Friday 18 August 2006

The timing is political

We should be sceptical about this alleged plot, and wary of politicians who seek to benefit

by Craig Murray


Nine days on, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was "imminent" and would bring "mass murder on an unbelievable scale" is, to say the least, peculiar. A 24th person, arrested amid much fanfare on Tuesday, was quietly released without charge the following day.

Media analysis has been full of information from police and security sources. By and large journalists are honourable in this kind of reporting. Their sources, unfortunately, are not - viz the non-existent ricin, the Forest Gate "chemical weapons vest", or Jean Charles de Menezes leaping the barriers. Unlike the herd of security experts, I have had the highest security clearance; I have done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis; and I have been inside the spin machine. And I am very sceptical about the story that has been spun.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not have passports. It could be pretty difficult to convince a jury that these individuals were about to go through with suicide bombings, whatever they bragged about on the net.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for more than a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information from people desperate to stop or avert torture. What you don't get is the truth.

We also have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing arrests the weekend before they were made. Why? Both in domestic trouble, they longed for a chance to change the story. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a chance. Comparisons with 9/11 were all over front pages.

And we have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, the home secretary, warning us all in advance of the evil that threatens us and complaining that some people "don't get" why we have to abandon traditional liberties.

Full story...

Wednesday 16 August 2006

The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?

by Craig Murray

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this, I believe, is the true story.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.

We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.

For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Full story...

Monday 14 August 2006

Liquid Bomb Pakistan Link Is False Flag Smoking Gun

I don't know anyone who believes this government any more. This "foiled terror plot" is as likely to be the work of MI5 as it is some crazy Muslim people!

Veracity of liquid explosives method also put under dubious doubt

by Paul Joseph Watson


Revelations concerning the origins and connections of the alleged liquid bomb terror plot to Pakistan and the 7/7 bombings in London provide a strong indication that the operation, known for months yet deliberately timed for public release, was a synthetic ruse concocted by the Bush/Blair cabal to re-package the flagging war on terror.

Media reports in the days following the alert cite Pakistan's ISI as having identified Rashid Rauf as, "the link between the plot's planners and British-based Muslims who were allegedly preparing to carry out attacks on transatlantic flights."

According to former NSA official Wayne Madsen, the Lashkar-e-Toiba terror group, to which Rashid Rauf is affiliated, is wholly operated and funded by the Pakistani ISI.

The Pakistani ISI is a CIA front and controls terror cells at the discretion of the highest levels of the US military-industrial complex. This means that the potential mastermind of the liquid bomb plot, Rashid Rauf (pictured), was operating under the oversight and direction of Pakistani and by proxy American intelligence agencies.

To understand why the Pakistan link strongly indicates that Thursday morning's terror alert was a manufactured ruse, it is necessary to understand the the nexus that connects Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and terrorist organizations.

In October 2001, under the headline 'Pakistani Intelligence Had Links to Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say,' the New York Times reported, "The intelligence service of Pakistan, a crucial American ally in the war on terrorism, has had an indirect but longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye for years to the growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to American officials."

The ISI has received CIA funds to create and control militant organizations, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Funds transferred from Pakistan bankrolled the alleged 9/11 hijackers before the attack. Ahmad Umar Sheikh wired $100,000 from Karachi to alleged lead hijacker Mohammed Atta at the behest of ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad. If this isn't a direct link from the ISI to Al-Qaeda then nothing is.

Porter Goss, later appointed as director of the CIA, was having breakfast with the money man behind the terrorists as the planes crashed on the morning of 9/11. Ahmad had also met with top defense and intelligence officials in Washington in the days before the attack, including then CIA director George Tenet, Pentagon officials, and White House personnel.

The fact that the Pakistani financier of the alleged hijackers was meeting with the top brass of the US government in the week before the attack was never investigated by the 9/11 Commission.

In addition, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was repeatedly protected by the ISI, according to Josef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.

Defense Intelligence Agency documents dated from 2001 clearly indicate that the CIA is aware that Pakistan's ISI supports and bankrolls Al-Qaeda groups but they have deliberately chosen to ignore the connection.

This rich history of ISI creation and protection of terrorist cells, allied with the fact that the ISI is a known CIA front, and added to the revelation that the mastermind of the liquid bomb plot Rashid Rauf is under ISI control, it is therefore obvious to conclude that the entire charade was cooked and orchestrated by elements of the Bush/Blair cabal and sold as promotional propaganda for the increased surveillance and behavioral control of UK and US citizens.

At the very least, the terror cell had been fully infiltrated for months - this has already been admitted - and the snap "foiling" of the attack was coordinated and stage-managed for purposes of political grandstanding on the part of Bush, Blair and the Neo-Fascist apparatus that seeks to use the ailing justification of the war on terror for a future military incursion into Iran.

Another dimension to the indication that we are being fed another hoax, are reports detailing the alleged plot's links to the 7/7 London bombings.

As this website has exhaustively documented for over a year, the 7/7 bombings and the patsies that were used to take the fall for them, were controlled and engineered by the British intelligence apparatus.

The alleged ringleader of the attack which targeted three tube trains and one bus, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was an MI5 informant, according to former London Metropolitan Police detective and terror expert Charles Shoebridge. Therefore, in the case of the liquid bomb plot suspects, any link to the London bombers is a link to MI5.

It is clear that the scope of the attack has been greatly exaggerated by the British government to maximize fear and subservience engendered by images of alarmed and frightened airliner passengers.

Doomsday proclamations of ten planes exploding into balls of flames in mid-air do not correlate with the capacity of the liquid explosives the alleged terrorists were to use.

The only other example where terrorists used liquid explosives was the December 1994 Philippines Airline Boeing 747 incident, a dry run for a bigger plot conducted by Ramzi Youssef.

In this case, Youssef planted the explosives explosives under one of the seats in the airliner and timed them to detonate after he disembarked for a connecting flight. The subsequent explosion killed only the Japanese businessman who was sitting directly above the bomb. Besides five people with minor injuries, the other 200-plus passengers were unharmed and the plane landed safely.

Only liquid explosives in large and noticeable amounts can have any literal chance of "blowing up" a plane in mid-air. Confiscating pregnant white women's lip gloss is completely insane and proves in itself that the new airport measures are purely designed to act as a PR coup for the police state.

In addition, photographs of passengers being ordered to pour liquids into one single container completely belies the claim that the alleged terrorists planned to mix the liquids to create the deadly explosives. If mixing liquids was a key component of the bomb making process then why are airport security ordering people to mix liquids?

Full story...

Friday 11 August 2006

Britain's airline terror plot: Questions that need to be answered

Go to sleep Britain, your government is in control again. Go to sleep Britain, your government knows how it all transpired. Here, here's 24/7 coverage of the Big Brother house. Watch this. SHUT UP! Go back to bed Britain, your government has all the answers and all you have to do is let us control your lives.

Ok people, if you REALLY want to understand all this terrorism stuff then get your arse down to the Video store and pick up a copy of "V for Vendetta" - quite possibly the best film I've seen in ten years!


The claim that American and British security forces have thwarted a terrorist plot to blow up commercial flights between Britain and the United States should not be accepted uncritically. It is impossible to determine at this point whether or not such an attack was in the offing, although the mass media have, as usual, reported the assertions of the British and American governments as indisputable fact, without bothering to ask for any specific information that would substantiate the official story.

The British police statement that the alleged plotters aimed to "create mass murder on an unimaginable scale" by blowing up mid-flight an unspecified number of aircraft is chilling. The far-reaching security measures that have been implemented—including the shutdown of London's Heathrow Airport and an indefinite ban on carry-on luggage—add to the climate of fear and apprehension.

At a time such as this—in the midst of spectacular claims from London and Washington, a media barrage supporting them, and a massive disruption of commercial flights resulting from extreme security measures—it is all the more imperative that people not suspend their capacity for critical thought and political judgement.

Raids in the early hours of Thursday morning on homes and business premises in London and the West Midlands resulted in 21 arrests. Spokesmen for the US and British governments asserted that those arrested were involved in the most significant terrorist plot since 9/11.

Later reports said that 24 people had been arrested in Britain and more had been detained in Pakistan. Among those arrested were a Muslim charity worker and a Heathrow Airport employee with an all-area access pass, according to Britain's Channel 4 News. Five suspects in the plot are still at large, according to ABC News, which cited US sources.

BBC News reported Thursday evening that the arrests were the result of a long-standing investigation coordinated between the US, British and Pakistani governments. British Home Secretary John Reid in a press conference earlier on Thursday said Prime Minister Tony Blair had briefed President George Bush on the impending arrests and security measures over the weekend.

Subsequent reports claimed the plotters had planned to target simultaneously up to ten aircraft from three US carriers by smuggling onboard liquid chemical explosives disguised as beverages or electronic devices.

US intelligence officials said the plotters hoped to stage a "dry run" today (Friday) and the actual attack would have followed days later. A senior congressional source claimed the plotters planned to mix a sports drink with a peroxide-based paste to make an "explosive cocktail" that could be triggered by an MP3 player or cell phone.

President George Bush made a brief statement mid-day Thursday that was calculated to heighten public anxieties and exploit the alleged terror plot to justify the panoply of reactionary policies his administration has pursued since 9/11 in the name of the "war on terror."

Speaking on an airport runway in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he said that the thwarted plot was a "stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom." He suggested that the plot vindicated the measures—massive domestic spying, military tribunals, detentions without trial—taken by his administration to "protect the American people," and went on to warn that "it is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America."

The World Socialist Web Site has no information that allows us to make a definitive judgement on the existence or non-existence of a terrorist plot on the scale claimed. However, it is the responsibility of the US and British governments to produce the facts that would substantiate their allegations and justify the extreme security measures they have taken, and to present these facts to the public in a clear and concise manner.

They have produced no such factual account or substantiation.

Full story...

Tuesday 8 August 2006

Is Israel Allowing Hezbollah to Kill Its Citizens?

I had noticed how an awful lot of the Israelis being killed are described as "Israeli Arabs" interesting to say the least.

by Kurt Nimmo

For the honest historian, it comes as no surprise government either kills its own citizens or allows enemies to do the same in an effort to score propaganda points or as an excuse to commence hostilities.

Examples are numerous, from FDR denying Americans passport and travel documents to let them flee the Japanese onslaught of the Philippines in the lead up to the Second World War (see US prisoners claim Roosevelt left them in Philippines deliberately) to Operation Northwoods, a plan drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage fake terror attacks in America (including assassination, airplane hijacking, and sinking of boats) in order to devise a pretext to invade Cuba.

Indeed, some of us, routinely dismissed as tinfoil hatters, believe elements within the United States government engineered and executed the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, as a way to get the ball rolling on the “war against terrorism,” that is to say the war against Islam, currently heating up big time in the Middle East.

Considering the above, and other examples, including the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger ship loaded up with a secret cargo of munitions (a fact admitted by the decidedly less than conspiratorial Encyclopedia Britannica), which contributed indirectly to the entry of the United States into World War I, and the suspicious sinking of the Maine in the Havana harbor, used as a pretext for the United States to declare war on Spain in 1898, the allegation “Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it’s fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war” should not be a startling or especially mind-boggling revelation.

According to Tom Ricks, a reporter for the Washington Post, during an appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources, citing “military analysts,” Israel “purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.”

Or, put differently, if Hezbollah continues to rocket northern Israel, the IOF may claim “moral equivalency” and continue its push into Lebanon, once again to the Litani River, a plentiful source of fresh water that long ago figured into Israel’s calculations of its endangered water resources (see Angela Joy Moss, ICE Case Studies, Litani River and Israel-Lebanon), in fact a resource long coveted by the Zionists, going as far back as Chaim Weizmann in 1919 and, a few decades later, Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, who advocated Israeli occupation of Lebanon up to the Litani River (see Stephen C. Lonergan and David B. Brooks, Watershed: the Role of Fresh Water in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict).

Full story...