Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, August 28, 2010
The corporate media wasted little time in seizing upon controversial Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s comments about Osama bin Laden being a U.S. spy to deride the claim as a far-fetched conspiracy theory, and yet the fact that Bin Laden was once a CIA protégé and has been used time and again to the benefit of the U.S. government’s geopolitical agenda is a documented fact.
It sounds like Fidel Castro has been reading Prison Planet.com, but the Guardian claims that the notorious revolutionary has “gone too far” in claiming Osama Bin Laden is a U.S. double agent.
The Cuban leader cites Wikileaks for his contention that Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset, but he went further in pointing out the fact that Bin Laden was routinely used by the Bush administration as a convenient boogeyman.
“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”
Indeed, this was a phenomenon that we documented for years, writing numerous different articles pointing out that whenever Bush was in political trouble, Bin Laden or one of his Al-Qaeda commanders would pop up at the most opportune moment to give Bush cover and allow him to grandstand as a trusted leader in the war on terror.
The most infamous example of this occurred just days before the 2004 presidential election, when Bin Laden appeared in a dubious video tape and attacked Bush, implicitly siding with his opponent John Kerry. Bin Laden’s chastisement of Bush resulted in a 6 point swing, enabling Bush to seal a second term in office. Both Bush and Kerry attributed the result to the intervention of the Bin Laden tape. Veteran newscaster Walter Cronkiteeven went as far as to charge that the whole thing smacked of a set-up orchestrated by Karl Rove.
“I thought it was going to help,” Bush told Bill Sammon, Senior White House Correspondent for the Washington Examiner. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”
But it wasn’t just before the election that Bush enlisted the help of Bin Laden to boost his political capital. Before every single state of the union speech, either Bin Laden or his right-hand man Al-Zawahiri would pop up and publicly slam Bush, after which Bush would then cite their comments in his speech as a reason for why Americans need to continue to support their commander in chief.
Furthermore, the organization that released the Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri tapes, IntelCenter, is nothing more than a Pentagon-run front group for the Central Intelligence Agency, as we exhaustively documented in a series of reports spanning many years.
IntelCenter was caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.
Pointing out that Bin Laden was used as a political tool by the Bush administration, as Castro commented, is to state the blindingly obvious – the only thing that could be judged as “far-fetched,” as the media characterizes it, would be to deny this patent fact.
Castro’s contention that Bin Laden is a U.S. spy or a CIA stooge is also backed up by a mountain of evidence.
Of course, it’s an undisputed fact that the Central Intelligence Agency trained and funded Bin Laden and the rest of the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards.
Distinguished former FBI agent Ted Gunderson revealed that Bin Laden had visited Sherman Oaks, California in 1986 under his CIA code name Tim Osman as part of Bin Laden’s role in helping the U.S. government fight a proxy war with the Soviets.
According to several reports, first arising out of a leak from the French secret service, Bin Laden met with two CIA agents at the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, just two months before the September 11 attacks. Despite the fact that Bin Laden was already on the FBI’s most wanted list for his alleged role in the Tanzania and Kenya embassy bombings, the CIA agents didn’t apprehend him and indeed later boasted to their colleagues about the privilege of being able to speak with the terror leader.
Indeed, just last year former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds revealed that the U.S. maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
The Bin Ladens and the Bush family enjoyed a decades-long close business relationship via the Carlyle Group and other oil, banking and construction ventures. Salem bin Laden invested $50,000 dollars in George W. Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, through his investment broker James Bath. The business connection of the two families was so tight that on the very morning of 9/11, George H.W. Bush was meeting with Osama bin Laden’s brother, Shafig bin Laden, in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington DC during a Carlyle Group function.
When all air traffic was grounded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the whole family of Osama Bin Laden, the supposed prime suspect behind the attacks, was flown out of the United States under special U.S. government protection in total secrecy.
Given this documented history, Castro is merely invoking common sense when he dismisses Bin Laden as a U.S. asset. No matter how the corporate media try to spin the claim as the rantings of an ageing Communist leader, every possible indication clearly points to the fact that Bin Laden has been working for the Agency from the very beginning.
Sunday, 29 August 2010
Osama bin Laden 'is a bought and paid for CIA agent' claims Cuban leader Fidel Castro
By Daily Mail Reporter
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has claimed Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent.
The country's former president has said that the world's most wanted terrorist always popped up when former US President George W Bush needed to scare the world, and argued that recently published documents on the internet prove it.
Castro told state media: 'Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.
'Bush never lacked for bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate.'
Castro said documents posted on the controversial WikiLeaks website 'effectively proved he (Bin Laden) was a CIA agent.' He did not elaborate further on the claims.
The comments were published today in the Communist party's daily newspaper, Granma.
They were the latest in a series of bold and provocative statements by Castro, who has emerged from exile to warn the planet is on the brink of a nuclear war.
Bizarrely, Castro even predicted that global conflict would mean cancellation of the final rounds of the World Cup in South Africa. He later apologised.
And last week, the 84-year-old began highlighting the work of Lithuanian investigative journalist Daniel Estulin, who he was meeting with when the Bin Laden comments came to light.
During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks.
He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a 'bad actor.'
Mr Estulin, is a well-known conspiracy theorist and wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors.
The secretive nature of the meetings and prominence of some members - including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and senior U.S. and European officials have led some to speculate that it operates as a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
Read more:
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has claimed Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent.
The country's former president has said that the world's most wanted terrorist always popped up when former US President George W Bush needed to scare the world, and argued that recently published documents on the internet prove it.
Castro told state media: 'Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.
'Bush never lacked for bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate.'
Castro said documents posted on the controversial WikiLeaks website 'effectively proved he (Bin Laden) was a CIA agent.' He did not elaborate further on the claims.
The comments were published today in the Communist party's daily newspaper, Granma.
They were the latest in a series of bold and provocative statements by Castro, who has emerged from exile to warn the planet is on the brink of a nuclear war.
Bizarrely, Castro even predicted that global conflict would mean cancellation of the final rounds of the World Cup in South Africa. He later apologised.
And last week, the 84-year-old began highlighting the work of Lithuanian investigative journalist Daniel Estulin, who he was meeting with when the Bin Laden comments came to light.
During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks.
He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a 'bad actor.'
Mr Estulin, is a well-known conspiracy theorist and wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors.
The secretive nature of the meetings and prominence of some members - including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and senior U.S. and European officials have led some to speculate that it operates as a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
Read more:
Friday, 27 August 2010
Land value tax - Andy Burnham joins the advocates
Why a land value tax is a sound socialist policy:
[An] immense financial and economic crisis into which the world has fallen. So what lay behind it? The answer is the credit-fuelled property cycle. The people of the US, UK, Spain and Ireland became feverish speculators in land. Today, the toxic waste poisons the entire world economy.
In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable, reinforced by a restrictive planning regime and generous tax treatment – property taxes are low and gains tax-free.
So I am a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth. This appropriation of the rise in the value of land is not just unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth? It has obviously dire consequences.
Martin Wolf, FT, July 8 2010
[An] immense financial and economic crisis into which the world has fallen. So what lay behind it? The answer is the credit-fuelled property cycle. The people of the US, UK, Spain and Ireland became feverish speculators in land. Today, the toxic waste poisons the entire world economy.
In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable, reinforced by a restrictive planning regime and generous tax treatment – property taxes are low and gains tax-free.
So I am a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth. This appropriation of the rise in the value of land is not just unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth? It has obviously dire consequences.
Martin Wolf, FT, July 8 2010
Friday, 20 August 2010
Israel's Facebook racist: "I would gladly kill them all"
Remember Lynndie England - the US GI who posed with brutalised Arab prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, exposing the dark heart of America's war in Iraq?
Now Israel, once again, shows its own dark racist heart on Facebook, in the pictures of IDF poster girl Eden Abergil. She posted loads of pictures on Facebook with her smiling and making fun of blindfolded and bound Palestinian prisoners.
Her blog embarrassed the IDF but Eden has no regrets. Here she shows why she doesn't get it - basically she hates Arabs.
Ms. Abergil responded to criticism, making it clear that she’s not taking the issue too seriously.
“No honey, they didn’t ruin my life. I can’t afford to have Arab—lovers ruin the perfect life I’m leading!!! I am not sorry and I do not regret it.”
Another surfer, Shai, responded to Ms. Abergil and claimed that she failed to grasp the meaning and implication of her actions.
“It’s called humanism,” he wrote, prompting Ms. Abergil to respond: “I’m not humane towards murderers.”
“In war there are no rules,” she wrote.
She later became more explicit, “I hate Arabs and wish them all the worst. I would gladly kill them all and even butcher them; one cannot forget their actions.”
Referring to the possibility that the images could injure Israel’s image in the international arena, Ms. Abergil said, “We will always be attacked. Whatever we do, we will always be attacked.”
IDF described the former soldier’s behaviour “shameful” which brings to disrepute the country and the army. But a Facebook support group has also been established calling itself ‘We are all with Eden Abergil’, and currently numbering 600 people.
The members have demanded that other soldiers post pictures similar to the ones uploaded by Ms. Abergil.
The former soldier has also approved hundreds of new Facebook friend requests that have been pouring in since the story broke causing a storm worldwide.
This kind of racist hate speak has been seen a lot on Facebook in Israel. When a human rights activist Edna Kanti appeared on Israel's Big Brother earlier this year, 100,000 Israelis joined a Facebook group against her, with posts full of violence against her as an 'Arab lover'.
100 days that shook the world
With the first 100 days of the Coalition marked by a blitzkrieg approach to tax and spend policies, David Cameron must rank as one of history's more unlikely revolutionaries. Cameron was elected as Tory leader in the mould of a Blairite reformer. He certainly gave the jaded Conservative brand a makeover, returning the party to electability. Of course, after a decade of Blair, many asked, do we need another snake oil salesman offering us sunshine and apple pie? The last time we went along with such promises, we got Iraq and government by spin doctor.
Leaving aside whether or not one approves of the Coalition government's policy agenda, the contrast with the early Blair years is remarkable. Blair had a thumping majority and could, if he had been so inclined to, have used his massive majority to usher in a new socialist dawn. Instead the party, steeled through 18 years of opposition and four election defeats, spent the first two years sticking tightly to the previous government's spending policies, and declaring loudly its economic prudence and orthodoxy. Of course 2010 is not 1997, and the global economic crisis presents a very different backdrop for a new government. But it is very difficult to argue that the government has a mandate for a massive shrinking of the welfare state. The Tories went into bed with the Liberals, and one might have expected a cautious centrism and a gradualist approach to deficit reduction. Instead we have Osborne's fire and brimstone warnings over deficit disaster - which are more by way of assertion than any proof of a Greek style crisis - and a full frontal assault on Gordon Brown's expanded welfare state.
Cameron and Osborne have taken their approach out of the Lenin and Trotsky school of turning a crisis into an opportunity for revolutionary change. It will be recalled by historians that the Bolsheviks were the minority party in the 1917 constituency assembly, with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries winning the majority of seats. In the end, though, Lenin's agenda was the one that triumphed. The parallel may seem crazy, and one has to hope that Britain won't descend into its own civil war when the cuts begin to bite.
Turning the clock forward to the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, and the contrast between Cameron-Osborne and Gordon Brown is clear. Brown, the man who penned the Red Book of Socialism in the early 1970s, saw his primary role in the biggest crisis of the system in 80 years, to save it. The nationalisations that took place were not the kind advocated by his younger self. The state-owned banks were not turned into people's cooperatives, rather, they were left to their own devices, with some mild exhortations to lend to small businesses, but now saved from collapse through a massive injection of taxpayers' money. Brown did not want to shake up the system, he did not see an opportunity for a once in a lifetime makeover of capitalism into a new model of tamed finance. No, he saw to it that the status quo survived. This cautious, conservative approach was lauded by markets and the IMF. However, it did not save him. Neither the electorate nor the Tory press thanked him for his efforts, and he was history.
A lot of people on the left saw the financial crisis as a clear sign that the 'neoliberal' era that started with Margaret Thatcher had come to an end. But something was missing. There was no plan or will to seize the opportunity to overhaul the system in a radical way. That task has now been handed to the Conservatives, and they have seized it with gusto. Except their version of revolution is very different. They aim to break up most of what remained of the welfare state that has grown steadily since 1945 and, from a certain pro-market perspective, has become so bloated that it is undermining the foundations of an entrepreneurial society. They aim to do nothing less than restore Britain to its entrepreneurial roots by finishing the work begun by Margaret Thatcher and taking an axe to welfarism. Thatcher was too busy fighting the trade unions and privatising state-owned industries to get round to that.
Cameron has made it abundantly clear, in the pages of The Sun and elsewhere, that he understands how limited the opportunity is to remake Britain. Political goodwill is a time-limited commodity. Labour doesn't have a new leader until September. Unless the Coalition splits, Labour will not have a crack at taking power again until 2015. And the record shows that Labour is fundamentally unwilling to reverse the structural changes brought in by successive Conservative governments. Cameron and Osborne must be betting on that, and that once the forces of entrepreneurship are unleashed, there will be no going back.
Leaving aside whether or not one approves of the Coalition government's policy agenda, the contrast with the early Blair years is remarkable. Blair had a thumping majority and could, if he had been so inclined to, have used his massive majority to usher in a new socialist dawn. Instead the party, steeled through 18 years of opposition and four election defeats, spent the first two years sticking tightly to the previous government's spending policies, and declaring loudly its economic prudence and orthodoxy. Of course 2010 is not 1997, and the global economic crisis presents a very different backdrop for a new government. But it is very difficult to argue that the government has a mandate for a massive shrinking of the welfare state. The Tories went into bed with the Liberals, and one might have expected a cautious centrism and a gradualist approach to deficit reduction. Instead we have Osborne's fire and brimstone warnings over deficit disaster - which are more by way of assertion than any proof of a Greek style crisis - and a full frontal assault on Gordon Brown's expanded welfare state.
Cameron and Osborne have taken their approach out of the Lenin and Trotsky school of turning a crisis into an opportunity for revolutionary change. It will be recalled by historians that the Bolsheviks were the minority party in the 1917 constituency assembly, with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries winning the majority of seats. In the end, though, Lenin's agenda was the one that triumphed. The parallel may seem crazy, and one has to hope that Britain won't descend into its own civil war when the cuts begin to bite.
Turning the clock forward to the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, and the contrast between Cameron-Osborne and Gordon Brown is clear. Brown, the man who penned the Red Book of Socialism in the early 1970s, saw his primary role in the biggest crisis of the system in 80 years, to save it. The nationalisations that took place were not the kind advocated by his younger self. The state-owned banks were not turned into people's cooperatives, rather, they were left to their own devices, with some mild exhortations to lend to small businesses, but now saved from collapse through a massive injection of taxpayers' money. Brown did not want to shake up the system, he did not see an opportunity for a once in a lifetime makeover of capitalism into a new model of tamed finance. No, he saw to it that the status quo survived. This cautious, conservative approach was lauded by markets and the IMF. However, it did not save him. Neither the electorate nor the Tory press thanked him for his efforts, and he was history.
A lot of people on the left saw the financial crisis as a clear sign that the 'neoliberal' era that started with Margaret Thatcher had come to an end. But something was missing. There was no plan or will to seize the opportunity to overhaul the system in a radical way. That task has now been handed to the Conservatives, and they have seized it with gusto. Except their version of revolution is very different. They aim to break up most of what remained of the welfare state that has grown steadily since 1945 and, from a certain pro-market perspective, has become so bloated that it is undermining the foundations of an entrepreneurial society. They aim to do nothing less than restore Britain to its entrepreneurial roots by finishing the work begun by Margaret Thatcher and taking an axe to welfarism. Thatcher was too busy fighting the trade unions and privatising state-owned industries to get round to that.
Cameron has made it abundantly clear, in the pages of The Sun and elsewhere, that he understands how limited the opportunity is to remake Britain. Political goodwill is a time-limited commodity. Labour doesn't have a new leader until September. Unless the Coalition splits, Labour will not have a crack at taking power again until 2015. And the record shows that Labour is fundamentally unwilling to reverse the structural changes brought in by successive Conservative governments. Cameron and Osborne must be betting on that, and that once the forces of entrepreneurship are unleashed, there will be no going back.
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