“We are in an information war and we are losing that war.”
This startling admission came on March 2 from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a statement to a US Foreign Policy Priorities committee meeting, in which she was defending her departmental budget.
"Al Jazeera is winning”, said Hillary Clinton, “The Chinese have opened up a global English language and multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English language network”.
In October last year, the chairman of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors stated that his organisation needs to fight its "enemies":
Yet overwhelmingly I notice that coverage of the US by Russia Today is coming not from Moscow, but from the truth movement and the alternative media in the US itself. On November 17 last year, Alex Jones told Max Keiser that as from about two years ago, people trust alternative media more than they trust mainstream media, and more people now get their news from alternative media than they do from old-line corporate media.
Al Jazeera was quite pleased at Hillary Clinton’s admission that people turn to them to get the “real news”.
So if the US truth movement is making such headway in the US, why can’t we in the UK? As in the US, the UK 9/11 truth movement is a loose network of groups and individuals. At my very first meeting on December 13, 2006, David Shayler explained that it had not been set up as a single membership association because it would – not could – be infiltrated and dismantled. We did, however, have a national coordinating committee, which broke up in quarreling, and we used to have monthly meetings in London with over 50 people present, which now, it seems, is no longer possible. Wherever you look, it’s the same picture, and yet we struggle on.
The point of Western propaganda was summed up by the Labour Party’s late Richard Crossman: “The way to carry out good propaganda is never to appear to be carrying it out at all”.
A US National Security Council Directive in 1950 stated that the most effective kind of propaganda was the kind where “the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own”.
Those quotes come from the introduction of a very revealing book by historan Frances Stonor Saunders called ‘Who paid the piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War’.
The Cultural Cold War was a secret programme of cultural propaganda in Western Europe, a central feature of which was to advance the claim that it did not exist. This was at a time when the British MI5 didn’t officially exist.
I think the reason that the 9/11 truth movement in the UK is kept under control, as well as some other movements I am familiar with, is simple: British propaganda is the best in the world.
So I was interested to see that on 11-12 September last year four hundred people attended a seminar in New York on the topic ‘How the world changed after 9/11’.
There was an impressive array of speakers:
Dr. Katherine Albrecht, talked about tracking individuals and the hugh databases that are being built up. “The fourth ammendent restricts the government’s ability to get into your personal information, but nothing restricts the ability of corporations to get into your personal information”, she stated. She said Stalin understood well how to identify people who were stepping out of the norm, and that in the US they are creating very similar things today. I wasn’t so sure about her claims on RFID, the so-called ‘spychips’. They are, after all, low-power radio frequency chips, which have antennas and can be jammed, or blocked with metal foil, but the overall trend is nevertheless worrying.
The Chinese are planning to track all Beijing citizens by means of their mobile phones. The paper edition of The Times devotes a whole page to that, using the word ‘paranoia’ twice, when refering to the Chinese government, as if it couldn’t happen in London.
If you don’t want your internet searching to be tracked and recorded, an alternative to Google is ‘http://startpage.com’. Their home page does indeed state that they retain no data.
Alex Jones told Max Keiser in his interview on November 17 last year that his Infowars had been blocked by Google the previous week. So perhaps StartPage is good for finding black matter in cyberspace.
The next speaker at the seminar was former MI5 officer Annie Machon, who gave a summary of the UK sitation.
“What are you worrying about, Americans?”, she asked, “At least you have a constitution to shred. We don’t have that in Britain”. MI6 has become a state sponsor of terror, she told the audience, Britain is the CCTV capital of the world, 800 public bodies have power to eavesdrop on our communications, and now the police are acquiring military-style spy drones to be put into force in 2011 on the South Coast. On Fascism, she said it was all in place, and that we were “pretty well there”. We can’t rely on the judges and the courts to protect our basic rights, she said. She explained that some of the measures that were implemented supposedly to protect us from terrorism could have the opposite effect; we could find a situation when terrorists can build a bomb which goes off only when it identifies a US passport. She finished with: “At the rate we’re going we’re not going to have a democracy to fight for soon… Let’s go on and change the world”.
Recently, the Pentagon has developed tiny spy planes which could mimic birds and insects.
“The application of such technology could completely revolutionize warfare and the art of intelligence gathering. Unfortunately, it will also fuel greater suspicion and paranoia regarding government domestic spying efforts. Let’s just hope none of these sorts of devices unexpectedly turn up inside any U.S. home.”
Will hope be enough? In London, the 7/7 inquest completed its public hearing of witnesses, and this was widely reported on various news channels in the UK. They focused on the human tragedy of the aftermath of the bombings rather than evidence of the cause. We were told that we will have to wait for the verdict. I thought the verdict had been declared by Judge Lady Justice Hallett right at the beginning: the 7/7 Four were guilty.
The general impression given is that the event was accompanied by a whole series of cockups, but the main point made by the coroner in the final session seems to have been concerned with linguistics:
“I just think that you people at the top need to say, we have to communicate with people in plain English.", she said.
The transcripts and evidence has been made public via the inquest’s website.
It seems that the government and MI5 want a say in the style of the verdict, arguing that by law only "brief, neutral and factual" verdicts can be recorded:
But the bereaved families said the coroner should be allowed to go into much greater detail about how the deaths came about.
They do not want a "sterile" conclusion that their loved ones were unlawfully killed that fails to rule on whether the security agencies could have prevented the atrocities or whether the emergency services could have saved more lives, their lawyers said.
Lawyers for families of those killed in the London 7/7 bombings are suggesting that MI5 is trying to gag justice by restricting the verdicts of the inquest into the attacks. I’d like to know what business it is of the Government or MI5. They did, after all, choose Lady Justice Hallett because they felt they needed a very senior judge to conduct the inquest, owing to the exceptional circumstances of the case. So why are they now trying to tell her her job?
March 7 saw another bail hearing for A J Hill, or Muad’Dip, the author of ‘7/7 Ripple Effect’. For the third time he was prevented by Wandworth Prison authorities from attending his own bail hearing. I was amazed that this could happen when I first heard about it from Nick, who had just visited John Hill in Wandsworth, after his second bail hearing. It is, however, all written up on John Hill’s trial website (http://mtrial.org/).
Apparently, the judge said that he would not grant him bail without him being in court. I tried to establish who his local MP would be, and found a piece in Hansard on prisoner voting rights (Hansard, House of Commons, 23 Nov 2010 : Column 152), in which Mark Pritchard MP asked the Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke:
“But is there not a contradiction at the heart of the Government's policy? Currently, all Members of Parliament represent all prisoners living in prisons within their constituency, yet the Secretary of State has said that they will be represented by Members of the constituencies where they were last registered. That contradiction needs to be resolved if representation of prisoners by prisoners (sic – presumably: by MPs) is to be taken seriously.”
Kenneth Clarke replied:
“I think there is some confusion in the House about the convention that applies, which both I and my hon. Friend should resolve-although it is not my responsibility to resolve it. I take the view that I represent my constituents when they are in prison wherever it is that they are imprisoned, but I know that other MPs take the view that they represent every resident of a prison in their constituency. Perhaps we should resolve the parliamentary conventions on this matter at the same time as we have a look at which prisoners might have voting rights.”
I therefore wrote to the MP for Wandsworth, in order to put the two in contact over the matter, but the MP’s personal assistant phoned me to say that he did not represent prisoners. What a mess! I was wondering whether John Hill would be released now that the public inquest hearings are over, or whether they will hold him until the end of the inquests into the deaths of the 7/7 Four.
The inquest’s website states: “The Coroner has jurisdiction over all 56 inquests which arise from the bombings on 7 July 2005. The Coroner has decided that the inquests into the deaths of the 52 members of the public killed on 7 July 2005 should be resumed and heard together. The inquests into the deaths of Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Jermaine Lindsay remain adjourned”.
I await the continuation of that inquest with interest. That inquest could be even more interesting than the current 7/7 inquest, in particular because of recent concern over the role of Mohammed Junaid Babar,
a US Muslim who is said to have set up training camps in north-west Pakistan where he taught bomb-making to supposed 7/7 bombing mastermind Mohammed Sidique Khan, but who was in fact a US informant, cooperating with US authorities even before he was arrested in 2004.
where a video is presented of the father of one of the victims, commenting on the implications. Graham Foulkes said that it looked as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was up to in Pakistan, adding that that was a very, very serious matter:
“I'm really horrified and upset. It seems to me that the Americans were tacitly supporting a major international terrorist who set up and ran a training camp which Khan attended”, he explained.
Whether Khan was really a terrorist or just an actor in the 7/7 security exercises, it seems that the security services will have some very serious questions to answer if the inquest on the 7/7 Four goes ahead. Tony Blair tried to introduce detention without trial for up to 90 days. The Muad’Dib case demonstrates that we now have detention without trial for, so far, 150 days. The longer this goes on, the stronger becomes the case for a wide-ranging review of fundamental human rights in this country.
Even if John Hill is found not guilty, 150 days of incarceration would make anyone think twice before sending information to a court of law under amicus curiae.
That effectively quashes a further legal right in the UK.
Then there are legal questions on statements of the guilt of the 7/7 Four to the potential jurors at the Kingston trial, and at the beginning of the inquest into the other 52 who died in the attacks. What happened to John Hill looks to me suspiciously like arbitrary arrest. That in itself should be causing deep concern. Then there is the issue of prisoner representation in Parliament. If they don’t have the vote, then no-one is interested in representing them. This makes a solid case for all prisoners having the vote, because even those who are critical of the powers-that-be have rights. If they can do this to John Hill, then they can do it to any of us.
There is another crazy aspect of this case, involving the right of free speech. According to the website, a condition of his bail in Ireland was that he “shall not communicate with any party in England or Wales save for wholly personal reasons or save for reasons wholly connected with the church and organisation known as The Way”.
This surely has to be an admission that his arrest was political. This should now be an issue to be raised with the Irish authorities and the EU authorities as a matter of human rights.
“In a series of breaking stories this month, more information is coming out exposing the true nature of the false flag attacks in Oklahoma City in 1995, in New York and Washington in 2001, and in London in 2005”.
In the same report they show former US Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, denying that $2.3 trillion had actually been lost in the defence budget, but claiming that it just couldn’t be tracked by the complex systems. He also denied any knowledge of Building 7:
All this bears out Annie Machon’s statement on Fascism, that we are “pretty well there”, and that we can’t rely on the judges and the courts to protect our basis rights. I used to wonder in my youth how many people around me at work would have been state aparachniks had we been in the Soviet Union rather than London. Now I am getting worried.
The head of the London School of Economics has resigned because of the close links with Muammar Gaddafi, which he developed at the university. An investigation is now to be instigated.
Simon Jenkins, writing now in The Guardian, gives an overview, saying that “The school's association with Libya's leader is just an extreme version of the predicament now facing all UK universities”.
When Tony Blair told the House of Commons after 9/11 that those who carried out the 9/11 attacks were limited not by any sense of morality, and that their limits were only practical and technical (Hansard HoC 14 September 2001, vol 372), what would Tony Blair himself have been doing, had he been born in Libya and had not been limited rules of democracy?
Yet many in the UK who know about the deception of 9/11 and 7/7 react as if nothing had anything to do with them. It has everything to do with them, especially if they are young. If John Hill is correct in his reconstruction of 7/7, then we could be dealing with state murder, as, indeed, we could in the case of weapons expert Dr David Kelly, whose long overdue inquest must be about to be announced any time now. I was once in a discussion with a group of friends, in which one of them mentioned “the excesses of Stalin”. I would have been incredulous if I had known he would turn on me fifteen or so years later, but I thought that was odd at the time. “You mean it’s alright to kill a few people, but not millions?” I thought afterwards. You could almost write a headline: “State murder: not many dead”.
Whenever democracy is subverted, whether at the level of governments or tiny membership associations, it’s important to take a stand. Let’s have the courage to fight for our democracy now. If we don’t, will we have the courage to do it later?
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