shot dead by Indian security forces. The member of the group that was captured alive, Ajmal Kasab, is the man in this well-known picture:

He has since been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by the Indian authorities.

Almost from the off, the Indian government and media have said that the ISI were behind the attacks. Indeed, they were far too co-ordinated, too well planned and executed, too 'professional' to have been carried out by a 'retail' terrorist group. Any terrorist attack that kills over half as many people as it injures (i.e. over 1/3 of all casualties are fatal) is a very 'successful' attack. Even veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war would only have experience of insurgency, of guerrilla warfare, not paramilitary urban terrorist operations as occurred in Mumbai. The shoe fits the ISI, no doubt about that.

Indeed, this has been a central theme in the US vs Rana trial. Rana initially tried to offer the defence that everything he had done, he had done for the Pakistani government. The US ruled against him, saying that he had no immunity from crimes against Americans. You can read the ruling here, courtesy of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Throughout Headley's testimony he has referred to handlers within both LeT and the ISI who provided training and directed both the Mumbai attack and the Denmark plot. The charge sheet filed by the US government in the Chicago trial named co-conspirators including 'Major Iqbal' of the ISI. The Indian National Investigation Agency's report on their interrogation of Headley last year details how Major Iqbal was not satisfied by the training Headley got from LeT, so he arranged for further intelligence/reconnaissance training. He helped finance Headley's trip to India, and debriefed him and took copies of his photos/videos when he returned. Again, this was a highly sophisticated operation.

So, there is no real dispute that the ISI, or at least people within the ISI, had their hands all over the Mumbai plot. What this trial has largely ignored is that Headley was a secret agent of some kind, working for the US government, and may have been all along. Headley was born in the US in 1960, his mother a well-to-do white American socialite, his father a Pakistani working in the Pakistan embassy in Washington. Headley's original name was Daood Gilani. His parents split up and his father took custody of young Daood, returning home to Pakistani. Gilani was educated as an elite Pakistani cadet boarding school, where he first met and befriended Tahawwur Rana.

In 1977 there was a coup d'etat in Pakistan, when the Socialist(ish) Pakistan People's Party were accused of vote-rigging in the national elections, and the military seized control of the government. Daood's mother retook custody of him and brought him back to America. He worked in a couple of video stores and in his mother's pub (named the Khyber Pass) but clearly got involved with seedier enterprises because in 1988 he was arrested for drug smuggling. He was arrested at Frankfurt airport with two kilos of heroin in his suitcase. Gilani offered to co-operate and got a reduced sentence in return for helping set up two other men on drugs charges. He got out in 1992, but had a heroin addiction and wound up back in jail for a few months in 1995.

He was again arrested for drug smuggling in 1997, again with several kilos of heroin. What should have been a mandatory 10 year minimum sentence was commuted to 15 months in jail and five years of supervised release, i.e. parole. You can read the full docket for the 1997 drugs case here, and I strongly recommend TalkLeft's coverage of the Headley story, here. During his supervised release Headley was allowed to travel to Pakistan on several occasions, having gained permission from a judge to make the trips as part of his spying deal with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The question is, what happened next? In November 2001, two months after 9/11, Headley's lawyer, his parole officer and an assistant US attorney unanimously applied for early termination of his period of supervised release, roughly half way through the five year sentence. I found a transcript of this hearing on PACER and James Corbett has usefully published it on his site, here. Check for yourself, but the NY Times's reporting on this hearing appears to me to be very accurate:

The transcript of a Nov. 16, 2001, probation hearing in federal court in New York shows the government took great pains not to identify which agency was handling Mr. Headley, or whether he worked for more than one.

Mr. Caso, his former probation officer, recalled that Mr. Headley had been turned over to the D.E.A. Another person familiar with the case confirms this account. It was a world Mr. Headley knew well. After arrests in 1987 and 1998, he cooperated with the drug agency in exchange for lighter sentences. He specialized in the ties between Pakistani drug organizations and American dealers along the East Coast.

A September 1998 letter that prosecutors submitted to court after an arrest then showed that the government considered Mr. Headley — who had admitted to distributing 15 kilograms of heroin over his years as a dealer — so “reliable and forthcoming,” that they sent him to Pakistan to “develop intelligence on Pakistani heroin traffickers.”

The letter indicates that Mr. Headley, who faced seven to nine years in prison for his offense, was such a trusted partner to the drug agency in the 1990s that he helped translate hours of tape-recorded telephone intercepts, and coached drug agency investigators on how to question Pakistani suspects. The courts looked favorably on his cooperation, according to records, sentencing Mr. Headley to 15 months in prison, and five years’ probation.

While he was on probation, in October 2001, a woman told the F.B.I. that she believed her former boyfriend, Mr. Headley, was sympathetic to extremist groups in Pakistan, according to a senior American official who has been briefed on the case. The government was flooded with thousands of such tips at that time, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

William Headley, an uncle, recalled that agents called his sister to ask if her son had terrorist leanings. “She didn’t seem upset at all by the call,” William Headley said. “And I didn’t think much of it either because at that time, I thought the government was checking out anyone who had ties to Pakistan.”

It is unclear how widely disseminated the warning was. But in that probation hearing one month later, the government enlisted Mr. Headley’s help again, suspending his sentence in exchange for what court records described only as “continuing cooperation.” According to the transcript, it was a rushed affair. The probation officer apologized for not being properly dressed, and the lawyers explained that they had not been able to make their case in writing. Mr. Headley was a potential gold mine, according to an official knowledgeable about the agreement to release him from probation. One person involved in the case said American agencies had “zero in terms of reliable intelligence. And it was clear from the conversations about him that the government was considering assignments that went beyond drugs.” - NY Times

Given that Headley was perfectly useful as a DEA informant even while out of jail on supervised release, what happened that caused the US authorities to rush through this hearing? Why bother? The key is that while he was just an international spy for the DEA, he had to apply through the courts to get permission to travel to Pakistan, thus leaving a paper trail of what he was doing and when. Pakistani drugs gangs are not likely to be sending agents to New York courts to be checking records to confirm the background of a new contact, so it didn't matter, until November 2001. If Headley was, post-9/11, recruited by the CIA or a similar agency, as a terrorism/counterterrorism spy then it would be more important for him to be a deniable agent.

The implication of all this is that Headley was some kind of double agent, working for the FBI and/or CIA on a mission to infiltrate LeT, or possibly a triple agent, working to infiltrate the ISI's infiltration of LeT. Whether Headley was in reality seduced by LeT radicalism, or whether he was just playing along as part of his spying mission, is impossible to ascertain at this point. Nonetheless, that he is/was a US spy has been a relatively common accusation in the Indian media, and in the global independent media. Aside from the odd article, like this one in The Times, the Western mainstream media has mostly ignored this allegation.

Until this trial. Headley and Rana were arrested in October 2009 as a plan was coming together to attack the offices of the Jyllands-Posten. The newspaper came to prominence in late 2005/early 2006, after printing cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed. The cartoons 'row' was a cynical ploy on the part of Flemming Rose, the paper's cultural editor, designed to provoke exactly the reaction it got at the time. Rose is an associate of racist Zionist academic Richard Pipes, and was awarded the Sappho award by the Free Press Society of Denmark. All's well until you realise that another recipient of the award is Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist whose depiction of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was a focal point for Islamic (and non-Islamic) objectors. And that the Free Press Society was founded by Lars Hedegaard, who co-published a book with cartoonist Westergaard. And that they belong to the same network as Geert Wilders and, of course, Daniel Pipes. And that even the latest recipient of the award felt obliged to pay lip service to the cartoons 'row' in her acceptance speech. Clearly it is not just the CIA and ISI who are playing dark and horrible games.

In the last couple of years a lot of news, most notably Wikileaks documents and the Osama Bin Laden 'death', has steadily turned the notion of ISI complicity in terrorism from a fringe suspicion into headline fact. We're now perfectly happy to believe that 'them', 'over there', the brown-skinned governments, they might sponsor terrorism for political ends with total disregard for the lives of innocent citizens, including their own. But of course our own government, over here, they wouldn't do such a thing. And so it has played out in this trial, with the ISI's role laid out in detail by the key witness, David Headley, but his own relationship to US authorities largely left a mystery.

Rana's lawyer did break the silence, accusing Headley of being a master manipulator, who had duped Rana into playing a fringe role in the conspiracy. He also pointed out that the emails between Headley, Rana and Major Iqbal were a textbook deception on Headley's part:

Swift asked Headley if he "kept compartmentalized secrets." That question was in reference to a series of e-mails Headley exchanged with Rana and co-conspirators Saajid Mir and Major Iqbal discussing a plan to gain access to top leaders of a right-wing Hindu organization in Mumbai. Headley shared piecemeal information with his co-conspirators, so that no one except he knew the whole story.

"The only person who knew everything was you," Swift said. "You did well in espionage school."

"Thank you," Headley replied. - Investigative Project on Terrorism

So, what are the major reasons for suspecting that Headley was a US secret agent, who either went rogue, or was on a very ugly mission? Firstly, Headley's father worked for the diplomatic service in the Pakistani embassy in Washington, and for Voice of America, a US sponsored foreign propaganda media organ, a bit like Russia Today. Voice of America has long been a means for the CIA to conduct covert action and recruit assets. It is therefore highly plausible that Headley's father worked for the CIA. His half-brother also worked as a press officer for Pakistan's Prime Minister.

Secondly, Headley was repeatedly reported to the authorities by his numerous wives and girlfriends as a possible radical with terrorist sympathies. Though these warnings took place regularly from late 2001 through to December 2008 - just after the Mumbai attack - Headley was not arrested until October 2009. Even that was months after a tip from British authorities in July 2009 about the Danish newspaper plot. Headley pleaded guilty after several months of debriefing, in March 2010. It wasn't until June that he was finally turned over to be interrogated by the Indian authorities. You can download the Indian NIA's interrogation report here. The US authorities are defending the deal they struck with Headley, saying that the intelligence they garnered was too valuable not to strike a pact.

So, they ignored warnings about him, even after he was still officially employed by the DEA, and even though they very much had him on their books as a person of interest. They took months to arrest him even when another intelligence service told them he posed a threat, and they then let him plead guilty and 'turn' co-operator for what will presumably be a massively reduced sentence. He was looking at life (30 years+) and a $3 million fine. On the basis of past cases I guess he'll get about 1/3 of that. He has also talked himself out of extradition to Pakistan, India or Denmark to face charges over any of his actions, and will certainly avoid the death penalty. At each stage he has been protected by the authorities in some way or another, and he is now a source of raw intelligence for the Americans alone. They didn't even let the Indian government talk to him until 3 months after he'd pleaded guilty, presumably so he could be adequately prepared to lay all the blame at Pakistan's door.

The November 16th 2001 hearing seems to be the point at which someone bigger than the DEA stepped in and took over running Headley for US intelligence purposes. Both the CIA and FBI deny ever employing Headley, but there are two key issues that bear thinking about. Anyone familiar with the global drugs trade knows that the CIA has some very dirty fingers in that particular pie. Headley, a man born into two worlds, with a drug dependence, with connections and the proven ability to use them, compromised by his criminal history, would no doubt have been on their radar as a possible asset for promotion from the DEA. He also fits the profile of a disposable intelligence asset (i.e. one who can end up being openly blamed and imprisoned) almost perfectly. The other key issues is Headley changing his name.

In February 2006 Daood Saleem Gilani became David Coleman Headley. You can read a copy of the legal decree effecting the change here. He also had a passport in the name of David Headley, though he did not change his Social Security Number at the time he changed his name. Headley told the NIA that the purpose was to avoid arousing suspicion:

The change of name, establishment of Immigration office in India on behalf of Tahawwur Hussain Rana, use of American passport to conceal my identity and so on were my ideas. The LeT appreciated these ideas. - NIA interrogation report

Note that Headley's actions would only be likely to avoid suspicion in countries like Pakistan and India. A white American man with an English-sounding name was much less likely to attract attention from immigration authorities, airport security and so on in such countries. But changing his name and getting a new passport in his new name would certainly arouse suspicion in the US authorities, assuming they were watching him. Given his prior work as a spy for the DEA, Headley would have been stupid to assume that they weren't watching him, and so the name change only really makes sense if he knew that the US authorities were nothing for him to worry about.

Then there is the media coverage of the trial, which has been almost exclusively either American or Indian, and very much sticks the boot into Pakistan for their role in the Mumbai massacre. There has been virtually nothing in the UK media about the trial, and absolutely nothing looking into his role as a secret agent. As such, there appears to be a tacit but unanimous agenda to only speak of Headley as a terrorist in cahoots with the ISI, and as a witness at the trial. No examination of the bigger questions has taken place. Among those in the independent media who have covered the story is the Corbett Report.

I was interviewed for this report and offered my thoughts as to what the hidden agenda is and why there is a refusal to examine the Headley story. Of the possibilities I mentioned, I think an invasion of Pakistan is highly unlikely. It is a huge country with a large population, nuclear weapons and an entrenched military government. A regime change is more likely, as the US seem to be covertly supporting the 'Arab spring' uprising across the Middle East, but would be risky as there is no guarantee of the new government doing as it is told. I think the most likely motive is that this is a chancy move to get into bed with the Indian government, as an economic-military bulwark against China. The Chinese and Indians don't get along, as major regional powers tend not to, and India is a nuclear power with huge economic potential and a massive population. It could be turned into the next Asian 'economic miracle' and usefully provide a new buyer for Western debt.

But the Indians aren't really buying it. The US Director of National Intelligence produced a report into the 'intelligence failure' over David Headley, and sent a copy to Indian authorities, but they are still prying into the case and attempting their own prosecutions of Rana and Headley. Secretary of Internal Security U K Bansal said of the failure to convict Rana of involvement in the Mumbai attack:

I do not see it as a setback as our case (India) is still under investigation... Prosecution in India against Rana and his co-accused David Headley depends on our own investigations which is being done by Indian investigating agencies... In our handling of terrorism in India, we do not rely overtly on prosecution in other countries. We have to rely on our own strength - Times of India

Indeed, exactly what India have made of the failed Mumbai prosecution is a matter of some contention. There's a very provocative discussion of the issue on the defence.pk forum, here. However, what is for me the most important aspect of this case and the whole Headley story is just how much we know about it. In similar prior cases, Egyptian Islamic Jihad trainer/CIA, FBI and US Special Forces man Ali Mohamed pleaded guilty to training Al Qaeda and helping bomb the African embassies but was never publicly sentenced, and has now pulled a Keyser Soze and disappeared off the map. Mohammed Junaid Babar, the only man to have been held responsible in any way for the 7/7 attacks in London, served a little over 4 years in prison, and a couple of years on parole. Most of the court documents in his case remain sealed.

Yet in the Headley case we have vast quantities of information at our fingertips. The Investigative Project have a page of court documents on the case, the Chicago Sun-Times have the Santiago proffer and response for Rana, where the US government tried to make him a co-operator, IBNLive have a whole batch of primary sources too. Much of this story is available to us for the cost of an internet connection and a few hours on a search engine. Despite this, very little qualitative analysis has taken place, and unless there's a diplomatic storm over India's attempts to prosecute Headley, this story will likely be forgotten, save for a lingering suspicion towards Pakistan. And maybe that's the point.

Osama Bin Lazarus

2011-05-02T12:44:00.015+01:00

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Not exactly a new story, but now President Obama's telling it people are finally believing it is true. Bin Laden was reported dead in 2001, and then again in 2006, and then again in 2007 (twice), as well as on a few other occasions. Virtually nothing has been heard of him recently, with the media preferring to cover the likes of Anwar Al-Awlaki and Adam Gadahn - both Americans. There are, of course, the usual doubts and theories as to who Awlaki and Gadahn really work for and what they represent. One story in particular has Awlaki dining at the Pentagon within months of 9/11:

You can read an extract from FBI documents on this story here. Awlaki was supposedly invited to dinner as part of an 'outreach program' to 'moderate Muslims', though I would guess that most people's memory of the immediate post-9/11 period was one where all Muslims were branded potential terrorists. As such, this excuse for Awlaki going to dinner at the Pentagon doesn't make much sense.

So, how did Osama Bin Laden die? The details aren't clear. He was apparently holed up in a 'compound' in Abbotabad, Pakistan and was tracked to there by US intelligence in the last few days. They launched a dual operation with Pakistani special forces, and somehow Bin Laden died. According to the BBC, a strike team carried out a forty minute assault against the 'compound' and Bin Laden was shot during the fight. A different BBC story says he was 'shot in the head while resisting'. They note how:

At some point in the operation one of the helicopters crashed, either from technical failure or having been hit by gunfire from the ground. - BBC

So they don't tell us whose helicopter crashed, or when, or why. Remarkably, The Sun (a journalistic entity with far less reach and reputation than the BBC) were more certain:

An American helicopter crashed during a brief firefight at the complex involving Navy Seal Team Six, an elite counter-terrorism unit, and bin Laden's body was carried away on foot. - The Sun

This implies that in fact Bin Laden's body was in the helicopter when it went down, and was recovered and taken away. There are many other reports to this effect. The Chinese English language news service had different information:

At about 1:20 a.m. local time a Pakistani helicopter was shot down by unknown people in the Sikandarabad area of Abbotabad. The Pakistani forces launched a search operation in the nearby area and encountered with a group of unknown armed people. A fire exchange followed between the two sides.

When the fire exchange ended, the Pakistani forces arrested some Arab women and kids as well some other armed people who later confessed to the Pakistani forces they were with Osama Bin laden when the fire was exchanged and Bin Laden was killed in the firing. - Xinhuanet

As per usual with these sorts of heavily-promoted events, the reporting is at best a bit sloppy and contradictory, and at worst a total sham. Was the helicopter Pakistani or American? Was it shot down early on, which then caused a search and rescue operation, or was it shot down during the firefight? Were forces drawn to the area by the helicopter crash or had they been tipped off by an informant? Was Bin Laden shot in the head while resisting, or was he killed as part of the lengthy firefight? Was it even Bin Laden? The BBC casts a bit of doubt citing the AP:

It says CIA experts analysed whether it could be anyone else but they decided it was almost certainly Bin Laden. - BBC

Only almost certain? But according to the Telegraph and others, Bin Laden was identified via DNA taken from his sister's brain (she died of brain cancer a few years ago). This does pose the question of how did they get a DNA match so quickly. Again, the officials have cast doubt on the evidence, according to ITN:

US officials say that initial DNA results prove that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead.

The officials said the test showed a "very confident match" that it was bin Laden who was killed in the US special forces raid at a luxury compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan. - ITN

Indeed, we have only one decidedly dodgy picture of a dead Bin Laden, being widely used by the mainstream media as part of the story. See for yourself:

Note that in the first picture the major trauma is to 'Bin Laden's' left eye, whereas in the second picture the trauma is to his right eye.

The Defense Dept has apparently admitted that this picture is a photoshopped fake that has been around for a while. A Telegraph article confirms this, linking to a composite of the images used to fake the Bin Laden image above.

Casting further doubt, it has been unanimously reported that the US dumped Bin Laden's body at sea, supposedly in accordance with Islamic rites requiring burial of the dead within 24 hours. This seems to be a ridiculous decision. Islamic scholars are already saying that a burial at sea is a violation of Islamic practices, and if Bin Laden was the mass murderer they claim then why pay him such respect? After all, this is a man they admit to summarily executing without any sort of trial whatsoever. The decision to dump the body makes much more sense if this whole thing is a deception operation of some kind, as there would be a need for a cover-up.

The media also unanimously referred to the location of the firefight as a 'compound'. The video of the building suggests otherwise:

It appears to be nothing more significant than a large house with a wall running round the outside, not unlike many wealthy peoples' houses.

British Royal Family Compound, London

The word also has echoes of the state-sanctioned murder of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in February 1993.

As noted in this documentary, the use of the word 'compound' helped militarise the situation, making the state's massacre seem more justified. The celebratory speech by Barack Obama admitted that:

A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body. - Obama Speech in Full

Despite admitting to extra-judicial murder, and in a foreign sovereign state no less, he claimed:

On nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaida's terror: Justice has been done. - Obama

It is worth watching Obama's speech, embedded below, alongside Paul Bremer's 'we got him' moment when the US said they caught Saddam Hussein, and Bush's speech on the same.

Notice the difference in management styles - the Neocons openly vainglorious and self-congratulatory, the Neolib Obama deferential and authoritarian. As appears to be the Modus Operandi of the Obama military PR strategy, here the celebrating was done by apparently ordinary people.

Just as in the 'Twitter revolutions', it was the microblogging site that first broke the news of the assault on the house in Abbotabad. You can read the tweet about a helicopter hovering overhead here. Citizen journalism, or planted information? You decide. Within minutes of the news reaching America there were hundreds of citizens demonstrating in New York and Washington, at the former site of the WTC and outside the White House. In each case the crowds were large enough to make for good TV, but not so large that they were too obviously a rent-a-mob. Whether these were spontaneous demonstrations or not, they helped ensure the feelgood factor.

As did the details from Obama that there were no civilian casualties, and no US military casualties, in the forty minute firefight. This only begs further questions. If it was that easy, why did the firefight last for forty minutes? If they didn't kill anyone at that stage, including Bin Laden, who were they shooting at for nearly three quarters of an hour? If there were others around, protecting Bin Laden, then what happened to them? Did they just decide to give up? Did they run out of ammunition? Were they also killed and this was studiously unreported? If it sounds too good to be true then it's probably horseshit. From a PR point of view, this couldn't have gone any better. If they are capable of fomenting 'spontaneous' uprisings in the Middle East then they're more than capable of doing it in the comfort of home.

Nonetheless, they haven't pushed the good news too hard, as the story has come with rumours of revenge attacks by Islamists and another round of hyping the terror threat. British PM David Cameron gave a much briefer statement than Obama, and almost exclusively focused on the 'negative vibe' of the possibility of terrorist reprisals, and the victims of the wave of terrorism supposedly inspired and directed by Bin Laden.

So what is going on here? Is this all just electioneering PR to give a boost to a vastly unpopular president? This is without doubt the finest point of Obama's administration so far. It also comes only days after the defense reshuffle that saw head of US forces in Afghanistan David Petraeus (a man predicted to run against Obama in 2012) moved over to head the CIA, and Leon Panetta move to replace the retiring Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense. Was this a move to placate Petraeus and give a boost to US defense policy? One must wonder, of course, at why Obama would choose this week of all weeks to make such big changes in the leadership of key institutions, when the US was supposedly involved in its most important covert operation for decades.

There may be more at stake. The execution of a public hate figure is a popular but illegal move, and it is only due to its popularity that its illegality is largely overlooked. We saw this only hours before the Bin Laden news came in, with word that NATO strikes against Libya had resulted in the deaths of one of Col Gaddafi's sons and three pre-teen grandchildren. This was not just the extra-judicial assassination of a terrorist, but the premeditated murder of innocent people in the name of 'protecting civilians'. Opposition to the Libya 'intervention' has been swift, cutting and on a large scale, and then along came the biggest victory, at least in terms of public perception, that the Western powers could ask for. So, was this news a vain attempt to curry favour with a disillusioned public, so as to shore up a failed, corrupt foreign policy?

There is a yet wider possibility. Since at least 1979 the NATO pact have been encouraging, financing, training and facilitating militant Islam as a force of destabilisation and mercenary terrorism. While groups like Al Qaeda have overtly been targeted as a designated enemy, they have covertly been prodded and manipulated in the furtherance of geostrategic goals. It appears with the Libya intervention that this process is being accelerated, and more openly admitted to. 'Revelation of the method', perhaps. Early on in the Obama administration the term 'war on terror' was dropped in favour of phrases like 'the struggle with violent extremism' - a much broader concept, even harder to define. This struggle has so far taken the form of increased special forces operations (death squads), increased drone strikes against terrorist bases (murder of civilians) and now the decapitation of the major enemy network.

In fact, even the notion of Al Qaeda as a network has been dropped, it is now a 'franchise' or just an 'ideology'. Perhaps the controlled demolition of Osama Bin Laden is a key step in the redrawing of the lines of sight in this battle. After all, if there's no Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is a decentralised loose-knit bunch of crazy Muslims, then it is a lot easier to justify sponsoring this or that particular group of crazy Muslims for this or that particular goal. As the double deal that is the war on terror becomes ever more apparent to an ever largening number of people, simple denial won't wash. By redefining the enemy as less a paramilitary entity - Al Qaeda - with a general - Bin Laden, and more as an ideological confluence led by Awlaki and the like, the double deal becomes more palatable and acceptable.

Recall the words of Graham Fuller, former National Intelligence Council member:

The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against [the Russians]. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia. - Fuller

With the great Muslim bogeyman now officially out of the way, this policy can be more fully endorsed and enacted. Consider that the lines between 'us' and 'them' are now so blurred that various newscasts accidentally reported that in fact Obama, not Osama, had been killed.

7/7: Une Question

2011-04-25T13:00:00.024+01:00

Progress is being made on a followup film to 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction and among the discoveries that will be detailed in the sequel is the fact that July 7th 2005 was not the first time London had suffered a suicide bombing. To many people familiar with the 7/7 issues this may seem like it is a point that has already been made. As we know, within days of the explosions the police had already identified the supposed culprits and were describing the attacks as suicide bombings. This BBC report from the 12th July 2005 sums it up:

Police knowing whodunnit? Check. Suicide bombers? Check. Encouraging of Racial/Cultural/Religious disharmony? Check. Tedious Muslim analyst cowing to the media, being all apologetic, and failing to talk about the real questions? Check. The piece even says that this was the first suicide bombing in Western Europe, thus making the attacks a categorical game-changer or paradigm-shifter, and of course presuming the West vs Islam Clash of Civilisations idea. Indeed, if you're looking for a 4 minute summary of everything that's wrong about how the conversation on 7/7 progressed, this little video has it all.

But hang on a minute. A little over a year before 7/7 we had the Atocha bombings in Madrid, carried out by a bunch of crackpot Islaminformantists, killing nearly 200 people. On the 11th of March 2004 they attacked the Madrid public transport system early in the morning - in many ways identical to the 7/7 bombings. A few weeks later, so we're told, several of the suspects blew themselves up when cornered by the authorities, killing themselves and one special forces agent and wounding about a dozen other police. So, presuming that time didn't go backwards between April 2004 and July 2005, then the April 2004 incident was Western Europe's first suicide bombing? Right?

Wrong. The first suicide bombing took place over a century earlier, in 1894. In the period 1870-1930 the Western world fought a 'war on terror' against the first red menace - the radical and/or militant aspects of the labour movement, communism and anarchism. The anarchists in particular seemed to like bombing stuff - indeed, the first fatal bombing on the London underground was the work of anarchists, though it seems at the time they blamed the Irish. But their violence was in many ways the product of infiltrators and provocateurs. The head of the Russian secret police in Paris, Peter Rachkovsky, and senior members of the British Special Branch ran numerous double agents.

As with so many other stories of this kind throughout history, this process did not only produce violence including the death of random citizens, it also produced some woeful miscarriages of justice. The way justice systems deal with the fallout from covert operations will be the main underlying topic of the sequel to 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction but the best example from the Victorian period is that of the Walsall Anarchists. They were six men arrested in 1892 who were accused of manufacturing bombs and running a bomb factory. Four were convicted and received sentences of up to ten years in prison.

The whole thing was a set up. The key evidence at the trial were letters from members of the group to an police provocateur called Auguste Coulon. Coulon was an unemployed dreamer who was obsessed with dynamite and explosions who was recruited by Special Branch man William Melville. Melville went on to head up the forerunner to MI5. The letter included diagrams of possible bomb cases that Coulon provided advice on and encouraged the group to make. They never actually made any cases, though that didn't stop the police making some to be used as evidence at the trial. The judge supported the detectives who testified at the trial when they refused to answer any questions about Coulon, who of course was never arrested and got paid a large sum of money for his role in the plot. A nice summary of the case can be downloaded here, in the form of a fact sheet provided by the museum of Walsall.

A couple of years later, in February 1894, a young French anarchist called Martial Bourdin blew himself up in Greenwich Park, not far from the Royal Observatory. The explosion blasted off one of his hands and caused a large injury to his stomach but he was found moments after, still alive. He was taken to hospital and died about half an hour later. So what the hell was Bourdin doing? Various theories have been put forward. One is that the anarchists were targeting the Observatory, which the global meridian line runs through. As a symbol of modernity and global organisation, two things anarchists didn't like very much, it isn't a bad target. This became the basis for Joseph Conrad's fictional adaptation of the Bourdin story in his book The Secret Agent.

According to this version, Bourdin's brother-in-law HB Samuels, who was then-editor of the anarchist journal The Commonweal, gave the bomb to Bourdin so that he could go and throw it at the Observatory. Bourdin presumably tripped up or had some other accident and so the bomb went off prematurely, killing him. Another similar intepretation is that Bourdin was supposed to be delivering the bomb to other anarchists who were to use it overseas, perhaps in France or Russia, and again that Bourdin died in an accident. This account was put forward by Patrick McIntyre, another Special Branch officer who had fallen out with Melville over his role in setting up the Walsall Anarchists. McIntyre found himself demoted for his protests, so he quit the police and published his memoirs in the newspaper, blowing the whistle on the infiltration operations.

When writing about Auguste Coulon he commented:This same description could of course be applied to numerous such provocateurs. On the basis of what informants had told him, McIntyre offered this summary of the Bourdin plot:

A further alternative is that Bourdin did not know he was even carrying a bomb and thought he was delivering something else. This is the interpretation/adaptation of the story that appears in Alfred Hitchcock's film version Sabotage.

A yet further version is that Samuels set up Bourdin in a sting operation and that police were waiting nearby to arrest Bourdin in possession of a bomb. This is suggested by a contemporary NY Times article that details how police had seen Bourdin and another man leaving a house near the Autonomie Club (the London anarchist hub) earlier in the day.

So, what happened? For even more on the problems with the Bourdin story I recommend this paper, but there is some key information largely overlooked by the existing discussion. For one, confirming suspicion at the time, Bourdin's brother-in-law HB Samuels was an associate of Auguste Coulon and a police agent of some kind. Author Alex Butterworth used the FOIA to obtain a copy of a police ledger of informants that substantiates not only McIntyre's claims but many more.

Perhaps more importantly, there was political pressure for Bourdin's death to be ruled a suicide. From Hansard, the only mention of Bourdin is from Charles Darling (the 1st Baron Darling) who said:

MR DARLING: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department a question of which I have given him private notice. It is whether his attention has been called to the statement that the coroner for Greenwich has been asked to deliver up the body of Martial Bourdin, and that the Anarchists of London propose to make it the occasion of a public funeral; whether there is not reason to suppose that Martial Bourdin came by his death in the course of a felonious act; and whether his own death, resulting from this, would not properly be found to be felo de se? In that case, does not the law provide for the disposal of the body? I wish further to ask whether the right hon. Gentleman will interfere in this matter, having regard to the action which the French Government found it necessary to take in the case of the Anarchist Vaillant?

The reason was that at the time suicide was still a crime (felo de se, to be a felon against oneself, a self-murderer). If Bourdin's death were ruled a suicide then the State could confiscate his possessions and decide how to dispose of his body. Darling was concerned that a public funeral for Bourdin would provide a means for public demonstration by anarchists, hence he wanted the Home Secretary to 'interfere in this matter'. In the event, the Home Secretary refused the request, saying:

MR. ASQUITH: That would certainly be a most extraordinary proceeding, considering that the jury have not yet found a verdict of felo de se. I do not know whether the hon. Member proposes that either I or the coroner should keep the body above ground until the jury has found a verdict.
MR. DARLING: Yes.
MR. ASQUITH: I certainly decline to do anything of the kind.

The funeral took place a few days later, and there was a large demonstration by anarchists who clashed with police. The New York Times reported that when one senior anarchist tried to deliver an oration when Bourdin's coffin was being lowered, he was seized by police and removed from the cemetery.

So what was the inquest verdict? From The Mercury:

Despite virtually no evidence showing that Bourdin had any intention of dying (and large amounts of money in his pockets suggesting he actively intended to live), the verdict was suicide. That's right, over a hundred years ago Britain suffered its first suicide bombing. Bizarrely, historian David Rooney denied this, saying in a 2009 podcast that 'It wasn't a suicide bomb, it had gone off by mistake'. One wonders if he would have said that before 7/7, or whether he is actually aware of the inquest verdict in Bourdin's case.

So, we have a supposedly radical movement heavily infiltrated by provocateurs and spies. We have a man in London blown to pieces by a bomb, who never explained what had happened and died shortly after the explosion. We have political pressure for a verdict of suicide that is born out at the inquest, and we have widespread ignorance/denial from both academics and the mainstream media. Even though Bourdin almost certainly did not intend to kill himself, by the official record he was Europe's first terrorist suicide bomber.

There is one other possibility, not explored above. Bourdin could have been what the IRA called a 'human bomb' or 'proxy bomb'. Typically, a man's family would be kidnapped and he would be threated with their torture or death and be forced to drive a car-bomb into a military checkpoint or other installation. Along with the 'real' suicide bomber there is the 'unwitting' suicide bomber and the 'unintentional' suicide bomber and the 'unwilling' suicide bomber. To the naked eye, after the explosion, it is virtually impossible to tell the difference which has occurred. Yet, as the video at the top of this article shows, it was only a matter of days before the police had decided not only who was responsible for 7/7, but that it was Britain's 'first' (to the very forgetful/ignorant) suicide bombing. We have to wonder: did they even consider any other possibility?

In a couple of weeks we will have the verdict from the inquests into the 52 certain victims of the 7/7 bombings, at which point Lady Justice Hallett will decide whether to hold inquests in the deaths of the four alleged bombers. The J7 group posted a lengthy explanation of the reason why inquests into the four should take place, indeed, must take place. They submitted the same to Hallett, who now has no excuses for deciding against holding them. If the last few months are anything to go by then what we'll get is more gameshow-style inquests where everyone in the audience knows what the answer is but for some reason none of the contestants, I mean witnesses and evidence, seem to be able to remember it.

To finish this time, another little extract from McIntyre's memoirs. He was a very early whistleblower into this sort of police/security service corruption, and therefore is of far more historical significance than he is recognised as being. This is his impression of the actual spirit of the anarchists and the danger they posed (or rather, didn't pose):

7/7: Our Quest

2011-03-25T11:37:00.032Z

The Inquests into the July 7th 2005 London bombings are drawing to a close, with a verdict due in several weeks, on May 6th. As expected and predicted, very few of the abundant questions about 7/7 have been answered, and plenty of new questions have emerged. It is now clear that an already patchy official narrative has worn away so that there are only a few strands left, and most of them are incidental. The July 7th Truth Campaign, Bridget in particular, have done absolutely sterling work covering the Inquests. Sadly, very few of the most popular independent news outlets have followed suit. The Corbett Report is an exception, and praise must go to it for this. The recent podcast 7/7 Is Still the Issue is a great listen, though I would say that because I'm featured in it.

More analysis and commentary will follow, but for now we should look at the ways in which the evidence presented at the 7/7 Inquests contradicts rather than supports the Home Office narrative. Despite assurances from habitual liar and war criminal Tony Blair that 'people want to know exactly what happened, and we will make sure that they do' the narrative does concede that 'The account is not yet the full picture.' No shit. The first problem concerns the four alleged bombers' movements on the morning of 7/7. With the admission back in 2006 that the account was in error over the Luton train time, this has been a focus of the 7/7 sceptics for a long time. The Inquests haven't helped clear this up.

The original narrative told the story that:

07.15: Lindsay, Hussain, Tanweer and Khan enter Luton station and go through the ticket barriers together. It is not known where they bought their tickets or what sort of tickets they possessed, but they must have had some to get on to the platform.

Before going on to say that:

07.40: The London King’s Cross train leaves Luton station. There are conflicting accounts of their behaviour on the train. Some witnesses report noisy conversations, another believes he saw 2 of them standing silently by a set of train doors. The 4 stood out a bit from usual commuters due to their luggage and casual clothes, but not enough to cause suspicion. This was the beginning of the summer tourist period and Luton Station serves Luton Airport.

At that time, the only CCTV image of the four at Luton was this one:

As anyone can see, this picture shows the men entering the station at just shy of 7:22, not at 7:15 as the narrative originally claimed. We also know that no train left Luton at 7:40 that morning. This led to former Home Secretary John Reid admitting the narrative was in error, and to the goverment publishing an update to the report. If we include the 2008 amendment to the official narrative, the story of the movements of the four alleged bombers at Luton station now reads as follows:

05.07: A red Fiat Brava arrives at Luton station car park. Jermaine Lindsay is alone in this car. During the 90 minutes or so before the others arrive, Lindsay gets out and walks around, enters the station, looks up at the departure board, comes out, moves the car a couple of times. There are a handful of other cars in the car park. A few more arrive during this period.

06.49: The Micra arrives at Luton and parks next to the Brava. The 4 men get out of their respective cars, look in the boots of both, and appear to move items between them. They each put on rucksacks which CCTV shows are large and full. The 4 are described as looking as if
they were going on a camping holiday. One car contained explosive devices of a different and smaller kind from those in the rucksacks. It is not clear what they were for, but they
may have been for self-defence or diversion in case of interception during the journey given their size; that they were in the car rather than the boot; and that they were left behind. Also left in the Micra were other items consistent with the use of explosives. A 9mm handgun was also found in the Brava. The Micra had a day parking ticket in the window, perhaps to avoid attention, the Brava did not.
07.14: Lindsay walks through the entrance foyer of the station, walks to the ticket hall and appears to check the departure board. Lindsay then walks back out of the station to rejoin Tanweer, Khan and Hussain at the rear of their vehicles. The 4 then put on their rucksacks and walk towards the station. They enter Luton station and go through the ticket barriers together. It is not known where they bought their tickets or what sort of tickets they possessed, but they must have had some to get on to the platform.
07.21: The 4 are caught on CCTV together heading to the platform for the King’s Cross Thameslink train. They are casually dressed, apparently relaxed. Tanweer’s posture and the way he pulls the rucksack on to his shoulder as he walks, suggests he finds it heavy. It is estimated that in each rucksack was 2-5 kg of high explosive. Tanweer is now wearing dark tracksuit bottoms. There is no explanation for this change at present.
07.25: The London King’s Cross train leaves Luton station. There are conflicting accounts of their behaviour on the train. Some witnesses report noisy conversations, another believes he saw 2 of them standing silently by a set of train doors. The 4 stood out a bit from usual commuters due to their luggage and casual clothes, but not enough to cause suspicion. This was the beginning of the summer tourist period and Luton Station serves Luton Airport. - Home Office narrative account, amended

The amended narrative doesn't explicitly say when the four entered the station together, thus avoiding the issue. At the trial where the Luton station CCTV footage was first shown the prosecutors explained that the timecodes on the videos were wrong. Taking the time from the original narrative (the four entering at 7:15 when the frame shows nearly 7:22) we get a discrepancy of around 7 minutes, from the amended narrative it is unclear what the discrepancy is. The obvious question is how well does the CCTV match up to this timeline of events? The original version of the Luton CCTV was initially downloadable from the Met Police's website but not anymore, and then it was available to view on Channel 4's website, but not anymore. You can of course view the footage in its entirety via the J7 Truth Campaign on Vimeo, and it isembedded below.

That version has many of the timecodes blurred out whereas the version show at the Inquests shows the timecode of every frame. You can watch the new CCTV below:

Regardless, from all versions of the CCTV it appears that every one of the cameras at Luton station were showing incorrect times. The section showing continuous activity (alleged bombers putting on rucksacks in car park, walking into station, walking to platform and getting on the train) show continuous and consistent timecodes from camera to camera. This would also make sense in a large building with a centralised CCTV system on one recorder which 'stamps' the frames of video with the same timecode. Why a train station, so reliant on accurate timing, would have a CCTV camera system showing a time as much as 7 minutes fast, without correcting it, is a bit of a mystery.

Taking the narrative point by point, at 5:07 Lindsay arrived. Both the old and the new CCTV has a timecode, but the new frames have helpful arrows to ensure you don't miss the riveting action.

The image does show Lindsay arriving at 5:07, but if this camera is on the same system (which it appears to be given the designation 'camera 24') then this timecode is up to 7 minutes fast, so the time could actually be as early as 5:00 a.m. on the hour. The other three alleged bombers, according to the narrative, arrived at 6:49, presumably having left Lindsay sat around for nearly two hours so he could get some last minute praying done, or maybe an early morning crossword. The CCTV from 'camera 26' shows their arrival happening at 6:52, three minutes later than the narrative states. So, is the discrepancy 7 minutes or 3 minutes? Comparing the CCTV timecodes to the original and amended narratives either option is plausible. There has also been some suspiciously heavy handed editing going on. The original CCTV from Luton stops at 6:50:11 and begins again 6:51:39. It also cuts out at 6:52:38 and starts again at 6:53:54. As noted by the July 7th Truth Campaign blog, this rather obvious editing appears to be a means of covering up a suspicious Jaguar in Luton station car park at the same time as the alleged bombers on both 7/7 and on 28/6, during the so called 'dummy run'.

The director's cut shown at the inquests includes these ommissions and also stops at 6:54:17 and begins again at 7:15:40, as though the footage covering those 20 minutes does not exist. Thus, if one were only aware of the evidence presented at the Inquests, the amended section of the narrative describing Lindsey going into the station and looking at the departure board at around 7:14 never actually happened. The original cut of the CCTV does show this, but shows it happening at 7:14, providing no discrepancy with the narrative. How could the cameras be 3 minutes fast and hence show the 6:49 arrival taking place at 6:52, but be on time at 7:14 to show Lindsay entering the station at that time? Did they cut this sequence out of the Inquests CCTV footage to try to cover up the mistake/deceit of saying the timecodes were wrong at the same time as saying the timecodes were right?

The original narrative, in a section unchanged by the amendment, says that at 7:21 the four were 'caught on CCTV together heading to the platform for the King’s Cross Thameslink train.' However, the timecoded frames show them entering the station just before 7:22, and so by the timecode they are not and could not have been pictured walking towards the platform at 7:21. They arrive on the platform at, by the timecode, 7:23:30.

Hence, even if we adjust the timecodes in accordance with previous discrepancies, the four still could not have been pictured heading towards the platform at 7:21. If the clock is three minutes fast then they arrived on the platform by 7:20. If the clock is 7 minutes fast then they arrived on the platform by 7:16. Either way, they could not have got to the platform before being captured heading towards the platform, and so they could not have been heading towards the platform at 7:21.

The CCTV shows the four men then waiting for a few minutes for the train to arrive, which it does so at 7:24:21, before departing at 7:25:36.

This poses huge problems for the narrative, whichever version one reads. Originally the four were said to have taken the 7:40 train, when the police had CCTV showing the four catching a train at 7:24 to 7:25. Then the Home Office published their amendment saying the four caught the 7:25 train, but officials have since claimed that the times on the CCTV at Luton are wrong. Again, if the timecode is 3 minutes fast then the train left at 7:22, and if it is 7 minutes fast then the train left at 7:18. In reality, the train left at 7:25, suggesting that there was in fact no problem with the CCTV timecodes from Luton.

The next major problem is the evidence concerning the four men's presence at the four (admitted) explosion sites. The CCTV at Kings Cross was supposedly not working for the exact 20 minute period when the four should have been moving through the station to catch the tube trains they allegedly bombed. Likewise, though the Inquests showed abundant exterior CCTV footage of the number 91 and number 30 bus Hasib Hussain supposedly caught and bombed, respectively, there was no CCTV from inside either bus. So, there isn't a single image showing the four accused heading towards the trains/bus, getting on the trains/bus, or riding on the trains/bus. We are left with the reports of the physical evidence at the scenes after the explosions had happened.

With regard to this the Home Office narrative says that at 8:50:

CCTV images show the platform at Liverpool Street with the eastbound Circle Line train alongside seconds before it is blown up. Shehzad Tanweer is not visible, but he must have been in the second carriage from the front. The images show commuters rushing to get on the train and a busy platform. Some get on, some just miss it. The train pulls out of the station. Seconds later smoke billows from the tunnel. There is shock and confusion on the platform as people
make for the exits.
Forensic evidence suggests that Tanweer was sitting towards the back of the second carriage with the rucksack next to him on the floor. The blast killed 8 people, including Tanweer, with 171 injured. - Home Office narrative

There are several problems with this. Firstly, the description of where Tanweer was on the train says he was 'sitting towards the back of the second carriage with the rucksack next to him on the floor.' However, when the BBC Conspiracy Files show interviewed a witness from inside the Aldgate train carriage, Bruce Lait, he told them that the hole he saw in the floor of the carriage was in the standing area between rows of seats.

Lait also explicitly said in an interview following 7/7 that he hadn't seen anyone standing where the hole was. Nonetheless, the Inquests did manage to dig up a witness, Michael Henning, who was in the next carriage along, and he remembers someone sitting where the narrative describes Tanweer as sitting. He drew a diagram, marking himself with an X and 'Tanweer' with a circled X.

July 7th Inquest exhibit INQ8352-2

Henning described the man he saw in extremely vague terms, saying:

I couldn't say with great detail his features, etcetera. It's more those soft focus of the people that you normally see on the Tube and haven't paid attention to. - July 7 Inquest transcript, Oct 18th 2010

As noted on the J7 blog, his description of 'Tanweer' did not match the CCTV images purportedly showing Tanweer on 7/7, and in general Henning could hardly be said to have made a positive ID of Tanweer in that location. Still, this is the closest the Inquests got to substantiating the narrative on this particular question.

That said, they did manage to spectacularly contradict the narrative, and to some extent support Bruce Lait's account. The police presented as evidence at the Inquests complex computer generated models showing exactly where everyone was in the affected carriages (though each one says it is 'approximate'). For simplicity's sake I'll use the BBC's dumbed down version, but you can see the Aldgate train diagram presented at the Inquests here. The BBC's version of the diagram is below:

As you can see, 'Tanweer' is located towards the back of the carriage, but he is in the standing area where Bruce Lait identified the hole in the floor, not sitting down. This not only contradicts the narrative, it substantiates a witness who claims that no one was standing there, and that the hole he saw looked like that caused by an explosion coming up through the floor of the train. So, far from supporting the Home Office narrative, the Inquests actually supported one of the witnesses whose account has consistently suggested a very different event.

There are nearly identical issues with the account of the Edgware Road explosion. The Home Office narrative says that:

At Edgware Road, Mohammad Sidique Khan was also in the second carriage from the front, most likely near the standing area by the first set of double doors. He was probably also seated with the bomb next to him on the floor. Shortly before the explosion, Khan was seen fiddling with the top of the rucksack. The explosion killed 7 including Khan, and injured 163 people. - Home Office narrative

Now, this gets a little complicated, because the narrative is (intentionally?) unclear. Khan was supposedly sat down, but sat down near the standing area by the first set of double doors, with his rucksack on the floor. This is indeed how the BBC's diagram portrays the scene:

The problem is that the centre of the explosion would appear to be in the middle of the standing area, where all the people who died are stood. Khan is sat down some distance away. The police diagram makes things even worse:

While Khan is sat down essentially as described in the narrative, the explosion seems to be taking place not on the floor next to him, but around the corner in the standing area. In order to set off the bomb, Khan would have had to be leaning and stretching at an absurd angle, and presumably pushing his rucksack between the legs of person number 9 in the diagram, Jonathan Downey. PC Potter of the British Transport Police attended the scene and drew a sketch portraying the bomb crater even more centrally:

For the bomb to have gone off where this sketch shows, it cannot have been manually detonated by Khan sat where the narrative and the police diagram say he was. So, why did they say Khan was sat there? Because of Danny Biddle, the only person who has consistently claimed that he saw Khan on the Edgware Road train. Biddle, however, is a highly unreliable witness whose account is not confirmed by anyone else. He was severely injured in the explosion, losing an eye and both legs, and was in a coma for weeks after the attacks. It was after recovering from the coma and seeing Khan identified on TV as the bomber that he made his identification. In his Inquest testimony, Biddle claimed that he saw Khan sat down, with a rucksack on his lap, and that he saw Khan pull a cord in the rucksack just before the explosion, rather than stood up, with the rucksack on the floor, as the police descriptions and diagrams have consistently maintained.

This has serious implications, not just for the narrative but for the veracity of what has been presented at the Inquests. The evidence presented by the police fundamentally contradicts the Home Office story, and contradicts Biddle's account. One can only assume they took the risk of allowing him to testify at the Inquests because his account of having seen 'Khan' fiddling with his rucksack just before the explosion was a key part of the Home Office narrative. Not only is it mentioned in the description of the Edgware Road explosion, but is listed as one of only 7 bits of 'key evidence indicating that these were co-ordinated suicide attacks by these 4 men.' The narrative notes that:

Witness accounts suggest 2 of the men were fiddling in their rucksacks shortly before the explosions. - Home Office Narrative

So, in two places the narrative tacitly refers to Biddle's account, making it impossible for the authorities to deny him a voice at the Inquests, no matter how much his version contradicted the evidence. The other witness who apparently saw one of the accused fiddling in his rucksack was Richard Jones, who got off the number 30 bus shortly before it was blown up. In the days immediately after 7/7, Jones was widely interviewed due to this compelling testimony that supported the notion of suicide bombings. The fact that he gave varying description of what he saw 'Hasib Hussain' wearing, and varying accounts of whether he was in a position to identify Hussain, and was sat on the lower deck of the bus when the explosion took place on the upper deck, were all conveniently ignored.

Jones was even selected as one of the BBC's 'victims of conspiracy theories' for their Conspiracy Files episode dedicated to 7/7. Rather than challenging Jones over his wildly conflicting interviews and his helping to advance the official conspiracy theory of 7/7, the BBC chose to refute the poorly-sourced claim that it was he who had bombed the bus. Virtually every independent documentary exploring 7/7 has criticised Jones, as have many of the bloggers, and perhaps it is because of this that the establishment finally admitted defeat and abandoned Jones as a witness. Perhaps this is why they had Biddle testify, because to lose one witness cited as key evidence could be considered unfortunate, but to lose two would look like carelessness.

In his Inquest testimony Jones claimed, ridiculously, that he had never actually claimed to have seen 'the bomber'. Yet the BBC ran his story the day after 7/7 in a piece titled 'Passenger believes he saw bomber' and Jones not only made no objection, he helpfully appeared on a feature-length BBC show about 7/7 a couple of years later. Despite this, the Inquests expressed sympathy for Jones, saying, 'Your statement, I'm afraid, has been open to conjecture and surmise in the way of these things in the public domain.' Reading Jones's testimony, available for handy PDF download here, courtesy of J7, it is unclear what purpose they had in calling him as a witness, except to perform this epic act of revisionism.

As such, the Home Office narrative now reads:

09.00: Hussain goes back into King’s Cross station through Boots and then goes into W H Smith on the station concourse and, it appears, buys a 9v battery. It is possible that a new battery was needed to detonate the device, but this is only speculation at this stage.
~~09.06: Hussain goes into McDonald’s on Euston Road, leaving about ten minutes later.~~
09.19: Hussain is seen on Grays Inn Road. Around this time, a man fitting Hussain’s description was seen on the no 91 bus travelling from King’s Cross to Euston Station, looking nervous and pushing past people.
~~It was almost certainly at Euston that Hussain switched to the no 30 bus travelling eastwards from Marble Arch.~~ The bus was crowded following the closures on the underground. Hussain sat on the upper deck, towards the back. Forensic evidence suggests the bomb was next to him in the aisle or between his feet on the floor. ~~A man fitting Hussain’s description was seen on the lower deck earlier, fiddling repeatedly with his rucksack.~~
09.47: The bomb goes off, killing 14 people, including Hussain, and injuring over 110. It remains unclear why the bomb did not go off at 08.50am alongside the others. It may be that Hussain was intending to go north from King’s Cross but was frustrated by delays on the Northern Line. Another possibility, as he seems to have bought a new battery, is that he was unable to detonate his device with the original battery. But we have no further evidence on this at this stage. - Home Office Narrative

Though the diagrams and other evidence does essentially confirm the narrative's version of where the explosion took place, there was no evidence that showed that Hasib Hussain was even on the bus, let alone responsible for the bombing.

The final scene is the Kings Cross-Russell Square bombing, supposedly carried out by Jermaine Lindsay. The narrative states that:

On the Piccadilly Line, Jermaine Lindsay was in the first carriage as it travelled between King’s Cross and Russell Square. It is unlikely that he was seated. The train was crowded, with 127 people in the first carriage alone, which makes it difficult to position those involved. Forensic evidence suggests the explosion occurred on or close to the floor of the standing area between the second and third set of seats. The explosion killed 27 people including Lindsay, and injured
over 340. - Home Office Narrative

Again the Inquests served up a pretty diagram, and it does essentially reflect the narrative's claims about the location of the explosion.

According to this, the explosion took place in the standing area by the rear set of double doors. This is reflected in other diagrams, such as this and this. But certain other evidence was not so clear cut. One diagram bears a handwritten note saying that there was another hole in the floor, and one in the roof, right towards the back of the carriage.

Yet another, along with testimony from Detective Inspector Brunsden, shows that Lindsay's body was found some distance away from the explosion, and closer to the holes mentioned in the above diagram. Brunsden explained that in the following image, the bomb crater is noted, the area marked 'Z' is where they found Lindsay's body and a plastic bottle suspected of being part of the bomb, and area 'Y' is where they found identification documents belonging to Lindsay.

As such, the official story of the Piccadilly line explosion is born out by some of the evidence at the Inquests, but not other evidence.

There are numerous other fundamental issues with the evidence presented at the Inquests, including the fact that the neither the detonator nor the main charge of the explosive used has been forensically identified. There is also the question of the pronouncement of 'life extinct' (i.e. the confirmations by a doctor of the number of people who died) either did not take place, or did take place but did not include the alleged bombers. The above is just a quick look at how the narrative has fallen apart in a couple of important places. A fuller analysis is coming in various formats, and one is already available via the J7 blog, but for the time being consider that slap bang in the middle of the 7/7 Inquests the police launched a PR campaign aimed at reminding the public that the terrorist threat is real and very, very scary. A few weeks later, the terrorist threat level for major transport hubs was raised, though as per usual the BBC reported that, 'there is no suggestion of any intelligence of an imminent attack.'

Debunking 7/7 Debunking Part Three

2010-10-18T11:37:00.025+01:00

The July 7th Inquests got underway last week and have so far provided a pantomime of disinformation and farcical arguments. Just as with the 2009 Intelligence and Security Committee report and the BBC Conspiracy Files episode on the London bombings of the same year, one of the primary concerns of the inquests has been to debunk and oppose 'conspiracy theories'. Hence, it is time for a new installment of the popular 'debunking 7/7 debunking' series, dealing with the fatuous and misleading arguments used in opposition to such 'conspiracy theories'. Those readers looking for a comparatively dispassionate analysis of the inquests should check out the dedicated blog from the July 7th Truth Campaign. Those looking for intelligent outrage at the pure codswallop we are expected to keep swallowing regarding 7/7 should take a look at Famous for 15 Megapixels. Both have provided far more sincere and earnest coverage of the inquests than anyone working in the mainstream media.

The 7/7 Inquests are taking place under the Coroners and Justice Act of 2009, which outlines exactly what are the purposes of such an investigation:

Purpose of Investigation
5
Matters to be ascertained
(1)
The purpose of an investigation under this Part into a person's death is to ascertain—
(a) who the deceased was;
(b) how, when and where the deceased came by his or her death;
(c) the particulars (if any) required by the 1953 Act to be registered concerning the death. - Coroners and Justice Act 2009

However, the 7/7 Inquests have systematically failed from the very opening day to fulfill these requirements. In the morning of 11th October the hearing opened with a statement by Lady Justice Hallet referring to "the deaths of the 52 innocent people who were killed as a result of the bombs in London on 7 July 2005." Before any investigation had taken place, a conclusive verdict on the cause of death of all 52 victims had been presented. Given that one of the questions the inquest is meant to be objectively examining is whether the emergency services could have responded more quickly and effectively, this opening statement is misleading at best. Even if we presume that the official version of events is true, there remains the possibility of some of the victims having died due to the delay in getting them emergency medical treatment. This would mean that they did not die just as a result of bombs going off, but also as a result of not being attended to sufficiently quickly. Beyond that, there is the issue of the inquests into the deaths of the four alleged bombers having been postponed until after the present inquests into the other 52 deaths. There is only a slim possibility of this happening, but if the inquests into the alleged bombers' deaths concludes anything other than that they died in intentional self-inflicted suicide bombings, the present inquests would prove to be a load of nonsense.

The inquests continued with a re-affirmation of the official version of events, namely that four British Muslims travelled to London and intentionally blew themselves up using homemade explosives. This re-affirmation was done using the sort of editorialised language more appropriate for a tabloid newspaper than a legal proceeding. Again, from the opening morning of the inquests, the counsel for the inquests (i.e. the government's lawyer) Hugo Keith QC, said:

The slaughter caused by the bombs caused not only
death, devastation and mutilation, but unleashed an
unimaginable tidal wave of shock, misery and horror for
their families and loved ones. Just as the lives of the
52 victims were callously and brutally ended, the lives
of many others have been, and continue to be, tortured
and wrecked. The bombs could only have had one purpose.
They were intended to kill and to injure. They were
acts of merciless savagery and one can only imagine at
the sheer inhumanity of the perpetrators. - July 7th Inquests, 11th Oct

While it is true that the death of loved ones is immensely painful for the bereaved, and they are more than worthy of our sympathy, this sort of language is not about expressing common human empathy and consideration. It is about writing the mainstream media's headlines for them, as demonstrated by this Telegraph story titled '7/7 inquest: London bombings were 'unimaginable wave of horror' and this Guardian story titled '7/7 inquest: victims killed by 'merciless savagery'. The use of words like 'carnage', 'horror' and 'merciless savagery' is designed to encourage those following the inquests to become lost in psychological disgust and not to engage their critical faculties and question what they are being told. Philosopher David Hume claimed that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." While the truth of this may be disputed, what is clear is that passions can be manipulated to cloud or even prevent reason from having an influence on what people end up believing.

This editorial rhetoric continued as the inquests progressed. On the second day of hearings, new footage was released on the inquests' website, and can be watched here. The video clips are taken from film shot in the hours and days immediately following the bombings, by emergency service workers, and show the aftermath of the explosions on the trains and bus. The videos have been reproduced by media outlets, capitalising on Keith's characterisation of the footage as 'distressing' and even going further, this ITN article describing it as a 'shocking video of carnage'. In reality the videos show very little and for a public who've experienced such horrific cinematic products as the Saw film franchise and recent gore fest The Human Centipede the images are relatively tame. For those who were on the trains and bus, or lost loved one, any such pictures would be distressing, regardless of what they actually showed or didn't show. Furthermore, Keith admitted that the clips had been 'edited and re-edited' to ensure none of the deceased can be seen, sharply contradicting the portrayal of this footage in the major media as 'horrific' and 'shocking'. Not only is this manipulative to the point of outright deception, it is also potentially illegal. The Coroners and Justice Act says explicitly that:

Neither the senior coroner conducting an investigation under this Part into a person's death nor the jury (if there is one) may express any opinion on any matter other than—
(a) the questions mentioned in subsection (1)(a) and (b) (read with subsection (2) where applicable);
(b) the particulars mentioned in subsection (1)(c). - Coroners and Justice Act 2009

While this provision only prohibits the coroner and jury from expressing such opinions, the spirit of the law means that it also covers the legal team advising the coroner. The sorts of comments made by Hugo Keith clearly involve expressing opinions on far more than just the issues of who died, when, where and how, in that they seek to describe the emotional reactions of the survivors and bereaved. One might even say that such inflammatory language glorifies terrorism, turning it from acts of violence motivated by desperation or prejudice or stupidity into acts that define our politics, our emotions and our way of life. Glorification of terrorism is contrary to the 2006 Terrorism Act, though I wouldn't recommend holding your breath and waiting for Keith to be charged. If, as then Prime Minister Tony Blair said on the afternoon of 7/7, the purpose of terrorism is to terrorise people, then Hugo Keith is doing the terrorists work for them.

Another bizarre story emanating from the opening week of the Inquests was that the alleged 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan sent a text message to his supposed co-conspirators on the 6th of July. This allegedly delayed the attacks by a day because Khan's wife was having complications with her pregnancy:

Examination of Khan's mobile telephone
which was recovered from the tunnel between Kings Cross
and Russell Square showed that he sent a text message at
04.35 in the morning of 6 July saying:
"Having major problem. Can't make time. Will ring
you when I get it sorted. Wait at home."

So it may have been that the attack was originally
planned for a different day. - July 7th Inquests, 11th October

As with so many stories floated as part of the War on Terror, there is much about this that doesn't ring true, or at least doesn't support what officials have advanced. For one, why was Khan's phone found in the tunnel between Kings' Cross and Russell Square tube stations when he is meant to have been responsible for a different explosion, miles away at Edgware Road? Just as his property and ID were found at three of the blast locations, this will appear to many people to smack of planted evidence. For another, why would a man supposedly following a jihadi ideology to the extent of killing himself and others care so much about his pregnant wife and unborn child? If the original plan was to carry out a 'martyrdom operation' on the 6th of July then why delay it for the sake of a wife he was never going to see again, and a child he would never see? Looked at the other way, if he was so concerned about his wife and unborn child that he delayed the mission then why did he kill himself? It doesn't add up. Just as it doesn't add up that Khan, a British Pakistani and alleged Islamic fundamentalist, would have married a Westernised woman of Indian descent. Given the animosity felt by both Pakistanis and Indians over the disputed region of Kashmir, this appears a highly unlikely union if Khan was what the police and government have told us he was.

Rather than acknowledge these problems, let alone discuss them, Hugo Keith preferred to adopt a strategy utilised by the 9/11 Commission. The opening day of the Inquests provided ample evidence that debunking 'conspiracy theories' was a crucial aim of the proceedings.

Thus it is
to be hoped that these inquests, however unpleasant and
distressing, as they will be, will assist in answering
the families' questions in allaying some of the rumours
and suspicion generated by conspiracy theorists...
..My Lady, I have mentioned this evidence because
a number of unlikely conspiracy theories have been aired
in the press and on the internet...
...We consider it important that such claims are
identified and addressed...
...Where such claims do not appear to be supported by
the evidence that has been gathered, there is, we feel,
a danger that the continuation of such claims might
needlessly distress the bereaved families as well as
detracting attention away from the issues that you have
identified as being worthy of further investigation. - July 7th Inquests, October 11th

While it may be true that unfounded speculation by 'conspiracy theorists' has caused distress to the survivors and bereaved, this pales in comparison to the distress caused by the unfounded speculation of the official versions of events; the fact that the government, police and MI5 have consistently failed to release evidence proving the truth or falsehood of the official version; the fact that every key element of the official story has been revised (except that Khan et al were responsible); the fact that it has taken over five years for inquests to be held; and the fact that every request and demand for a proper inquiry has been refused and ridiculed. A few 'conspiracy theorists on the internet' simply cannot have caused anything close to the degree of frustration and confusion caused by the actions of the authorities of the state, no matter how whacky or speculative their claims might be.

Despite this, the above comments show that debunking 'conspiracy theories/theorists' is very much what the Inquests are hoping to achieve, certainly more so than their legally mandated duties outlined above. Keith even admitted that:

It is not a proper
function of an inquest to attribute blame or apportion
guilt, or a proper function of mine to express opinions
on impermissible areas. - July 7th Inquests, 11th October

This did not stop him from devoting a large proportion of his opening day statement to apportioning blame, to reaffirming the official narrative, and in general to using a supposedly unbiased judicial process for the political purpose of opposing and criticising 'conspiracy theories'. This perception of such theories, or even just the well-founded questioning and analysis offered by those such as the July 7th Truth Campaign, is entirely in keeping with the work of Cass Sunstein, and the more recent report published by the DEMOS thinktank. Both view 'conspiracy theories' as a political problem, a threat to public confidence in the powerful institutions of the state (and presumably their bosom buddies in the corporate world). Both advocate covert and overt opposition to such theories as a means of restoring such confidence. In Sunstein's list of possible government activites against 'conspiracy theories' he wrote:

(3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. - Sunstein, 2008

Likewise, DEMOS also put forth a policy of infiltration:

Government agents or their allies should openly infiltrate the
Internet sites or spaces to plant doubts about conspiracy theories,
introducing alternative information. - DEMOS, The Power of Unreason

If Hugo Keith QC has been officially or unofficially tasked with infiltrating the space that is the July 7th Inquests with the specific mission of trying to debunk 'conspiracy theories' about 7/7, it would not be much of a surprise. As noted on the July 7th Truth Campaign's Inquest blog, Keith's background is very much one of a state-sponsored legal hatchet man. A quick glance at his background, detailed here, shows that he defended the Queen at the inquests into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed, perhaps the highest profile effort by the British state to debunk the 'conspiracy theory' that they were killed by MI6 at the behest of the Royal family. Keith also represented David Mills and Silvio Berlusconi in a major money laundering and tax fraud case in Italy. Among his other work was helping the Secretary of State extradite Gary McKinnon, who hacked into the Pentagon looking for evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrials. Keith also helped the Director of Public Prosecutions resist prosecuting anyone in the police for the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. He also helped the Serious Fraud Office defend the decision to end the investigation into corruption in deals between the major British arms manufacturer BAE Systems and one of their major clients, the state of Saudi Arabia. Most recently, Keith's skills were put to helping the police justify shooting barrister Mark Saunders five times, a decision the inquest into Saunders' death judged to be 'self defence'. When it comes to defending the violence and corruption of the state, Keith is more than happy to take public money and use his status and education to further that aim. As such, if there was state involvement in the bombings of 7/7 then it is no surprise to see Keith once again turn up and perform his 'duty'.

The QC's pièce de résistance in the July 7th Inquests, at least so far, came in his efforts to oppose the idea that the four alleged bombers may have been set up as patsies - a possibility considered in the recent film 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction, which was submitted to the counsel for the Inquests and all the lawyers representing survivors and the bereaved. Keith said:

There is no evidence at all that we have seen to
suggest that the bombers were duped in some way so that
they did not know that they were going to die or, even
more absurdly, that they did not know that they were
carrying explosives at all. Indeed, such claims run
entirely contrary to all the evidence that I have
summarised so far.
It is right to say that the bombers were
surprisingly effective, it would seem, in concealing
their intentions from those around them. Tanweer played
cricket in the evening before putting the terrible plot
into effect and seemed more concerned, according to his
family, by the loss of his mobile phone. - July 7th Inquests, 11th October

Again pinching his lines from the 9/11 Commission, Keith claimed there 'is no evidence at all that we have seen' indicating that the alleged bombers were unintentional victims of the bombings. Employing a truly remarkable degree of doublethink, he then cited just the sort of evidence that does indicate this, i.e. that Shehzad Tanweer played cricket on the evening before 7/7. By contrast, one might expect a jihadi fundamentalist on the verge of a suicide mission to be spending that time making last minute checks and preparations, or praying. This is the same Tanweer who in the supposed 'dummy run' CCTV footage showing only three of the alleged bombers going to London a few days before 7/7 is seen wearing a t-shirt branded by the Western sportswear firm Puma.

However, even though Keith says they have seen no such evidence he tacitly admits that Tanweer playing cricket is such evidence, by describing this and other indications as part of an effort at 'concealing their intentions'. This is purely circular, and complete balderdash. Evidence that the men weren't knowing suicide bombers isn't actually evidence they weren't knowing suicide bombers, but evidence that they were concealing the fact that they were suicide bombers. The notion that they were suicide bombers is both a premise of the argument, and the argument's conclusion. It is only if you believe they were guilty that you could possibly interpret Tanweer's behaviour in this light, and claiming it as evidence of their guilt is a remarkable feat of twisted logic. This was not the only self-contradictory argument employed. The less than integral QC also cited as evidence of the alleged bombers intent videos that appeared at highly convenient times for the official narrative:

If there were any residual doubts, these are further
answered by two other pieces of evidence: Tanweer's
so-called last will and testament, which appeared a year
later on the internet, in which he seeks to justify
attacks, and the footage of Khan which appeared on
Al Jazeera, on 1 September 2005, to similar effect.
Those parts of the videos that showed them at any
rate must of course have been prepared prior to 7 July,
and thus, on account of their content, demonstrate that
their views had been held for some time. Indeed, the
release of the videos reinforces the terrorist dimension
of the attacks. They were made to be released following
the attacks themselves. - July 7th Inquests, 11th October

The two videos referred to are so-called 'martyrdom tapes', the first of which appeared at the beginning of September 2005, just as questions began circulating in the major media about whether the bombings were in fact suicide attacks. The second appeared on the day before the first anniversary of the attacks, on the 6th of July 2006. Though Keith went to great lengths to cast doubt on 'conspiracy theorists on the internet', he evidently had no qualms at all about citing videos of unknown provenance that appeared on the internet and used to help advance the official conspiracy theory. In this context, his comment that 'the release of the videos reinforces the terrorist dimension of the attacks' is perhaps an ironic confession. Though the authenticity of both videos has been questioned, let us assume for the sake of argument that they are genuine.

Neither video contains any mention of attacking the London public transport system, suicide bombings, or indeed any terrorist attack of any kind. As the above clips show, the mainstream media instantly seized upon the videos as evidence of the four alleged bombers guilt, even though they are at best evidence of only two of the four having vaguely jihadish beliefs. Not a single mainstream outlet has bothered to ask 'where are the equivalent videos for Hasib Hussein and Germaine Lindsay?' Put another way, Khan and Tanweer making such videos is not evidence of the guilt of others who knew them, yet this is exactly the argument the rogue QC has employed. What is particularly strange about the second item above, courtesy of the BBC, is that they interviewed Azzam Tamimi, an 'Islamic academic'. Tamimi trotted out the BBC's desired script about the videos, but he himself is an open supporter of Hamas, and has praised suicide bombers. He did this both before 7/7, in a 2004 interview for the BBC show Hardtalk, and after 7/7, in a speech where he said:

The greatest act of martyrdom is standing up for what is true and just. - Daily Mail, 2006

As such, Tamimi has made far more incriminating statements (however true or untrue they may be) than either Khan or Tanweer made in their 'martyrdom videos', and yet the BBC are happy to continue using Tamimi as a pundit, all the while reporting on the Khan/Tanweer tapes as proof of their guilt. This goes beyond mere doublethink and double standards. It is the height of journalistic hypocrisy and propaganda.

So, given that the opening of the July 7th Inquests has proven to be a huge disappointment for anyone seeking the truth about what happened, what are we to expect from the next few months of proceedings? The Provisional Index of Factual Issues and the timeline for what the Inquests will cover in the next four or five months are both weighted heavily on the question of 'preventability', i.e. the title of the 2009 ISC report 'Could 7/7 Have Been Prevented?' Having presumed what happened and who was responsible, this final part of the Inquests will examine whether or not the police and MI5 had enough information to have interdicted the bombing plot, and will serve to determine the boundaries of future discussions about 7/7 in the same way as the opening statements analysed above. In all likelihood, the Inquests will conclude that MI5 and the police were not sufficiently vigilant in their battle against the great terrorism menace. The upshot of asking the questions in this way is that MI5 in particular will be portrayed as not being paranoid enough to confront the 'real and serious' threat that we are facing. Even though their investigations have led to such ridiculous and corrupt convictions as that of paintballer Mohammed Hamid, they will be encouraged to become ever more suspicious of British Muslims in the name of stopping another attack from happening. The likely outcome is that this will then be exploited by our political masters to justify increasingly vicious counterterrorism policy and legislation, as has consistently been the case over the five years since the London bombings.

7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction

2010-10-05T12:39:00.010+01:00

With the fifth anniversary of 7/7 coming and going with the slightest of official acknowledgment and with no sign of an official inquiry, it remains up to the independent media and campaigners to keep up the pressure on the authorities. In that vein, Howard Beale's News Hour is pleased to present the feature-length documentary 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction. A 2 1/2 hour production, 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction is an extensive exploration of many of the questions and conspiracy theories about the bombings in London on July 7th 2005. Comprised of footage gleaned from mainstream news websites and youtube, it situates the debate about July 7th firmly in the context of the lengthy history of Western covert operations, and the ongoing policy of the global 'War on Terror'. The first part of the film covers three specific periods - Central America circa 1954-63, Italy from 1945-1990, and Afghanistan/Pakistan/the Balkans from 1979-present day. The exploration of Operation PBSUCCESS - the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz - Operation Pluto/Zapata - the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs - Operation Gladio - NATO's false flag terrorism in Europe - and Operation Cyclone - the CIA's sponsorship of the mujahideen in Afghanistan - focuses largely on the psychological warfare elements of these black ops, including their attempts to manipulate the media and public opinion.

Though not by any means a comprehensive history of such operations, this exploration provides ample evidence of official deceptions, black operations and false flag sponsorship of terrorism. These tactics are nothing new. Though it is perhaps a mythical account of events that may or may not have actually happened, Homer's Iliad provides a wonderful example of the value and power of such military tactics. One of the oldest works in Western literature, it tells the story of several weeks of the decade-long siege of Ilion by an alliance of different states from what we now called Greece. Commonly known as the Trojan War, the conflict showed how deception was an inherent part of Europe's first great empire.

The Iliad primarily tells the story of period where a quarrel between King Agamemnon (overlord of Mycenae and Argos) and Achilles (the legendary warrior who was virtually invulnerable) saw the Greeks being forced back towards the beaches near Troy, in what is now Turkey. As told in books 15 and 16 of the Iliad, as the Trojan forces threatened the Greek ships, a Greek soldier named Patroclus rushed to Achilles, his cousin, to try to persuade him to rejoin the fighting. Achilles refused, saying to get back in touch with him when the Trojan reached his own flotilla of around 50 vessels. However, Achilles did concede to allowing Patroclus wear his armour and lead his soldiers, the fearsome Myrmidons, into battle to help the other Greek forces. This provided the dual benefit of enabling Patroclus to lead Greece's best soldiers back into the fray and also scaring the Trojans into believing that the awesome Achilles had rejoined the battle. However, pride got the better of Patroclus and once he'd saved the ship he pursued the Trojans inland and ended up being killed by the Trojan hero Hector. This brought Achilles back into the battle and he killed Hector to avenge his cousin, trailing the body around the walls of the city of Troy behind his chariot. The conflict culminated with the Trojan Horse, the best known false flag attack of all time. At least until 9/11 anyway.

What might we make of this in modern times? Whether this actually happened, in this way, is impossible to know. At best we make educated guesses as to history before the written record. However, it is important to realise that without the psychological effect of Achilles' armor, the Greeks might have lost the Trojan War at that point. Violence on its own is half as effective, if even that, compared to violence combined with an intelligence propaganda and deception strategy, what are now known as psychological operations. Patroclus not only deceived his enemy, the Trojans, but also his allies, the Myrmidons commanded by Achilles. The equivalent today is one interpretation of 'Al Qaeda', i.e. Osama Bin Laden, Anwar Al Awlaki, Ayamn Zawahiri, Omar Bakri and so on. They serve as a object of fixation for our foreign policy, an 'enemy image' such as that talked about by neoconservative intellectual Carl Schmitt, this much is widely recognised. However, they also serve as an object of fixation for the many disenfranchised, alienated or just angry/unhappy Muslims of the world, a 'hero image' like Achilles armor.

Bin Laden in particular is an increasingly obvious psyop. His latest tape, a comparatively rational call for help for the flood-stricken areas of Pakistan, is not a call to arms like his two fatwas of the 1990s, or his other recordings of the 2000s, and so indicates a shift in policy. Though Bin Laden the man has probably been dead for years, Bin Laden the symbol, the image, can live on indefinitely. So, whoever the speaker on the tape actually is, their attack on the failings of the Pakistani government to deal with the floods that have so far claimed thousands of lives and rendered millions homeless, only serves to foment instability in a country increasingly being seen as a target by Western foreign policy makers. This makes far more sense if Bin Laden is a Western psyop than if he's an Islamic fundamentalist seeking to destroy the West and establish a caliphate. In this role, he not only provides the means for very real violence (the war in Afghanistan, most obviously) that excuses our foreign policy, but also for the psychological violence of our domestic policy. Just as young Muslims in Pakistan are turned towards joining the mujahideen or Taleban, inspired by Bin Laden and his ilk, young Muslims in the UK and elsewhere are turned towards acts of petty (or non-existent) criminality. This provides a justification for the destruction of civil liberties and for the arrest of hundreds of mostly young Muslim men who are instantly labelled 'terror suspects'. Assuming Bin Laden is not a complete fucking idiot, why would he so willingly play this role given how convenient it is to those advancing the 'war on terror' ideology, now rebranded as the 'struggle with violent extremism'?

Into this context came 7/7, the bombings in London on July 7th 2005. The explosions on the underground supposedly took place at 8:50 a.m. and the news broke at around 9:15. For over an hour the news media unanimously reported that 'power surges' were to blame, and that the explosions were primarily electrical in nature. At 9:47 a bus blew up in central London, and the story began to shift. At around 10:45 the BBC began reporting that the security services had informed BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner that they believed the explosions were bombings caused by Al Qaeda. This set off a chain of comments from officials and media commentators that that the events 'bore all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda', even though Al Qaeda as it is officially identified had never attacked public transport systems before. The 2004 Madrid train bombings were, at least according to the Spanish government, perpetrated by a local Spanish/North African Islamist group, who had no connection to Bin Laden. A two-year investigation in Spain found no evidence of an Al Qaeda link, and so unless MI5 knew something the Spanish authorities did not, MI5 had no evidence of Al Qaeda being involved in Madrid, hence had no evidence that attacks on the London public transport system 'bore all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda'. That they were making this claim less than two hours after the initial explosions very strongly suggests a cover story, and hence a psyop. That they were making this claim through an anonymous claim via the state-funded broadcaster pretty much confirms a cover story, and hence a psyop.

Curiously, the security services then went into a complete reverse, saying that the bombings were carried out by four homegrown 'self-radicalised' suicide bombers, working entirely alone, with no connection to a wider network and no connection to Al Qaeda. The phrase 'clean skins' was bandied around like it was going out of fashion, with the intelligence service lurching from being so sure who was responsible less than 2 hours after the initial phase of the bombings to claiming to have had no foreknowledge whatsoever. MI5 and Special Branch said they had no records of the men alleged to have been responsible, and therefore were completely innocent of any 'intelligence failure' in their mission to stop this exact sort of attack. This became the official story, published in the second report of May 2006, written by the Intelligence and Security Committee. However, the report contradicts this broad conclusion, stating:

36. Investigations since July have shown that the group was in contact with others involved in extremism in the UK, including a number of people who ***. There is no intelligence to indicate that there was a fifth or further bombers.

37. Siddeque Khan is now known to have visited Pakistan in 2003 and to have spent several months there with Shazad Tanweer between November 2004 and February 2005. It has not yet been established who they met in Pakistan, but it is assessed as likely that they had some contact with Al Qaida figures.
(...)
55. It is also clear that, prior to the 7 July attacks, the Security Service had come across Siddeque Khan and Shazad Tanweer on the peripheries of other surveillance and investigative operations. - ISC Report, 2006

Far from being 'clean skins' with no connection to any kind of wider network, two of the alleged bombers had visited Pakistan where MI5 presumed they met Al Qaeda figures, and the same two (Khan and Tanweer) had been observed by MI5 as part of an investigation into a suspected terrorist group in Britain.

More information about this came to light during the trial of the 'fertiliser bomb plotters', i.e. Omar Khyam and his miscellaneous associates. The suspects in this plot had been arrested in March/April 2004, and though they had been photographed, videotaped and bugged talking to Khan and Tanweer, MI5 did nothing to follow up the two men who would allegedly become suicide bombers a year later. An excerpt from this surveillance can be watched here. It was also claimed in the trial that the mastermind of the fertiliser bomb plot was a man known as 'Q' but named after the trial as Mohammed Quayyum Khan. However, 'Q' was never arrested, never questioned about his role in the plot, never called as a witness at the trial. Suspicions abound that he was a double agent, an informant for MI5 and/or Special Branch. This is of particular importance to 7/7 because at the fertiliser bomb plot trial it was claimed that 'Q' was 'instrumental' in getting Mohammed Siddique Khan, the alleged 7/7 ringleader, to Pakistan in 2003.

While there, Mohammed Siddique Khan, along with the supposed leader of the fertiliser plot Omar Khyam, received 'terror training' at a camp in Malakand set up by Mohammed Junaid Babar. Babar is a Pakistani American who grew up in New York, but apparently set out to participate in the jihad in Afghanistan after he was inspired by watching the 9/11 attacks. He set up the camp in Malakand, and provided training to two alleged ringleaders. Junaid Babar gave a couple of inflammatory interviews when he first left the US, saying he was going to 'kill every American I see' in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the Washington Post:

U.S. counterterrorism officials said Babar first hit their radar screen in late 2001, after the incendiary comments he made to ITN were broadcast. - Dan Eggen, Washington Post

Babar returned to the US in April 2004 and a few days later the FBI arrested. According to the Feds he was turned and became an informant almost immediately, but the indications are that he'd at least been under surveillance, if not an active double agent, since late in 2001. He became the 'Al Qaeda supergrass', a term purloined from the days of prosecutions of the Mafia, and was the key witness at the fertiliser bomb plot trial, and the trial of three men alleged to have been co-conspirators to the 7/7 plot.

This doesn't add up. If Babar was a compliant informant in 2004, then even if he didn't identify the alleged 7/7 bombers at that time he certainly identified them after the bombings had happened. According to the above Washington Post article:

He has identified at least one of the suicide bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, through photographs and has provided other details that may be helpful in unraveling the plot, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources. - Washington Post

As such, MI5 knew in the latter part of 2005 who it was that Mohammed Siddique Khan met in Pakistan in 2003, and so that the ISC couldn't figure it out in 2006 beggars belief. It became clear that the intelligence services and the authorities employed to oversee their work were not telling the truth about what they knew and when they knew it.

This is only one of many crucial elements of the official story of 7/7 that has been radically revised over time. Everything from the nature of the explosives used to the direction and location of the tube trains hit by the bombings, to the extent to which the security services had opportunities to interdict the plot has been rewritten in truly Orwellian fashion. Each new version is heralded by the mainstream media as 'the truth' and each prior version left behind as an irrelevance. Ultimately, those who talk of 'the official story' or 'the official version' are referring to a plural entity, chock full of internal contradictions, and subject to massive external contradictions with all of its various bedfellows over the years of revision. Hence the title of the film, '7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction', as the official story contains the tools for its own dismantling, the blossom of its own falling apart. Like the ancient cities of Latin America, now taken back by the forests and jungle, it is an artifice, perhaps designed to be subject to ever increasing change and redrafting. Given this perpetual destabilising of the key aspects of the government's story we can be forgiven for asking why it is that the only constant aspect of the story that the four alleged bombers were responsible. You can watch 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction in sections on youtube, or via the embedded player below.

You can also watch or download the film on stagevu, and likewise via blip.tv. With the inquests due to begin for real next week I firmly encourage concerned citizens of all stripes to follow proceedings both through the media and on the official inquest website. I will be attempting to cover them in detail on this blog, and there are plans afoot for a followup film to 7/7: Seeds of Deconstruction examining the repeated failure of justice institutions to proceed with impartiality in virtually every aspect of their role in the ongoing war on terror.

A Tale of Two Leaks

2010-09-03T18:14:00.030+01:00

Perhaps the two biggest and most-disputed news stories of 2010 have been the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Wikileaks publication of the Afghan War Diary. The exact nature of both events is uncertain, and their motives and causes are the subject of some speculation. For the most part the mainstream media have portrayed the Deepwater oil spill as an accident. The dispute within the mainstream media has largely revolved around nationalistic prejudices - the US media blaming BRITISH petroleum for the largest oil spill in history, the British media objecting. This particular spin appears to have been an attempt by Barack Obama to appear more nationalistic, to recover some of the centre ground the 'right wing' have gained since the 2008 election. As this chart from pollster.com shows, the Obama-fronted administration is suffering from serious mid-term ratings trouble.

Traditionally, two years into an administration is a difficult time for new presidents, but given the success of the populist, cult of personality election campaign (that won awards from the advertising industry) times look tough for Barack. Nonetheless, he came out fighting. He visited Louisiana, the area most heavily afflicted by the spill, taking care to be pictured on the beach, literally getting his hands dirty.

This was in stark contrast to George W Bush's visit to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was criticised for a doing a flyover of the flood-stricken city from Air Force One.

Obama's 'tough' approach to the problem of the oil spill included a highly embarrassing moment when the niggercommunistmuslimantichrist claiming he visited the area because the locals could tell him 'whose ass to kick'.

Very shortly, and not inspired at all by Gulf of Mexico fisherman put out of work by the spill, Barack started to kick some ass, and he opted for BP. Labelling them a British company and saying it was entirely their 'recklessness' that had led to the disaster, he adopted a policy not dissimilar to that of the Bush administration when launching the War on Terror. He turned BP, and in particular chief executive Tony Hayward, into the villains of the story he helped paint himself as the hero. However, as the chart above shows, his ratings continue to fall. Now, Hayward deserves no sympathy, he is, or at least was until the scandal forced him to step down, an overpaid executive of one company in an elite oil cartel who control the West's energy supplies. The arrogance of being a 'member of the club' was amply demonstrated by BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg referring to the afflicted as 'small people'. For all they have had to play the villains in this pantomime, the company is ultimately protected, and will no doubt recover its share price and position in the 'market'.

The whole story is ridiculous. 'BP' is only 40% British owned, and an equal share is held by Americans. BP's partner in the deep-drilling rig operation was the Texas-based Anadarko. In a memo obtained by TPMMuckraker BP attempted to bill Anadarko for $272 million, but the American company refused to pay. They claim it was entirely BP's recklessness that was to blame. However, the much-maligned Halliburton were at least partly responsible for the safety procedures that allegedly failed, and so we have a triumvirate of not particularly British companies in the firing line. But there are indications, largely buried by the transatlantic dick waving, that it was no accident, and this isn't just about corporate greed.

Several weeks before the 'blowout' Tony Hayward sold £1.4 million in BP shares, at the same time as the company were officially pinning their future on deepwater drilling. In the three months prior to the explosion, insider trading specialists Goldman Sachs sold 58% of their holdings in BP, worth around a quarter of a billion dollars. When you factor in that Goldman Sachs chairman and managing director Peter Sutherland is a former chairman of BP, as well as a Bilderberg attendee, European Chairman for the Trilateral Commission and financial advisor to the Vatican, the possibility of an inside job looks very plausible. Why did BP bend over backwards to pay up the $20 billion demanded by the US congress? Just as the insurance companies paid out after 9/11 for the destruction of three World Trade Center skyscrapers without the slightest investigation, BP have simply folded and given in.

Why might they have done this? According to Japan-based journalist Ben Fulford it was a reaction to the Chinese slowing down their buying of US debt. In his view, the blowing up of the rig and the initial failure to do much about it was the US saying 'if you do not give us the money, we will destroy the planet’s eco-system.' There are other possible reasons, and some distinct parallels with 9/11 that bear thinking about, aside from the insider trading that betrayed foreknowledge, and the apparent acceptance of financial liability after the event of a company powerful enough to fight their corner. Just as military and counterterrorism exercises were apparently exploited to help facilitate the 9/11 attacks, alarms and safety mechanisms on the Deepwater Horizon rig were switched off. This was done 'to help the workers sleep', but left the rig open to accident or sabotage.

There is also the visual nature of the event. On May 12th, weeks after the initial explosion and sinking of the rig, BP released footage of the spill as it progressed underwater. By May 21st they 'bowed to pressure' and produced a live feed of the spill. For weeks people could tune in to youtube and watch as underwater clouds of mud and oil flowed from the busted pipes. The comparison with 9/11 is quite simple. Though the timeframes for the oil spill were much longer, a simple pattern was followed. An initial explosion on the rig (the 'plane' hitting the South Tower) followed by the rig sinking and collapsing (the twin towers 'collapsing') followed by a billowing pyroclastic flow of oil and mud (the flow of the debris from the towers covering lower Manhattan).

On June 14th, President Obama explicitly compared the spill to the terrorist attack, calling it an 'environmental 9/11'.

The disaster will "shape how we think about the environment... for years to come", he told US website Politico. - BBC

This is entirely in keeping with comments made in the aftermath of the failure of the Copenhagen conference to reach anything even approaching a binding agreement on emission reductions. The failure of that much-hyped conference, along with the increased scepticism of climate science in the wake of the climategate scandal, meant that getting the carbon economy back on the agenda was going to be difficult. Back in January, things were looking so bad that banks were withdrawing from the carbon market that had seen such heavy investment over the previous two years. By June, and shortly before Obama's 9/11 comment, Reuters reported that they were once again actively investing. Not long afterwards, it was reported that a ban on offshore drilling enacted in response to the spill was going to result in a rise in the price of oil.

The need for a crisis to help reinvigorate this long-held agenda was flagged by prominent academics just prior to the events in the Gulf of Mexico. James Lovelock, the author of the Gaia hypothesis (which in most respects contradicts the climate change doommongers) gave a highly convenient interview to the Guardian:

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists' emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. "The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Lovelock, 90, believes the world's best hope is to invest in adaptation measures, such as building sea defences around the cities that are most vulnerable to sea-level rises. He thinks only a catastrophic event would now persuade humanity to take the threat of climate change seriously enough, such as the collapse of a giant glacier in Antarctica, such as the Pine Island glacier, which would immediately push up sea level.

"That would be the sort of event that would change public opinion," he said. "Or a return of the dust bowl in the mid-west. Another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report won't be enough. We'll just argue over it like now." - Guardian

This followed on from comments made by BBC climate correspondent Richard Black and Financial Times Environment correspondent Fiona Harvey. During a question and answer session at Oxford University on February 26th they were asked about Met Office forecasts, and what would convince 'sceptics and deniers':

Q: What will persuade sceptics and deniers?

BJ: It’s curious how Met Office and WMO predictions on AGW came out in the week of CH (some audience disagreement as to whether there had been a change from their normal timetable). It was at least bad timing for organisations that value integrity. They should distance themselves from advocacy. The Met Office is ahead of the science.

FH: FT readers are versed in risk and probability which are difficult to communicate in the rest of the media. Climate scientists aren’t generally newsworthy; sceptics, IPCC problems and emails are making the news. “Climate – guess what? Still changing” is an unlikely headline. A short-term disaster is needed to guarantee coverage as people aren’t good at processing information about there being no ice at the poles in 30 years. Or get David Attenborough as the front man because everyone trusts him.

RB: I agree that a short term disaster would be effective in persuading people. - Bishop Hill blog

Much like PNAC called for a 'New Pearl Harbour' and Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke of the need for a 'widely perceived direct external threat' for the US to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy, these statements evoke the need for a climate catastrophe to get the carbon economy and emissions policies back in the public minds. The world's biggest ever oil leak? Not a bad effort. There was steady increase in stories of how bad it was, from initial estimates of 1,000 barrels a day soon becoming up to 100,000 barrels per day. Oil industry whistleblower Lindsey Williams got in on the act, going on the Alex Jones show saying his contacts in the industry were worried about poisonous gases emanating from the site of the spill. He appeared on the Jeff Rense show with much the same story. In keeping with his somewhat curious religious views he portrayed the disaster as being of biblical proportions, and that it would require a nuclear explosion to seal up the ocean floor. The possible use of a nuke was officially denied just as Williams was feeding the story to the alternative media. This was in June, and he was talking about four months being required to do the preparatory work before the nuke would be detonated. A couple of weeks later, BP announced that they'd stemmed the flow of oil. By August Obama and his daughter were pictured on holiday, swimming at Alligator Point in Florida. It seems unlikely that if toxic gases were spewing up out of the water than the President would be allowed to go swimming on the Northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico. That said, BP are allegedly still spending nearly $100 million a day on dealing with the leak, so though it appears Lindsey Williams had been given misinformation it remains to be seen what happens.

By the end of July the mainstream was reporting that the oil spill, though huge, may not have been as catastrophic as previously thought. Perhaps as a bolster against this, at the same time a joint report by the UK Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US declared itself the 'best evidence yet' of global warming, and that the evidence was 'unmistakable'. In the midst of the oil spill Professor Phil Jones, who was sacked to help manage the PR during climategate, was reinstated after yet another inquiry found he'd done no wrong in refusing FOIA requests, suggesting colleagues destroyed the data, and generally refusing to make public any of the information or analysis that had produced 'evidence' of global warming. A month later, as it appeared that oceanic bacteria were degrading the spilled oil much faster than anticipated, the EU's top climate official called for a reworking of the carbon markets. Connie Hedegaard, another Bilderberg attendee, called for an overhaul of the 'Clean Development Mechanism' to 'make the carbon market an even more powerful instrument to reduce emissions'. If the stories about the oil spill not being as bad as it was portrayed are true, that may help explain why another rig has just exploded.

The second biggest leak of the year was Wikileaks' publication of the Afghan War Diary. The 'compendium' of around 91,000 documents largely consisting of basic military intelligence reports has offered a more detailed view of the Afghan War than any prior coverage. The simultaneous reporting 'scoop' by the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times catapulted Wikileaks, and Julian Assange, into the limelight. Disputes began immediately. The Pentagon responded in typical fashion, saying that Wikileaks had 'blood on their hands' because they'd exposed sensitive information. Given the actual tedium of sifting through the documents to try to find strategically useful information, this is complete horseshit. The insurgency in Afghanistan, now 'spilling' into Pakistan, would be better off just looking on the ground with their own eyes than spending weeks poring over files on the internet. If Wikileaks starts broadcasting a live feed from the US's Predator drone aircraft then that's a different matter, and I for one would find it a lot more riveting than the oil spill. And herein lies one of the more prominent criticisms of the Wikileaks War Diary story, that it may in fact be a carefully manipulated internet-era psychological operation, carried out by the very people who it apparently damages.

Suspicions were raised by the fact that two themes are relatively prevalent throughout the documents - ISI sponsorship of the insurgency, and intelligence maintaining the idea that Osama Bin Laden is actually still alive. To anyone who has actually been following the War on Terror with any integrity or critical faculties, that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence bureau are in the habit of sponsoring various militant/terrorist groups comes as no surprise. And yet, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the NY Times all presented the story as though it were something new and outrageous. Of apparently less concern was the actions of a US Special Forces group called Task Force 373, basically a commando unit used for assassination missions. This is extra-judicial murder, like killing senior Nazis at the end of World War 2 instead of capturing them and putting them on trial. The NY Times reported that these missions frequently 'go wrong' and end up killing civilians. The net effect of this coverage is to maintain the notion of an 'us' and a 'them'. Now the 'them' who are inflicting the dreadful threat of terrorism on the West (not actual terrorism, just the threat of it) has been expanded to include Pakistan.

In all likelihood, the Brzezinski plan for Pakistan is to use them against Iran. Though there are fresh murmurs of a war against Iran, it remains highly unlikely given the US deficit and given how badly the existing wars are going. However, the murmurs do indicate that the neocons are taking ground from the Obama administration, since invasion of Iran is their policy. Brzezinski, ever the chess player, favours hiding behind proxies and manipulating the situation geopolitically, and hence wants to use the only existing Muslim nuclear power (Pakistan) to counter Iran's rather obvious efforts to become a nuclear power. So, they ratchet up the sponsorship of groups like Jundullah and Jaish-e-Mohammed to try to destabilise Iran and monopolise their military intelligence assets in fighting a dirty war. The problem with this is that the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes more powerful. In trying to deal with the Iran problem, the Obama administration has made the war in Afghanistan unwinnable. Hence, the neocons are able to seize some power saying that the only option is an all-out strike on Iran to take them out of the picture. In the midst of this struggle, Obama announced the 'end of combat operations' in Iraq. Not the end of the war. Not the end of the US occupation. But the end of 'combat operations'. Remind you of anything?

The other common criticism of the Wikileaks War Diary is that it promulgates the myth that Osama Bin Laden is still alive and causing trouble, and is a reason to be as afraid as you can manage. Even Fidel Castro got involved, saying that the Wikileaks documents 'prove' Bin Laden is a US spy. Either Castro is just being a cantankerous old Commie or he's being very clever in suggesting the presence of Bin Laden in the documents is reason to believe that his reputation as an international terrorist is one created and advanced by Western intelligence for their own ends. Either way, good on him. The world won't be quite the same when Fidel Castro isn't in it anymore.

One of the better critiques of this story is offered by Brendon O'Neill of Spiked:

[I]t’s worth noting that the documents reveal little that we didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed was happening...
...Truth is not something that is handed to us on a silver platter by know-it-all whistleblowers. It is something we discover for ourselves through a process of critical investigation and by quizzing and querying received wisdoms. The media’s pant-wetting excitement about these leaked documents only shows what a parlous state journalism is in, and how much journalists have become the passive recipients of information rather than active seekers of the truth...
...In equating Truth with exposure – so that Truth becomes something which is revealed to us by a supposedly heroic individual in the corridors of powers – journalists and editors are compliant in the denigration of the meaning of Truth. Truth becomes, not something we find out through critical study and investigation, but something we are handed by external forces who apparently have always pure, unimpeachable motives...
...Waiting for the Truth to be revealed is always a fool’s errand – whether you’re waiting for God to reveal it, or, even worse, some sap in a suit in the Pentagon who one morning has a very belated pang of guilt about his role in the destruction of Afghanistan. - Spiked

Giving credence to the notion that Wikileaks is an earnest website, working to put information in the public domain, who are seen as a threat by the CIA and Pentagon, is the treatment of Assange. On August 2oth, he was charged with rape in Sweden. However, within a day the arrest warrant was canceled and the charges dropped. Then at the beginning of September a 'top Swedish prosecuter' said that the case had been re-opened. So, is Assange being stigmatised and branded a rapist in order to try to discredit Wikileaks? It's possible. However, if anything the stories about Assange being charged, then the charges being dropped, then being potentially brought up again, all mentioned the War Diary as part of their coverage. It's almost as if they wanted us to make the connection, and presume the rape allegation false, and a concoction of Assange/Wikileaks apparent enemies.

A couple of days after the charges were dropped, Wikileaks published a new CIA document on their website. They pre-announced the publication on Twitter. The entries (reverse chronological order) read:

The possible prosecution of WikiLeaks | Antiwar http://bit.ly/dx2nc3
9:53 AM Aug 25th via bitly

WikiLeaks to release CIA paper tomorrow.
11:53 PM Aug 24th via bitly - Wikileaks on Twitter

Clearly Wikileaks wanted the publication of the CIA document to help distract from Assange's legal trouble, and firmly placed it in the context of them fighting back against 'prosecution' from outside. The document itself is from the CIA's 'Red Cell', supposedly responsible for 'outside the box' thinking. It's subject is the US 'export of terrorism', i.e. US citizens who'd gone and been involved with terrorism in other countries. The memo mentions several examples, and concludes that the PR damage of the rest of the world recognising that terrorism can originate in the US could undermine legal efforts to get foreign nations to extradite suspects to the US, and in general make US agents abroad into targets for retribution.

Perhaps the most interesting and revealing aspect of this memo is what it doesn't say. It talks of the US 'export' of terrorism. Not sponsorship. Not control or manipulation. 'Export'. One of the examples mentioned is that of David Headley from Chicago, who helped Lashkar-e-Taiba carry out the 2008 Mumbai attacks. However, the US refused to let Headley be interrogated by Indian authorities investigating the attacks, leading them and many others to believe he is in fact a CIA operative. They did eventually hand him over to the Indian authorities, but only after extensive interrogation (or debriefing) by US agents. Headley certainly worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration as an informant for years, including paying visits to Pakistan on their behalf and he may have been recruited from their by intelligence agencies higher up the food chain, such as the CIA. Though he ended up pleading guilty, just like Ali Mohamed there is no report of him actually being sentenced, and according to his lawyer this won't happen until next year when the trial of one of his co-accused is completed.

While it is not surprising to find the CIA not explicitly referring to their own sponsorship of terrorists, if Wikileaks were honest in their coverage of the issue of terrorism you would expect them to mention that Headley was probably CIA, and certainly a secret agent of some type. But they didn't. This suggests that the publication of the CIA memo was part of a media campaign aimed at taking attention away from the rape allegations, and restoring credibility to Wikileaks in a period of criticism. But who is ultimately pulling the strings? Was this just a self-protectionist move by Wikileaks, or a more subtle propaganda strategy? Is the aim to grant credibility to Wikileaks only insofar as they continue to ignore the very biggest questions? Are they a product of the people they supposedly seek to expose? Certainly Webster Tarpley thinks so.

If the aim here is to promote and cultivate Wikileaks in such a way as to discredit and marginalise 'conspiracy theorists' then this leak is an excellent means of doing that. In the second part of the above video, Tarpley rightly asks of Assange 'who pays you?' Similar document-publishing, whistleblowing website Cryptome recently published a series of messages purportedly posted by Wikileaks insiders on an encrypted messageboard. Though cryptome cast doubt on the authenticity of the messages, but they include demands for a full audit of Wikileaks finances, allegations of Wikileaks manipulating their releases, and of the organisation having a 'pyramid structure'. How Wikileaks has determined that it needs $5 million a year is a question worth asking when all they ostensibly do is host a website and pay for Assange's travelling expenses. Whether these messages are authentic is virtually impossible to say, but they do make some important points. Nonetheless, Cryptome officially supports Wikileaks.

If Wikileaks has been created, infiltrated, or otherwise been manipulated by Western military intelligence then it is in keeping with strategies outlined in various significant reports. As outlined in David Ray Griffin's new book 'Cognitive Infiltration', Obama appointee Cass Sunstein advocated the covert infiltration of groups and movements deemed 'conspiracist' and therefore a threat. He did this in a 2009 paper published in the Journal of Political Philosophy titled 'Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures'. I've yet to find a fully available copy of the paper, but it is likely a rehash of his 2008 paper 'Conspiracy Theories'. In it, Sunstein attributes belief in conspiracy theories largely to psychological bases. The paper trots out the usual crap about how difficult it is for conspiracies to be real in an 'open society':

Consider all the work that must be done to hide and to cover up the government’s role in producing a terrorist attack on its own territory, or in arranging to kill political opponents. In a closed society, secrets are not difficult to keep, and distrust of official accounts makes a great deal of sense. In such societies, conspiracy theories are both more likely to be true and harder to show to be false in light of available information. But when the press is free, and when checks and balances are in force, government cannot easily keep its conspiracies hidden for long. These points do not mean that it is logically impossible, even in free societies, that conspiracy theories are true. But it does mean that institutional checks make it unlikely, in such societies, that powerful groups can keep dark secrets for extended periods, at least if those secrets involve important events with major social salience. - Sunstein, 2008

What this commonly repeated attempt to refute conspiracy theories in general is missing is that in fact, even in open societies, secrets are kept as a matter of routine. As the CIA loves to remind us, we know about their failures, but we'll never hear about their successes. Military secrets are routinely kept not only from opponents on the battlefield but from the very public they are supposedly protecting. Leaks such as the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary are 'sexy' media stories precisely because we live in a society where we basically know sod all about what our soldiers and spies are really up to. On the contrary to sort of argument put forth by Sunstein, in an open society where you can obfuscate, bury bad news, or just flood people with information so they can't process it in a meaningful way, it's actually rather easy to plan and carry out (for example) false flag terrorist attacks. In the case of 7/7, virtually no forensic evidence has been leaked into the public domain, making it impossible to draw any evidence-based narrative of what happened. Those claiming to know that 7/7 was an inside job are making a leap, but no greater leap than those who claim to know that it wasn't.

Sunstein moves on to the general ignorance of people, and finds in this another cause for conspiracy theories to be believed.

Some beliefs are also motivated, in the sense that people are pleased to hold them or displeased to reject them.35 Acceptance (or for that matter rejection) of a conspiracy theory is frequently motivated in that sense. Reactions to a claim of conspiracy to assassinate a political leader, or to commit or to allow some atrocity either domestically or abroad, are often determined by the motivations of those who hear the claim. These are points about individual judgments, bracketing social influences. But after some bad event has occurred, those influences are crucial, for most people will have little or no direct information about its cause. How many people know, directly or on the basis of personal investigation, whether Al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy on his own? - Sunstein, 2008

In fact, the majority of people who believe that Al Qaeda were not responsible for 9/11 and that Oswald didn't kill JFK believe so on the basis of investigation. How rational that investigation is, how sound the evidence and how logical their conclusions are as to what really happened are all a matter of considerable dispute. But the sorts of people who affirm that 9/11 was an inside job typically have far more information about the event than they do about any other given major news event. They even have a tendency to bombard those who are unconvinced with information and arguments in attempts to convince the '9/11 truth sceptics'. So, the answer to Sunstein's rather rhetorical question is 'quite a lot, actually'.

Sunstein goes on to describe several possible responses by governments concerned about conspiracy theories.

What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do,
what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1)
Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5). - Sunstein, 2008

The idea of a tax on conspiracy theorists is truly wonderful, and could only ever be the product of a mind reaching for a predetermined conclusion with all its might, without caring how stupid the person it belongs to ends up looking. It would lead to a lengthy legal battle on the definition of a conspiracy theory, since there are dozens of official conspiracy theories that presumably would deserve to be taxed too. Maybe it isn't such a stupid idea after all.

He goes on to explain what this strategy of 'cognitive infiltration' might look like.

By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups...
...We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. - Sunstein, 2008

As I imagine Griffin's book will discuss, infiltrating perceived dangerous social movements is not a new strategy, and if anything the likes of Sunstein talking about it so explicitly is itself an attempted psychological operation. By advocating the policy in such clear terms he is trying to make it seem normal, rational, and inevitable. It is the just response of a sensible government in the face of a menace.

The same basic thesis can be found in more recent report, which reference Sunstein's work. Supposedly 'third way' think tank DEMOS recently published 'The Power of Unreason: Conspiracy Theories, Extremism and Counter-Terrorism'. Even more so than Sunstein, they identify belief in conspiracy theories with 'extreme' beliefs and ultimately with terrorism. They note how groups from the Ku Klux Klan to Aum Shinrikyo have believed they were the targets of persecution, or that they were a vanguard against the onslaught of tyrannical government. They note how anarchist group the Angry Brigade sent communiques 'bursting with conspiracy':

Communique 7: …THEY shoved garbage from their media down our
throats. THEY made us obscure sexual caricatures, all of us men and
women. They killed, napalmed, burned us into soap, mutilated us,
raped us. It’s gone on for centuries. Slowly we started understanding
THE BIG CON
Communique 9: We are slowly destroying the long tentacles of the
oppressive state machine…bureaucracy and technology used against
the people…to speed up our work, to slow down our minds and actions,
to obliterate the truth. - Angry brigade communiques, cited in The Power of Unreason

Frankly, however stupid and counterproductive and needlessly violent I think terrorism is, there's a lot to identify with in the statements, however 'conspiratorial' their tone. DEMOS show much the same sort of intellectual dishonesty as Sunstein, describing the story of US group MOVE thus:

MOVE – an anarcho-primitivist group involved in a police
shooting in 1985 in the United States – spoke of government
corruption and blamed all the world’s ills on technology. - The Power of Unreason

DEMOS's analysis is almost entirely inaccurate. Several members of the commune were involved in a shootout where a police officer was killed, but that was in 1978, not 1985. Completely ommitted from the analysis above is the fact that the MOVE commune in was subjected to a horrific siege by Philadelphia police in 1985. Tear gas canisters were hurled in, the house was drenched with water cannons, thousands of rounds were fired at the building and then to cap it all a helicopter dropped a bomb primarily made of C-4 on top of them, killing 11 people including 5 children, and causing fire and destruction that ultimately consumed 65 houses. That's a pretty good psychological motivation for people to believe the state is capable of terrorism against its own people. Echoing Sunstein once more, DEMOS cite the Wikileaks War Diary as an example of how hard it is to keep secrets:

It is also becoming more difficult for security services to operate
behind a veil of secrecy. The recent leaking of thousands of
classified US intelligence documents to Wikileaks highlights
mounting challenges. - The Power of Unreason

To respond to this, DEMOS advocate policies entirely similar to those offered by Sunstein:

Government agents or their allies should openly infiltrate the
Internet sites or spaces to plant doubts about conspiracy theories,
introducing alternative information. - The Power of Unreason

However, they did add a new policy:

As the government conducts its review of counter-terrorism powers,
it should consider how the intelligence agencies and other counterterrorism
operations could be more transparent...
---Make intelligence announcements more explicit.
In Denmark, intelligence agencies publish an unclassified
assessment of their judgement of the threats facing the country.- The Power of Unreason

Not only do they suggest the infiltration of 'undesirable' groups, in physical and cyberspace, but also that the intelligence agencies should provide more information and be more explicit about the threats we face. Now, if this were done in anything even approaching an honest fashion, it might be a somewhat sensible strategy. Stability via transparent government. But in reality, that isn't going to happen, and what DEMOS is really advocating is that intelligence agencies see conspiracy theories as an ideological enemy, to be confronted and eliminated. I'm no fearmonger, but this is all getting a bit KGB for my liking.

One final document also suggests that the Wikileaks storm might be taking place in the Pentagon's teacup. The Joint Special Operations University published a report in 2006 called Blogs and Military Information Strategy. It outlines how the blogosphere, as a synecdoche of the internet in general, is a new battleground for the US Army, and in particular the implications blogs have for 'influence operations', one category of psychological operations. It includes some rather natty diagrams and graphs, including W.L. Bennet's model of the infosphere.

The JSOU report explains a complex set of strategies to deal with the problems posed by blogs (and therefore all independent news sites) with regard to 'influence operations. It says:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group, or community to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital...
...An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly...
...There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information...
...There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media, on all three layers, in support of military deception activities...
...Credibility is the heart and soul of influence operations. In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and nonattribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure. Because of the potential blowback effect, information strategy should avoid planting false information as much as possible. - JSOU Report 06-5 Blogs and Military Information Strategy

So even if Wikileaks is not a pure creation of military intelligence, the question remains as to whether it has been given undue prominence via the publication of the Afghan War Diary as part of an influence operation. To take the website offline would be a relatively simple matter for the US Army, but as noted in this paper that wouldn't solve the problem, and manipulation of the website, its content, and how it is perceived is a more sophisticated and effective strategy. Nonetheless, Assange might not even be aware of this, and might be perfectly honest in saying he is 'annoyed' by the 9/11 Truth movement. He may simply be an egotistical, unwitting pawn in a propaganda game that extends far beyond his influence.

In both of these stories there is much that remains uncertain, and while the people pulling the strings may still be in the shadows, the agendas being advanced via these major news events are quite obvious. What is certain is that these are stories of and for the internet age. Though they affect very real events, the video stream of the oil spill that turned it into an issue of global opinion, and the documents published by Wikileaks are things that happened online, and could only have happened online. Given the open concern about 'conspiracy theories' and the policies already adopted by military intelligence institutions, we need new strategies to counteract the effects. To that end we need 100 sites like Wikileaks, offering places for the disaffected who work in these institutions to help lay bare how they really work. Thus whether or not Wikileaks is a CIA operation would be irrelevant, because they would be but one site among many, rather than the world's premier online resource for whistleblowers. What we must also do as a critically concerned public is to remember that any individual news story produces easy, comfortable heroes and villains. We need to study these stories in context, because no one story ever explains that much, however big it is. We need to look for trends, connections across time and space, use our lateral thinking skills to always be able to consider what it beyond what we're being told. We also need to demand and expect more of investigative journalists, who will pro-actively seek out secret information rather than waiting to copy-paste it from Wikileaks. It is a dying art, but one absolutely crucial if democracy is to mean anything at all. Ultimately, we cannot trust the authorities who dominate the airwaves, because by their own confession they are more interested in deception than they are in truth.

Mendacious metaphors

2010-08-06T12:06:00.016+01:00

Inception, this summer's sci-fi thriller blockbuster, ranks at the time of writing at number 3 in the all-time movie rankings on IMDB. A similar phenomenon was seen two years ago with director Christopher Nolan's Batman relaunch sequel The Dark Knight, which reached similarly dizzying heights on IMDB and has only now fallen out of the top 10. While The Dark Knight does not pretend to be anything but a well thought out take on a classic comic book action story, Inception broaches far more philosophical topics and has loftier ambitions. Though it is a textbook example of narrative complexity, and derives tremendous tension from its pinnacle of quadruple jeopardy, in essence it says absolutely nothing. Though the script is full of references to the subconscious, and the entire story takes place in a multi-layered dream, the movie makes no effort to discuss the importance or relevance of dreams or what psychologists call the subconscious, they are mere tools and excuses used to create dramatic tension. It is an outstanding example of modernist filmmaking, concerned only with form, only with the cinematic experience of watching it. Philosophically speaking, it is totally vacuous. The concepts and references are just there for the sake of creating a point in the story where the success or failure of the protagonists rests not on a single or dual factors, but on a succession of well-sychronised 'kicks' that wake our heroes from several successive 'levels' of 'dream state'. The twist at the end appears to be the rather obvious in-story joke that the entire thing is one big dream of Leonardo Dicaprio's character. As far as cop-out, obviously leaving it open for a lucrative sequel endings go, it was a tour de force of which Nolan is presumably very proud.

The movie is a well designed trick. It convinces people that it must be about something, because there's always something going on and you have to add it all up to make sure you follow the plot correctly. But that is all it is about - the plot itself. As an intellectual experience, it is completely insular. An analysis of the essential plot points and creative decisions made in the story telling process illustrate that this can only be intentional. The movie is ostensibly set in a world different to ours, but the only exploration of the way in which it is different is the existence of a technology that allows people to enter other people's dreams. Basically they all sit in a room together, wired up to a silver suitcase. The only other information that we're offered about the world is when a Japanese businessman (cliche alert!) hires Dicaprio and his anonymous, one dimensional band of associates to attempt 'inception', the use of the technology to try to plant an idea in a rival businessman's head.

Briefly, it is explained that the rival is about to inherit a monopolistic energy company with which no one can compete, and so the Japanese businessman wants to implant the idea that the rival should split up the monopolistic company and sell it off. This is the only other information we're given about the 'real' world in which the story occurs. Unlike virtually every other sci-fi story set in a different world, the narrative conceit of setting isn't used to say anything about our own world. It simply isn't part of the story.

Instead we are invited to try to get interested and engaged by Dicaprio having a dead wife, who for reasons that are too tedious to get into, he is wrongly thought to have killed and hence he is separated from his children. The last Dicaprio movie I watched was Shutter Island, which also involved having to sit through two hours of his shitly-bearded face try to convey the emotion of having a dead wife. The central character in Memento (which is identical to Inception in several regards) also has a dead wife. As does as least one contestant on The X-Factor every year. Indeed, the story of 'man with dead wife' is about as overused as having a fat black guy play the busdriver. There is, incidentally, a lovely moment in season two of The Wire where McNulty jokes about having a dead wife in a playful attempt to curry interest from Beadie. Nolan himself shows that he knows this is a cliche by making this plot element entirely subservient to the story. That is to say, there is no exploration of the experience of a man who has lost his wife, it is merely a fact that is necessary for the climax to happen in the way that it does.

Indeed, several other factors are likewise subservient, to the extent that the entire plot is supporting one climactic sequence of cutting between successfully dependent events. Ignoring the storyteller's mantra to 'show' rather than 'tell', we are told virtually the whole story explicitly through dialogue to make sure that even the thickos at the back can grasp what's going on. We are told that in order to plant the idea (incept? inceive?) in the business rival's head they need a three-layered dream - a dream within a dream within a dream - so they can ensure the idea goes 'deep' enough. (This is only one of a dozen different uses of the word 'deep' in the script, more on that lower down) Why is this the case? Why a three-layered dream? Purely because the plot demands it. We are told that three layers is highly unstable. Why is this the case? Why would dreaming within dreaming within dreaming involve experiencing a reality that is less stable than mere dreaming within dreaming? No explanation is given. It is purely because the plot demands it.

So, they drug the target with a powerful sedative, and drug themselves with it too. Once in the first level of the dream, we are told that because of the sedative if they 'die' in the dream that they won't wake up, but will go into another, apparently parallel, dream state they call 'limbo'. No one bothers to ask 'what happens if you die in limbo, do you wake up then?' which is important, because the film has no answer for that rather obvious question, at least at that point in the story. Again, the whole 'limbo' diversion is an excuse for something else that needs to happen so that the narrative conclusion can be what the writers want it to be. It isn't saying anything about the nature of experiencing death within a dream, or being conscious of experiencing death in a dream, and it sure as hell isn't saying anything about humans being the only creatures that know that they are going to die. It's just a piece of a jigsaw. If people are satisfied with themselves for having put the jigsaw together by the end of the movie then they will go home happy with the cinematic experience, happy to have consumed Inception as a product.

And here is the crucial factor in the deception of Inception. It isn't even Titanic. Titanic was a largely meaningless blockbuster, also starring Dicaprio, but at least it gave its audience a good emotional work out. It may not have taught them anything, it may not have informed them, it may not have inspired them, but at least it made people feel something. Inception doesn't even accomplish that. All it is offering its audience is the prize of being able to follow the plot, which isn't even that complex relative to, just for example, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It is the cinematic equivalent of a Sudoku puzzle. In many tabletop games, in particular most board games, the multiplayer aspect means that one is testing oneself against other people within the framework of the rules. There is an unpredictable exchange that requires an ad hoc mental process. In Sudoku, either one 'gets' it and completes the puzzle, or one doesn't. In Inception, either you follow the plot, or you don't. In a movie where so much is at stake for the characters, virtually nothing is at stake for the watching audience.

Indeed, even the title is misleading gibberish. The word 'inception' means the beginning of something. It does not mean planting an idea in someone's mind through their subconscious. 'Insertion' would be more accurate. However, Nolan clearly isn't concerned with actually using words to mean what they mean, but solely with finding a single-word, cool sounding title for a movie that says nothing about anything. Calling a movie 'insertion' would make it sound like an unimaginative porn film, presumably based around people placing objects in their bodily orifices. The title 'Inception' plays the same role as the sunglasses and long leather jackets in The Matrix. It is almost empty data - signifying nothing other than the filmmaker's desire to be thought of as having made a cool movie. All the talk, in both films, of perception of reality is not an effort to explore ontology through cinema, but as part of a carefully arranged group of symbols which are collectively meaningless but individually compelling enough to appear meaningful at least for the duration of the film. The film is not only driven by almost pure formalism, it engages in a form of psychological deception.

That is not to say people shouldn't find the movie enjoyable, more so that they should realise what it is that they are enjoying. That is, their own ability to follow a reasonably complex plot, their own capacity to solve a puzzle so that they can buy into the dramatic tension of the climactic sequence. Inception does make its audience work a little harder than most mainstream action thrillers, but this is only to make the film more compelling as a physical, formal experience. It's the equivalent of using more contrasting colours in a painting, or slightly cruder language in a sitcom. Not subtle, not particularly clever and most certainly not philosophical. David Denby of the New Yorker twigged this:

Christopher Nolan(...) appears to believe that if he can do certain things in cinema—especially very complicated things—then he has to do them. But why? To what end? His new movie, “Inception,” is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly...
...“Inception” is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else...
...Bizarre oddities, which complicate the puzzle but are meaningless in themselves, flash by in an instant. The actors, trying to suggest familiarity with the task of dream invasion, spin off gibberish in the most casual way. Parodies, I assume, will follow on YouTube...
...But who cares if Cobb gets back to two kids we don’t know? And why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. - Inception review, New Yorker

There is something much more important at stake than Nolan's aesthetic philosophy, and that is that Inception works as a corporate psychological operation, as mass propaganda. This is most obvious in its treatment of dreams-within-dreams. The characters are seen entering a dream, and then falling asleep within it and entering another dream, and then falling asleep within that and entering another dream. These dreams are arranged in a linear, vertical formation so to fully wake up they need to wake up from the 'deepest level' (3rd dream) to the 'deeper level' (2nd dream) to the merely 'deep level' (1st dream) and from there wake up to reality. The neat planning and execution of these four successive 'wake ups' is what creates the quadruple jeopardy - to successfully wake up, all four must work in the right way and the right order.

However, this isn't how dreams work. No one falls asleep in a dream and finds themself in another dream. Sometimes, people experience 'waking up' in a dream but that is usually the beginning of the dream (insofar as they remember it), not a transition from a prior dream state, and certainly not a passage up some imaginary ladder of different dream states. No one actually experiences lucid dreaming in the manner portrayed in Inception. The film is also asexual. Aside from Dicaprio's dead wife, there is no indication that any of the characters even have a sexuality or any kind of romantic emotion whatsoever, and yet this is perhaps the number one topic for real dreams. This confirms that Nolan has no interest in discussing people's real experience of dreams.

In reality, most people experience dreams within dreams laterally, not vertically. As is portrayed in the far superior film based on a very, very similar premise Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we tumble sideways, never in full control, finding the world of our own mind a constantly shifting, unsteady ground, rather than the rigid military formation demanded by Nolan's plot. But Nolan could have created the same quadruple jeopardy without arranging the dreams vertically. Had the various dreams been parallel, he could have simply had the characters explain with their psychobabble that they needed to exit the dreams simultaneously at the same time as the target, the rival businessman, so he didn't realise he'd been in a dream all along while they were planting the idea. Or whatever. It could have not been dreams at all, but three or four events needing to happen in different places for the desired conclusion to happen. Instead of parallel dream states one could have Sliders-style parallel universes, causally interconnected. There are an infinite number of possible scenarios where four stories or situations have mutually dependent influence.

So why all the crap about dreams, the subconscious, perception of reality, and saying 'levels' and 'deep' like there's a legal quota to be hit? Two key reasons springs to mind. The first is to make the film appear to be about far more than it really is. Bombard people with words that sound clever, and a fair number of them will think you are being clever. Whether you are saying anything meaningful is irrelevant. It's akin to the infamous Milgram Experiment in the 1960s, where participants were told they were to give electric shocks to subjects. The experiment found that in a scientific setting, told to do so by an apparent authority figure, the majority of people would gladly administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks. This experiment has been recreated several times, including by the BBC:

In these experiments, the symbols of authority are that of science. The authoritarian white, middle aged male wearing a lab coat, in a room with the sort of functional equipment one would expect in a lab experiment. In Inception, the symbols of authority are those of science fiction, pseudo-psychological and technical dialogue, paradoxically complex plots reminiscent of those in the Back to the Future films, and pretty young things/swarthy middle aged hacks doing the walking and talking. But Inception is solely concerned with its own exposition, with blending the established elements of the sci-fi thriller in a sufficiently familiar but sufficiently fresh way to attain blockbuster status. It is an exercise in the balance of entropy and redundancy, the predictable and the unpredictable.

As such, using metaphors like 'deep' and 'levels' to describe different dream states/parts of the story is a reasonably cunning move. These are extremely common metaphors, the Swiss Army Knives of critical language. 'On one level' 'an another level' 'on different levels' are used to fill in spaces in sentences where the analysis is lacking, or even where it fails. Commonly, 'deep' is used to mean 'profound' but, significantly, it is also often used to mean 'compelling'. The two meanings are quite different. An illusion can be compelling, people who think they've seen ghosts and UFOs (or maybe actually have seen ghosts and/or UFOs) find their visions compelling. Whether those visions are profound, or the results of a superficial failure of the senses, or a deliberate illusion, or of a willing mind seeing what it wants to see, remains uncertain. Inception plays on this dual meaning, as it is very compelling to watch, but ultimately lacks any kind of profundity. Its adherents will defend it, claiming to see all sorts of fabulous and wonderful meanings (or just appreciating it technically) but the conjunction of the signs in the film show that this is probably not the case.

'Subconscious' and 'subconsciously' are likewise overused, from pop-psychological studies of why women eat less when men are around to highly convenient and misleading explanations of what motivates terrorists. Again, the 'sub' prefix implies a vertical arrangement, a hierarchy, though ironically most claims about the subconscious grant it great authority. The word 'subconscious' is mentioned throughout Inception, but no notable exploration of its role takes place. It is merely the place where the anonymous team of nubiles and veterans have to plant the idea in the target. All this language firmly encourages the audience to phrase their thoughts, not just about the film, in a language which presumes hierarchy, which presumes authority, which assumes some kind of chain of command. Shit rolls downhill.

Of course, people repeat this nonsense, further encouraging these thought patterns. People come to accept the hierarchy, because they find it difficult to articulate thoughts in the absence of such hierarchical metaphors. Not only does Inception dupe its audience into thinking it is about far more interesting and complex things than it really is about, it further encourages them to accept a top-down order of things, by further propagating and entrenching a vocabulary that wholly presumes and affirms such an order. That it does so while satisfying people through the use of their own minds, feeling as though they are getting a mental workout when they are actually being blinded by propaganda, makes Inception a work of supreme doublethink. It rewards you for accepting its precepts and presumptions, which themselves entail you thinking in such a way that is wholly unrewarding. Well done for staying in your designated place. We thank you for not smoking.

I refer again to George Orwell's essay Politics and the English language. In the essay, Orwell criticises several passages of writing for their 'staleness of imagery' and 'is lack of precision'.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not...
...As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. - Orwell, Politics and the English language

Inception is guilty of many of the charges Orwell was levelling at writers several decades ago, in particular 'dying metaphors' ('deep') and 'pretentious diction' ('subconscious'). My interpretation of the film outlined above is not an exposition of a meaning contained within it, but of the role it plays linguistically. It has a carefully arranged veneer of appearing meaningful, but is ultimately meaningless. Yet in duping its audience in this way, it makes use of words (and indeed, images and plot elements) that maintain in the audience habits of thinking that keep them susceptible to this sort of deception. Indeed, 'deception' would be a far more accurate title for the film.

Ultimately, Inception makes a philosophical error common to many sci-fi films, namely of upholding the dualism and binary opposition of appearance and reality. The danger implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the movie's dramatic height is that while the characters could simply be woken from their dream state, that they would have lost their grip on reality. The conceit at the end of the film indicating that Dicaprio is still in a dream, having lost that grip, firmly upholds this opposition and dualism. But dreams are not mere appearance, they are compelling fantasy, apparent visions that we generate for ourselves when asleep. They conform to a different logic to waking life, but they aren't the opposite of waking life. They are experienced in much the same way, and have very real effects, perhaps more than we presently understand. It is an opposition of convenience - asleep/awake appearance/reality falsity/truth - but not one that is easily upheld. You can dream and know you are dreaming. You can be awake and think you are still dreaming. The line is far from clear, without the need for any ludicrous, convoluted, jargon-laden exposition through cinema.

The most famous assault on this binary opposition came a century before poststructuralism in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. He argued that there is only appearance, that when we replace one 'appearance' with 'reality' (for example, due to a new observation or deduction) then all we are doing is replacing one appearance with another. The metaphysical realism and rationalism of Immanuel Kant in particular would have us believe that if only we use our faculty of reason to disengage from our particular subjective motives and interests is the knowledge we produce an adequate presentation of reality. This understanding has reality as a thing in itself, out there, which we generally only understand through the veil of our subjective perceptions of it. For Nietzsche, this distinction is a nonsense, an attempt by philosophers to look round a corner they haven't reached. Appearance is reality, as far as we can ever know. While this idea is contested and explored through Nietzsche's work, perhaps his most simple deconstruction of the opposition of appearance and reality came in Twilight of the Idols:

HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE. The History of an Error
1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )
3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

And so, as he concluded:

The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world reduced to the antithesis "world" and "nothing." - Nietzsche, Will to Power §567

As such, I am not calling Inception 'shallow' or 'superficial' as these are analogies of the same type, language from the same wrongheaded conceptual scheme Nolan seems to subscribe to. Rather, the film is vapid, meaningless and willfully deceitful, a carefully constructed psychological operation that will only contribute to a world of mendacious metaphors that make clarity of thought and word that much harder.

Putting the 'Man' in Disaster Management

2010-05-23T10:28:00.035+01:00

Recently, a new HBO series called Treme begun broadcasting in the US. From the creators of the epic political police show The Wire, Treme explores the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, showing the New Orleans locals struggle not only to re-establish their lives economically, but also to reinvigorate the city's world famous music scene. As such, the show moves beyond the analysis of failed institutions that comprised most of the content of The Wire, to the question of how to restore a cultural identity damaged by the same winds and water that flooded thousands of homes and businesses. While fans of The Wire will find familiar the rants of John Goodman's lecturer/novelist about the failings of FEMA and other disaster management agencies, Treme offers a more intimate spiritual journey to its audience. It is not aiming to merely garner sympathy for the victims of a natural disaster, indeed, an early episode includes a scene of a street musician laying into some young Christian whitebread do-gooders for their condescension and lack of realism. The intent appears to be to show the power of human resolve even in the face of the awesome power of nature, and horrific institutional incompetence.

By contrast, last year's epic disaster movie 2012 was a by-the-numbers film seeking to capitalise on a huge, and growing, alt-culture obsession with Mayan calendars and predictions of an apocalypse on December 21st, 2012. Director Roland Emmerich, who brought up the spectacular Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, alongside the less impressive Godzilla, took well over two hours to tell an extremely hackneyed and unoriginal story. The disaster scenario itself is relatively original - a huge solar flare heats up the earth's core, causes the crust to destabilise and ultimately displace. This causes huge landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and, once the crust displacement stops, massive tidal waves a bit like when you move too quickly in the bath and a load of water slops over the end. This is all portrayed through exceptional CGI, including a wonderful 9/11-inspired shot where a plane carrying our protagonists flies in between two collapsing buildings.

However, the creativity ends there. The story itself has been almost entirely lifted from previous movies - a man somewhat estranged from his wife/family - see Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day or Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow - leads a small group of survivors against the odds and ultimately rescues them from ever-impending doom. This basic story goes back millenia, at least as far as the Jewish exodus from Egypt (the probable reference point given the pre-eminence of Jewish writers and directors in Hollywood) and before that when nomadic civilisations travelled and travailed the earth's surface. As a story structure it isn't bad, but in the disaster movie genre it is a staple to the point of being hackneyed and tedious.

However, it is the movie's sexist and racist subtext which is most telling, in terms of what this highly unrealistic film tells us about how humans truly respond to crises. John Cusack plays the protagonist, the estranged husband and father whose former wife has married a plastic surgeon who is usefully and utterly predictably killed off so as to enable the reunification of the family unit by the movie's end. Anyone with half a brain, or who has seen prior Emmerich films or others in the genre, sees this resolution coming at least an hour before it happens. The family themselves are a pissy, whining, patronising mess. Beyond occasionally screaming 'mommy' or 'daddy' the children do absolutely nothing, and aside from a couple of feeder lines to allow Cusack to deliver punchlines used in the trailer, the wife does much the same. Throughout the film the wife and kids are treated as a composite unit, a thing that needs to be rescued because it is so incapable of self-determination. This is the classic 'women and children first' mentality - save the weakest because they cannot save themselves. This is particularly evident in all of the vehicle sequences. The protagonists initially escape a huge earthquake, which destroys California and sees it break up and fall into the Pacific ocean, by Cusack driving them to an airport in the limousine he uses for work. The sequence involves a dozen near-misses, a tactic repeated so often that by the end it fails to have any dramatic impact because you know the clean white middle class picket fence family will survive. In particular, one moment sees Cusack drive the limo through a collapsing building and out the other side. The implication is that his macho bravado at confronting the unknown (he can have no idea if the building will last long enough for the car to get through it) is rewarded, that it is brave men who do the saving of incapable women and children. After the family get to the airport, they acquire a small plane, and then later a larger plane with a few more passengers including a moderately entertaining Russian billionaire apparently based on oligarch Alisher Usmanov, part owner of Arsenal football club and a close friend of Vladimir Putin. In every section where the plane is in flight, the men are up front doing the piloting while the women and kids hide in the back/belly of the plane as they continue to contribute nothing to the rescue attempt. At one moment, where the pilots discover that Hawaii (where they intended to refuel) is on fire and seemingly sinking into the ocean, the men are called up to the cockpit and the women and children left downstairs with Russian oligarch's collection of automobiles, again implying the family is merely an object in need of being rescued rather than a group of autonomous humans.

This prejudice extends beyond the principal group of characters. Among the geologists and other officials who predict and attempt to manage the crisis there is not a single female of any note. They are exclusively male, barking orders and engaging in egotistical battles over authority and jurisdiction. Just in case the implicit message (that only men are useful and capable) wasn't clear enough, the opening scene offers one more slap in the face to anyone seeking to question the established order of disaster management. We see the chief geologist visiting India and meeting up with another geologist who has discovered dramatically increasing temperatures under the earth's surface. Our principle initially says hello to the Indian geologist's wife, who informs him that she has (in her dutiful, subservient role as female) made 'that fish curry you love'. Once she is out of the way, the Indian geologist returns her to 'her place' saying 'her fish curry is still awful'. Even the one moment where a woman contributes something, albeit in her domesticated role as food-preparer, she is derogated and sidelined. Even the newsreaders who appear sporadically are all male, ensuring all authoritative voices are those of men. Every woman is a supplemental character to a male - the president's daughter, the protagonist's wife and so on. One has to wonder at the personal background of the screenwriter, Harald Kloser, that he is so aggressively against any sign that women actually have something to offer the world.

The bias also extends to racism. Though there is the occasional black or Chinese face in the film, it is almost exclusively a tale of global crisis affecting white people. While the president and the chief geologist are played by black men (the sight of Danny 'I'm getting too old for this shit' Glover as the president is an amusing highlight), they are both suave, clean, articulate black men, obviously inspired to some extent by Barack Obama. They are the acceptable face of black men, in that they are bourgeois whites in everything but the colour of their skin. Similarly, the Indian geologist who discovers the phenomena in the first place is killed in a giant tsunami after playing a very minor role, and the Chinese are portrayed almost exclusively as labourers. The governmental plan for surviving the disaster is to build gigantic ships - essentially ferries - in the Himalayas, so that they can ride out the tsunamis. Though financed by selling tickets to the Russian billionaire and the like, the construction is done by the Chinese. When the American party arrives in the Himalayas to begin boarding the ships, there is a wide shot showing several ships side by side, and the US crisis manager mutters 'leave it to the Chinese'. The implication is that the autocratic, collectivist Chinese state is actually something to be praised, due to it being useful to the world's elite. Only passing reference is made to the right of the workers who produced the ships to a ticket on board them.

Almost completely ignored is Latin America, alluded to through images of Christ the Redeemer crumbling and falling down, and the whole Arab world. The former is a particularly gross oversight, given that the whole story is based on the predictions of Mayan Indians, the 'aboriginal' population of the Southern American continent. Without the Mayan 'long count' calendar there would be no 2012 subculture, and therefore no movie. Despite this, Roland Emmerich saw fit to only make a fleeting reference to the inspiration for his work, through a news story playing on John Cusack's TV about a group of (white) 2012 obsessives committing suicide at an ancient Mayan site in a South American jungle. The treatment of Arabs is even more laughable. Though Mecca appears in the movie's trailer, Arabs are only referred to in a disparaging way. One of the billionaires who is sold a ticket is an apparent oil sheikh, who aside from buying a ticket only appears elsewhere in the film towards the end when the black geologist is expressing his disgust at the selections of passengers for the 'arks'. Putting that clearly in an anti-Arab context, the Russian oligarch is shown as a hero, sacrificing his life to save those of his sons, as he falls to his death ensuring they get on board just in time. That screenwriter Harald Kloser and director Roland Emmerich maintain this racist bias was admitted by Emmerich in an interview. He discussed why the film shows the destruction of other religious sites, including Christ the Redeemer and the Sistine Chapel, but does not show any damage to the Kaaba (commonly known as 'the big square thing in Mecca'). He said:

Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich says.
But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a
movie. And he was right. ... We have to all ... in the Western world ... think
about this. You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if
you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that
sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something
which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film,
so I kind of left it out. - SciFiWire

This logic has been criticised by some as cowing to Islam, but a semiotic study of the movie itself suggests the opposite. Rather than being intimidated by Muslims, Kloser and Emmerich show a clear racism towards Muslim and Arab peoples, assuming that the CGI destruction of the Kaaba would result in a fatwa. Nowhere is there any indication that they sought out the opinion of Muslim leaders to see how they would respond to the on-screen destruction of the Kaaba, they simply assumed that a fatwa would be the response. In the context of a movie which portrays everyone but white ruling class males (along with the occasional non-white useful pawn) as useless, this editorial decision, and the conversation Emmerich reports having with Kloser, is clearly motivated by racism rather than a rational or sincere fear of Islam or Muslims.

As a result, the movie is at base one huge sexist, racist, macho, technocratic narrative, leaving no pejorative stereotype unused, no blind prejudiced stone unturned. Even the English member of the scientific investigation and advice team speaks in that accent that only exists in the minds of Hollywood directors, because I assure you no one in England actually talks like that. Characters are invariably killed off as their dramatic purpose comes to an end, and the survivors are only those who conform to the precepts and biases of the writer and director. Despite this, the Daily Star provided the 2012 movie DVD release with the ideal reviewer tagline, calling it 'the best disaster movie ever'. Thought the paper has a female editor, it is owned by superrich pornographer Richard Desmond, so perhaps praising a remarkably misanthropic film is to be expected. The Daily Mirror, a tabloid newspaper supposedly aimed at a left-leaning readership, reviewed the movie very positively. Completely betraying the standards they like to claim they stand for (the 2003 anti-Iraq War march in London was partly sponsored by the paper), they gave 2012 a glowing review, bizarrely even praising the abysmal script.

Ironically, though Emmerich also told SciFiWire that he is 'against organized religion' he chose major story elements - the apocalypse, using 'arks' to save people and animals from a flood, focusing on a small group battling against the odds, an everyman prophet (played by Woody Harrelson) - that are more than familiar to readers of the Bible. In particular, the flood/ark narrative dominates the entire second half of the film. In the alternate ending, a cruise ship carrying the chief geologist's father is found perched on top of a rocky outcrop in the sea. This is reminiscent of a common story in conspiracy/alt history folklore - that the remains of Noah's Ark can be found on Mt Ararat in Turkey, near the border with Iraq. Though this has been common knowledge among those who care to look (see, for example, this thread from 2004), British tabloid The Sun reported on the story as a new one as recently as last month. As ever, the fringe is years ahead of the mainstream.

More significant that Emmerich's personal hypocrisy, or Kloser's sexism and racism, is the philosophy underpinning the whole story portrayed in 2012, which is also the philosophy of real life disaster management. In the film, those that survive do so due to making it to a dam on the Chinese side of the Himalayas that contains the arks. It is a parable of technology as our saviour, rather than the resilience of the human spirit as in the grand narrative of Treme, or Robocop as discussed earlier on this blog. But this is not just a technocratic philosophy, as the semiotic prejudices of 2012 demonstrate, it is above all a masculine ideology. That is not to say it is a male ideology, though it is one that conforms to the roles men have historically dominated far more that women.

Particularly instructive on this front is the work of French-Algerian philosopher Helene Cixous, who followed on from Lyotard's critique of grand narratives and Derrida/Lacan's critiques of language. In Deconstruction: A Reader, a collection of essays on poststructuralist theory covering many topics, editor Martin McQuillan wrote about Cixous' attack on the binary opposition of masculine/feminine. In his introduction, 'five strategies for deconstruction', he outlined Cixous' analysis of how a great many values are placed into such oppositions, typically privileging the male over the female, and the masculine over the feminine. The entire section on Cixous is worth reading, so is reproduced here.

What Cixous' essay Sorties ultimately showed is that the masculine prejudice of the monetary/labour economy examined in detail by feminists, postcolonialists and people who don't fit an '-ist' description are continued in the economy of spoken and written language. Expanding on Derrida's assertion that speech is privileged over writing, Cixous developed a theory where the masculine (and hence the Western, the rational, the cultural, the scientific) is historically privileged over the feminine (and hence the Eastern, the irrational, the natural, the mystical).

This is an evolution of what Derrida dubbed 'the metaphysics of presence', the linguistic tradition of privileging speech over language due to spoken meaning allegedly being 'present' at the moment of expression, an aspect absent from written meaning. What Derrida demonstrated, in his typically convoluted and obscure way, is that all language involves a deferral of meaning, most simply that the words used (in speech or writing) are necessarily distinct from other words. One would have to know the meaning of the words not being used in order to be certain of the meaning of the words that are being used, and hence meaning is deferred onto words that are not part of the sentence being spoken or written. Rather than meaning being simply present or absent, a common binary opposition in Western philosophy, meaning is suspended, neither entirely present nor entirely absent, like a ghost or spectre. This is the reason why Derrida uses spectral metaphors in so much of his work, including in the title of perhaps his most politically themed work Spectres of Marx.

As Derrida deconstructed the binary opposition of meaning being present/absent, Cixous expanded this to the binary oppositions of masculine/feminine, rational/irrational and so on. Her work showed not only how such values are bound into binary oppositions with one privileged term and one subservient term, but that each opposition is supported by many others. Hence, man is Western, rational, scientific, ordered, in control and woman is Eastern, emotional, mystical, chaotic and needs to be controlled. A further opposition - convex/concave is of particular relevance to the issue of how humans manage catastrophe. The masculine is convex - protruding, penetrative, a 'presence' in the world. The feminine is concave - receeding, enveloping, an 'absence' from the world. Though these words most obvious describe the difference between male and female genitals (the shaft vs. the crevice, crudely put) it is also a question of roles within the world.

The masculine answer to a problem is to create something anew, typically a technology or feat of engineering. In 2012, the answer to the global crisis is gigantic boats designed to preserve human life, ironically acting like protective wombs for those lucky, or white and male, enough to make it to the Himalayas. Likewise, when faced with a security issue in a specific country the stock response is a military invasion (the contemporary euphemism being 'intervention'). Space in the world is defined by the masculine by building stuff on it, ownership is declared by planting a flag. The feminine response is subversion and adaptation, seeking to alter conceptions of the problem, to dissolve the intellectual limitations on how we see the issue so that there is the possibility of an unexpected solution rearing its head. Space is defined by the feminine by clearing it of obstruction in the hope that something new presents itself in time to deal with whatever the problem is. The former is a rational process, beginning with standard premises and with the explicit aim and assumption of working to a solution. The latter is an irrational process, beginning without premises to avoid the limitations they inevitably present, and hoping that removal of limitations will allow human ingenuity to come up with something that would otherwise appear counter-intuitive.

In 2012, women (and likewise all non-Western races, ideas, cultures, traditions, contributions) are sidelined in favour of an entirely masculine, technocratic solution that willingly trades billions of people's lives for the security of the elite few. Rather than try to adapt to the crisis, they seek to rise above it and prove man's superiority over nature. In reality, this approach and pursuit often fails, as seen in the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the response to Hurricane Katrina. One moment in the coverage of the rescue efforts after the recent Haiti earthquake was particularly telling. A seven year old boy named Kiki was dug out of the rubble after being trapped for nearly eight days. The image of Kiki, arms outstretched, was broadcast around the world as a triumphant message that the US-led rescue efforts were succeeding, and portraying the aggressive giant rogue state as a benevolent patriarch. However, the video tells another story.

With the cameras already in place, Kiki was presented to the world by US firefighters. Though his mother stood nearby, the firemen cheered as they pulled the child away from her and handed him over to his father. Once again, the woman was sidelined in favour of the man. Once the boy had been placed in the arms of his father, one of the fireman can be seen explicitly directing the father to face the onlooking international media, so as to ensure that the PR value of the rescue was capitalised on fully. Only then was the boy handed over to medical officials to check him for injuries and other damage caused by his ordeal. This footage from Sky News shows the fuller picture.

The implication of this is that the firemen, far from being the brave, noble, beneficent rescue service solely concerned with other people's welfare that they were portrayed as being, were in fact primarily concerned with the public image, with reinforcing the US's international image. They appear to have waited for the media cameras to show up before completing the rescue operation, or at least to have ensured media presence for the moment when Kiki was actually removed from the rubble. They largely ignored his mother, and made sure of the friendly image of a father lifting his boy aloft before he was given medical treatment. Largely ignored by the trumpeting Western media is that while Kiki and his sister were rescued, three of their siblings died in the aftermath of the quake, and the family now lives in destitution in a shanty town on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. While Kiki's story has been widely presented as an example of the success of the masculine rescue efforts of the US-led services in Haiti, the reality is that the same failings that meant Haiti's infrastructure could not withstand the earthquake remain, and affect ever more people in one of the world's poorest countries.

A further example of this masculine logic was on display in the recent British General Election. While the result was a hung parliament, and ultimately a tenuous Conservative-Liberal coalition, the most notable feature of the voting results was the concern with race, nationality and immigration. The parties that gained the most votes compared to the last election were largely right-wing nationalists - the BNP, UKIP, the 'English Democrats' and the Conservative Party. With immigration being blamed for everything from economic problems (they take our jobs) to security issues (every immigrant is a potential suicide bomber), a racist obsession with immigration by the country's most popular newspapers just about achieved the desired result of a Tory government. With the government running a huge deficit, the Conservatives and nationalists promised to 'get tough' on the problem, exhibiting the same confrontational, domineering, masculine philosophy of 2012, FEMA and the rest. Only a matter of days before the election took place, one event in particular lent yet more weight to the narrative that demanded that 'someone do something' about the problems. On May 1st a car bomb was found and defused in Times Square, New York. The following day it was widely reported that another bomb had been found in Pittsburgh 'in a microwave, near a half marathon'. As far as terrorism goes, this is pretty surreal. However, like so many of these stories, it turned out to be nothing of the sort. After the microwave was largely destroyed in a controlled explosion by bomb disposal officers, it became abundantly clear that the early reports of it containing a pipe bomb were wide of the mark - the microwave actually contained a tin of ravioli. Some amusing pictures can be seen here. The 'bomb' in New York has been widely called 'amateurish', comprised of propane gas cylinders and low-grade fireworks.

The car had been left in Times Square, one of the busiest parts of perhaps the busiest city in the world, with its engine running and its hazard lights switched on. Either the man arrested, Faisal Shahzad, was a total incompetent, or he never had any intention of the car blowing up. The aim appears to have been to remind people once again of the great brown threat of Islamic terrorism, at a time when it would have maximum impact on the British election. Suggestive of this event being a provocation of intelligence services, a Pakistani Army Officer reported to be in contact with Faisal was arrested in connection with attempted bombing.

There are two further aspects to this story that provide indications of something more elaborate than one man with a poorly constructed car bomb. The accused, Faisal Shahzad, is Pakistani-American, though different reports have him as either Kashmiri or Pashtun. But the CCTV footage released of a man supposedly responsible for parking the car in Times Square is a middle aged white man. Also, another man named Sheikh Mohammed Rehan was arrested in Pakistan due to his connection with Faisal Shahzad. Rehan is reportedly a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, one of numerous Pakistani militant groups with long-standing ties to the ISI, CIA and MI6. As noted by Paul Joseph Watson, the group was founded by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man who gave $100,000 to alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta at the behest of the ISI's General Mahmud Ahmed. At this stage, the indications are that this was either a thoroughly incompetent attempt at a car bombing, or a psychological operation sponsored by intelligence services. Either way, it helped reinforce the prejudices and misconceptions that influenced the British General Election result.

There are alternatives to this masculine ideology of tackling all threats and problems by 'getting tough' and declaring some sort of war on a range of collective and abstract nouns that cannot be targeted by bullets and missiles. A more mature, careful ideology would be to adapt to new threats and problems, using both the masculine approach of looking for innovations given the framework of knowledge we have and the feminine approach of avoiding the solution being a self-fulfilling prophecy of our precepts. Rather than try to destroy the problematic through the violence of a head-on confrontation (whether that violence be technological innovation, military invasion or something else) we should seek to reach accommodations with problems where it is possible to do so, and seek out the true causes of problems where an accommodation cannot be reached. Waiting for a natural disaster like the Haiti earthquake (or, if you're a raging conspiracist, creating them with HAARP) and then leaping in and showing our 'strong hand' via the rescue effort, we should have been helping Haiti develop the economy and education to build infrastructure that can withstand earthquakes. As the Kiki story shows, this has been completely ignored by mainstream politicians and press alike, in favour of cuddly pictures of a small black boy being rescued by noble white firemen. In that vein, to finish this time I have included one of my favourite videos regarding the 2012 phenomenon, showing Ian Xel Lengold explains some of the reasons why people are predicting not an apocalypse, but some kind of cosmic ontological-perceptual shift in a couple of years time. While I don't necessarily subscribe to Lengold's interpretations or conclusions, what I do subscribe to is that he offers a far more inspiring and multi-faceted view of human potential than Roland Emmerich's movie, etc.

History of a Hunter

2010-04-27T10:45:00.001+01:00

Everette Howard Hunt was born in October 1918, in Hamburg, New York. He would go on to lead a life which perhaps more than any other represents the darker truths underpinning the history of the 20th Century. He would become known as E Howard Hunt, or just Howard Hunt, an author of spy novels, CIA agent, Watergate burglar and eventually John F Kennedy assassination accomplice. The true life legend that is his biography lives on, as do the debates about many of the events with which he was involved.

Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940, and shortly afterwards joined the US military to fight in World War 2. He served in the navy and air force, before getting involved with the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was a nascent proactive military counterintelligence agency, and was effectively reorganised after the war had finished to become the Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Act of 1947 solidified a process that had been happening for some time in the United States. Ground was broken for the construction of the Pentagon on September 11th 1941, a symbol of the development of a permanent large scale military industrial complex in America. The National Security Act set up America's first peacetime intelligence agency - the CIA - and merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into one entity, the National Military Establishment. Two years later, this would become the Department of Defense. It also created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and took effect on September 18th 1947, the same day that the first US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, took office. It was signed by President Truman, a 33rd degree freemason, aboard the Presidential aircraft Sacred Cow, the prototype for Air Force One.

Forrestal's life and death proved highly controversial, and serve as a suitable introduction to the story of Hunt's life. Despite his military background, Forrestal lasted only 18 months in the job as Secretary of Defense. Truman lost faith in him and asked him to resign, and amid fears over his mental state the administration had him sectioned and incarcerated at Bethesda Naval hospital. The same Bethesda Naval hospital where a little over 10 years later the secret autopsy of John Kennedy was carried out. Within weeks Forrestal had died in mysterious circumstances, falling from a kitchen window across from his bedroom at the hospital, a bathrobe sash knotted tightly round his neck. Though it was quickly ruled a suicide, there are a number of theories claiming he was murdered. According to Henry Makow:

When he realized Masonic bankers controlled Communism as well as Capitalism, he couldn't keep quiet. He was deemed "insane" and thrown from the window of Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a good guy. He lost. - Makow, Rense.com

This story appears to originate in conspiracy theory classic Pawns in the Game by William Guy Carr. Citing unspecified sections of Forrestal's diaries, Carr explains that:

In 1945 Forrestal had been convinced that the American Bankers were closely affiliated with the International Bankers who controlled the Banks of England, France and other countries. He was also convinced, according to his diaries, that the International Money-Barons were the Illuminati and directly responsible for the outbreak of World Wars One and Two. He tried to convince President Roosevelt, and other Top Level Government officials, of the truth. Either he failed, and committed suicide in a fit of depression, or he was murdered to shut his mouth for ever. - Pawns in the Game

However, this is profoundly contrasted by somewhat substantiated claims made during Forrestal's lifetime by journalists including Drew Pearson. Forrestal's background was in the same elite banking circles (he was also a corporate lawyer) as the stories above say he was warning Roosevelt against. During his time at Dillon, Read & Co the firmed loaned considerable money to Germany, which helped revive the industries that formed Hitler's war machine. Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler details Dillon, Read & Co loans of over $70 million dollars to German industrial cartels and 'Participation in German industrial issues in [the] U.S. capital market' of around a quarter of a billion dollars. The firm were also a Big Oil banker, and during Forrestal's tenure in charge of procurement and production for the US Navy in World War 2, he vastly overpaid the Arabian-American Oil Company to fuel the ships. The same Arabian-American Oil Company that was controlled through the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil monopoly. Was he a genuine whistleblower, or a shill, or a depressive?

There are other allegations. Forrestal opposed the partitioning of Palestine to create the Jewish State of Israel. Some consider this to also be a concession to the oil barons who had more to lose through alienating oil-rich Arab states through the creation of Israel than they did to gain from it. However, many of those same oil barons, and the bankers who form part of the same group, were and still are Jewish Zionists. Sometimes, religious conviction outweighs the desire for money and power. So it is hard to say whether Forrestal's opposition to the creation of Israel would have been seen as useful or problematic by those elite powers. It is thus a leap too far to isolate this as the reason for murdering him. The most esoteric of all the Forrestal murder-suicide theories is that he passionately opposed the secrecy of the MJ-12 group who were looking into UFOs and extraterrestrial life. William Cooper claims that this is the reason Forrestal was sectioned and imprisoned in a naval hospital, and notes that the day before his death his brother had notified authorities of his intention to remove James from Bethesda.

Whatever the truth, the end of Forrestal's life coincided with the rise of the permanent US military capacity, one able not just to defend the lands of the US but also able to launch offensive operations all over the world. This made possible the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 1949, and the permanent disabling of the German military industrial capacity and thus the necessity of a huge US military presence there. President Eisenhower, who was one of NATO's first Supreme Commanders, warned about this historical development in his farewell address some years later. He said:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

If Forrestal's comments to Roosevelt were blowing the whistle, then Eisenhower's farewell address was blowing a trumpet.

It was during the Eisenhower presidency that Howard Hunt participated in perhaps the textbook example of a CIA-sponsored coup. As the OSS became the CIA, its staff were almost entirely comprised of people who had fought counterintelligence battles during the war. Though the USSR and the Warsaw Pact presented a somewhat different challenge, the likes of Howard Hunt and Allen Dulles proved themselves capable Cold Warriors.

Guatemala in the years leading up to the 1950s was politically unstable, a succession of regimes had been quickly installed and removed and the weakness of the state apparatus had allowed the United Fruit Company to dominate the country. John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man discusses the influence of the 'corporatocracy' on this part of the world in detail, as he worked there for years. The incremental colonisation of Guatemala by United Fruit definitely fits the profile he describes.

The company owned vast tracks of land in the essentially agrarian country, and also the railways by which the produce was moved about, and the ports by which it was exported. Guatemala was the epitome of a 'banana republic': The people were poorly educated, there was little by way of national independent media, but they tried to stand their ground in the face of an economic and political invasion by a US company. They elected Jacobo Arbenz, a middle class man of Swiss heritage who promised massive economic reform. He assumed control in March 1951.

Arbenz issued Decree 900, the land reform bill. It enabled the government to seize uncultivated land from large plantations and turning it over to peasant farmers. Even Arbenz gave up land himself. While this may sound like communism, Arbenz was only influenced by Marxism. He still believed in private property, and the peasants to whom the land were given were to be private farming landowners able to sell their goods for a profit and potentially buy more land or advance their lives in other ways. Arbenz wasn't a member of the Communist Party, he had no significant association with the USSR.

However, United Fruit were mightily angry because he took over 200,000 acres off them and paid approximately $600,000 for it, in 25 year government bonds. This sort of 'play you at your own game' economic strategy is very similar to what Hugo Chavez has been doing in Venezuela. Arbenz paid what the company declared the land was worth for tax purposes, though when the US State Department got involved they were throwing around the figure of $15 million. Given that United Fruit barely paid for the land in the first place as far as I am concerned they were lucky to get the $600,000. If Arbenz was a 'proper' communist he probably would have had them shot.

So, United Fruit enlisted the help of the US State Department and the CIA. There were obvious reasons why their pleas found receptive ears. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, was a former President of the company's board, and a stockholder. His brother John Foster Dulles, Sec. of State, had worked as the company's legal counsel. Walter Bedel Smith was on the company's board of directors throughout this period, during which he was director of the CIA up until February 1953, when he was replaced by Allen Dulles and took the job immediately under John Foster Dulles at the State Department. Smith also helped found the Bilderberg Group and the National Security Agency. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was a stockholder, as was Assistant Sec. of State for Latin American Affairs, John Moors Cabot. Just in case that wasn't enough, Eisenhower's personal secretary Ann Whitman was married to United Fruit's chief of Public Relations.

A fuller story of the coup that overthrew Arbenz and replaced him with a military dictator called Castillo Armas is told by the CIA's declassified documents. Over 14,000 pages explain how they recruited Armas to lead a small band of rebels and mercenaries and used covert and overt propaganda to spread distrust of Arbenz within both Guatemala and the US. Hunt played a central role as Chief of Propaganda for the operation, codenamed PB/Fortune and later PB/Success. In his memoir American Spy, Hunt describes his unease at being United Fruit's 'lapdog' but says he says the issue of 'stopping the spread of Communism' motivated him to take up the role offered to him.

While still an embroyonic field at the time, psychological warfare was going to be one of the main ingredients of PB/Success. The foundation of the campaign would be guerrilla radio broadcasts blared over frequencies close to the Guatemalan national channel. Relatively few Guatemalans owned a radio at that time, but it was considered to be an authoritative source of information, and we knew that wherever interested ears tuned in, gossiping lips would soon follow, spreading the message...

...On D-Day, the station would direct a powerful blast directly at the Guatemalan government's radio beacon, overriding their transmitter with prerecorded fictional radio broadcasts in which non-existent Guatemalan military officers would spread terror by announcing that battalions of soldiers were streaming across the border. Additionally, we hired a group of Guatemalan newspaper reporters to bang out reams of anti-Communist articles for publication in Latin American countries. They wrote pamphlets that were passed out in the streets and leaflets that were airdropped to remote towns and villages in the mountains and jungles. Phillips also devised another interesting anti-Communist technique in Chile that we duplicated in Guatemala in which housewives were taught to riot in the streets banging pots and pans to protest Communist programs. - American Spy, p74-75

The operation was heavily leveraged - the army under the command of Armas numbered less than 400, and possibly even less than 200. If it had come to a direct military confrontation, Arbenz's army would definitely have won. However, the propaganda achieved two key purposes, enabling the coup attempt to succeed. Firstly, it focused on the rural population who had most benefited from Decree 900, portraying Arbenz as untrustworthy, a Soviet puppet, and a traitor. This was Arbenz's electoral base, but as the pots and pans tactic demonstrates, large numbers were turned against him. The propaganda also convinced Arbenz that the tiny army led by Armas was much larger and posed a realistic threat. On 'D-Day' this impression was exacerbated as ex-WW2 bombers piloted by CIA agents attacked Guatemala City. They dropped bombs, lumps of explosive attached to hand grenades, bottles filled with gasoline, and even empty Coca-Cola bottles. Anything that would make a noise and give the appearance of a much larger attacking force.

In the end, Arbenz resigned and fled the country while Armas's army sat about in a small village just inside the Guatemalan border with Honduras. They smoked cigarettes, told jokes, leered at the locals and showed off a Guy Fawkes-style effigy of Arbenz to the press. The crude dummy had a sign hanging around its neck saying 'go back to Russia'. This was a tiny part of what was an elaborate PR campaign designed just as much for the US population as it was for the Guatemalans. The faction leading the coup hired Tommy the Cork - Thomas Corcoran - a 'superlobbyist' who set about drumming up support in the US congress for the ousting of Arbenz. They also recruited Edward Bernays, who took a group of journalists to Guatemala to meet with anti-Arbenz officials who told them horror stories which they naively repeated in their articles.

Once Arbenz had been ousted the propaganda continued. Armas was invited to America, given a tickertape parade in New York City and awarded honorary degrees by US universities. Not long after, the US sent in Vice President Richard Nixon. Ironically, his role was effectively subservient to the program devised by Hunt, who as one of the Watergate burglars would also be partly responsible for the downfall of the Nixon presidency. Nixon flew into Guatemala and held a press conference with Armas, offering a public US endorsement of the new leader. They showed off Communist leaflets and books supposedly found in the Presidential palace, claiming this proved that the Arbenz 'regime' was 'controlled by foreigners' i.e. by the Soviets. Nixon praised Armas as a popular revolutionary and a democrat, though at the election which saw Armas returned as President, he was the only candidate. However, given some of Nixon's public statements he probably considered this a 'white lie'. In an amusing footnote, Hunt's CIA career took him to Uruguay some years later, where he lived just down the road from the exiled Arbenz, even meeting him occasionally at diplomatic functions.

The next major operation in which Hunt was involved was the notoriously scandal-ridden Bay of Pigs affair. In 1959 Fidel and Raul Castro overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista after two years of guerilla warfare fought from the Sierra Maestra mountain range. The CIA even provided some funding to Castro's rebels, among them Che Guevara, to try to get intelligence on the progress of the struggle. After the coup, Richard Nixon went to visit Fidel in Havana, and they had an apparently intelligent, peaceful exchange. However, as Castro later mentioned in an interview with highly respectable journalist Bill Moyers, Nixon wrote a memo to Eisenhower as soon as he returned to Washington. According to Castro the memo said that he was 'a Communist' who 'had to be eliminated'. Nixon's memo summarising his meeting with Castro, available courtesy of the National Security Archives, doesn't say this explicitly. However, it does liken Castro to Sukarno, the popular quasi-socialist leader of Indonesia who was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1965. It says Castro is 'naive' about Communism or 'under Communist discipline' and that he showed no concern about Communism coming to power in China. Nixon's concern is clear, and he went on to be a 'strong supporter' of the CIA's attempt to oust Castro.

The CIA recruited Castro's sister to inform on how the nascent government was developing. However, it appears Cuban machismo may have kept her in the dark about Cuban counterintelligence, which functioned very well. Thousands of Cuban citizens had fled the country not long after the regime, including many who had supported Castro and felt betrayed by him as he sought to take wealth and power from the middle class. They became exiles in Miami and this is where Howard Hunt came in. As the CIA trained a couple of thousand men in a camp in Guatemala to conduct the paramilitary operation, Hunt was in Miami in charge of the political operation. His job was to find a way to unify the hundreds of disparate Cuban exile groups, some consisting of only one or two people, under one leader. He chose Manuel Artime, a well educated man in his 20s, who would help lead the new government once Castro was toppled. However, the coup attempts failed for a dozen different reasons. Though the CIA had recruited Castro's sister, they had very little by way of reliable intelligence on the domestic opposition to the Cuban government. The exiles in Miami boasted of having far more contacts and support on the island than they actually had, as the more important they made themselves out to be the more money the CIA threw at them.

Hunt developed strong relations with the Cubans, and when the invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed he sympathised with the Cuban sense of betrayal by President Kennedy. In particular several of his close friends, including Artime, were captured and imprisoned by Castro. When the Americans finally paid a ransom for the release of the prisoners, Artime called up Hunt to tell him the good news.

"Feliz Navidad, amigo," said Artime. "I'm at Miami airport."
It felt so good to hear his voice that I cried...
...A few day later, President Kennedy visited Miami where he met the survivors of the 2506 [the exile brigade] at a televised ceremony at the Orange Bowl. There, Pepe San Roman gave JFK the brigade's flag to hold for 'safekeeping'.
Kennedy responded with the faulty promise, 'I can assure you that this flag will be returned to the brigade in a free Havana.'
Manolo visited me in Washington shortly after the beginning of 1963...
... He confided in me that the flag was a replica and that the presentation nearly didn't take place because of the animosity of the brigade members toward JFK. - American Spy, p122

Why did the Cubans, and by extension the CIA, hate Kennedy so much? He had made support for the Cuban exiles a major part of his electoral platform in the election of 1960, where he narrowly defeated Nixon. He made it virtually impossible for the CIA to conduct the covert operation (codenamed Zapata) by insisting on iron-clad deniability. When they launched an air raid against Castro airfields in the run up to the invasion, using planes painted to look like Cuban air force bombers, the cover was blown. The planes landed back in Miami, but one of the pilots was quickly identified as a member of the exile brigade, and the plane had nose guns demonstrating that it was in fact an American B-26, not a Cuban one. Kennedy called off the second air raid, which could have completely destroyed what was left of the Cuban air force. As it was, they still had three Mig fighters.

When the invasion came the exile-piloted B-26s circled over the beach where the brigade landed. This made it impossible for Castro to bring up tanks, heavy artillery, and large numbers of troops in case they were bombed en route to the battle. The handful of remaining fighters were launched shortly after dawn, and took on the sluggish and large targets that the B-26s presented. Five were shot down and the rest so badly damaged that they had to retreat. The brigade's communcations ship and supply ship were sunk, leaving them desperately short of supplies. Kennedy refused to send in the US armed forces, nestled a few miles away for a 'training exercise' in the Carribean. The Cubans, the CIA and the US military all had grudges to bear with Kennedy, blaming him for the brigade's failure and subsequent surrender. Any one, or possibly all of them, may be to blame for Kennedy's assassination two and half years later.

Kennedy forced the resignations of or just fired the top three men at the CIA - Allen Dulles, Richard Bissel and Charles Cabel. Cabel's brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy assassination, and Dulles went on to serve on the Warren Commission. Many of those still in the CIA who were somehow responsible for the failure, including Hunt, were moved to the newly created domestic operations division. This included the interception of phonecalls within the US, which is illegal. The responsibility for domestic law enforcement resides with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the police agencies, and a judge decides whether or not they can monitor phonecalls, at least until the Patriot Act was brought in. The domestic operations division were also involved in domestic propaganda, using journalists and publishers both to gather information and to try to manipulate public opinion. According to the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated the 'dirty laundry' of US intelligence agencies, Operation Mockingbird cost $265 million a year. According to a 1977 article by Carl Bernstein the operations included Joseph Alsop, Williarn Paley, Henry Luce, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Barry Bingham Sr. and James Copley. Luce, most notably, was also a member of Skull n Bones and according to Hunt a 'good friend' of Allen Dulles. The media organs in some way used by the CIA included ABC, the NBC, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System and the Miami Herald. According to the CIA's Family Jewels the operations also involved bugging journalists' telephones. It is interesting that the kinds of activities that would bring down the Nixon presidency began under JFK.

Hunt retired from the CIA in 1970 and the following year was approached by Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon. They asked him to join the President's Special Investigation Unit, now more commonly known as the White House Plumbers, so called because they were there to stop the leaks. Of particular concern was the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of US political and military involvement in Vietnam prepared by the Department of Defense. It had been leaked to the New York Times by one of its contributing authors, Daniel Ellsberg, who made copies of the classified documents and the study based on them and handed them to reporter Neil Sheehan. The Times prepared a series of articles of extracts from the papers and commentaries on what they indicated, but Nixon got a court order to prevent them from publishing. Ellsberg then leaked the documents to over a dozen other newspapers, and the Supreme Court overruled the White House and allowed the Times to publish their work.

The Plumbers hit back. They investigated Ellsberg and found he was educated at Cambridge University, historically a prime location for Soviet recruitment of spies, and had visited Sweden, which was a key entry point for Soviet agents looking to infiltrate Western Europe, and was a prolific womaniser. All this made Colson and Hunt suspect that Ellsberg was a Soviet spy and had leaked the full Pentagon Papers to the USSR. Keen to find confirmation of this, they broke into his psychiatrist's office with the intention of photographing his medical files. Hunt teamed up with Gordon Liddy, a Nazi-sympathising nutter who had worked for the FBI. They two donned disguises and cased the office of the psychiatrist, named Lewis Fielding. They wore wigs and inserted insoles in their shoes to alter the way they walked, and managed to gain entry to the office to take pictures of the interior using a camera disguised as a tobacco pouch. However, the mission was not without it's problems, as Hunt described:

All in all, everything went as planned, except for an amusing event in the park. Liddy told me that he had been sitting on a park bench when he was cruised by a gay 'seven-foot Navajo' who apparently found Liddy so inviting in his longish wig that Liddy almost had to fight off the large, amorous suitor. - American Spy, p185

For the burglary itself Hunt recruited Bernard Barker, and two Cubans named Felipe De Diego - a Bay of Pigs veteran - and Rolando Martinez - who had run sabotage operations inside Cuba as part of Operation Mongoose. Ultimately, the mission failed because though they successfully broke into the office, Barker and the Cubans were unable to find any files relating to Ellsberg. The burglary crew opened medicine cabinets and had strewn materials all over the floor and a few days later the local police arrested a drug addict who conveniently confessed to the Plumbers' crime.

That was in 1971, and the following year was a presidential election year. Nixon had taken the White House at the second attempt. Having been beaten by JFK in 1960 he also he failed in a 1962 attempt to become governor of his home state of California, then announced his retirement from politics, before staging a comeback to take the big job. However, he had steadily become intensely paranoid, and though he retained a large amount of the support that had seen him elected President, he believed there were dark forces working against him. The Plumbers were enlisted to try to help Nixon, and were largely funded by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, also known as CREEP. Project Gemstone was born - a multi-facted covert operation designed to not only gather intelligence on what the Democratic party were up to, but also to try to influence public opinion and therefore the election result. This included various subprojects named after precious stones.

Our highest priority, 'Diamond', was the counterdemonstration plan for San Diego, where the Republican convention was scheduled to take place. 'Garnet' was abother counterdemonstration program, in which we planned to hire various distasteful people to demonstrate against the Republicans, with the hopefull fallout that the American public would find their antics so repulsive that they would vote for Nixon, just to thumb their nose at the demonstrators (much like how today's American Idol television audiences often seem to vote for contestants whom Simon Cowell ridicules). - American Spy, p195

Gemstone culminated in the break-ins at the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington DC, where the Democratic Party's National Committee (DNC) had its headquarters. The team comprised Hunt, Barker and Liddy, two anti-Castro Cubans named Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez, a former CIA security specialist Jim McCord, and former CIA agent Frank Sturgis. Hunt, Barker, the Cubans and Sturgis all went back to Operation 40 and the Bay of Pigs invasion. The aim of the break-in was to photograph documents detailing Democratic campaign contributions in the hope of finding a connection to Castro or the Soviets, and to bug the office and phone of Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the DNC. The first attempt failed because Gonzalez, a locksmith by trade, didn't have the right tool to pick the locks and allow access to the DNC offices. The second attempt largely succeeded, but the entry team photographed the wrong documents and McCord cocked up the bugging part of the operation.

The third attempt was the big one. Not only were the entry team arrested, the entire White House covert operations team was uncovered, eventually forcing Nixon to resign and precipitating a series of inquiries into the actions of the US intelligence services. The team broke in on the night of 17th June 1972 and were discovered due to a sloppy mistake. The technique developed during the earlier break-ins was to have McCord sneak into the Watergate complex through the garage doors, and tape open the locks on doors allowing the others access to a staircase and thus the floor containing the DNC's offices. This was common practice among cleaners and maintenance crews, but a security guard found the doors taped open, removed the tape and then found them re-taped again hours later. He alerted the police, who located and arrested the entry team. Liddy and Hunt escaped that evening but phone numbers and the money trail led the FBI to both of them. Though Nixon was allowed to retire and his successor, Gerald Ford, gave him a full pardon the Watergate burglars were imprisoned. Hunt served 33 months, by which time his wife had died in a plane accident and he had essentially been bankrupted. Also imprisoned were several White House staffers, including White House counsels John Dean and John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Chief of Staff HR Haldemann, deputy director of CREEP Jeb MacGruder and Attorney General John Mitchell.

The Watergate scandal not only brought down a presidential administration and virtually ruined Hunt's life, it was also the basis for the Church Committee's investigation into illegal activities by US intelligence services and the Rockefeller's Commission's investigation into CIA activities within the US, both in 1975. President Ford reacted to the discoveries of these inquiries by enacting Executive Order 11905, which amended the National Security Act of 1947 by providing greater oversight of intelligence agency activities and banning political assassinations. Whether the CIA and the rest of the US 'intelligence community' really paid any attention is a matter of some dispute. The public pressure arising from the information reported by the two inquiries, particularly the Church Committee, led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), formed in 1976 and lasting until 1979. The HSCA looked into the killings of President John F Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April 1968.

Hunt testified before the Rockefeller Commission and the HSCA about his alleged role in the Kennedy assassination. Writers, in particular Tad Szulc, had written about infamous photographs taken in Dealey Plaza of three men that were arrested shortly after the shooting of JFK. The photos of these tramps have been the subject of tremendous debate.

Howard Hunt is allegedly the third man (L-R), the one wearing a hat. The first two men have been widely identified, perhaps correctly, as Frank Sturgis and Daniel Carswell (Carswell was also CIA). Sceptics, including Oliver Stone in his movie JFK, have pointed out that two of the men look quite young to be homeless in 1960s America, that all three men are clean shaven and the two whose hair can be seen shows it to be well kept. They appear to be wearing mostly new clothes with little or no sign of dirt, wear or fraying, and that if you were not told they were vagrants they wouldn't stand out as such. That they were arrested, questioned, and then released has caused some to suspect they were protected assets of the intelligence services involved in the assassination.

Hunt denied that he was in Dallas that day, affirming to both the Rockefeller Commission and the HSCA that he was at home in Washington on the day in question. He tells a tale of being out shopping for groceries when he and his wife heard about the shooting. They then collected their son from school, went home and watched the rolling TV coverage as events unfolded into the evening. However, this now appears not to be true. Though Hunt re-affirmed this version of events in his autobiography, published shortly after his death in January 2007, he sent his son St John Hunt a tape recording in 2004 making an extensive confession, and telling his son to release the recording after his death. Howard Hunt claims that he was in fact in Dallas that day, as a 'benchwarmer' rather than a key player in the assassination. He named then vice-President Lyndon Johnson as one of the main men behind the plot, and identified Cord Meyer and William King Harvey of the CIA as its progenitors. Harvey in particular played a key role in Operation Mongoose, the Pentagon-CIA plan to kill Castro (among other things). As picked up by Oliver Stone's movie Nixon, there is a suspicion that Mongoose 'got turned around' and became the vehicle for the Kennedy assassination, a suspicion held by Richard Nixon himself.

The story of Hunt's confession was first picked up by Prisonplanet and then by Coast to Coast radio. However, it has not gained any notable coverage in mainstream news media. His son St John offered his opinion on the tramp photographs, saying that the third man looked much like his father did in the early 1960s. But people quite often confess to crimes they haven't committed, such at the LA drug addict who said he broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. There is also the issue of why Hunt went to such lengths in his 2007 book to deny his involvement in the assassination when he knew he was dying and therefore that soon after his son would make his recorded confession a matter of public knowledge (at least to those who bother to look for such things). Most publishers would jump at the chance to publish an irrefutable posthumous confession by a CIA agent. It's ideal from a legal point of view because it can't be proven true or false because the guy making the confession is dead, the publisher doesn't even have to claim the confession as true in order to get people interested. Kennedy assassination theories are the most commonly believed type of conspiracy theory, with the possible exception of those concerning 9/11, so it is a guaranteed money maker, a very rare thing in publishing.

However, put against that Hunt knew of the CIA's infiltration of the publishing industry, and so if he had told his book publisher what he told his son then there was a reasonable chance of the CIA finding out his intentions. In any case, his book was edited by the CIA before publication, and so is perhaps not an authentic representation of Hunt's view of his own life. Hopefully some of these issues will be discussed in Alex Jones's forthcoming Kennedy assassination movie, which features St John Hunt in extensive interviews, alongside long-term investigator Jim Marrs. Though there is no release date available yet the preview indicates that it expands on the theories put forth in the mainstream films Executive Action and JFK.

The Fabrication of Crisis

2010-01-29T11:37:00.006Z

The dramatic failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference Proceedings was succeeded by a significant 'cold air mass'. The Northern hemisphere winter was already looking cold while the conference was taking place, and temperatures rapidly plummeted once the delegates had flown home. Record snowfall hit locations as far South as Beijing and Seoul, while sunny Florida was struggling to reach positive temperatures.

Once again, the Met Office's predictions were wrong, and not just wrong in the sense of being inaccurate, wrong in the sense of identifying a trend that clearly wasn't really there. This is a common failing of statistical methods. Despite this the pro-AGW scientists are still trying to sell global warming theory. The World Meteorological Organisation have denied that the cold weather in any way questions the AGW theory of climate change. Secretary General Michel Jarraud said:

"We cannot explain any single phenomenon by one single cause." - VOA News

Except, presumably, for explaining climate change by human activity. The Met Office followed suit, finding a way to argue that the cold weather is in fact a result of global warming, demonstrating how the entire investigation of the climate is led by a desired conclusion. Stephen Dorling of the disgraced University of East Anglia gave interviews to two newspapers, both of which came out with astoundingly unscientific nonsense as a result:

But Stephen Dorling, of the scandal-hit University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences, remained adamant that the weather should not be used as evidence against climate change. - Daily Express
But he said it was wrong to focus on single events - whether they were cold snaps or heat waves - which were the product of natural variability. - Telegraph

The former betrays the hoax that underpins this sort of science, that empirical evidence is discounted in favour of 'value added' statistics, though the process which produced those statistics is kept secret. The latter is genuinely bizarre because it seems to imply that single events are naturally occurring but longer trends are the result of some 'unnatural' activity, presumably by humans. The global warming in the mind of that article's author is truly anthropogenic or 'man made', in that it an invention of the imagination, not the conclusion of an investigative process.

It should also be noted that single events, in particular heat waves, are often used to advance the vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. When a very hot summer struck Europe in 2003, killing Parisian pensioners, it was consistently used as evidence for global warming. Two years afterwards the Guardian ran an article saying the knock-on effect of this 'single event' could contribute to global warming on a large scale. Continuing their beautifully contradictory coverage the Telegraph published an article suggesting the cold weather might signal a 'pause' to global warming, and that we may see a cooling period. A very similar piece appeared in the BBC's coverage in April 2008 after a particularly cold winter.

For those advancing the global warming theory any argument will do. Weather that might support the desired conclusion is cited as evidence that the theory is correct. Weather that doesn't support the desired conclusion is dismissed as 'single events' that are part of natural fluctuations. These single events aren't significant compared to the long term trend, except when they can find a reason to suggest the single events have helped cause the long term trend that is the desired conclusion. Any concessions to a short term trend is always contrasted with a reference to the long term trend that is the desired conclusion. This is political logic.

These contradictions are typified in this Discover Magazine blog, which predictably features a Greenpeace banner advert at the top of the page with a picture of a polar bear stating 'give £3 a month to stop climate change'. Given that 'single events' can naturally occur which then add up to a short term trend, which can turn into a long term trend, it's probably fair to say that regardless of what humans do there will always be some climate change happening.

Perhaps because of the failure of Copenhagen, and the failure of this mishmash of causality myths and ideology to convince the desired number of people, the crisis-salesmen have resorted to somewhat cruder methods. On the evening of Christmas day Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a passenger on Flight 253 from Schipol to Detroit, set fire to his trousers, allegedly trying to detonate plastic explosives in his underwear. Though the precise nature of the device is unclear, it is variously reported to have involved unmixed PETN powder and some form of Acetone Peroxide, along with a syringe full of acid. This is allegedly the same mixture of explosive compounds used by so-called 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid. In both cases, whether they constituted a viable explosive device is not apparent. Whether young Mutallab could have actually downed the plane over the city, and hence deserve the already appointed titled of the 'Detroit Bomber' or would have just blown off his balls, is yet to be established.

The incident was initially reported as a passenger trying to light fireworks on the plane, but soon after the story evolved to include another passenger, a Dutchman named Japser Schuringa, who subdued Mutallab when he tried to do whatever it was he was trying to do.

Mr Schuringa said Abdulmutallab seemed “out of it” and was “staring into nothing”. - The Telegraph

In the following days and weeks there were a series of other 'security scares' on similar flights. Two days after Christmas the same flight (Northwest Airlines flight 253) was 'involved in an emergency incident' coming into Detroit. The cause was that a Nigerian passenger had apparently become sick and had spent a long time in the plane's bathroom. The day after it was reported that Mutallab had bragged to the FBI that there were more willing plane bombers waiting in the wings. Indeed, the young man was apparently very keen to talk about terrorism until his government-appointed lawyer 'reduced' his 'co-operation'.

Another plane out of Amsterdam, this one going to Aruba, was diverted after an unruly passenger made bomb threats, about two weeks into the New Year. However, the prize goes to Meadows Field Airport in California which was closed after yet another security scare in the wake of the Flight 253 incident. Two baggage handlers were taken to hospital complaining of feeling nauseous after opening bottles they believed contained a suspicious liquid. The bottles tested positive for traces of explosive, both TNT and TATP, so the airport was evacuated and shut down. The only problem was that they contained honey. Not explosives, not acid, not underwear, not misguided Nigerians. Honey. Similarly, Minneapolis St Paul airport was closed after a 'suspicious' bag was identified by a bomb-sniffing dog. It turned out to be the bag the handlers put on the carousel to indicate the end of a batch, that all of the luggage from a particular flight has been unloaded. Likewise the comic Joan Rivers was kept off a flight from Costa Rica to Newark after a gate inspector was concerned about her passport containing both her married and professional names.

Perhaps in response to bottles of honey or the use of stage names, MI5 took the decision to raise the UK threat level from 'substantial' to 'severe'. The non-specific, unconfirmable international terrorist threat strikes again, leading Sky News to begin their piece on the story saying:

It is the threat that won't go away. The chance of an international terrorist attack on the UK has increased again. - Sky News

However, it is the threat level (supposedly an assessment derived from the available intelligence) that has been raised, not the chance of an attack. Heightened security and 'vigilance' on the part of the public as a result of publicly raising the threat level should, if anything, make an attack less likely, not more likely. But Sky News know what they're doing, and know that it butters a lot of bread to keep making out that at any moment a confused young man from Africa might set fire to his underpants. Accompanying the hiking of the threat level came Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who assured us that we still face a 'real and serious' threat from terrorism. 'Real and serious' is the same phrase used by Johnson's half a dozen predecessors in the job of primary domestic propagandist for the War on Terror, which indicates the threat is manufactured and farcical.

Indeed, as far as bombers go, Mutallab was pretty poor, down there with those who set fire to themselves in a jeep and then drove into a bollard at Glasgow airport a couple of years ago. However, these aren't particularly isolated incidents in the history of Islamic terrorism. Ramzi Yousef, the designer of the bomb used to attack the WTC in 1993, was known for a series of accidents. One in particular saw him accidentally drink sulphuric acid from a bottle thinking it was a soft drink he'd poured into the same kind of bottle. Soft drinks were also to blame for the closure of New York's Penn station in 2005 after a 'suspicious' soda can had to be investigated by National Guardsmen and HAZMAT teams.

Another story from 1993 is telling, when Osama Bin Laden purchased an aircraft to help him ship weapons from Afghanistan to Sudan, where he was based at the time. A former mujahid who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets, was enlisted to help. Essam al-Ridi lived in Texas and acquired an ageing ex-US military plane from the Tucson 'Boneyard'.

The saga of the T-39 is a rare amusement in the Bin Laden chronicle. Because of a shortage of cash, the Saudi insisted on spending no more than $250,000. What he got was a 1960s vintage aircraft with a range of about 1500 miles. To get the plane from the southwestern US to Khartoum, Al-Ridi had to make a seven-leg journey, beginning in Dallas-Forth Worth and flying via Sault Sainte Marie in Ontario to an airstrip in Frobisher bay, just below the Arctic Circle, then to Iceland, next to a couple of stops in Europe, on to Caire, and finally to its destination. Al-Ridi expected the journey to take a couple of days. When he go to Frobisher Bay, -65 degree weather cracked a window and the plane lost its hydraulic system, forcing a stopover. After a week in Canada's frozen north, Air Mujahid was up and running again, and Al-Ridi delivered the plane...
...About a year and a half after his epic journey, Al-Ridi was summoned to Sudan to fly the plane again. It had been poorly maintained, he arrived at the airport to find that the tires had melted on the runway, the engines were filled with sand and the keys were missing. After repairs by an airport mechanic, Al-Ridi took the plane up for a brief test. He made several circuits around the airport, performed a touch-and-go, and then brought the plane in for a landing. While it was hurtling down the tarmac, all the brake systems failed. Al-Ridi shut off the engines but with the plane still plowing forward at sixty knots, the runway ran out, and the plane slammed into a sand pile. Al-Ridi, an Egyptian who worked for Bin Laden as a business matter, not out of ideological conviction, was fearful of being identified with the Saudi's plane. He sprinted from the runway and caught a flight out of Sudan as fast as he could. - The Age of Sacred Terror

Nonetheless, that the young Nigerian posed a 'real and serious' threat to the security of our way of life doesn't seem to be in question by any officials. Instead the authorities have been having a dispute over 'intelligence failures', in essence the same dispute that took place after 9/11 and 7/7, and after Richard Reid's attempt to set fire to his shoes. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab came from a wealthy family, his father is a banker and former government official. He was educated at an international school in Togo, and studied engineering and business finance in London. He broke off ties with his family and apparently moved around, living in Yemen, Egypt and/or Dubai.

In May 2008 he applied for a student visa to enter the UK putting bogus course details on his application. It was denied, and he was added to the British terrorist watch list. Despite this in June 2008 he applied for and received a US entry visa through the US embassy in London. In August he attended a course held by an Islamic centre in Texas, though his movements between then and the following summer are not known. Umar then turned up in Yemen, and by November 2009 his father was appealing to the US embassy in Abuja telling them to retrieve his son. Mutallab's father also warned the CIA station in Abuja that his son had got involved with Islamic extremists and might do something stupid.

At this point the US added his name to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list, but not the no-fly list. The entry visa issued in June 2008 was not revoked. Between then and a month later, when Mutallab boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria on its way to Holland, no effort was made to track Umar or find out what he was doing. According to this version of events the relevant agencies didn't share information or ensure it was investigated. Even Obama got in on the act, criticising 'intelligence failures' and apparently threatening to fire the chiefs of various agencies. While Downing St. claimed they had shared a file on Mutallab with the CIA in 2008 the Americans reacted furiously to any suggestion that they had intelligence indicating he was a terrorist. The UK government went into reverse gear, giving a wonderfully contradictory press conference:

During a briefing to journalists on Tuesday, Prime Minister's spokesman said: "There is no suggestion that the UK passed intelligence to the US that they did not act on."

Sky's political correspondent Joey Jones said it had been an "awful" briefing.

"He tried to clear things up but only succeeded in muddying the waters still further," Jones said.

"After he read Downing Street's statement, the spokesman said there would be no further comment on intelligence issues.

"However, he continued to answer questions from journalists on the subject even saying: 'Whatever information was passed to the US, they did what they needed to do with it.'

"When I pointed out the contradiction, the spokesman said: 'It's not for me to comment on what the US should do with intelligence.'" - Sky News

Assuming the truth of this interpretation, whereby intelligence agencies failed in their role to act on information given to them to deter threats to the public they supposedly protect, it is an act of truly horrific doublethink for officials to react by insisting on tighter security at airports. In particular the use of full-body scanners, which are in no way a solution to the apparent failure of intelligence bureaucracies.

The images produced by these machines are so lifelike that there is already an outcry over the invasion of privacy, and concerns that they break child pornography laws in making images of nude children. In all likelihood making nude images of anyone without their permission is illegal, child or adult. However, given that the FBI has recently been accused by its parent Department of Justice of 'fabricating terror emergencies' to obtain phone records, it remains a real possibility that such invasive and explicit scanners could become the norm at Western airports.

If this happens, it will be another blow to the already struggling airline industry. Japan Airlines recently filed for bankruptcy despite a state bailout, capping a very bad couple of years for the travel business. In particular, oil prices and the impact on budget airlines of a drop in demand due to the recession have caused greater problems to carriers than 9/11. As discussed by Bilderberg report Daniel Estulin, this may have its origins in the peak oil scenario. This may also explain why the West is so keen to get involved in Haiti, though the US Geological Survey recently stated that Venezuela is now estimated to have the largest recoverable reserves in the world.

Back to the PG-13 terrorism, it is strange that while Mutallab himself is pleading not guilty that a recording allegedly made by Osama Bin Laden takes credit for the operation. For one, Mutallab is opening himself up to cross-examination by entering a not-guilty plea and is contradicting the 'willing martyr' ideology supposedly subscribed to by Islamikaze terrorist. Secondly, why is Bin Laden taking credit for what, if one presumes the whole narrative and mythology behind Osama, was a failed attack? In terms of psychological impact, a key concern of the 'Al Qaeda Manual', Osama taking credit for it only really suits the Americans (etc.) in bolstering the enemy image. It makes Al Qaeda look ridiculous if this is their best attempt against an airliner.

However, were the 'intelligence failures' in fact intelligence successes? The allegation has been made by several publications, most obviously Alex Jones's Infowars but also the Russian Pravda. In particular, Infowars picked up on three issues which indicate that Mutallab is something other than what he's cracked up to be. Firstly, when Mutallab tried to board in Amsterdam he apparently had no passport, but was allowed to board due to a 'well dressed Indian man' getting involved and apparently helping Mutallab to bypass security. This is based on eye-witness testimony from lawyer Kurt Haskell and his wife.

Further allegations of a cameraman filming the entire flight including the attempt by Mutallab to do whatever he was trying to do let infowars to conclude that the event was staged, that Mutallab is a patsy and that there may even have been two different Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab's. The reason given for this is so that the War on Terror can be expanded to include Yemen, itself a potential staging base for forays into East Africa. Either diplomatic pressure or the threat of military force will enable the US to treat the Yemeni territory as their own, and given the Chinese investment in East Africa the aim could be to destabilise the threat of progress for a region of the world that has been starving for a long time.

Running alongside the Mutallab story has been the saga of the delightfully named Islam4UK (phones4U). Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the organisation, is a long term associate of Omar Bakri and helped found Al-Muhajiroun, of which Islam4UK is a splinter group. Shortly after Mutallab's adventure a story hit the national British press that the group were planning a march in honour of the Muslims who have died in Afghanistan. The location chosen for the march was Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, which has become a centre for British mourning of dead due to its proximity to RAF Lyneham. The British reaction was predictably xenophobic, with facebook pages being set up to demand the group be banned. For the most part the fact that the British were among the invaders and instigators of the war has been conveniently ignored, with the proposed march being dismissed as a 'stunt'.

By January 10th the media coverage led Islam4UK to announce that they were cancelling plans for the march. They also stated that the much-publicised detail that they were intending on carrying 500 coffins to represent the dead Muslims in Afghanistan was a fabrication, a conflation of details about the number intending to join the march and a comment made by Choudary. However, two days later the government decided 'if in doubt, ban al-muhajiroun', which is becoming the default policy for dealing with Muslim-oriented dissent. This ludicrous decision was rightly criticised by Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary Chris Huhne:

“There is a real risk they will paint themselves as martyrs while simply changing their name and carrying on, or going underground.” - Libdems.org.uk

There is more than a 'real risk' - if history is anything to go by then the group will reform under a new name while gaining support and credibility. While precisely what Choudary is remains unclear (he may not be a fundamentalist of any kind) the role of such organisations is to exploit the quite justified and reasonable outrage of ordinary Muslims at their treatment both by governments in the West and our military forces in the Middle East. However, just as banning the organisation plays into the hands of the organisation's leader, their exploitation of this outrage plays into the hands of the UK government who are trying to regain the support of the white working class. Oposition to immigration, multiculturalism and the right of religious peoples to believe different things is a frequent theme amongst poorer white British people, with Muslims a convenient scapegoat. By looking like they are 'cracking down on the extremists', the government gets a welcome boost from the conservatives and casual racists.

Crisis is often fabricated, whether it is through the semantic manipulation of the difference between single events, short term trends and overall patterns, or through incompetence dressed up as catastrophe, or through success being reported as failure. In all cases authorities not only fail to hold themselves to account, but seek to gain further power for themselves in the name of 'solving the problem'. The institutions of power not only provide a means for protecting their own, and scapegoating the odd rebel where necessary, but also for turning their own corruption and conspiracy into a reason to enhance, rather than disband, them. The real problems (pollution, postcolonialism and so on) remain because the policies being employed are never designed to tackle the real problems. Whether by accident or by design, they are designed to solve imaginary or misconceived problems, and so create new problems of their own which will in years to come have the public clamouring for a solution.