June 2012
NOTE: This newsletter contains some important and urgent information whichis being suppressed by the mainstream media. Please feel free to distribute it to anyone you feel may be interested.
The head of Britain's internal security service MI5, Jonathan Evans, talking about the possibility of a terrorist event during the London Olympic Games, has stated that the national threat level is assessed to be SUBSTANTIAL - meaning that an attack is a "strong possibility". He also stated: "The fact that there have been no successful al Qaida related terrorist attacks in Britain since 2005 is the result of a great deal of hard and creative work by the security, intelligence and Police services". Yet what did happen on 7 July 2005? (What we do know is that much of what we, the public, were told turned out to be untrue). I wonder what "creative work" means.
Jonathan Evans was giving the Lord Mayor's Annual Defence and Security Lecture in the City of London on 25 June 2012, titled 'The Olympics and Beyond'. The last time he had given a public lecture was on 16 September 2010, when he told the Worshipful Company of Security Professionals: "There will be a major security operation to support the Games, but we should not underestimate the challenge of mounting the Games securely in an environment with a high terrorist threat, the first time this has been attempted". The first time this has been attempted, he says!
A resident of Newham, where much of the Olympic Park is situated, writes on the Games Monitor website that "a sense of foreboding has descended on many of the people who, like me, live and work in Newham in east London". He points out that 24% of the residents are Muslim, and that during Ramadan the streets of Newham are likely to be very busy late into the evening. Against this background there will be "the largest peacetime military and security operation since 1945". But his main concern is the massive policing operation and its impact on local people. Police officers will have the power to instruct groups of two or more people who live outside the area to leave for up to 24 hours. They will have curfew powers for unaccompanied people under the age of 16. "Coupled with a range of stop and search powers under criminal, anti-social behaviour and anti-terrorist legislation, NMP's [Newham MonitoringProject's] fear is that young people in particular and ethnic minorities in general will be subjected to a level of intrusive policing that is likely to lead [to] arrests and criminalisation", he explains.
Why would anyone want to stage the Olympic Games under such conditions if their aim was not to create a police state?
Temporary measures in politics usually turn out not to be so temporary after all. Indeed, Jonathan Evans said in his recent lecture, "We are also anticipating an Olympic security legacy after the Games". I suggested in my last newsletter that there could be a security crack-down at the time ofthe Olympics whether or not there was a terrorist event. The Government has created enough fear in the minds of the public as to be able to take all sorts of measures to limit our freedoms. To see what the latest security restrictions are, see the Big Brother Watch website.
If we have not yet been told the truth on the London bombings of 7/7, how can we trust the Government, or MI5, in statements on some forthcoming terror event in London? Is MI5 telling the truth about Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism? My previous reports on the two main government think tanks, Policy Exchange and Demos, suggest that there is gross deception on the terrorist threat supposedly posed by Muslims in the UK. Indeed, I have reported on the sacking of South Yorkshire Police's Principal Intelligence Officer, Tony Farrell, for concluding that the threat of terrorism from UK Muslims is negligible compared to that coming from our own government.
The issue of 7/7 needs to be investigated, just as 9/11 needs to be investigated. According to an article appearing on the Muslim Brotherhood's website, IkhwanWeb , on 15 September 2007, the now newly elected Presidentof Egypt, Dr. Mohamed Morsi, stated on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:
"The US administration has never presented any evidences on the identity of those who committed that incident. The Muslim Brotherhood and others demanded a transparent trial with clear evidence and to have court rulings. We confirm that this isn't a defense to those who committed these actions but we only seek the truth".
The article also makes clear that immediately after the 9/11 attacks happened, the Muslim Brotherhood condemned them, seeing them as "totally divorced from any religion or creed, actions which are totally rejected by Islam".
According to an article in the Washington Times on 31 May this year, Dr Morsi in 2008 called on the US to provide "scientific" proof for its account of events.
"We have officially demanded a fair trial for 9/11 suspects and the issuance of a detailed scientific report about the attacks, but the U.S. administration did not respond till now", Mr. Morsi told Ikhwanweb, the Washington Times reports. "This requires a huge scientific conference that is devoted to analyzing what caused the attack against a massive structure like the two WTC towers," he said, referring to the World Trade Center. "Should this happen, we will stand firmly against whoever committed this horrific crime against innocent civilians". However,the Washington Times reports negatively about the personality of Dr Morsi,and adds that Osama bin Laden admitted his terror group's involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks in a videotaped message in October 2004. The website Muslims for 9/11 Truth reproduces this article but refutes the statement on Bin Laden, stating: "False! Bin Laden repeatedly denied responsibility for 9/11, deplored the attacks, called them un-Islamic, and blamed 'some people with their own agenda' and 'American Jews' for the attacks in repeated statements before his death in December, 2001". The same website states: "Add Mohamed Morsi to the lists of heads of state who openly support 9/11truth. Presidents Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, former PMMahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and Fidel Castro of Cuba preceded him".
Many other issues involving the UK security services need to be investigated, too. Just from the issues reported in my news letters one could begin to wonder whether the people in the United Kingdom may be more secure, and democracy may be better safeguarded, if MI5, MI6 and ACPO (The Association of Chief Police Officers) ceased to exist.
Recently, Brighton's Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, made a sensational revelation in Parliament, concerning undercover police officer Bob Lambert,who had infiltrated the Animal Liberation Movement, and who had been unmasked, as reported in my earlier newsletters. On Wednesday, 13 June, she told parliament: "In July 1987, three branches of Debenhams, in Luton,Romford and Harrow, were targeted by the ALF in co-ordinated, simultaneous incendiary attacks because the shops were selling fur products. Sheppard and Clarke were tried and found guilty, but the culprit who planted the incendiary device in the Harrow store was never caught. Bob Lambert's exposure as an undercover police officer has prompted Geoff Sheppard to speak out about that Harrow attack. Sheppard alleges that Lambert was the one who planted the third device and was involved in the ALF's co-ordinatedcampaign"
She went on to quote a statement by Sheppard, in which he said: "There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store in Harrow. I specifically remember him giving an explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device." Sheppard also alleged that the intelligence for the raid was so precise that it was now obvious that it "came from Bob Lambert", who knew that the pair were going to be there making another set of incendiary devices.
Caroline Lucas talked of police obstructionism in investigating the issues of undercover officers, including the holding of investigations in secret, and concluded that she hoped that the Government would "agree to set up a far reaching public inquiry into undercover police infiltrators and informers, looking back over past practices as well as looking forward".
In a Guardian blog, Rob Evans writes (Monday 25 June 2012 15.25 BST): "By any measure, the allegation is startling and serious, and the public should know whether it is true or not. So who is investigating?" - "The answer to that question is typically opaque".
A similar case has now arisen in Germany concerning the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, in which Palestinian militants with a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist group called 'Black September' took nine Israeli athletes hostage and demanded the release of several hundred Palestinians from Israeli prisons. When the police attempted to free the Israelis at the Fürstenfeldbruck military airport, where they were being held in two helicopters, the terrorists murdered all of their hostages. A police officer also died in the firefight. Three of the Palestinians survived. That was the official account, but the German magazine Spiegel has now come up with new evidence.
"Though it was never proved, left-wing extremists were suspected of working with the Palestinian terrorists behind the operation. But previously unreleased files seen by SPIEGEL prove that neo-Nazis were involved instead -- and officials knew about it", wrote theSpiegel on 17 June
The previously classified documents were provided by the German domestic intelligence service (BfV) in response to a request by SPIEGEL. "This evidence practically proved that the suspicion that German neo-Nazi Pohland Abramowski were collaborating with the Palestinian terrorists was in fact true", says Spiegel. According to the article, Pohl claims to have had no knowledge of the planned attack in Munich at the time. He claims that there was talk of hostage-taking in Germany in which the Palestinians planned to exchange 20 Israelis for some 200 fellow Palestinian militants in Israeli prisons. "The Palestinians insisted that it would be a bloodless incident, and they asked the two Germans what they thought the Germanpublic would think about it", Spiegel reports. "The German courts treated Pohl and Abramowski with astonishing leniency. ... . Only four days after sentencing, Pohl was released and fled to Beirut", Spiegel reported.
Assuming that Pohl is inverting the truth, the pattern emerging here is consistent with that of Operation Gladio, in which protest groups intending perhaps to create minor diversions find themselves involved in something much bigger and more sinister than they had ever imagined, having been infiltrated and manipulated by undercover agents of the security forces. So if it has taken 40 years for an investigation of the Munich Olympics attackto be announced, how long will it take to get a proper investigation into the London terror attacks of 7 July 2005?
I attended the Employment Appeal Tribunal hearing in London for the case of Tony Farrell, in which he is appealing against unfair dismissal from South Yorkshire Police when, in 2010 he reached the conclusion that the risk to the public of terrorism from Islamic extremists was negligible compared with that from our own government. In September 2011 an employment tribunal in Sheffield dismissed his case, and on Friday 15 June his appeal to that was heard in London. The essence of his appeal was that it should have been plainly obvious to the Employment Tribunal judge that he was being poorly represented by his legal team; they had advised him to appeal on the grounds that he had been dismissed because of his religious beliefs rather than for making protected disclosures in the process of refusing to carry out a management instruction which would have been unlawful. Indeed, when Tony Farrell broke the news of his story at a meeting of our Keep Talking group in London some of us expressed concern about the religious discrimination angle. Part way through his Sheffield hearing, truth campaigner Ian Crane, who was not legally qualified, tookover Tony's representation with more credible argumentation.
Tony's case was dismissed by the judge in London, in a ruling that took ten minutes to prepare and twenty minutes to read out. Essentially, the reason was that the appeal hearing could only consider new points of law,and that there was a precedent which contradicted Tony's case. Clearly, something has gone very wrong with this case.
One point that caught my attention in particular was made by the judge after Tony Farrell's barrister had acknowledged that it was not the job of the tribunal to reach conclusions of fact, meaning that it could only consider points of law, but that the official version of events does not stack up. The judge responded by saying that he was quite right in saying that it was no business of his to judge that issue, adding that Lady Justice Hallett had dealt with that. Lady Justice Hallett had run the inquest into 52 victims of the London bombings, specifically excluding the four Muslim lads widely alleged to have committed the atrocities. It was outside her remit to determine the guilt or innocence of those four. In fact, she stated their guilt right at the beginning of the proceedings,with no examination of the facts. I was surprised that the Employment Appeal Tribunal judge could have made such a comment, just as I had been surprised that Lady Justice Hallett could have made the allegation of guilt before her inquest proceedings had begun. Clearly, something has gone verywrong with this case, too.
I was, however, impressed at the 23-page skeletal argument document ,which Tony had produced. It may or may not have had legal validity, but it does retell the story in a formal way, with the emphasis which it should perhaps have had right from the beginning. The important point for me is that Tony had already been making representation to his employers expressing concern at the statistical method being imposed nationally by the Home Office in producing a Risk Assessment Matrix. He made it known that in his opinion these matrices were flawed, and when applied too generically were nonsensical. An 'Orwellian speak' was creeping in. "And so it was that a new simplified language emerged. Principals were horrified but seemed powerless to stop the madness", the document states. "Blind acceptance of the Government's rhetoric on threat levels would invariably point towards imminent threats from Al Qaeda / Islamic Extremism. Such values fed into the matrix would in turn be used by ACPO to make the case for extra resource allocation to enhance counter terrorism activity under CONTEST II", the document states.
"Trusting what they tell us is a leap of faith. That faith was destroyed once it dawned on the Claimant that the retrospective official narratives of 9/11 and 7/7 were full of very serious distortions and omissions", the document explained. I think this document is an important document in the history of the truth movement, because it describes how the Government was manipulating statistics in order to advance their own version of events, at the same time claiming that the evidence was coming from the professionals. I look forward to seeing this document on some website somewhere. It is of direct relevance to current claims of risks of terrorist attacks coming from Muslim extremists during the Olympic Games, as being put forward by the Government, and MI5.
Journalist Adrian Salbuchi, who is based in Buenos Aires and is a regular contributor to Russia Today, has been trying to draw attention to a 'scenario analysis' published by the Rockefeller Foundation in May 2010. The Rockefeller Foundation is right at the heart of the Establishment in the US, and what they produce has to be taken seriously. He wrote to journalist Tony Gosling, who posted his request on his 9/11 Forum. It read: "Please find below an article that I consider to be very important. Surprisingly (?), it was rejected by those who'normally' publish my works... May I ask you kindly help us to spread this information as far and wide as possible". His article is headed 'Are the London Olympics a target for a False-Flag Attack?'.
He explains that false-flag attacks carry their tell-tale signs, because, when planned, they must include some sort of communication so that those in the know can make sure that neither they nor their associates or loved ones should happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (ED: like Silverstein just happened to be at a doctor's appointment on 9/11 and his son and daughter were late for a meeting at the "Windows on the World" restaurant). "Is somethingalong these lines on Global Power Master drawing boards for the up-coming London O lympics?", he asks. "The question would surely sound ludicrous, were it not for a May 2010 Report issued by The Rockefeller Foundation (RF)and Global Business Network (GBN) that 'predicts' exactly that", he explains. The text of his article reveals that in one of their scenarios they talk of a bombing that kills 13,000 people at the London Olympics.
"Called 'Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development', it carries introductions by RF president Judith Rodin and GBN chairman Peter Schwartz, both members of the powerful New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think-tank, a key geo political planning node of the Global Power structure embedded deep inside the US", writes Adrian Salbuchi. So I looked up the report to see what I could make of it.
I found it was written in the same sort of pseudo-scientific sociological clap-trap that the deceptive reports that I had previously studied by the British think tanks Demos and Policy Exchange had been written in. In his introductory letter, Peter Schwartz writes: "Perhaps most importantly, scenarios give us a new, shared language that deepens our conversations about the future and how we can help to shape it". Indeed, once we can understand the language they are written in, we can understand their purpose and their warnings. The report does the usual thing of starting off in what Adrian Salbuchi calls "rather nondescript terms". In fact, the first eight pages are carefully preparing the reader for a set of false alternatives, the alternatives which the authors wish to guide us into, but ignoring any other alternatives that any normal person might think of, such as ending the current wars by bringing about more openness and transparency, or doing a deal between the US and Russia in which they will call off all proxy wars. What they do instead is to direct the reader to just four possible scenarios, which they call 'Lock Step', 'Clever Together', 'Hack Attack' and 'Smart Scramble', all of which are doomsdays cenarios.
The 'Hack Attack' scenario includes the following paragraph: "Devastating shocks like September 11, the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake had certainly primed the world for sudden disasters. But no one was prepared for a world in which large-scale catastrophes would occur with such breathtaking frequency. The years 2010 to 2020 were dubbed the 'doom decade' for good reason: the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13,000, was followed closely by an earthquake in Indonesia killing 40,000, a tsunami that almost wiped out Nicaragua, and the onset of the West China famine, caused by a once-in-a-millennium drought linked to climate change". I wonder if, when translated, they could mean: "the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13 August, 1000". The thirteenth of August is the day the crowds will disperse from the Olympics (ED: also a masonic number).
All four of these scenarios are presented as 'plausible'. Indeed, they write: "The scenarios that follow are not meant to be exhaustive - rather,they are designed to be both plausible and provocative, to engage your imagination while also raising new questions for you about what that future might look and feel like". They also state: "Together, a set of scenarios captures a range of future possibilities, good and bad, expected and surprising - but always plausible". So the Rockefeller Foundation is actually stating that it is plausible that thirteen thousand people will die in a bombing during the London Olympic Games.
Indeed, in his introductory letter, Peter Schwartz states: "Through interviews and the scenario workshops, they have engaged a diverse set of people - from different geographies, disciplines, and sectors - to identify the key forces driving change, to explore the most critical uncertainties,and to develop challenging yet plausible scenarios and implications". So what have all these people been doing in their analysis, and why is that not explained in the report? Is this based on some serious analysis of publicly available material - in which case one would expect an account of their thinking - or is it based on information known only to the Global Elite? All they need to have done was to ask a class of first year sociology students to come up with four scenarios of doom, and they would have produced just as good a result, unless there's something they're nottelling us.
So how likely is a terrorist attack in London during the Olympics of 2012? What better way could there be of assessing this than to listen to an investigative journalist who is training undercover as a security guard for the London Olympics with private security firm G4S? Lee Hazledean is a filmmaker and investigative TV journalist, who has also been involved in major stories such as how the British Army infiltrated the IRA and carried out false flag operations. Unusually, he broke his story whilst still operating undercover, hoping nevertheless to continue his undercover work until the Olympics. Presumably he is using an assumed name.
In a deeply worrying interview on Tony Gosling's Friday Drivetime slot on BCfm Radio in Bristol on Friday 22 June he reported that security training is so appalling that the safety and security of the London 2012 Olympics are in jeopardy. The 'Rapiscan' walk-through metal detectors don't work properly and aren't sensitive enough to pick up large knives, ammunition and other metallic threats. He was told that they would be set to go off only after 50 people have walked through to limit queuing time and to get spectators into the venue. G4S are recruiting long-term unemployed people as security officers, regardless of how suitable they are for the role. In training classes, there is drug dealing, some people can't speak any English whatsoever, and others are constantly making jokes about disabled people. People who haven't even completed their training are being picked to be Team Leaders over highly trained security officers, ex-soldiers and ex-police. Uniforms are going missing, and people are taking photos on their mobile phones in the training facility.
Also, there are plans for the evacuation of London; G4S are going to be at the forefront, as well as 100,000 troops coming in via Woolwich barracks, made up of regular British Forces, American regular army and European troops. Lee was not told why there would be any need for an evacuation of the whole of London, they just said it was to be a "defining moment in the history of London". The troops are being held across London in various barracks once they've been through Woolwich. Lee also had this information confirmed by an army doctor who was shocked at all the foreign troops coming into London. There is also a shipment of what are being described as'casket linings'; each casket can hold four or five people, and 200,000 casket linings have been delivered, he believes, from America. Also, they were shown videos of drones attacking targets in Afghanistan, and were told that drones would be patrolling the skies over London during the Olympics, carrying out surveillance and search and destroy missions if necessary. Lee believes there is something fundamentally wrong with how the security for the Olympics is being implemented by G4S.
Lee also discovered that there is a media black-out on all major news outlets to do with the Olympics. Tony Gosling suggested to him that he raise this with Channel 4's Andy Davies, but he said that Andy Davies didn't want to know. I would be interested to know how such news blackouts occur, because I've suspected them before. There is a system of 'D-notices', by which the Government makes it known that a certain issue may be voluntarily avoided by the press, but that there may be consequences if they ignore it. Is there a D-notice on the Olympics arrangements, or is there some other censureship process at work? Is the D-notice system being abused? If so, how should journalists fight back? If Tony Farrell of the South Yorkshire Police can stand up to authority in defending his obligation to report things to his bosses that they don't want to hear,then could there be some journalists who would be prepared to take a similar stance in the mainstream media? Do Russia Today and Aljazeera come under the D-notice system, or would they get banned, as Iran's Press TV did?
A week earlier, a Darlington data entry clerk turned whistleblower was sacked by G4S after having told ITV's North-East Tonight programme of the shambles at the G4S offices in Thornaby, near Stockton. She told the programme that staff were cutting corners while screening security workers applying for jobs at the London Olympics. Sarah Hubble told viewers: "It was an absolute shambles - you had people vetting potential employees who had not been vetted themselves". She said that her experiences had prompted her to pursue a career in journalism. "I got a taste of what journalism could be like and I loved every single second of it, so much so that I want more," she said. This was reported in the Northern Echo on 2nd June 2012 and reached the Daily Mail. This story ties up with Lee Hazledean's story. It seems, though, that since then, some sort of notice, perhaps a D-notice - would have been issued to the press, enforcing censureship on such stories in the future. Best of luck with Sarah Hubble in her journalistic career.
An excellent commentary with links on these two stories is provided on Tony Gosling's 9/11 forum.
"Unless this story is broken in a newspaper or foreign news agency it's unlikely to see the light of day", says the write-up on the Friday Drivetime website. Let's try to help that along. Send your friends the links. Possibly copy the interview on to an audio CD and pass it on. I sense that the army of talkers is growing. We all know that there is something fundamentally wrong. I can now walk into any pub and quickly find people who agree. Five years ago people thought that truthers were 'conspiracy theorists'; I had to be very guarded in talking about 9/11 and 7/7 and the impending economic gloom. But now the idea that we're being governed by a hidden government with its own agenda is becoming generally accepted. But there's still a long way to go.
We must encourage potential whistleblowers to speak out. Find out andspeak out, and do keep Talking.
Showing posts with label DEMOS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DEMOS. Show all posts
Monday, 16 July 2012
Sunday, 13 November 2011
Its Democracy, Jim, but not as we know it
It seems the revolution has begun. The Occupy demonstrations have taken place in over 95 cities across 82 countries but it's no longer just about 'the economy, stupid' (to use Bill Clinton's famous phrase), but about the corporate state. The economic crisis was caused by large financial institutions which had more power than elected governments. It was the economy that moved people into activism, but a bigger picture is now emerging.
Mussolini talked of the "Corporate State of Fascism". That's exactly what's developing now. It's been a hidden Fascism, with a democratic veneer, but since the turn of the century people in the US and the UK – 'Oceania', as George Orwell described it in '1984' – have been increasingly frustrated at their lack of a voice in big decisions of state. In the UK we had no voice in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite there being two million people out on the streets; Parliament voted on the basis of a lie. In 2001 Parliament had no vote at all, since decisions on waging war could at that stage be taken only by the Prime Minister in conjunction with the Monarch. So who did take these decisions? There is a growing feeling throughout the Western world that such decisions are taken not by elected politicians, but by gigantic financial institutions which in the end will profit from these wars.
So what would one expect from a corporate society? We may not expect the same brutality that one would have in an openly tyrannical regime, and, indeed, I am grateful to my opponents for not pulling my fingernails out, but in principle we would expect something similar. A corporate society does not uphold democratic values, even if it pretends to. Any troublesome group will be infiltrated by the corporate state, to neutralise its activities, or at least to keep them within certain limits.
This is exactly what has been emerging over the past year. On 20 October Newsnight broadcast a further revelation about an undercover policeman having infiltrated a civilian group with the purpose of subverting it:
"So far this year there have been no fewer than eight inquiries set up, after the discovery that undercover police have been used to infiltrate political organisations. There may be a ninth soon, because Newsnight has evidence of another operation, in which undercover policemen may have given false evidence in court. The officer became an activist in the Reclaim the Streets campaign, and was arrested after a group from the campaign occupied an office".
'Reclaim the Streets' is a direct action group which is concerned about the increasing takeover of urban streets by the corporate state. Their video documentary does show law-breaking, and indeed this is to be expected in a society which is more and more sceptical of the democratic processes in the country. "It turns the street into a road …", says their video, " the street can be much more about community, about social interaction … the road is a means of getting from A to B". The police do have a responsibility to keep the traffic flowing, but are their methods appropriate, and is it acceptable for the police to incite the very law-breaking which they are supposed to prevent, by means of agent provocateurs?
The Newsnight programme was about a cyclists demonstration of August 1996 in Central Lonon, in which a splinter group went to the headquarters of London Underground to unfurl protest banners. The incident led to the false arrest of one protestor, and false testimony in court by the undercover cop, who had played a leading role. The officer concerned was Jim Boyling, known in 'Reclaim the Streets' as Jim Sutton.
The Metropolitan Police were due to publish a report on an internal inquiry the following day, but at the last moment that report was delayed
It transpired that the alternative news source Indymedia had first become aware of the issue of undercover cops in protest movements and had passed information to The Guardian and BBC's Newsnight team, who worked together on their investigations. Again, the agenda is being driven by the alternative media rather than by paid investigative journalists
Since this is not just a British issue – some of these British cops had also been subverting groups abroad - Indymedia is now asking people to translate a statement on this into various languages.
I reported previously on Mark Kennedy, who had been posing as Mark (Flash) Stone in an environmental group, and whose actions had nearly led to the imprisonment of at least twenty innocent campaigners,
Lynn Watson (real name unknown), the police officer dressed as a clown in the Rebel Clown Army, a tiny group protesting against the Iraq war,
Other undercover police officers unmasked were Bob Lambert, posing as Bob Robinson,
Mark (Marco) Jacobs, whose real name is unknown,
Peter Black
and
Simon Wellings.
Groups infected were a variety of protest groups, such as anarchist, animal rights, anti-fascist, anti-globalisation, anti-racist, environmental and left-wing political groups. Those groups included: 2008 Camp For Climate Action, 2008 demo against the planned military academy at St Athan, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, Animal Liberation Front, anti-EDL, Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN), Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum, Climate Camp, The Common Place (Leeds anarchist centre), Dissent! (the network mobilising protesters for the G8 summit at Gleneagles), Globalise Resistance, London Greenpeace, No Border campaigns, Rebel Clown Army, Reclaim the Streets, Rising Tide Network, and Trident Ploughshares direct action network.
The lengths some of these undercover cops will go to in gaining credibility in the groups they have infiltrated are extraordinary. Kennedy provoked fellow officers to beat him up in a Climate Camp. Jim Boyling lied under oath in a criminal trial to protect his identity. Bob Lambert appeared in court under a fictional name. Several of them had sexual relationships with some of their victims, sometimes long-term relationships.
Jim Boyling even married one of his victims and had two children with her, now aged 5 and 7. How do you explain that one to the children, even when they are older, and how will they feel when they realise how they were brought into the world? Does the state have liabilities for their maintenance and for compensation for possible psychological trauma?
So if all this is going on with the police force in groups taking part in street activism, then what is going on with the security services in other groups that the corporate state disapproves of? I have already dealt with reports from former MI5 officers of large-scale infiltration in political parties, even "tiny organisations which pose no threat to national security". The purpose would be to turn these groups into controlled opposition, or to dismantle them, or at least make them ineffectual. It appears that the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party had around a thousand members each at the time the Berlin Wall fell, and each had, I understand 20 to 40 agents, whose job it was to cause quarreling and to demolish the organisations. How extensive is this, and how far will they go in 'gaining credence of the committee', to use a phrase from an email to me from the Director of Development of Esperanto Association of Britain shortly after he had left, admitting that that was all he had been doing for the two years in which he was being paid to develop the association.
Most people's reaction to anything like this is to pretend it isn't happening, and to try to shut others up when they talk about it. They'll tell you you're putting people off joining. I take the opposite view. I'm pleased to see that Cardiff Anarchists Network put out a statement on this:
But he [Marco Jacobs] also deliberately and systematically set out to damage a movement, and we think it is important that knowledge of what he did, and how he did it, is shared and discussed as widely as possible". They also wrote that many members were reeling with anger, resentment and guilt. "Marco worked hard to sow distrust, dislike and suspicion amongst us, and it was allowing him to do [that] that was perhaps our biggest mistake", they wrote.
Yet after all this, no-one, it seems, is capable of uttering the words 'the British secret police', even though it is patently obvious that such a thing exists. Yet the police now have a problem, because if they carry on behaving like SS thugs more cases will be uncovered. It will be in their interests to keep their noses clean until the whole issue has passed over. Perhaps that is why there was so little violence in the Occupy demonstrations in London this month. It is generally believed by many of the regulars who demonstrate for various causes in Central London that the police regularly use such tactics.
The late Brian Haw complained bitterly about such things and former MP George Galloway made allegations about agent provocateurs during some demonstrations. I myself would not have believed that such things could happen until I started taking part in truth and anti-war demonstrations only a few years ago, and started seeing things for myself.
We need more people to speak out. Most people who know things won't, and those who do will get criticised for their 'methods'. Some people, such as those in the South Yorkshire Police in the Tony Farrell case, see themselves as 'footsoldiers of the Government' and are therefore consciously complicit in the cover-ups. Others, like many I know, are simply in denial, or are suffering from Cognitive Dissonance or doublethink. Even those who recognise what is going on remain silent. Yet a few, like Tony Farrell have the courage to speak out.
During my researches into the Esperanto association in 2005, I would have loved to have come across a report somewhere of subversion in some other membership association which was being taken over by an inner clique, so that I could see how that may work, and so that I would have a base for comparison. Surely someone, somewhere would have been carrying out some investigation into their own association. Did no-one in the Labour Party compile membership statistics and link them to what was recorded in the minutes and the accounts? I could find nothing. If anyone knows of any such work, I would love to receive information on it. We need this information in order to build up the bigger picture, which is now looking very ominous indeed.
I can say that at long last we have a response from the Esperanto association to my financial chart, which I eventually managed to publish in EAB Update (pp 12-13) and, in the following issue, the treasurer accepted that my figures were correct. That issue of the periodical has now appeared on the Internet for all to see (p19).
That means that she should now explain why she told the Management Committee that the capital was being eaten up when at the time it was growing. Instead of doing that, she demonstrated how she had also given the same impression to members, by producing a rival chart showing a decreasing capital. She can be sure that few members will read the text, because they have such confidence in the treasurer, that they would refuse to believe that such a contradiction would be possible, rather than looking at the evidence, so they would not notice that that was a forecast for November 1994! Why produce the forecast figures when you have the real figures, unless the intent was to deceive? The other chart gives the impression of annual losses, which obviously could not have been the case if the capital was in fact increasing.
Yet members will not speak out, but will criticise me for doing so. In the same issue (page 17) a former Honorary Secretary expresses that he could not see the point in publishing my article, even though he says I have a point. He also wrote that my chart raises the question of why they sold the shop in London. Fine, but that's his point, not mine. I could have made a case out on that, but I didn't. That letter had actually been written before my article appeared, though it was presented as a reaction to it. Criticism of the President, with which I wholeheartedly agreed, had been cut out by the editor, who also rejected my reply, saying that the matter of the capital was a 'non-issue'.
A second letter in the same issue, from a former President, criticises me for virtually everything under the sun, including my work for the 9/11 truth movement, but avoids the issue which I had raised in my article (pp 17-18). There was nothing provocative about my article, and in no way was it critical of the committee, since that had been an explicit condition imposed by the editor. The problem of waking people up in a membership association is a small-scale example of waking up the masses in the case of hidden tyranny. The solution that I see is two-fold: (1) engage with the small minority who will be prepared to engage with you, and (2) take the issue outside the brainwashed community. Then things can start to happen. The statement by the Cardiff Anarchists Network may help to encourage others to speak out.
I also found an article by comedian Mark Thomas, who had had to come to terms with the fact that a close friend and trusted co-worker had been found to be spying on his activities. That turned out to be industrial espionage, which takes us back to consider the whole lot as different aspects of the corporate state. If that causes such soul-searching, imaging what it's like if there are five, ten or twenty of them whom you've known for as many years.
I found an interesting video called 'Psychologists help 9/11 truth deniers' which describes how people react when their fundamental beliefs are challenged. This is well-worth watching by anyone who understands English. It applies not only to 9/11 but to any situation in which people may react by saying "I refuse to believe ...", rather than looking at the evidence.
I've received a couple of messages from Esperantists, saying that they were interested to hear of the infiltration of the cyclist group or the environmental group, but that I should keep quiet about the Esperanto case. Eventually they will realise that by the same logic some in the cyclist group, the enviromental group, the 9/11 truth movement, and many other groups, may be interested in the Esperanto case for the same reason. The common issue for all these groups, even though they may be working for different causes and may not agree with each other, is the defence of democracy. For undemocratic methods to be brought to light, people need to speak out in public. It's not necessary to be able to prove who has infiltrated an organisation and with what purpose; it's only necessary to demonstrate behaviour. My crime was to produce hard facts, with no allegations or interpretation. It was then for others to interpret those facts, and we have just seen examples of that in the magazine. On the other hand, members should have been more alert to undemocratic methods being used by people of influence. This is essentially the point being made by former accountant for the European Commission Martha Andreasson, who is now an MEP for my area. The accounts had not been audited, and that in itself should be good reason to replace the people in charge. Concealment in itself should be sufficient reason to remove people's representatives from office whether at governmental level or in a tiny membership association.
My idea of advancing this issue at about the same rate as the general truth movement seems to be paying off. I reported in my last newsletter about the Guardian report of a 9/11 conference in the US.
Since then we have seen a blog in the Daily Telegraph, usually one of the most establishment of the national newspapers, with the title 'The 9/11 conspiracy theories aren't as irrational as you might think'.The rest of the article was critical of the truth movement, but at least here we have a grudging acceptance that we may actually have a point. Keep them coming! Encourage them to keep slagging us off, as long as there is a grudging admission that we may be right!
There are also big issues arising in the mainstream media. The Murder of Muammar Gadaffi may have been an uncontrolled revenge killing by soldiers on the ground, or it may have been allowed to happen by those higher up. Gadaffi would have realised that they couldn't send him to the International Criminal Court for trial because of the incriminating evidence he may provide against some of the NATO governments. His murder had actually been attempted by a group in the 1990s by what is now known as Al Qaeda, paid for by MI6, but it was bungled. That was what eventually made David Shayler decide to leave MI5 and blow the whistle.
As regards the Euro crisis, was it not all inevitable from the start? I kept quiet when the Euro was about to be introduced because I regarded myself as an ignoramus on economic affairs, when the experts were telling us all that it would be alright. Are we really to believe that no-one in the higher echelons of the EU spotted the flaw? Many in the financial markets below them would have been fooling themselves rather than accepting the obvious. So was this a project destined to failure? Was the objective to force the EU countries into a United States of Europe similar to the United States of America? Fine if they want to form such a union, but only if such a decision is taken by democratic means. So what happens if we in the UK have a referendum on leaving the EU? It's quite simple, really. If the vote goes against, we stay in, and if it goes in favour, we have another referendum. But if we were really to withdraw, what would be the consequences? Is it not time someone produced a proper analysis? Are those who want power to return to Westminster deluding themselves? Who has the power now, and who would have it if we were to withdraw? It sounds to me like the gigantic financial corporations in both cases. It's just a question of which financial corporations.
So where do we go from here? I think we are on the right track. We need to maintain an awareness of the bigger picture regarding corporate control of our society, the way in which we are manipulated by hidden propaganda, financial dealing, fear-mongering, and infiltration even in tiny membership association which pose no threat to national security. There will be more revelations. When the Occupy movement starts putting up placards relating to 9/11 truth, then the whole issue of who controls our society will come to a head.
But the danger is, as always, some false-flag terror event, which could bring everyone back into line, in supporting the next war, and persuading the population that they really do love Big Brother. At the October meeting of the Keep Talking group in London we had a guest speaker from Oslo, Torstein Viddal, who is the key researcher in the truth movement into the Norwegian attacks of 22/7. He lives only a couple of minutes away from where the Oslo bomb exploded, and despite a building between there and his flat, his window was blown open. He grabbed his camera and rushed out. At the Keep Talking meeting he showed a short video of how the International Criminal Court works, and suggested that we call for an investigation by the ICC with a view to prosecuting for war crimes. That's worth thinking about. His text can be read on the Norwegian 9/11 Truth site
Also worth thinking about is the issue of corporate government, and how to bring all these issues together in the current rebellion, and how to cope with the next terrorist event, which may well be intended to derail the rebellion and give an excuse for going in with truncheons, tasers, jack-boots and worse. Keep thinking. And keep talking.
Mussolini talked of the "Corporate State of Fascism". That's exactly what's developing now. It's been a hidden Fascism, with a democratic veneer, but since the turn of the century people in the US and the UK – 'Oceania', as George Orwell described it in '1984' – have been increasingly frustrated at their lack of a voice in big decisions of state. In the UK we had no voice in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite there being two million people out on the streets; Parliament voted on the basis of a lie. In 2001 Parliament had no vote at all, since decisions on waging war could at that stage be taken only by the Prime Minister in conjunction with the Monarch. So who did take these decisions? There is a growing feeling throughout the Western world that such decisions are taken not by elected politicians, but by gigantic financial institutions which in the end will profit from these wars.
So what would one expect from a corporate society? We may not expect the same brutality that one would have in an openly tyrannical regime, and, indeed, I am grateful to my opponents for not pulling my fingernails out, but in principle we would expect something similar. A corporate society does not uphold democratic values, even if it pretends to. Any troublesome group will be infiltrated by the corporate state, to neutralise its activities, or at least to keep them within certain limits.
This is exactly what has been emerging over the past year. On 20 October Newsnight broadcast a further revelation about an undercover policeman having infiltrated a civilian group with the purpose of subverting it:
"So far this year there have been no fewer than eight inquiries set up, after the discovery that undercover police have been used to infiltrate political organisations. There may be a ninth soon, because Newsnight has evidence of another operation, in which undercover policemen may have given false evidence in court. The officer became an activist in the Reclaim the Streets campaign, and was arrested after a group from the campaign occupied an office".
'Reclaim the Streets' is a direct action group which is concerned about the increasing takeover of urban streets by the corporate state. Their video documentary does show law-breaking, and indeed this is to be expected in a society which is more and more sceptical of the democratic processes in the country. "It turns the street into a road …", says their video, " the street can be much more about community, about social interaction … the road is a means of getting from A to B". The police do have a responsibility to keep the traffic flowing, but are their methods appropriate, and is it acceptable for the police to incite the very law-breaking which they are supposed to prevent, by means of agent provocateurs?
The Newsnight programme was about a cyclists demonstration of August 1996 in Central Lonon, in which a splinter group went to the headquarters of London Underground to unfurl protest banners. The incident led to the false arrest of one protestor, and false testimony in court by the undercover cop, who had played a leading role. The officer concerned was Jim Boyling, known in 'Reclaim the Streets' as Jim Sutton.
The Metropolitan Police were due to publish a report on an internal inquiry the following day, but at the last moment that report was delayed
It transpired that the alternative news source Indymedia had first become aware of the issue of undercover cops in protest movements and had passed information to The Guardian and BBC's Newsnight team, who worked together on their investigations. Again, the agenda is being driven by the alternative media rather than by paid investigative journalists
Since this is not just a British issue – some of these British cops had also been subverting groups abroad - Indymedia is now asking people to translate a statement on this into various languages.
I reported previously on Mark Kennedy, who had been posing as Mark (Flash) Stone in an environmental group, and whose actions had nearly led to the imprisonment of at least twenty innocent campaigners,
Lynn Watson (real name unknown), the police officer dressed as a clown in the Rebel Clown Army, a tiny group protesting against the Iraq war,
Other undercover police officers unmasked were Bob Lambert, posing as Bob Robinson,
Mark (Marco) Jacobs, whose real name is unknown,
Peter Black
and
Simon Wellings.
Groups infected were a variety of protest groups, such as anarchist, animal rights, anti-fascist, anti-globalisation, anti-racist, environmental and left-wing political groups. Those groups included: 2008 Camp For Climate Action, 2008 demo against the planned military academy at St Athan, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, Animal Liberation Front, anti-EDL, Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN), Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum, Climate Camp, The Common Place (Leeds anarchist centre), Dissent! (the network mobilising protesters for the G8 summit at Gleneagles), Globalise Resistance, London Greenpeace, No Border campaigns, Rebel Clown Army, Reclaim the Streets, Rising Tide Network, and Trident Ploughshares direct action network.
The lengths some of these undercover cops will go to in gaining credibility in the groups they have infiltrated are extraordinary. Kennedy provoked fellow officers to beat him up in a Climate Camp. Jim Boyling lied under oath in a criminal trial to protect his identity. Bob Lambert appeared in court under a fictional name. Several of them had sexual relationships with some of their victims, sometimes long-term relationships.
Jim Boyling even married one of his victims and had two children with her, now aged 5 and 7. How do you explain that one to the children, even when they are older, and how will they feel when they realise how they were brought into the world? Does the state have liabilities for their maintenance and for compensation for possible psychological trauma?
So if all this is going on with the police force in groups taking part in street activism, then what is going on with the security services in other groups that the corporate state disapproves of? I have already dealt with reports from former MI5 officers of large-scale infiltration in political parties, even "tiny organisations which pose no threat to national security". The purpose would be to turn these groups into controlled opposition, or to dismantle them, or at least make them ineffectual. It appears that the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party had around a thousand members each at the time the Berlin Wall fell, and each had, I understand 20 to 40 agents, whose job it was to cause quarreling and to demolish the organisations. How extensive is this, and how far will they go in 'gaining credence of the committee', to use a phrase from an email to me from the Director of Development of Esperanto Association of Britain shortly after he had left, admitting that that was all he had been doing for the two years in which he was being paid to develop the association.
Most people's reaction to anything like this is to pretend it isn't happening, and to try to shut others up when they talk about it. They'll tell you you're putting people off joining. I take the opposite view. I'm pleased to see that Cardiff Anarchists Network put out a statement on this:
But he [Marco Jacobs] also deliberately and systematically set out to damage a movement, and we think it is important that knowledge of what he did, and how he did it, is shared and discussed as widely as possible". They also wrote that many members were reeling with anger, resentment and guilt. "Marco worked hard to sow distrust, dislike and suspicion amongst us, and it was allowing him to do [that] that was perhaps our biggest mistake", they wrote.
Yet after all this, no-one, it seems, is capable of uttering the words 'the British secret police', even though it is patently obvious that such a thing exists. Yet the police now have a problem, because if they carry on behaving like SS thugs more cases will be uncovered. It will be in their interests to keep their noses clean until the whole issue has passed over. Perhaps that is why there was so little violence in the Occupy demonstrations in London this month. It is generally believed by many of the regulars who demonstrate for various causes in Central London that the police regularly use such tactics.
The late Brian Haw complained bitterly about such things and former MP George Galloway made allegations about agent provocateurs during some demonstrations. I myself would not have believed that such things could happen until I started taking part in truth and anti-war demonstrations only a few years ago, and started seeing things for myself.
We need more people to speak out. Most people who know things won't, and those who do will get criticised for their 'methods'. Some people, such as those in the South Yorkshire Police in the Tony Farrell case, see themselves as 'footsoldiers of the Government' and are therefore consciously complicit in the cover-ups. Others, like many I know, are simply in denial, or are suffering from Cognitive Dissonance or doublethink. Even those who recognise what is going on remain silent. Yet a few, like Tony Farrell have the courage to speak out.
During my researches into the Esperanto association in 2005, I would have loved to have come across a report somewhere of subversion in some other membership association which was being taken over by an inner clique, so that I could see how that may work, and so that I would have a base for comparison. Surely someone, somewhere would have been carrying out some investigation into their own association. Did no-one in the Labour Party compile membership statistics and link them to what was recorded in the minutes and the accounts? I could find nothing. If anyone knows of any such work, I would love to receive information on it. We need this information in order to build up the bigger picture, which is now looking very ominous indeed.
I can say that at long last we have a response from the Esperanto association to my financial chart, which I eventually managed to publish in EAB Update (pp 12-13) and, in the following issue, the treasurer accepted that my figures were correct. That issue of the periodical has now appeared on the Internet for all to see (p19).
That means that she should now explain why she told the Management Committee that the capital was being eaten up when at the time it was growing. Instead of doing that, she demonstrated how she had also given the same impression to members, by producing a rival chart showing a decreasing capital. She can be sure that few members will read the text, because they have such confidence in the treasurer, that they would refuse to believe that such a contradiction would be possible, rather than looking at the evidence, so they would not notice that that was a forecast for November 1994! Why produce the forecast figures when you have the real figures, unless the intent was to deceive? The other chart gives the impression of annual losses, which obviously could not have been the case if the capital was in fact increasing.
Yet members will not speak out, but will criticise me for doing so. In the same issue (page 17) a former Honorary Secretary expresses that he could not see the point in publishing my article, even though he says I have a point. He also wrote that my chart raises the question of why they sold the shop in London. Fine, but that's his point, not mine. I could have made a case out on that, but I didn't. That letter had actually been written before my article appeared, though it was presented as a reaction to it. Criticism of the President, with which I wholeheartedly agreed, had been cut out by the editor, who also rejected my reply, saying that the matter of the capital was a 'non-issue'.
A second letter in the same issue, from a former President, criticises me for virtually everything under the sun, including my work for the 9/11 truth movement, but avoids the issue which I had raised in my article (pp 17-18). There was nothing provocative about my article, and in no way was it critical of the committee, since that had been an explicit condition imposed by the editor. The problem of waking people up in a membership association is a small-scale example of waking up the masses in the case of hidden tyranny. The solution that I see is two-fold: (1) engage with the small minority who will be prepared to engage with you, and (2) take the issue outside the brainwashed community. Then things can start to happen. The statement by the Cardiff Anarchists Network may help to encourage others to speak out.
I also found an article by comedian Mark Thomas, who had had to come to terms with the fact that a close friend and trusted co-worker had been found to be spying on his activities. That turned out to be industrial espionage, which takes us back to consider the whole lot as different aspects of the corporate state. If that causes such soul-searching, imaging what it's like if there are five, ten or twenty of them whom you've known for as many years.
I found an interesting video called 'Psychologists help 9/11 truth deniers' which describes how people react when their fundamental beliefs are challenged. This is well-worth watching by anyone who understands English. It applies not only to 9/11 but to any situation in which people may react by saying "I refuse to believe ...", rather than looking at the evidence.
I've received a couple of messages from Esperantists, saying that they were interested to hear of the infiltration of the cyclist group or the environmental group, but that I should keep quiet about the Esperanto case. Eventually they will realise that by the same logic some in the cyclist group, the enviromental group, the 9/11 truth movement, and many other groups, may be interested in the Esperanto case for the same reason. The common issue for all these groups, even though they may be working for different causes and may not agree with each other, is the defence of democracy. For undemocratic methods to be brought to light, people need to speak out in public. It's not necessary to be able to prove who has infiltrated an organisation and with what purpose; it's only necessary to demonstrate behaviour. My crime was to produce hard facts, with no allegations or interpretation. It was then for others to interpret those facts, and we have just seen examples of that in the magazine. On the other hand, members should have been more alert to undemocratic methods being used by people of influence. This is essentially the point being made by former accountant for the European Commission Martha Andreasson, who is now an MEP for my area. The accounts had not been audited, and that in itself should be good reason to replace the people in charge. Concealment in itself should be sufficient reason to remove people's representatives from office whether at governmental level or in a tiny membership association.
My idea of advancing this issue at about the same rate as the general truth movement seems to be paying off. I reported in my last newsletter about the Guardian report of a 9/11 conference in the US.
Since then we have seen a blog in the Daily Telegraph, usually one of the most establishment of the national newspapers, with the title 'The 9/11 conspiracy theories aren't as irrational as you might think'.The rest of the article was critical of the truth movement, but at least here we have a grudging acceptance that we may actually have a point. Keep them coming! Encourage them to keep slagging us off, as long as there is a grudging admission that we may be right!
There are also big issues arising in the mainstream media. The Murder of Muammar Gadaffi may have been an uncontrolled revenge killing by soldiers on the ground, or it may have been allowed to happen by those higher up. Gadaffi would have realised that they couldn't send him to the International Criminal Court for trial because of the incriminating evidence he may provide against some of the NATO governments. His murder had actually been attempted by a group in the 1990s by what is now known as Al Qaeda, paid for by MI6, but it was bungled. That was what eventually made David Shayler decide to leave MI5 and blow the whistle.
As regards the Euro crisis, was it not all inevitable from the start? I kept quiet when the Euro was about to be introduced because I regarded myself as an ignoramus on economic affairs, when the experts were telling us all that it would be alright. Are we really to believe that no-one in the higher echelons of the EU spotted the flaw? Many in the financial markets below them would have been fooling themselves rather than accepting the obvious. So was this a project destined to failure? Was the objective to force the EU countries into a United States of Europe similar to the United States of America? Fine if they want to form such a union, but only if such a decision is taken by democratic means. So what happens if we in the UK have a referendum on leaving the EU? It's quite simple, really. If the vote goes against, we stay in, and if it goes in favour, we have another referendum. But if we were really to withdraw, what would be the consequences? Is it not time someone produced a proper analysis? Are those who want power to return to Westminster deluding themselves? Who has the power now, and who would have it if we were to withdraw? It sounds to me like the gigantic financial corporations in both cases. It's just a question of which financial corporations.
So where do we go from here? I think we are on the right track. We need to maintain an awareness of the bigger picture regarding corporate control of our society, the way in which we are manipulated by hidden propaganda, financial dealing, fear-mongering, and infiltration even in tiny membership association which pose no threat to national security. There will be more revelations. When the Occupy movement starts putting up placards relating to 9/11 truth, then the whole issue of who controls our society will come to a head.
But the danger is, as always, some false-flag terror event, which could bring everyone back into line, in supporting the next war, and persuading the population that they really do love Big Brother. At the October meeting of the Keep Talking group in London we had a guest speaker from Oslo, Torstein Viddal, who is the key researcher in the truth movement into the Norwegian attacks of 22/7. He lives only a couple of minutes away from where the Oslo bomb exploded, and despite a building between there and his flat, his window was blown open. He grabbed his camera and rushed out. At the Keep Talking meeting he showed a short video of how the International Criminal Court works, and suggested that we call for an investigation by the ICC with a view to prosecuting for war crimes. That's worth thinking about. His text can be read on the Norwegian 9/11 Truth site
Also worth thinking about is the issue of corporate government, and how to bring all these issues together in the current rebellion, and how to cope with the next terrorist event, which may well be intended to derail the rebellion and give an excuse for going in with truncheons, tasers, jack-boots and worse. Keep thinking. And keep talking.
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Take Charlie's advice: Begin your own cognitive infiltration
September 2011
I think everyone's now suffering from 9/11 fatigue, following the bombardment from the mainstream media over the period of the tenth anniversary. Some of it wasn't too bad, and some was even revealing, but of course virtually none of it questioned the official conspiracy theory (a summary of which can be watched HERE and the ridiculous assertions put out relentlessly by governments and the mainstream media over the past ten years. I see reasons for hope, though.
After the showing of the BBC's Conspiracy Files programme '9/11 Ten Years on' on 29 August someone asked me "How was it?" The falsifications were so blatant that I could honestly reply that it was encouraging, because many people would now be able to see through the propaganda who couldn't have seen through it in their previous programmes. I thought it signaled a break-through.
It was just as described by John Pilger in his Chicago address, when he reported an anecdote from visiting Soviet journalists in the US. Their spokesman said: “I have to tell you, that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?"
And yet it was surreal. Throughout the blogs of the mainstream media the comments from the public were overwhelmingly critical of the official story, and of the press's reporting of it. I had expected that we would be swamped with all sorts of weirdos doing their usual stuff to ridicule anyone who wasn't towing the official line and to disrupt intelligent discussion. Dealing with this had become a way of life. But where were they now? Had they given up? I contributed some comments myself in various places, and even complimented BBC Newsnight's team on revealing the plight of many first responders who were now dying of cancer. I suggested that it was now OK for journalists to let a little bit of the truth out, because now they would have the support of the public. I think we're winning, folks.
On 12 September, an amazing blog appeared on the The Guardian's website 'How the world changed after 9/11'. "On the day of September 11, Charlie Skelton attends a symposium of critical thinkers in New York", ran the subheading. Yes, it was a proper journalistic report of a conference of leading critical thinkers on the 9/11 attacks. The blog mentioned Webster Tarpley and CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Charlie Skelton concludes by saying:
"We have to do something. Even if that something is simply to Google 'Cass Sunstein' and start from there. Begin your own cognitive infiltration. Google 'Vigilant Guardian' or 'Able Danger'. Crosscheck 'Abdel Hakim Belhadj' and 'Al-Qaida'. Begin digging. Begin thinking. And stop believing." I see that as a break-through. Mr Skelton has also blogged on New York activists and the 9/11 demonstration outside the BBC in 2009 but primarily on the Bilderberg group.
For the first time as far as I am aware, an article has appeared in the mainstream media in the UK raising serious questions on the official conspiracy theory on 9/11. The significance of this is not just in the effect of that article as a one-off, but that it signals to other journalists that it's now OK to raise such issues in the national press. I hope it doesn't get Charlie Skelton into trouble, since George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee and David Aaronovitch all write for The Guardian. Unless the authorities find some way of silencing people over that Guardian article, other journalists will get the message, and the cracks in the facade will widen.
So I was interested to see an article by Guardian journalist Nicolaus Mills on 15 September in The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' headed 'The anthrax scare: not a germ of truth', and subheaded 'Ten years on, the anthrax attacks seem a footnote to 9/11, but we forget how George Bush used them to push for war in Iraq'. The breakthrough is real.
During the run-up to the tenth anniversary we would discuss what we could do to mark the event. Anything I could think of, and any ideas from others, all seemed like a drop in the ocean compared with the expected onslaught. I remembered the tactic of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, when they would await enemy fire, count a certain number of seconds, then all pop up from their underground hideouts and return fire when the enemy had run out of ammunition. However, shortly before the 9/11 anniversary Belinda, who used to organise the 9/11 Truth meetings in London, had a bit of inspiration, and organised a public meeting at the Indian YMCA for the Keep Talking group. The speaker was Ian Crane, who had been the first chairman of the London 9/11 Truth movement before I was around, and who now organises the Alternative View conferences. At the time, he was planning a lecture tour around the UK. Belinda has the magic touch, and so does Ian Crane. I was getting nervous about a low turnout, which could make the event look ridiculous in such a large hall, so I sent out a press release using various freeby services. The Keep Talking group put a couple of classified advertisements in London newspapers (one of which didn't appear). But I think it was Ian Crane's own publicity machine that got the people there. On the evening itself some of us initially put out about fifty chairs. About 170 people turned up. The issue is very much alive, and the authorities could hardly have done better in helping us keeping it alive.
Earlier the same day, some members of Keep Talking were driving down from Sheffield, where they had been attending the employment tribunal hearing for Tony Farrell, the former Principal Intelligence Analyst for South Yorkshire Police, who had been sacked for his assessment of terrorist risks in the area, even though his bosses recognised that he may be right, as I reported in my August newsletter. By chance, Ian Crane had been due to speak in Sheffield on 9/11 and related issues. In the event, following his talk, Ian Crane ended up representing Tony Farrell at the tribunal. That evening, just as Ian Crane was about to speak at the London Indian YMCA, Tony Farrell unexpectedly turned up, looking in high spirits, despite having lost the case. He told us he intended to appeal. He got an enthusiastic round of applause after Ian Crane had outlined his story.
I've just been speaking to someone I don't know over the phone, who was telling me all about Tony Farrell's mistakes, and why he can't be right. But for me, the case shouldn't rest on whether or not he is right, because no-one challenged him on that. In fact, he reported that his bosses had admitted that he may be right. So what was he fired for? It's quite simple. As his bosses in South Yorkshire Police put it: "We are footsoldiers of the Government". So, I sometimes think, are the courts.
Petition to reinstate Tony Farrell
I wasn't at the hearing myself, though initially I had planned to be. I thought it better to follow events on the Internet, and post the occasional comment. I also got a couple of press releases out and tried to catch up on other urgent work, like preparing for an Interlinquistics Symposium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, where I had been invited to present a paper on the cause of the stagnation of the Esperanto movement. The university runs a course on Interlinquistics, and one of the organisers, a professor of sociology had sent me a paper of his titled 'Esperanto-movado: Ĉu perdita komunumo?' [The Esperanto movement: Is it a lost community?]
In that paper he contrasts two tendencies in sociological research: the common sense approach and the science-based approach, arguing that there was a dearth of science-based sociological research on the Esperanto movement. I had been doing science-based research work into the Esperanto movement in the UK, and this had caught his attention. They wanted at the Symposium to identify the present-day challenges to the Esperanto movement. In my presentation, I brought it all down to one single factor, the same as I would for the whole of the truth movement: coping with Cognitive Dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling that people sometimes get when they are confronted with facts that are in contradiction to deeply held beliefs. This can lead to them making all sorts of silly statements and incoherent explanations, in order to avoid having to admit that their beliefs could be mistaken. I linked this to George Orwell's 'voluntary censureship', which he wrote about in the preface to Animal Farm, though this was censured out during his lifetime
As long as this Cognitive Dissonance reigns, mass deception will be successful, but as soon as it is overcome, mass deception will be seen for what it is. The fundamental problem is not that an association or a government may be taken over by fraudsters, but that if it's done with a smile, most of the voters will let them do it. Look at Tony Blair. How is it possible to believe that someone with such charm could have so many conflicts of interest whilst working as a peace envoy in the Middle East? 0A Channel 4 Dispatches programme on 27 September presented an amazing story. But will there be consequences?
The way to break through Cognitive Dissonance I think is to introduce the issues in the abstract, and then show the bigger picture when the person has accepted the simple facts or the logic. The best example of that that I can think of is the Dutch television interview with demolition expert Danny Jowenko:
Since he was an expert, he may have recognised it as controlled demolition anyway, but I think many of the viewers would have been coloured by previous knowledge. After the interview he was prepared to speak out on Building 7. I was saddened, on looking up the link for the video, to find that he died in a car crash.
Similarly, in a talk at the London Esperanto Club, I had asked members whether any of them knew about the matter of Dermod Quirke and the library. As expected, they looked perplexed. I then told them that I didn't either. I read out a short text which had appeared in the national association's periodical, saying that no-one on the Management Committee knew anything about it either, and neither did whoever wrote the text. They looked bewildered. I then told them that I had asked Dermod Quirke about it and he couldn't tell me. So who did know anything about it? Whether or not it happened to be true, the whole thing was a concoction. Only when members were sufficiently mystified did I reveal the context. It was part of a statement by the President, and presented an example of my 'mischievous and possibly defamatory' allegations against the Management Committee. It was their way of silencing me when I had revealed information which members were entitled to know. Members were being kept in the dark over a campaign to save the college in which the association's own headquarters were housed. The President's deception had worked.
As I flew back from Poznan, some of the Keep Talking members were attending a 'Conspiracy Theory Day' conference in London. Speakers were to include the two authors of the Demos report on 'conspiracy theories' whom we met on 25 October 2010, when we in the Keep Talking group challenged them to demonstrate their ideas on 'open infiltration'. Also billed to speak was their friend David Aaronovitch, known for his anti-truth-movement campaign. It was clear that this was to be a propaganda event for the conspiracy deniers. My eye was particularly drawn to the name of Robert Brotherton, said to be doing a PhD on conspiracy theories at Goldsmith's College. Now that's interesting; our confrontation with Demos took place at Goldsmith's College by the invitation from another PhD student in conspiracy theories.
I was expecting the whole thing to be stage-managed. Demos had not responded to my challenge for a return match, and we had not been invited to present our case at their 'conspiracy theory' meeting. But at the last moment something weird happened. David Aaronovitch pulled out, and he was replaced by Ian Crane. Some of the Keep Talking group attended as members of the public, including Kevin Boyle, who wrote the meeting up on his blog and reproduced in the Sovereign Independent. From his description of the event, it sounds as if it was far from walking into the lion's den, as I had expected. He wrote that Ian Crane's presentation was "clear and powerful and punctuated with regular applause". Ian Crane also handed the stage over to Tony Farrell for five minutes, "and here was the whole confrontation of the day personified in one man", Kevin wrote.
It sounded like a rout, so I sought a report from the other side, and found one, of all places in the CiF Watch website, which describes itself as "Monitoring and exposing antisemitism on the Guardian's newspaper's 'Comment is Free' blog" guest written by "Mitnaged".
What the relevance of that is I haven't yet figured out, but Jamie Bartlett did try to tell me that the antisemites were having a go at Carl Miller because of his Jewish name. Don't try to make sense of it. In any case, is the idea that there could be criminals in the Knesset as well as in Westminster and the Capitol antisemitism? If it is, that can only be because 'anti-semitism' lost its hyphen long ago.
The CiF Watch report stated that nothing in Ian Crane's presentation constituted "what could be called rigorous scientific evidence let alone proof". Yet Carl Miller had admitted to us that their own statistical results linking conspiracy theory groups with terrorism was not based on any statistical analysis, and Jamie Barlett admitted that the Demos report was "not a scientific report". However, CiF Watch did inform us that "The 'troofers' also set up a stall at the back of the hall from which they sold copies of DVDs which purported to tell us the real story about the events of 9/11 and 7/7". Great! The intention had been to hand them out outside the conference, but they ended up selling the packs at £1 each. They reported back to Keep Talking: "DVDs and flyers went like hot cakes at yesterday's Conspiracy Theories Conference. A great day for our side".
As for the psychologists, I found a documentary on YouTube, broadcast on Channel 4 three years ago, featuring Professor French and his co-worker Patrick Leman. Dr Leman stated: "As psychologists, we're not principally interested in whether one particular conspiracy theory is true or another one isn't" 'Conspiracy – Who really runs the world?'. Exactly. I wonder whether anyone has researched the reasons some people become witch doctors, voodoo practitioners, psychologists etc.
One could turn the question around, and ask why some people believe what they are told by authority. My colleague David Bowman has put up an analysis of this on the Berkshire 9/11 Truth blogsite, under the title 'See No Truth, Hear No Truth, Speak No Truth'. This is an excellent analysis, and again it comes down to tackling Cognitive Dissonance. The remaining practical problem that I see is tackling the opposition, the propagandists who know all the psychological stuff and have been applying it more effectively than we were, but to mislead and discredit. As always, I think the main part of solving the problem is understanding it, and David's analysis is very welcome in furthering that aim.
I found it interesting that former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, giving a BBC 2011 Reith Lecture on 20 September, asserted: "The terrorist now has at his disposal tools which were once the sole preserve of the state".
Really? Hydrogen peroxide and black pepper? That's what we were told the 7/7 Four used to blow up three trains and a bus. Hydrogen peroxide has been used in hair dye since about 1860, and black pepper goes back at least as far as Rameses II, and was available in Europe in the Middle Ages. So what is Eliza Manningham-Buller suggesting? I don't know, but if in the past only states had the facilities to commit such terrorist atrocities, then perhaps that's still the case. Well, actually, in her first lecture on 6 September, she stated:
"But I do not expect terrorism as a tool, often used by states in earlier decades, now used largely by groups, to disappear"
So who sponsors these groups? Yet there was no consideration of such issues; she stated that they came to an immediate conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible.
See Ian's comment"It's amazing that MI5 could come to an immediate conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible, and the following day they and those in Washington could have no doubt about their atrocities, before carrying out any forensic analysis or collecting any evidence."
These partial admissions are interesting. These people seem to be positioning themselves; it's now only a matter of time before the mainstream media start asking them what they knew and when they knew it.
Yet as the national press is starting to admit reality, Liverpool Football Club is considering disciplinary action against striker Nathan Eccleston for tweeting: "I ain't going to say attack don't let the media make u believe that was terrorist that did it. #OTIS.".
'OTIS is presumed to stand for 'Only The Illuminati Succeed'. This is reminiscent of the American footballer Rashard Mendenhall, who got into trouble for Twitter remarks questioning the public celebrations of Osama bin Laden's death, and whether the World Trade Center towers were really brought down on September 11 only by crashing two hijacked airliners into the buildings.
Joey Barton, a footballer who has a notorious bad-boy persona, has stated: "People should embrace the fact they're individual," Barton tells me. "I can't think of anything more morose than being the same as everybody else. What would we get out of that? I embrace that I'm peculiar and refuse to conform.
This is a breath of fresh air.
These people need our support, if only because others who may wish to speak out should not feel intimidated.
The antidote is to keep talking.
I think everyone's now suffering from 9/11 fatigue, following the bombardment from the mainstream media over the period of the tenth anniversary. Some of it wasn't too bad, and some was even revealing, but of course virtually none of it questioned the official conspiracy theory (a summary of which can be watched HERE and the ridiculous assertions put out relentlessly by governments and the mainstream media over the past ten years. I see reasons for hope, though.
After the showing of the BBC's Conspiracy Files programme '9/11 Ten Years on' on 29 August someone asked me "How was it?" The falsifications were so blatant that I could honestly reply that it was encouraging, because many people would now be able to see through the propaganda who couldn't have seen through it in their previous programmes. I thought it signaled a break-through.
It was just as described by John Pilger in his Chicago address, when he reported an anecdote from visiting Soviet journalists in the US. Their spokesman said: “I have to tell you, that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?"
And yet it was surreal. Throughout the blogs of the mainstream media the comments from the public were overwhelmingly critical of the official story, and of the press's reporting of it. I had expected that we would be swamped with all sorts of weirdos doing their usual stuff to ridicule anyone who wasn't towing the official line and to disrupt intelligent discussion. Dealing with this had become a way of life. But where were they now? Had they given up? I contributed some comments myself in various places, and even complimented BBC Newsnight's team on revealing the plight of many first responders who were now dying of cancer. I suggested that it was now OK for journalists to let a little bit of the truth out, because now they would have the support of the public. I think we're winning, folks.
On 12 September, an amazing blog appeared on the The Guardian's website 'How the world changed after 9/11'. "On the day of September 11, Charlie Skelton attends a symposium of critical thinkers in New York", ran the subheading. Yes, it was a proper journalistic report of a conference of leading critical thinkers on the 9/11 attacks. The blog mentioned Webster Tarpley and CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Charlie Skelton concludes by saying:
"We have to do something. Even if that something is simply to Google 'Cass Sunstein' and start from there. Begin your own cognitive infiltration. Google 'Vigilant Guardian' or 'Able Danger'. Crosscheck 'Abdel Hakim Belhadj' and 'Al-Qaida'. Begin digging. Begin thinking. And stop believing." I see that as a break-through. Mr Skelton has also blogged on New York activists and the 9/11 demonstration outside the BBC in 2009 but primarily on the Bilderberg group.
For the first time as far as I am aware, an article has appeared in the mainstream media in the UK raising serious questions on the official conspiracy theory on 9/11. The significance of this is not just in the effect of that article as a one-off, but that it signals to other journalists that it's now OK to raise such issues in the national press. I hope it doesn't get Charlie Skelton into trouble, since George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee and David Aaronovitch all write for The Guardian. Unless the authorities find some way of silencing people over that Guardian article, other journalists will get the message, and the cracks in the facade will widen.
So I was interested to see an article by Guardian journalist Nicolaus Mills on 15 September in The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' headed 'The anthrax scare: not a germ of truth', and subheaded 'Ten years on, the anthrax attacks seem a footnote to 9/11, but we forget how George Bush used them to push for war in Iraq'. The breakthrough is real.
During the run-up to the tenth anniversary we would discuss what we could do to mark the event. Anything I could think of, and any ideas from others, all seemed like a drop in the ocean compared with the expected onslaught. I remembered the tactic of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, when they would await enemy fire, count a certain number of seconds, then all pop up from their underground hideouts and return fire when the enemy had run out of ammunition. However, shortly before the 9/11 anniversary Belinda, who used to organise the 9/11 Truth meetings in London, had a bit of inspiration, and organised a public meeting at the Indian YMCA for the Keep Talking group. The speaker was Ian Crane, who had been the first chairman of the London 9/11 Truth movement before I was around, and who now organises the Alternative View conferences. At the time, he was planning a lecture tour around the UK. Belinda has the magic touch, and so does Ian Crane. I was getting nervous about a low turnout, which could make the event look ridiculous in such a large hall, so I sent out a press release using various freeby services. The Keep Talking group put a couple of classified advertisements in London newspapers (one of which didn't appear). But I think it was Ian Crane's own publicity machine that got the people there. On the evening itself some of us initially put out about fifty chairs. About 170 people turned up. The issue is very much alive, and the authorities could hardly have done better in helping us keeping it alive.
Earlier the same day, some members of Keep Talking were driving down from Sheffield, where they had been attending the employment tribunal hearing for Tony Farrell, the former Principal Intelligence Analyst for South Yorkshire Police, who had been sacked for his assessment of terrorist risks in the area, even though his bosses recognised that he may be right, as I reported in my August newsletter. By chance, Ian Crane had been due to speak in Sheffield on 9/11 and related issues. In the event, following his talk, Ian Crane ended up representing Tony Farrell at the tribunal. That evening, just as Ian Crane was about to speak at the London Indian YMCA, Tony Farrell unexpectedly turned up, looking in high spirits, despite having lost the case. He told us he intended to appeal. He got an enthusiastic round of applause after Ian Crane had outlined his story.
I've just been speaking to someone I don't know over the phone, who was telling me all about Tony Farrell's mistakes, and why he can't be right. But for me, the case shouldn't rest on whether or not he is right, because no-one challenged him on that. In fact, he reported that his bosses had admitted that he may be right. So what was he fired for? It's quite simple. As his bosses in South Yorkshire Police put it: "We are footsoldiers of the Government". So, I sometimes think, are the courts.
Petition to reinstate Tony Farrell
I wasn't at the hearing myself, though initially I had planned to be. I thought it better to follow events on the Internet, and post the occasional comment. I also got a couple of press releases out and tried to catch up on other urgent work, like preparing for an Interlinquistics Symposium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, where I had been invited to present a paper on the cause of the stagnation of the Esperanto movement. The university runs a course on Interlinquistics, and one of the organisers, a professor of sociology had sent me a paper of his titled 'Esperanto-movado: Ĉu perdita komunumo?' [The Esperanto movement: Is it a lost community?]
In that paper he contrasts two tendencies in sociological research: the common sense approach and the science-based approach, arguing that there was a dearth of science-based sociological research on the Esperanto movement. I had been doing science-based research work into the Esperanto movement in the UK, and this had caught his attention. They wanted at the Symposium to identify the present-day challenges to the Esperanto movement. In my presentation, I brought it all down to one single factor, the same as I would for the whole of the truth movement: coping with Cognitive Dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling that people sometimes get when they are confronted with facts that are in contradiction to deeply held beliefs. This can lead to them making all sorts of silly statements and incoherent explanations, in order to avoid having to admit that their beliefs could be mistaken. I linked this to George Orwell's 'voluntary censureship', which he wrote about in the preface to Animal Farm, though this was censured out during his lifetime
As long as this Cognitive Dissonance reigns, mass deception will be successful, but as soon as it is overcome, mass deception will be seen for what it is. The fundamental problem is not that an association or a government may be taken over by fraudsters, but that if it's done with a smile, most of the voters will let them do it. Look at Tony Blair. How is it possible to believe that someone with such charm could have so many conflicts of interest whilst working as a peace envoy in the Middle East? 0A Channel 4 Dispatches programme on 27 September presented an amazing story. But will there be consequences?
The way to break through Cognitive Dissonance I think is to introduce the issues in the abstract, and then show the bigger picture when the person has accepted the simple facts or the logic. The best example of that that I can think of is the Dutch television interview with demolition expert Danny Jowenko:
Since he was an expert, he may have recognised it as controlled demolition anyway, but I think many of the viewers would have been coloured by previous knowledge. After the interview he was prepared to speak out on Building 7. I was saddened, on looking up the link for the video, to find that he died in a car crash.
Similarly, in a talk at the London Esperanto Club, I had asked members whether any of them knew about the matter of Dermod Quirke and the library. As expected, they looked perplexed. I then told them that I didn't either. I read out a short text which had appeared in the national association's periodical, saying that no-one on the Management Committee knew anything about it either, and neither did whoever wrote the text. They looked bewildered. I then told them that I had asked Dermod Quirke about it and he couldn't tell me. So who did know anything about it? Whether or not it happened to be true, the whole thing was a concoction. Only when members were sufficiently mystified did I reveal the context. It was part of a statement by the President, and presented an example of my 'mischievous and possibly defamatory' allegations against the Management Committee. It was their way of silencing me when I had revealed information which members were entitled to know. Members were being kept in the dark over a campaign to save the college in which the association's own headquarters were housed. The President's deception had worked.
As I flew back from Poznan, some of the Keep Talking members were attending a 'Conspiracy Theory Day' conference in London. Speakers were to include the two authors of the Demos report on 'conspiracy theories' whom we met on 25 October 2010, when we in the Keep Talking group challenged them to demonstrate their ideas on 'open infiltration'. Also billed to speak was their friend David Aaronovitch, known for his anti-truth-movement campaign. It was clear that this was to be a propaganda event for the conspiracy deniers. My eye was particularly drawn to the name of Robert Brotherton, said to be doing a PhD on conspiracy theories at Goldsmith's College. Now that's interesting; our confrontation with Demos took place at Goldsmith's College by the invitation from another PhD student in conspiracy theories.
I was expecting the whole thing to be stage-managed. Demos had not responded to my challenge for a return match, and we had not been invited to present our case at their 'conspiracy theory' meeting. But at the last moment something weird happened. David Aaronovitch pulled out, and he was replaced by Ian Crane. Some of the Keep Talking group attended as members of the public, including Kevin Boyle, who wrote the meeting up on his blog and reproduced in the Sovereign Independent. From his description of the event, it sounds as if it was far from walking into the lion's den, as I had expected. He wrote that Ian Crane's presentation was "clear and powerful and punctuated with regular applause". Ian Crane also handed the stage over to Tony Farrell for five minutes, "and here was the whole confrontation of the day personified in one man", Kevin wrote.
It sounded like a rout, so I sought a report from the other side, and found one, of all places in the CiF Watch website, which describes itself as "Monitoring and exposing antisemitism on the Guardian's newspaper's 'Comment is Free' blog" guest written by "Mitnaged".
What the relevance of that is I haven't yet figured out, but Jamie Bartlett did try to tell me that the antisemites were having a go at Carl Miller because of his Jewish name. Don't try to make sense of it. In any case, is the idea that there could be criminals in the Knesset as well as in Westminster and the Capitol antisemitism? If it is, that can only be because 'anti-semitism' lost its hyphen long ago.
The CiF Watch report stated that nothing in Ian Crane's presentation constituted "what could be called rigorous scientific evidence let alone proof". Yet Carl Miller had admitted to us that their own statistical results linking conspiracy theory groups with terrorism was not based on any statistical analysis, and Jamie Barlett admitted that the Demos report was "not a scientific report". However, CiF Watch did inform us that "The 'troofers' also set up a stall at the back of the hall from which they sold copies of DVDs which purported to tell us the real story about the events of 9/11 and 7/7". Great! The intention had been to hand them out outside the conference, but they ended up selling the packs at £1 each. They reported back to Keep Talking: "DVDs and flyers went like hot cakes at yesterday's Conspiracy Theories Conference. A great day for our side".
As for the psychologists, I found a documentary on YouTube, broadcast on Channel 4 three years ago, featuring Professor French and his co-worker Patrick Leman. Dr Leman stated: "As psychologists, we're not principally interested in whether one particular conspiracy theory is true or another one isn't" 'Conspiracy – Who really runs the world?'. Exactly. I wonder whether anyone has researched the reasons some people become witch doctors, voodoo practitioners, psychologists etc.
One could turn the question around, and ask why some people believe what they are told by authority. My colleague David Bowman has put up an analysis of this on the Berkshire 9/11 Truth blogsite, under the title 'See No Truth, Hear No Truth, Speak No Truth'. This is an excellent analysis, and again it comes down to tackling Cognitive Dissonance. The remaining practical problem that I see is tackling the opposition, the propagandists who know all the psychological stuff and have been applying it more effectively than we were, but to mislead and discredit. As always, I think the main part of solving the problem is understanding it, and David's analysis is very welcome in furthering that aim.
I found it interesting that former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, giving a BBC 2011 Reith Lecture on 20 September, asserted: "The terrorist now has at his disposal tools which were once the sole preserve of the state".
Really? Hydrogen peroxide and black pepper? That's what we were told the 7/7 Four used to blow up three trains and a bus. Hydrogen peroxide has been used in hair dye since about 1860, and black pepper goes back at least as far as Rameses II, and was available in Europe in the Middle Ages. So what is Eliza Manningham-Buller suggesting? I don't know, but if in the past only states had the facilities to commit such terrorist atrocities, then perhaps that's still the case. Well, actually, in her first lecture on 6 September, she stated:
"But I do not expect terrorism as a tool, often used by states in earlier decades, now used largely by groups, to disappear"
So who sponsors these groups? Yet there was no consideration of such issues; she stated that they came to an immediate conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible.
See Ian's comment"It's amazing that MI5 could come to an immediate conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible, and the following day they and those in Washington could have no doubt about their atrocities, before carrying out any forensic analysis or collecting any evidence."
These partial admissions are interesting. These people seem to be positioning themselves; it's now only a matter of time before the mainstream media start asking them what they knew and when they knew it.
Yet as the national press is starting to admit reality, Liverpool Football Club is considering disciplinary action against striker Nathan Eccleston for tweeting: "I ain't going to say attack don't let the media make u believe that was terrorist that did it. #OTIS.".
'OTIS is presumed to stand for 'Only The Illuminati Succeed'. This is reminiscent of the American footballer Rashard Mendenhall, who got into trouble for Twitter remarks questioning the public celebrations of Osama bin Laden's death, and whether the World Trade Center towers were really brought down on September 11 only by crashing two hijacked airliners into the buildings.
Joey Barton, a footballer who has a notorious bad-boy persona, has stated: "People should embrace the fact they're individual," Barton tells me. "I can't think of anything more morose than being the same as everybody else. What would we get out of that? I embrace that I'm peculiar and refuse to conform.
This is a breath of fresh air.
These people need our support, if only because others who may wish to speak out should not feel intimidated.
The antidote is to keep talking.
Monday, 6 June 2011
Undercover police are a bunch of clowns
Originally sent January 2011
Every once in a while an iconic image appears on our television screens.
For me, such an image appeared on January 25 in the form of a clown, a member of CIRCA, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army
...who turned out to be a police infiltrator
New footage obtained by Channel 4 News shows a woman, believed to be an undercover police officer, taking part in anti war protests dressed as a clown.
...
The news comes against a backdrop of Britain's most senior public order police officer apologising to MPs after providing them with false information when he denied having plain-clothes officers in the crowd at the G20 demonstrations two years ago.
Her fellow clowns said they felt “betrayed”. I know how they feel. Just over a year ago I had an article published under the heading ‘Klaŭnokratio’ [Clownocracy] in what I suppose is the Esperanto equivalent of Private Eye, in which I described various crazy goings on in London, where it seemed as if someone had sent in the clowns. That was to do both with Esperanto meetings and truth movement meetings, some of which I reported in my September 2009 newsletter, in connection with the book launch for ‘Terror on the Tube’.
On seeing that iconic image of the police clown, I realised that it would at least give me some credibility in what I had been trying to tell people who didn’t want to hear. Sure enough, the following morning I received an email from a long-lost Esperanto friend, who no longer thought I was crazy.
It turned out that the operation in CIRCA had been carried out by a secretive unit belonging to the Association of Chief Police Officers.
But hang on, aren’t they a private company limited by guarantee? According to their website:
“The Association of Chief Police Officers is responsible for defining national standards and professional practice in key areas of policing”.
So professional policing standards are defined by a private company limited by guarantee, which infiltrates legitimate civilian protest groups? I think that sums it up,
Except that they don’t state that they are limited by guarantee on their website as they are required to do by law.
The Guardian report continued: “Today the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Tim Godwin, said his force would take over the spy agency - the National Public Order Intelligence Unit - on Monday. It will come under the Met's counter-terrorism command”.
Erm, counterterrorism? Infiltrating legitimate demonstrations against the Iraq war is counterterrorism?
This sounds reminiscent of the arrest of Walter Wolfgang, the Labour Party member who called out “Nonsense” when Jack Straw said they were bringing democracy to Iraq, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Such police undercover operations were not limited to anti-war protest groups. On January 10, a trial collapsed of six environmental protesters accused of conspiring to shut down the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire in 2009, when one of those arrested, though not charged, turned out to be a police undercover agent.
The defence lawyer stated: “On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid on Iona School in Nottingham which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today. However the Prosecution told the defence just last Friday, just before the trial was due to begin, 20 months after the investigation had begun, that: ‘Previously unavailable material that significantly undermined the prosecution case came to light on Wednesday 5th January’. The discovery of this material came at a time when the prosecution were informed that we planned disclosure of the evidence relating to PC Kennedy before the trial judge”.
In other words, it looks like a very expensive police setup. He also said
the case raised concerns over the role of an officer as 'agent provocateur', called for an inquiry into 'murky' police tactics, and questioned the need to spend vast amounts of money and resources infiltrating a 'peaceful, accountable and democratic' group.
The BBC’s Newsnight programme gave a feel of what it was like for fellow environmental campaigners on finding how they have been betrayed. They also interviewed an environmental protestor and a former undercover police officer, who spoke of “fractured lives”, and said that there are also people in the private security sector involved in undercover operations. The environmental campaigner said “The police police politically”. “There’s all sorts of political policing happening here in the UK, and it’s really damaging and it undermines democracy”, she said.
It turned out that PC Mark Kennedy was present also at the G20 demonstration in London when bystander Ian Tomlinson died, having been assaulted by a police officer:
Broadhurst, who was in charge of policing the G20 protests, had erroneously told the home affairs select committee in May 2009 that no plain-clothes officers were present at the demonstrations, saying it would have been too dangerous to have deployed them.
Today he apologised several times to the committee, saying that his denial was "true to the best of my knowledge at the time". He admitted that numerous City of London police officers had been present at the demonstration, along with more than one Met officer, including PC Mark Kennedy.
In 2008, MP George Galloway accused London Metropolitan Police of engaging in "a deliberate conspiracy to bring about scenes of violent disorder" during President Bush's visit to the UK, naming a senior police officer thought to have been operating as an undercover agent provocateur", writing:
You will be aware by now of an article in the Mail on Sunday of 22 June by Yasmin Whittaker-Khan in which she recounts her shock at meeting a man, whom she knew to be a policeman from a previous encounter, who seemed determined to bring about a confrontation between the demonstrators and the police.
“Are environmental activists really a spying priority?”, asks former MI5 officer Annie Machon turned truth campaigner:
“Acpo set up the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This first focused primarily on animal rights activists, but mission creep rapidly set in and the unit's role expanded into peaceful protest groups. When this unaccountable, Stasi-like unit was revealed it rightly caused an outcry, especially as the term ‘domestic extremist’ is not recognised under UK law, and cannot legally be used as justification to aggressively invade an individual's privacy because of their legitimate political beliefs and activism.”
On the secret services she writes:
“Also, MI5 and MI6 operate outside any realistic democratic oversight and control. . . . The spooks are effectively above the law, while at the same time protected by the draconian Official Secrets Act”.
She replied to her own headline question with: “A group of well-meaning environmental protesters should not even be on the radar”.
We saw in my recent newsletters how the term ‘extremism’ was being used by the clowns of DEMOS to justify government infiltration into groups which questioned the government’s version of events. They were recommending ‘open infiltration’, suggesting that it wasn’t even necessary to do these things covertly any more.
Annie Machon’s reference to “the draconian Official Secrets Act” makes me think of an interesting blog that I came across the other day on the website of the Butler Esperanto Library. It goes under the title “el la senato de Liliputo” [From the senate of Liliput] and is about what the libarian overheard during a meeting of the Management Committee of the Esperanto Association in July 2005, which was being held in the next room. It was about a resolution which I was later to refer to as the “Esperanto Official Secrets Act”, under which any member of the committee who revealed anything about the discussions other than minuted decisions could be denounced to the members and to the Charity Commission. It makes fascinating reading, if you can read the language, especially when the Vice-President asks where the Librarian got the information from, and then himself suffers from selective amnesia.
The clownocratic wording of that resolution could only have been produced by a high-level civil servant, though the person in question just gave me a blank stare when I asked who wrote it. Yes, I was at the meeting, and the resolution was brought in just after I had started my research.
So on seeing that blog the other day I added a comment giving the background.
I followed the reappearance of Tony Blair before the Chilcot commission on January 21st on the guardian website(as ‘iafantomo’) of which the video, transcript and related documents are archived on the Iraq Inquiry website.
Tony Blair seemed to me to be having some difficulty in reconciling what he had been telling President Bush and the House of Commons with the legal advice that he had been given. The day before going to see President Bush, he was sent a letter by Lord Goldsmith, saying,
"I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of Resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the Security Council."
Having received that advice, what he actually told the President was that he repeated his strong commitment to do what it took to disarm Saddam. “Did you not feel constrained in making that commitment by the advice that the Attorney General was continuing to give you?”, asked Sir Roderic Lyne. Tony Blair explained that he didn’t.
Earlier (15 January, 2003) Tony Blair had told the Commons:
“There are circumstances in which a UN resolution is not necessary, because it is necessary to be able to say in circumstances where an unreasonable veto is put down that we would still act." Lord Goldsmith has stated said that these words were not compatible with the advice that he had given to him the day before.
Tony Blair explained: “…I was saying it not in a sense as a lawyer, but politically”. Yet Tony Blair’s case for invading Iraq was shifting more and more towards 9/11, and indeed there had been talk in the aftermath of 9/11 of a possible invasion of Iraq. If that was the case, then Tony Blair should again be recalled, to explain the sequence of events which led from 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq.
Chilcot should go back to the statements made to the House of Commons on the two recalls of Parliament following 9/11, and in television interviews around that time. Tony Blair was claiming that he had seen “incontrovertible evidence” that Osama bin Laden had been responsible for 9/11. As with the claimed evidence for weapons of mass destruction, the Chilcot commission should now be examining whether such “incontrovertible evidence” existed. Who else saw such “incontrovertivble evidence”?
The leaders of the other main political parties should be interviewed by Chilcot, because it was said that that “incontrovertible evidence” had been shown to them. The leader of the Conservative Party confirmed in the House of Commons that he had seen such incontrovertible evidence, but the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party did not. Had they, or had they not? And what about NATO? Had Lord Robertson, as Secretary General of NATO seen such incontrovertible evidence, and could his involvement in the New Labour Group have possibly coloured his judgement? If such incontrovertible evidence existed, but still has to be kept secret, then Chilcot should enquire on what grounds it would need to be kept secret a decade after the event.
What possible reason could there be for keeping that incontrovertible evidence secret even from the FBI, who are still telling us that they have no such evidence
Perhaps the FBI should be interviewed by Chilcot, too.
Then what was the role of British ambassadors abroad? Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, informs us that the UK ambassador in Moscow “was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War”. “He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war”, Craig Murray added. Perhaps Sir Roderic Lyne should be questioned by the Chilcot Commission.
But there might just be a slight problem with that: he may first have to clone himself, since he himself sits on the commission.
Sir John Chilcot was just ten minutes in to the first public session of the Iraq Inquiry when he told the first big lie – and a lie which, when examined, exposes the entire charade.
"My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind."
That is demonstrably untrue. Three of the five members – Rod Lyne, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman – are prominent proponents of the Iraq war. By contrast, nobody on the committee was in public against the invasion of Iraq. How can it be fine to pack the committee with supporters of the invasion, when anyone against the invasion was excluded?
It seems Tony Blair missed a trick or two there. He could have personally taken charge of the whole inquiry, to ensure that the whole matter was in a safe pair of hands.
Perhaps also diplomatic contacts with Iraq around that time should be investigated. According to a new book by former CIA asset Susan Lindauer, Iraq offered to help the US in its investigation of 9/11. “He [Saddam] was more harsh on terrorists than we were”, she told Kevin Barret on No Lies Radio, “They were offering us everything we wanted”.
The book is "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq"
The story needs to be checked out, but if true, Tony Blair definitely needs to be recalled by Chilcot.
During Tony Blair’s session with Chilcot, the nation’s attention was deflected by the resignation of the Prime Minister’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, over the phone hacking allegations from the time that he was editor of the News of the World.
It appears that the London Metropolitan Police had been turning a blind eye to much of this, and there have been suggestions of possible collusion.
Things have to be getting bad when a former Deputy Prime Minister seeks to sue the London Metropolitan Police and <
a former minister warns that British democracy risks becoming a "laughing stock" around the world unless allegations about the phone hacking are fully investigated
Even discussion of sensitive issues such as these can be difficult, which is the reason I produce these newsletters.
At last year’s Euston seminar on 9/11 Professor Jim Fetzer spoke about the difficulties in even arranging such a meeting. Videos of the talks have been posted on the Internet by Pentos Films (http://vimeo.com/user4693310/videos), together with interesting interviews with Ken O’Keefe, who chaired the meeting, and who had been abord the Mavi Mara relief boat to Gaza.
We used to have regular monthly meetings in London of that size, but no longer. To understand what happened, one should study how the clownocratic system works.
I notice that the forum for the trial of Anthony John Hill, otherwise known by his pseudonym Muad’Dib, author of The Ripple Effect, has been suspended, “due to people using the forum in non-constructive ways it was never meant to be used for”.
I have to say that this is perfectly normal. I have taken part in a fair number of discussion groups and forums on things that the Establishment may wish us to keep quiet on, and every single one of them has run into similar problems.
George Orwell was right when he wrote in his censored preface to Animal Farm, “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness”.
John Hill has been silenced over 7/7, at least for the duration of the inquest, on what appears to be a bogus charge. He is still languishing in Wandsworth Prison in London, protesting the innocence of the four Muslim lads who were declared guilty at the beginning of the inquest. The Friends of Muad’Dib are now asking people to distribute The Ripple Effect as widely as possible. Despite everything, people still say that they prefer to live in this country than anywhere else. Well let’s keep it that way. The rights we have were hard fought-over by our forefathers, not by us.
What are we going to hand over to the next generation? A problem with globalisation is that financial oligarchies from various parts of the world are coming together, sometimes in competition and sometimes in co-operation, and pulling the strings in governments across the world. Who has been pulling the strings in Egypt for thirty years? Perhaps it’s the same people that have been pulling the strings in Britain and other countries.
Who runs Russia? I recently saw an interview with President Karzai of Afghanistan on Russia Today during his visit to Moscow:
He came across much more sympathetically than he does in the West. Yet whichever propaganda image is nearer the truth, he does have a credible point that Afghan farmers turn to poppies out of desperation, and there’s a market in the West where the opium is processed. I should have thought that the way to solve that would have been for the occupying powers to subsidise Afghan farmers in producing real crops for the Afghan people – unless, of course they are under the control of clownocrats whose strings are being pulled by the oligarchs of the narcotics industry.
The Great Game continues. At least in an autocracy you know what the rules are: you either shut up or you have a revolution. But how do you deal with a clownocracy? I suppose you just have to laugh and keep talking.
Every once in a while an iconic image appears on our television screens.
For me, such an image appeared on January 25 in the form of a clown, a member of CIRCA, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army
...who turned out to be a police infiltrator
New footage obtained by Channel 4 News shows a woman, believed to be an undercover police officer, taking part in anti war protests dressed as a clown.
...
The news comes against a backdrop of Britain's most senior public order police officer apologising to MPs after providing them with false information when he denied having plain-clothes officers in the crowd at the G20 demonstrations two years ago.
Her fellow clowns said they felt “betrayed”. I know how they feel. Just over a year ago I had an article published under the heading ‘Klaŭnokratio’ [Clownocracy] in what I suppose is the Esperanto equivalent of Private Eye, in which I described various crazy goings on in London, where it seemed as if someone had sent in the clowns. That was to do both with Esperanto meetings and truth movement meetings, some of which I reported in my September 2009 newsletter, in connection with the book launch for ‘Terror on the Tube’.
On seeing that iconic image of the police clown, I realised that it would at least give me some credibility in what I had been trying to tell people who didn’t want to hear. Sure enough, the following morning I received an email from a long-lost Esperanto friend, who no longer thought I was crazy.
It turned out that the operation in CIRCA had been carried out by a secretive unit belonging to the Association of Chief Police Officers.
But hang on, aren’t they a private company limited by guarantee? According to their website:
“The Association of Chief Police Officers is responsible for defining national standards and professional practice in key areas of policing”.
So professional policing standards are defined by a private company limited by guarantee, which infiltrates legitimate civilian protest groups? I think that sums it up,
Except that they don’t state that they are limited by guarantee on their website as they are required to do by law.
The Guardian report continued: “Today the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Tim Godwin, said his force would take over the spy agency - the National Public Order Intelligence Unit - on Monday. It will come under the Met's counter-terrorism command”.
Erm, counterterrorism? Infiltrating legitimate demonstrations against the Iraq war is counterterrorism?
This sounds reminiscent of the arrest of Walter Wolfgang, the Labour Party member who called out “Nonsense” when Jack Straw said they were bringing democracy to Iraq, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Such police undercover operations were not limited to anti-war protest groups. On January 10, a trial collapsed of six environmental protesters accused of conspiring to shut down the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire in 2009, when one of those arrested, though not charged, turned out to be a police undercover agent.
The defence lawyer stated: “On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid on Iona School in Nottingham which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today. However the Prosecution told the defence just last Friday, just before the trial was due to begin, 20 months after the investigation had begun, that: ‘Previously unavailable material that significantly undermined the prosecution case came to light on Wednesday 5th January’. The discovery of this material came at a time when the prosecution were informed that we planned disclosure of the evidence relating to PC Kennedy before the trial judge”.
In other words, it looks like a very expensive police setup. He also said
the case raised concerns over the role of an officer as 'agent provocateur', called for an inquiry into 'murky' police tactics, and questioned the need to spend vast amounts of money and resources infiltrating a 'peaceful, accountable and democratic' group.
The BBC’s Newsnight programme gave a feel of what it was like for fellow environmental campaigners on finding how they have been betrayed. They also interviewed an environmental protestor and a former undercover police officer, who spoke of “fractured lives”, and said that there are also people in the private security sector involved in undercover operations. The environmental campaigner said “The police police politically”. “There’s all sorts of political policing happening here in the UK, and it’s really damaging and it undermines democracy”, she said.
It turned out that PC Mark Kennedy was present also at the G20 demonstration in London when bystander Ian Tomlinson died, having been assaulted by a police officer:
Broadhurst, who was in charge of policing the G20 protests, had erroneously told the home affairs select committee in May 2009 that no plain-clothes officers were present at the demonstrations, saying it would have been too dangerous to have deployed them.
Today he apologised several times to the committee, saying that his denial was "true to the best of my knowledge at the time". He admitted that numerous City of London police officers had been present at the demonstration, along with more than one Met officer, including PC Mark Kennedy.
In 2008, MP George Galloway accused London Metropolitan Police of engaging in "a deliberate conspiracy to bring about scenes of violent disorder" during President Bush's visit to the UK, naming a senior police officer thought to have been operating as an undercover agent provocateur", writing:
You will be aware by now of an article in the Mail on Sunday of 22 June by Yasmin Whittaker-Khan in which she recounts her shock at meeting a man, whom she knew to be a policeman from a previous encounter, who seemed determined to bring about a confrontation between the demonstrators and the police.
“Are environmental activists really a spying priority?”, asks former MI5 officer Annie Machon turned truth campaigner:
“Acpo set up the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This first focused primarily on animal rights activists, but mission creep rapidly set in and the unit's role expanded into peaceful protest groups. When this unaccountable, Stasi-like unit was revealed it rightly caused an outcry, especially as the term ‘domestic extremist’ is not recognised under UK law, and cannot legally be used as justification to aggressively invade an individual's privacy because of their legitimate political beliefs and activism.”
On the secret services she writes:
“Also, MI5 and MI6 operate outside any realistic democratic oversight and control. . . . The spooks are effectively above the law, while at the same time protected by the draconian Official Secrets Act”.
She replied to her own headline question with: “A group of well-meaning environmental protesters should not even be on the radar”.
We saw in my recent newsletters how the term ‘extremism’ was being used by the clowns of DEMOS to justify government infiltration into groups which questioned the government’s version of events. They were recommending ‘open infiltration’, suggesting that it wasn’t even necessary to do these things covertly any more.
Annie Machon’s reference to “the draconian Official Secrets Act” makes me think of an interesting blog that I came across the other day on the website of the Butler Esperanto Library. It goes under the title “el la senato de Liliputo” [From the senate of Liliput] and is about what the libarian overheard during a meeting of the Management Committee of the Esperanto Association in July 2005, which was being held in the next room. It was about a resolution which I was later to refer to as the “Esperanto Official Secrets Act”, under which any member of the committee who revealed anything about the discussions other than minuted decisions could be denounced to the members and to the Charity Commission. It makes fascinating reading, if you can read the language, especially when the Vice-President asks where the Librarian got the information from, and then himself suffers from selective amnesia.
The clownocratic wording of that resolution could only have been produced by a high-level civil servant, though the person in question just gave me a blank stare when I asked who wrote it. Yes, I was at the meeting, and the resolution was brought in just after I had started my research.
So on seeing that blog the other day I added a comment giving the background.
I followed the reappearance of Tony Blair before the Chilcot commission on January 21st on the guardian website(as ‘iafantomo’) of which the video, transcript and related documents are archived on the Iraq Inquiry website.
Tony Blair seemed to me to be having some difficulty in reconciling what he had been telling President Bush and the House of Commons with the legal advice that he had been given. The day before going to see President Bush, he was sent a letter by Lord Goldsmith, saying,
"I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of Resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the Security Council."
Having received that advice, what he actually told the President was that he repeated his strong commitment to do what it took to disarm Saddam. “Did you not feel constrained in making that commitment by the advice that the Attorney General was continuing to give you?”, asked Sir Roderic Lyne. Tony Blair explained that he didn’t.
Earlier (15 January, 2003) Tony Blair had told the Commons:
“There are circumstances in which a UN resolution is not necessary, because it is necessary to be able to say in circumstances where an unreasonable veto is put down that we would still act." Lord Goldsmith has stated said that these words were not compatible with the advice that he had given to him the day before.
Tony Blair explained: “…I was saying it not in a sense as a lawyer, but politically”. Yet Tony Blair’s case for invading Iraq was shifting more and more towards 9/11, and indeed there had been talk in the aftermath of 9/11 of a possible invasion of Iraq. If that was the case, then Tony Blair should again be recalled, to explain the sequence of events which led from 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq.
Chilcot should go back to the statements made to the House of Commons on the two recalls of Parliament following 9/11, and in television interviews around that time. Tony Blair was claiming that he had seen “incontrovertible evidence” that Osama bin Laden had been responsible for 9/11. As with the claimed evidence for weapons of mass destruction, the Chilcot commission should now be examining whether such “incontrovertible evidence” existed. Who else saw such “incontrovertivble evidence”?
The leaders of the other main political parties should be interviewed by Chilcot, because it was said that that “incontrovertible evidence” had been shown to them. The leader of the Conservative Party confirmed in the House of Commons that he had seen such incontrovertible evidence, but the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party did not. Had they, or had they not? And what about NATO? Had Lord Robertson, as Secretary General of NATO seen such incontrovertible evidence, and could his involvement in the New Labour Group have possibly coloured his judgement? If such incontrovertible evidence existed, but still has to be kept secret, then Chilcot should enquire on what grounds it would need to be kept secret a decade after the event.
What possible reason could there be for keeping that incontrovertible evidence secret even from the FBI, who are still telling us that they have no such evidence
Perhaps the FBI should be interviewed by Chilcot, too.
Then what was the role of British ambassadors abroad? Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, informs us that the UK ambassador in Moscow “was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War”. “He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war”, Craig Murray added. Perhaps Sir Roderic Lyne should be questioned by the Chilcot Commission.
But there might just be a slight problem with that: he may first have to clone himself, since he himself sits on the commission.
Sir John Chilcot was just ten minutes in to the first public session of the Iraq Inquiry when he told the first big lie – and a lie which, when examined, exposes the entire charade.
"My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind."
That is demonstrably untrue. Three of the five members – Rod Lyne, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman – are prominent proponents of the Iraq war. By contrast, nobody on the committee was in public against the invasion of Iraq. How can it be fine to pack the committee with supporters of the invasion, when anyone against the invasion was excluded?
It seems Tony Blair missed a trick or two there. He could have personally taken charge of the whole inquiry, to ensure that the whole matter was in a safe pair of hands.
Perhaps also diplomatic contacts with Iraq around that time should be investigated. According to a new book by former CIA asset Susan Lindauer, Iraq offered to help the US in its investigation of 9/11. “He [Saddam] was more harsh on terrorists than we were”, she told Kevin Barret on No Lies Radio, “They were offering us everything we wanted”.
The book is "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq"
The story needs to be checked out, but if true, Tony Blair definitely needs to be recalled by Chilcot.
During Tony Blair’s session with Chilcot, the nation’s attention was deflected by the resignation of the Prime Minister’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, over the phone hacking allegations from the time that he was editor of the News of the World.
It appears that the London Metropolitan Police had been turning a blind eye to much of this, and there have been suggestions of possible collusion.
Things have to be getting bad when a former Deputy Prime Minister seeks to sue the London Metropolitan Police and <
a former minister warns that British democracy risks becoming a "laughing stock" around the world unless allegations about the phone hacking are fully investigated
Even discussion of sensitive issues such as these can be difficult, which is the reason I produce these newsletters.
At last year’s Euston seminar on 9/11 Professor Jim Fetzer spoke about the difficulties in even arranging such a meeting. Videos of the talks have been posted on the Internet by Pentos Films (http://vimeo.com/user4693310/videos), together with interesting interviews with Ken O’Keefe, who chaired the meeting, and who had been abord the Mavi Mara relief boat to Gaza.
We used to have regular monthly meetings in London of that size, but no longer. To understand what happened, one should study how the clownocratic system works.
I notice that the forum for the trial of Anthony John Hill, otherwise known by his pseudonym Muad’Dib, author of The Ripple Effect, has been suspended, “due to people using the forum in non-constructive ways it was never meant to be used for”.
I have to say that this is perfectly normal. I have taken part in a fair number of discussion groups and forums on things that the Establishment may wish us to keep quiet on, and every single one of them has run into similar problems.
George Orwell was right when he wrote in his censored preface to Animal Farm, “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness”.
John Hill has been silenced over 7/7, at least for the duration of the inquest, on what appears to be a bogus charge. He is still languishing in Wandsworth Prison in London, protesting the innocence of the four Muslim lads who were declared guilty at the beginning of the inquest. The Friends of Muad’Dib are now asking people to distribute The Ripple Effect as widely as possible. Despite everything, people still say that they prefer to live in this country than anywhere else. Well let’s keep it that way. The rights we have were hard fought-over by our forefathers, not by us.
What are we going to hand over to the next generation? A problem with globalisation is that financial oligarchies from various parts of the world are coming together, sometimes in competition and sometimes in co-operation, and pulling the strings in governments across the world. Who has been pulling the strings in Egypt for thirty years? Perhaps it’s the same people that have been pulling the strings in Britain and other countries.
Who runs Russia? I recently saw an interview with President Karzai of Afghanistan on Russia Today during his visit to Moscow:
He came across much more sympathetically than he does in the West. Yet whichever propaganda image is nearer the truth, he does have a credible point that Afghan farmers turn to poppies out of desperation, and there’s a market in the West where the opium is processed. I should have thought that the way to solve that would have been for the occupying powers to subsidise Afghan farmers in producing real crops for the Afghan people – unless, of course they are under the control of clownocrats whose strings are being pulled by the oligarchs of the narcotics industry.
The Great Game continues. At least in an autocracy you know what the rules are: you either shut up or you have a revolution. But how do you deal with a clownocracy? I suppose you just have to laugh and keep talking.
Jamie Bartlett says young people should develop critical thinking skills - Who would disagree?
Originally sent October 2010
For the first time ever in the history of the 9/11 truth movement, as far as I am aware, truth seekers will have an opportunity to be directly confronted by ‘the other side’.
The think-tank DEMOS has accepted an invitation to talk about their recommendations to Government on ‘open infiltration’ in what they call ‘conspiracy theory’ groups. That meeting will take place this coming Monday, under the heading ‘DEMOS v. The Truth Movement’.
The speakers will be the two authors of the DEMOS report ‘the power of unreason: conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism’, which I wrote about in my September newsletter.
Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller have agreed to come along and explain the thinking behind their work, and to answer questions from the audience. In my September newsletter I described the recommendations, and gave some background on DEMOS, explaining its importance in Government thinking since 1997. If you don’t have that newsletter, and would like a copy, just email. I can also supply you with my Powerpoint presentation which I used at last month’s meeting of ‘9/11 Keep Talking’, in which I analysed the contents of the report.
In summary, I wrote in the newsletter:
“The report was headed, ‘the power of unreason: conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism’, and it claims to examine the role of conspiracy theories in extremist groups, arguing that conspiracy theories are linked to violence. It singles out the 9/11 Truth movement as being “most notorious and influential”, in that it questions the official accounts of 9/11.
It states that the obvious response by Government of producing information often fails because any refutation risks being taken as evidence of a cover up. The authors propose introducing ‘alternative information’ to civilian groups which believe in conspiracy theories. This may be introduced directly by agents of the Government, ‘or their allies’, in what they term ‘open infiltration’, or it may be introduced by civilian groups, which would be seen to be independent of Government.”
Shortly after the report was published, Jamie Bartlett opened up a blog on the DEMOS website headed ‘The bloggers strike back’ giving a description of the report, and accepting comments. Many of these comments concerned the issue of 9/11, which had been included in the report.
In response to one contributer, he stated: “Paolo you are absolutely right, the report was not about the 9/11 truth movement, but about conspiracy theories in extremist groups. I have, however, consequently been sucked into a debate about 9/11, which I am more than happy to take on”.
He added: “Finally, I will be going on to a radio show soon with someone who I think is quite an influential person in the 9/11 truth movement. To his credit he's willing to have me on his radio show. So I'll post details when I get them. I put a couple of questions up myself, and these were replied to privately. I then asked Carl whether they would be willing to come and talk to us and answer questions on their report. Carl replied that he would, but that they would both be abroad for the next meeting.
Some time later I wrote on Jamie’s blog page: “You and Carl will be most welcome to come to our 9/11 Keep Talking group in London to explain your report and to answer questions on it. This would provide an opportunity for both of you to demonstrate just how 'open infiltration' would work, and how you would propose to introduce ‘alternative information’ in connection with the 9/11 issue. It would also allow you to explain to us the other forms of infiltration which you propose, and why they are necessary, compared with the current methods already employed by the security services. Carl has already accepted in principle, and so if you could email me with some dates, I'll be able to set something up.”
Jamie responded privately, and that led to Monday’s meeting. Initially, we had intended this as a normal monthly meeting of the London group, which we had been holding in a pub in St Pancras Station, in a meeting room provided free of charge. But by the last meeting they were asking us to commit to £10 per head in drinks and food. Attendance went down. Then David Rose stepped in. He is a PhD student of Sociology at Goldsmith’s College, a part of the University of London, working on ‘Visual Sociology and Conspiracy Theories’ (http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/nash/).
DEMOS press release
Instead, civil society must play a stronger role in engaging with conspiracy theories where they find them, and the education system needs to do more to equip young people with critical thinking skills, especially in respect of the net.
BBC report:
Secrecy surrounding counter-terrorism operations is fuelling mistrust of authorities, a study by independent think tank Demos suggests.
It urges the government and secret services to be more open to stop extremist groups using conspiracy theories to discredit them.
A Demos spokesman said: "Less-secret services could make Britain safer."
The study calls for greater communication with trusted community leaders and individuals.
Both the DEMOS press release and the Guardian blog give prominance to 9/11, thus emphasising that the 9/11 truth movement was indeed of primary relevance to the report. Please feel free to pass this newsletter on to friends and to get the information out there, and above all, keep talking.
For the first time ever in the history of the 9/11 truth movement, as far as I am aware, truth seekers will have an opportunity to be directly confronted by ‘the other side’.
The think-tank DEMOS has accepted an invitation to talk about their recommendations to Government on ‘open infiltration’ in what they call ‘conspiracy theory’ groups. That meeting will take place this coming Monday, under the heading ‘DEMOS v. The Truth Movement’.
The speakers will be the two authors of the DEMOS report ‘the power of unreason: conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism’, which I wrote about in my September newsletter.
Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller have agreed to come along and explain the thinking behind their work, and to answer questions from the audience. In my September newsletter I described the recommendations, and gave some background on DEMOS, explaining its importance in Government thinking since 1997. If you don’t have that newsletter, and would like a copy, just email. I can also supply you with my Powerpoint presentation which I used at last month’s meeting of ‘9/11 Keep Talking’, in which I analysed the contents of the report.
In summary, I wrote in the newsletter:
“The report was headed, ‘the power of unreason: conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism’, and it claims to examine the role of conspiracy theories in extremist groups, arguing that conspiracy theories are linked to violence. It singles out the 9/11 Truth movement as being “most notorious and influential”, in that it questions the official accounts of 9/11.
It states that the obvious response by Government of producing information often fails because any refutation risks being taken as evidence of a cover up. The authors propose introducing ‘alternative information’ to civilian groups which believe in conspiracy theories. This may be introduced directly by agents of the Government, ‘or their allies’, in what they term ‘open infiltration’, or it may be introduced by civilian groups, which would be seen to be independent of Government.”
Shortly after the report was published, Jamie Bartlett opened up a blog on the DEMOS website headed ‘The bloggers strike back’ giving a description of the report, and accepting comments. Many of these comments concerned the issue of 9/11, which had been included in the report.
In response to one contributer, he stated: “Paolo you are absolutely right, the report was not about the 9/11 truth movement, but about conspiracy theories in extremist groups. I have, however, consequently been sucked into a debate about 9/11, which I am more than happy to take on”.
He added: “Finally, I will be going on to a radio show soon with someone who I think is quite an influential person in the 9/11 truth movement. To his credit he's willing to have me on his radio show. So I'll post details when I get them. I put a couple of questions up myself, and these were replied to privately. I then asked Carl whether they would be willing to come and talk to us and answer questions on their report. Carl replied that he would, but that they would both be abroad for the next meeting.
Some time later I wrote on Jamie’s blog page: “You and Carl will be most welcome to come to our 9/11 Keep Talking group in London to explain your report and to answer questions on it. This would provide an opportunity for both of you to demonstrate just how 'open infiltration' would work, and how you would propose to introduce ‘alternative information’ in connection with the 9/11 issue. It would also allow you to explain to us the other forms of infiltration which you propose, and why they are necessary, compared with the current methods already employed by the security services. Carl has already accepted in principle, and so if you could email me with some dates, I'll be able to set something up.”
Jamie responded privately, and that led to Monday’s meeting. Initially, we had intended this as a normal monthly meeting of the London group, which we had been holding in a pub in St Pancras Station, in a meeting room provided free of charge. But by the last meeting they were asking us to commit to £10 per head in drinks and food. Attendance went down. Then David Rose stepped in. He is a PhD student of Sociology at Goldsmith’s College, a part of the University of London, working on ‘Visual Sociology and Conspiracy Theories’ (http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/nash/).
DEMOS press release
Instead, civil society must play a stronger role in engaging with conspiracy theories where they find them, and the education system needs to do more to equip young people with critical thinking skills, especially in respect of the net.
BBC report:
Secrecy surrounding counter-terrorism operations is fuelling mistrust of authorities, a study by independent think tank Demos suggests.
It urges the government and secret services to be more open to stop extremist groups using conspiracy theories to discredit them.
A Demos spokesman said: "Less-secret services could make Britain safer."
The study calls for greater communication with trusted community leaders and individuals.
Both the DEMOS press release and the Guardian blog give prominance to 9/11, thus emphasising that the 9/11 truth movement was indeed of primary relevance to the report. Please feel free to pass this newsletter on to friends and to get the information out there, and above all, keep talking.
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