"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which
is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda."
--General Douglas MacArthur
"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising".
--Former NBC news prez Rubin Frank
A Flag is not a Blindfold
Are Americans The Victims Of A Hoax?
by Michael Rivero
The time has come to stop using the flag as a blindfold, to stop waving our guns and our
gods at each other, to take a close look at the facts which have emerged from the attacks on
the World Trade Towers and to recognize the very real possibility, indeed probability, that
We The People are the victims of a gigantic and deadly hoax.
In a normal terrorist event, the terrorists cannot wait to take credit, in order to link the
violence to the socio-political intent of the terrorist organization. Yet the prime suspect
in the New York Towers case, ex(?) CIA asset Osama Bin Laden (whose brother is one of George
W. Bush's Texas business partners), has issued only two statements regarding the September
11th attacks, and both of those are denials of any involvement.
Huge problems are emerging in the official view of events. It's known that the United States
was planning an invasion of Afghanistan long before the attacks on the World Trade
Towers.[1] Indeed the attacks on the World Trade Towers perfectly fit the timetable of an
invasion by October stated by US officials just last summer.
The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't point to Afghanistan. They
come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a
focus in any one region. Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was
based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister
Prince Saud Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the 5 Saudi
men were not aboard the four jetliners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania
on September 11. "It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing
to do with what happened," Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with
U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker is also
reported to still be alive in Tunisia, while a 7th named man died two years ago!
In a recent development, the BBC is reporting that the transcript of a phone call made by
Stewardess Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic controls shows that the stewardess
gave the seat numbers occupied by the hijackers, seat numbers which were not the seats of
the men the FBI claimed were responsible for the hijacking![2]
FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that at this time the
FBI has no legal proof to prove the true identities of the suicidal hijackers. Yet in the
haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, our government and the FBI
(which does not have the best record for honesty in investigations to begin with, having
been caught rigging lab tests, manufacturing testimony in the Vincent Foster affair, and
illegally withholding/destroying evidence in the Oklahoma Bombing case) are not taking too
close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, ex(?) CIA asset Osama
Bin Laden.
In particular, the FBI, too busy harassing political dissenters to find spies in its midst,
the long rumored mole inside the White House, or plug leaks in high-tech flowing to foreign
nations, has willfully and criminally ignored the implications of some vital pieces of
information the FBI is itself waving around at the public.
We are being told that this crack team of terrorists, able to breeze past airport security
as if it wasn't there, wound up leaving so much evidence in its wake that the bumbling
Inspector Clouseau (or the FBI) could not fail to stumble over it. The locations where the
terrorists supposedly stayed are so overloaded with damning materials that they resemble
less a crimes scene, and more a "B" detective movie set, with vital clues always on
prominent display for the cameras.
Yet another problem lies with the described actions of the hijackers themselves. We are
being told on the one hand that these men were such fanatical devotees of their faith that
they willingly crashed the jets they were flying into buildings. Yet on the other hand, we
are being told that these same men spent the night before their planned visit to Allah
drinking in strip bars, committing not just one, but two mortal sins which would keep them
out of Paradise no matter what else they did. Truly devout Muslims would spend the day
before a suicide attack fasting and praying. Not only does the drinking in strip bars not
fit the profile of a fanatically religious Muslim willing to die for his cause, but the
witness reports of the men in the bars are of men going out of their way to be noticed and
remembered, while waving around phony identifications.
Because of the facts of the phony identifications, we don't really know who was on those
planes. What we do know is that the men on those planes went to a great deal of trouble to
steal the identities of Muslims, and to make sure those identities were seen and remembered,
then to leave a plethora of planted clues around, such as crop dusting manuals, and letters
in checked baggage (why does a terrorist about to die need to check baggage?) that "somehow"
didn't get on the final, fatal, flight.
Fake terror is nothing new.[3] According to recently released files, our government planned
Operation Northwoods to stage phony terror attacks against American citizens in the wake of
the Bay Of Pigs, to anger Americans into support for a second invasion of Cuba.[4] The plan
was spiked by JFK. If our government has ever actually carried out such plans to stage phony
terror attacks, the documents have remained classified. But given the reality of Operation
Northwoods, or the manner in which FDR manuevered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor[5], one
cannot rule out the possibility that, once again, the people of the United States are being
lied to by their own government, to manufacture consent for a war of invasion already being
discussed with other nations the previous summer.
It is also quite possible, indeed likely, that the United States is being spoofed by a third
party to trigger a war. It has happened before. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a defector
from Israel's secret service, Mossad, Israel decided to mount a false-flag operation
designed to further discredit Libya, and provoke the US to attack an Arab nation.[6] A
transmitter loaded with pre-recorded messages was planted in Tripoli, Libya, by a Mossad
team. The `Trojan Horse' beamed out fake messages about Libyan-authorized bombings and
planned attacks that were immediately intercepted by US electronic monitoring. Convinced by
this disinformation that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco in which a US
soldier died, President Ronald Reagan ordered massive air attacks on Libya, including an
obvious- and illegal(under US law) attempt to assassinate Qadaffi himself. Some 100 Libyan
civilians were killed, including Qadaffi's two year old daughter. Libyan officials had no
idea why they were attacked.
It is worth remembering the motto of the Mossad is, "By way of deception, thou shalt do
war."
Whether they were involved in the attacks or not, it cannot be doubted that Israel has
benefited from the attacks in New York. While world attention is focused on what the US will
do in Afghanistan, Israel has escalated its attacks against Palestinians towns. Israel has
repeatedly tried to claim that Palestinians were involved in the New York attacks, hoping to
bury the Palestinian cause under the rubble of the World Trade Towers. Because of the faked
IDs and stolen identities, we don't really know who planned the World Trade Towers attacks.
We only know who they wanted us to blame.
And we know that the United States has been tricked in the past into bombing someone who did
not deserve the attack, and that those who were bombed then embarked on what from their
point of view was justified retaliation that culminated over Lockerbie. And while bombs were
falling and planes were crashing, Israel was laughing at us that we had been so easily
fooled into bombing Israel's targets for them.
Are we being hoaxed again, by Israel, or by our own government, or by both? It's impossible
to rule that out. Right now there are a lot of people who want war. Oil companies want
Afghanistan's petroleum products. Our corporations want "friendlier" markets. The CIA wants
all that opium. And all those war-mongers, with all their greed and agendas, will not
hesitate in the least to pour your tax dollars and your children's blood all over
Afghanistan, to get those "friendlier" markets, oil, and opium.
Because of the vested interests at work here, American citizens must, more than at any other
time in recent history, rely on themselves to decide what is happening in our nation. Too
many of those who purport to report the "truth" to us are eager to grab more tax money and
more children to pour into a war of invasion, poised at a region which has swallowed up
every army that has tried to conquer it since the time of Alexander The Great.
And consider this. Grab a map of Europe and Asia, and plot out all the places the United
States now has troops. Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, through the middle east and now into
Afghanistan. A rather obvious militarized line is being formed across the continents. Why?
A Moment Of Reflection (Repost)
The following article apparently struck a resonance around the world. I have been informed
that it has been copied off and reposted at websites in places like Norway, Germany,
Australia, etc. and so I have reposted it here.
On September 11th, four teams of hijackers walked past the security at three major
metropolitan airports and hijacked four aircraft. Two were crashed into the World Trade
Towers, one into the Pentagon, and one was apparently and thankfully shot down before it
could reach its target.
The media call these perpetrators terrorists. Given that we don't really know exactly who
they were and what belief systems they were slaves to, we cannot know whether they called
themselves holy warriors, freedom fighters, or something else. I doubt they call themselves
terrorists for using unconventional tactics, no more than the American colonists who used
unconventional tactics that the British found morally repugnant called themselves
terrorists.
But what we do know about these people is that they were educated. They were pilots. They
were equipped to survive in modern American culture. Minus their hate, they could have been
prosperous and successful here. With their hate, because of their hate, they were willing to
throw their education, their prosperity, their futures, and their lives away in a blinding
flash as aluminum ploughed into concrete with hundreds of innocent lives following just a
few feet behind.
How could anyone hate America enough to throw their own lives away in their attacks on the
symbols of our nation's economic and military power? I mean it's not like someone just wakes
up one morning and decides to hijack a jet passenger liner and use it to knock down a
skyscraper and is willing to die in the process because there's nothing good to watch on TV.
Nobody wakes up and says, "Gee the baseball game got rained out, let's go blow up a
building." Anyone willing to commit such a crime as we have seen this week is seriously
pissed off about something, and in order to stop more attacks we need to face up to what
that something is.
We're not talking "lone nuts", but entire teams of people willing to die in their attacks on
our buildings and against our citizens. What makes these people so hate us that they would
sacrifice their lives in their eagerness to strike at us?
Maybe it's because America, despite lovely speeches about bringing freedom and democracy to
the world, has a record of backing some of the worst dictators to be found. The US
Government, for reasons of commercial interest, backed men like Batista and the Shah of
Iran, despots who drove their people into poverty to enrich American corporations until
their people rebelled. Then we befuddled Americans scratch our heads and wonder why those
people don't seem to like us very much.
Maybe people hate us because what we call Peacekeepers still looks and feels like an
invading army to those who stop the bullets, step on the landmines, and catch the bombs.
Maybe it's because the US Government has executed its foreign policy by tricking nations
into fighting each other. Saddam was our buddy once, when he was useful to our policy
towards Iran. We The People paid for the Supergun. Our government sold Saddam the first of
his biological weapons.
Then our government decided they didn't need him any more, told him it would be okay if he
invaded Kuwait and declared war on him, blowing up the Supergun and the biological weapons
(we hope). Think maybe Saddam carries a grudge? I sure would if I was double crossed like
that.
We played the same double cross with Osama Bin Laden, our ally and a CIA contract agent in
Afghanistan, funded with $6 billion of your tax dollars, now branded a super-villain worthy
of a comic book. Remember the last time our government decided to "take care of Osama?" We
blew up an aspirin factory in Sudan. Big joke, that was. You, the taxpayers, not only got to
pay for the million-a-shot cruise missiles, you also got to pay to rebuild the aspirin
factory when the owners sued the USA, with Vernon Jordan as their attorney! Think the people
who worked in that factory (the ones who survived at any rate) like us? I doubt it.
Maybe the reason people in the middle east are willing to conduct holy wars against us is
because so many holy wars were conducted against them in the past, going back to the
so-called "Holy" Crusades.
Jerusalem was conquered on 7/15/1099 and 60,000 non-Christians were killed. Bodies were slit
open to search for gold coins they might have swallowed. Jews who had taken refuge in the
city's synagogue were burned alive, thousands of muslims were chopped to death in Al-Aqsa
mosque. According to the Archbishop of Tyre, who was an eye-witness, "It was impossible to
look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human
bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the
spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the
horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors
themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to
all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand
infidels perished." Christian chronicler Eckehard of Aura noted that "even the following
summer in all of Palestine the air was polluted by the stench of decomposition".
After rude behavior like that, nobody would be welcome again.
Maybe people are willing to use terror attacks against us because we use terror attacks
against them. In 1985, authorized by William Casey, the CIA planted a car bomb near a mosque
in Beirut to kill Sheik Mohammed Hossein Fadlallah, a muslim cleric. The bomb missed the
Sheik but killed 80 people, including children. Is it really okay for us to use tactics we
condemn in others? No, it isn't. If they are morally wrong to use car bombs that kill
innocent people, then so are we.
Or maybe the reason so many people hate us enough to die attacking us is something as simple
as growing up watching your playmates blown to bloody bits before your eyes, and picking up
a piece of shrapnel stamped, "Made in the USA". It is silly to think that anyone could
endure a childhood like that and remain entirely positive about the USA. Because for all its
public talk of peace, the United States remains the largest exporter of mechanized death in
the world. And if it is acceptable for the victims of guns to blame the gun makers for their
injuries, it must be equally acceptable for the victims of bombs, missiles, and mines, to
blame the weapons makers as well.
It is far less than clear just who is behind the attacks in New York and Washington DC.
Fingers have been pointed at Saddam Hussein, Arafat, and ex CIA agent Osama Bin Laden. It
may be any one of them. It may be all three.
It may be none of them. It could be the work of a third party, unknown and unseen, with the
goal of triggering yet another war where the blood of innocents will be bartered for greater
wealth and influence. We do know that those who hijacked the planes went to a great deal of
effort to steal identities of Middle Eastern Arabs and use them on their forged
identifications.
What also know is that wars are often started with deceptions. Sun Tzu states in The Art Of
War that all warfare is based on deception, and that rulers must cultivate the appearance of
moral rightness in order to persuade their nations to fight.
When Hitler needed the support of the German people to invade Poland, he got it by staging a
phony attack complete with dead bodies in Polish uniforms on the German side of the border.
Recently declassified documents prove that Pearl Harbor wasn't quite the total surprise it
was claimed to be. And the story about stolen incubators that angered America into support
of Desert Storm turned out to be a complete fiction created by Hill & Kowlton, a public
relations firm that has grown rich lying to people on behalf of governments, ANY
governments, and whose executives have bragged, "We would represent Satan, if he paid us."
Forget for a moment who was hurt in these attacks, and study who benefited.
A few weeks ago the USA was factionalized, her people justly critical of the policies of the
government, questioning even if that government's taxes were legal, questioning the support
of Israel, questioning the handling of the Condit case, questioning Waco, questioning a
self-critical nation demanding answers to some tough questions; answers the government did
not have. Now, the United States has been transformed. All criticism is gone, Criticism
itself is now deemed to be, instead of the right of the people, an act of treason.
In the blink of an eye our nation has gone from being 266 million thinking citizens wanting
to know if the government is right to 266 million conscripts willing to follow the
government into war even if it is wrong. In the blink of an eye the people have stopped
blaming the government for the worsening economy and shifted that blame to the "terrorists".
The government of the United States has reasserted its power over the people. It is
stronger, much stronger, because if this attack. And any educated student of history would
know ahead of time that this strengthening of the US government's power would be the result
of horrendous attacks such as we have seen..
Israel, criticized by the world for its treatment of displaced Palestinians, now finds that
criticism silenced. For the foreseeable future, Israel can do what it will with the
Palestinians, immune from the censure of the world's press, burying the Palestininan cause
under the rubble of the World Trade Towers.
Unless he is still working for the CIA, Osama Bin Laden would not have wanted to cause any
of the changes which have resulted from the horrific attacks on New York and Washington DC.
The attacks made the US government stronger. Who benefits from that? That stronger US
Government is now ready to wage war against the Arabs. Who benefits from that?
Who really gained from the attacks in New York and Washington DC? Whose political agendas
were advanced by the attacks? That is where to look for the planners of the World Trade
Towers attacks.
That we have been attacked is certain. But before we send out the cruise missiles to prove
how big our national machismo is, we had better make sure we are aimed at the right party,
and not just being suckered into bombing someone that the real planners and perpetrators of
the World Trade Center attack want to trick us into bombing. Because if, in the heat of the
moment and the lust for vengeance we surrender our basic American principles such as demand
for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, then we ourselves will have damaged America and what it
stands for far more than those who attacked the World Trade Center could ever do themselves.
What the hijackers could not knock down, we will have thrown down ourselves. If we do that,
then those who planned and carried out the attacks against the World Trade Towers and the
Pentagon will have won, even if we hunt them down and kill them.
Don't be a slave to your beliefs about what a government could or could not do. History is
full of governments that perpetrated monumental frauds upon their own people to trigger a
war. Governments HAVE to commit fraud to start a war because most people, especially
Americans, refuse to initiate a war of conquest. They have to have the illusion they have
been attacked first.
5,000 lives are a lot. But to a government, ours or anyone else's, it's a tiny fraction of a
percent to sacrifice to bring 100% of the nation under control, isn't it? And if we go into
a protracted war in Afghanistan, a region that has resisted invasion for the last 2000
years, we will soon long for the days when our dead could be counted in mere thousands.
The World Trade Towers cost a billion dollars. That's 1/10th of a percent of what the
Department Of Defense misplaced last year, and a drop in the barrel compared to the worth of
the oil sitting under the lands we are about to attack.
Are you really so sure you have been told the truth about what is going on?
EVIDENCE AGAINST OSAMA NOT TO BE PRESENTED
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush on Monday backed off the administration's pledge to quickly
release evidence against Osama bin Laden. He said doing so could "make the war more
difficult to win."[7]
The entire case against Osama Bin Laden rested on the claim that the identities of the
hijackers were known. That claim fell apart when even the US admitted that the hijackers had
used phony identifications with the stolen identities of mideastern arabs on them.[8]
Moreover, the hijackers had made a conspicuous display of themselves in various locales to
make sure that the stolen identities would be remembered.
The forged IDs wreck any chain of evidence that leads from the hijackers to those who
controlled them.
So, where are we? Well, it looks like we're about to invade Afghanistan. We don't know for
sure that Osama actually had anything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Towers but
we are still going to invade Afghanistan. We don't even know that Osama is still inside
Afghanistan but we are still going to invade Afghanistan.
It is rapidly becoming clear that Osama was just the excuse; the real goal all along was to
invade Afghanistan, which is, of course, what the US was telling other countries it intended
to do last summer.
So, without proof of any Afghani's guilt, without proof that the prime suspect is even
there, we will invade Afghanistan.
COALITION? WE DON' NEED NO STINKIN' COALITION!
Fridays newspapers carried the story that the United States and Britain were prepared to "go
it alone" in the war against Afghanistan. In an article in London's Financial Times,
spokesmen for Britain and the US suggested that all those other nations would just
complicate things anyway and that perhaps the US and Britain should just do it themselves.
Such bravado scarcely conceals the truth behind this stance; that the coalition of multiple
nations eager to engage in this "crusade" has evaporated, indeed, probably never existed in
the first place. Germany and Italy never did sign on. Iran forbade overflights, and Friday
Russia pulled back from allowing the use of Tajikistan while Saudi Arabia expressed doubt on
allowing the US to use its bases.
There are many reasons why the coalition has refused to come together.
The US has been telling other nations since last summer that it was going to attack
Afghanistan. Most nations, like most people, are sharp enough to realize that the timing of
the World Trade Center attack fits right into that time table.
Other nations realize that Afghanistan is correct in demanding proof of anyone's guilt
before handing them over, and that includes Osama Bin Laden, who is officially a suspect,
nothing more. And the US doesn't have any proof about who attacked the World Trade Towers.
Four of the supposedly dead Arab hijackers have turned up alive, one more has been dead for
two years, and with the admission by the US government that the hijackers used stolen
identities for the hijacking and the wild attention-getting parties leading up to them, it's
clear that we do not know who the hijackers were, only who they wished us to think they
were.
Given that the goal of terrorism is (we are told) to force us to abandon our way of life and
our values, a great many people watched to see how George Bush would react to Afghanistan's
request. The moment Bush dismissed the Afghanistan government's request for evidence, Bush
was seen to have discarded the rule of law as well as the basic American principles of
needing evidence to prosecute (or extradite) someone. Indeed Bush, with his "Give us what we
want or else" rhetoric, sounded more like a terrorist than a President.
Most nations are sharp enough to realize that Osama Bin Laden could very well still be
woring for the CIA, continuing a long pattern of American foreign policy-by-proxy,
maintaining control of the region and its oil by stirring up constant trouble.
Declaring a war on terrorism and those who support it is a very fuzzy goal. Nobody knows
where the bombs will fall once they get going, and most people still remember the wonderful
target selection jobs that blew up a Sudanese aspirin factory. Nobody wants to join in a
"crusade" that might make their own pharmacies a target for a cruise missile.
Bush has declared that a major portion of the "crusade" will be covert teams sneaking into
other countries to blow things up and assassinate people. No matter what name we may call
it, it will still look and feel like terrorism to everyone else and can only escalate the
conflicts. And most other nations know the CIA has been playing these games all along. In
1985, authorized by William Casey, the CIA planted a car bomb near a mosque in Beirut to
kill Sheik Mohammed Hossein Fadlallah, a muslim cleric. The bomb missed the Sheik but killed
80 people, including children. Incidents like these underscore the United States' "It's okay
when we do it, but bad when you do it" as the rankest of hypocrisy.
For these and many more reasons, the ardor to get into George Bush's crusade has cooled. The
US and Britain are trying to put the best face on it they can, but the fact is that the
facade of this being a multi-lateral fight against injustice is gone. This is good news.
While there will be bloodshed and violence, it will not be the major threat to world peace
it may have been since one cannot have a world war if the rest of the world refuses to show
up.
Having painted himself into a corner with his war-rhetoric, and needing to distract the
American people from an economy that was poised for a melt-down long before the attacks on
the World Trade Towers, Bush will have to move forward, to find some way to pour enough
young gladiators into the Afghani arena to satiate the mob's list for prime-time
live-and-in-color blood. In the end, it is hoped, the war if Afghan will be much like Desert
Storm. We'll blow up a lot of desert, kill 5 times as many goats as people, declare victory
and go home leaving everything pretty much as it was to begin with. We'll waste a lot of
money, but I prefer that than wasting the lives of our children.
So, the coalition faw down go boom. What will Bush do now to bolster up his "crusade"?
One thing to consider; if those who attacked the World Trade Towers to ignite a war fail to
get the war they desire, be prepared for more staged terror incidents in the days to come.
Okay, so just who was on those aircraft? In the rush to sell an invasion of Afghanistan, our
government and media have been waving a bunch of middle eastern faces at us on the TV;
photos of the dangerous hijackers who ploughed their stolen aircraft into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. Flight 93 was supposedly flown by Captain Saeed al-Ghamdi and a
second hijacker named Bukhari, while Abdulrahman al-Omari was supposed to be at the controls
of flight 11. Going from these suspects, links are being created to point the finger of
blame at various targets, including but not limited to Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, etc. Ah,
but the best laid plans gang aft aglay and there's a problem! Mr. al-Omari, a pilot with
Saudi Airlines published a great article detailing the strange financial linkages between
the Bush family and the Bin Ladens. Then, as now, the media remains the propaganda arm of
the government. Proven media lies, often in support of a war.