Showing posts with label George Galloway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Galloway. Show all posts

Sunday, 30 September 2012

Is the public enemy no.1?

September 2012

As the world was distracted by the great Olympic sideshow, Britain and the US admitted to giving military aid to the insurgents in Syria. "And we will give them more", stated UK Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the US of trying to justify terrorism.

Kabul Press notes the lack of comment from the US administration on the assassination of Syria's Foreign Minister, suggesting that they are encouraging Syrian suicide bombers.

An article in Iran's Press TV website claims that NATO has secretly authorised an attack on Syria.

History is repeating itself. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from Iraq. Yet Syria seems to be the line drawn in the sand, as far as Russia and China are concerned.

Attempts to isolate Iran, again on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction, are now looking ridiculous, as 120 nations assemble in Tehran for a conference of the Non-Aligned Movement.

"Non-Aligned Movement: Tehran's new secret weapon?" asks an article on the Russia Today website:

Leaders and ranking envoys from more than 120 developing nations flew to Tehran this week to attend the 16th summit of the NAM. There, they are expected to throw their support behind Iran in its standoff with the UN Security Council and the ‘big six’ of world powers. Basking in the publicity they are usually deprived of by international media, the leaders of “underdeveloped and unprivileged” nations (to use the NAM’s parlance), will feel like real movers and shakers in world politics. At least, for the five days before they return home.

Yet who is the enemy? They keep saying that terrorist incidents bear all the hallmarks of Al Qaida. I pointed out in my July newsletter that Al Qaida always has been a US database of CIA operatives and their co-fighters, and that perhaps it should be written as 'Al CIA da'.

An analysis of the possible links with the CIA has since been published by Elias Davidsson on the website Muslims for 9/11 Truth, under the heading 'Al-CIA-duh exposed! Who are Al Qaeda's enemies?'

I think we were all relieved that there wasn't a terrorist attack on London during the Olympics, but it's not over yet. The Paralympics ends on the 9th of September. In an article headed 'Imminent terror attack on London?', the Iranian television website Press TV has published further reasons to think that an attack may have been planned.

In September 2011 the Westfield Stratford City Mall, situated next to the Olympic Park, was opened by former Executive Chairman and General President of the Westfield Group Frank Lowy. "Frank Lowy and his copartner Larry Silverstein had rented the whole World Trade Center (WTC) for 99 years just a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks", the article states. It also points out:

"The WTC complex buildings 1, 2, and 7 along with Westfield Hotel were ruined in the 9/11 attacks, so Silverstein and the Westfield company pocketed about $5.4 billion from the attacks".

I think that must have been the Marriott Hotel, owned by the Westfield Group. Other Marriott Hotels which suffered terrorist attacks were those in Islamabad (2008-09-20) and Jakarta (2008-07-17). "With regard to Lowy's talent for investment in places that are victims of terrorist attacks, the question raises that [of] whether the Olympic Park would be a possible target for terrorist attacks. The insurance companies have been committed to compensate about $7 billion for lost profits, if terrorist attacks happen", the article suggests

I think we have to regard the scenario analysis published by the Rockefeller Foundation, which I reported on in my July newsletter, as being just that: four possible scenarios, one of which was the 'Hack Attack' involving a terrorist attack during the London Olympics. That document could have been put out to sound out ideas amongst the insiders, in rather a similar way that think tank reports in the UK can be put out to sound out political ideas before politicians have the courage to talk about them in public. Perhaps someone should be analysing the other three scenarios put out by the Rockefeller Foundation.

I think there's not much doubt that the London Olympics must have been the most militarised and draconian ever. I don't think there can be many people left in the UK who would not agree that the Olympics were taken over by giant corporations. Stories of the 'brand police' defending the commercial rights of these corporations against other business told us whose side the Establishment was on. The most ludicrous of these that I came across was the announcement of an investigation when unofficial condoms were found in the Olympic village.

So what's it all about? Suppose this were extended to the whole country, not just for the Olympics, but forever, with G4S running the brand police, the rest of the police, the prisons and possibly parts of the the judicial system, too. That's what Mussolini called Fascism. When I say we are governed by corporations, most people nowadays seem to agree. That is how close we are. Could it be that the Olympic circus was just an exercise for the coming Fascist state?

There's been a lot of nonsense, as well as a lot of sense, talked of the year 2012. My own interpretation has been that 2012 is the culmination of a twenty-year operation to introduce the draconian New World Order. This may have consisted of four five-year plans following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. In the UK these stages look like: stage 1 (1992 - 1997) establishment of New Labour, Demos, etc; stage 2 (1998- 2002): pretexts for Blair's wars; stage 3 (2003 - 2007) chaos in the Middle East and fear at home; stage 4 (2008 - 2012): financial control. So perhaps there's now a fifth stage (2013 - 2017): consolidation of the corporate / Fascist state.

In my July newsletter I mentioned Richard Cottrell's idea that Tony Blair may be positioning himself to come back as Prime Minister. I thought he could never be an elected leader ever again, so if he was to become Prime Minister again they would get some clown elected in 2015 - perhaps the current Mayor of London Boris Johnson - then let Tony Blair take over in 2017.

I asked Richard for his thoughts on this, and he wrote back, "I think we are mistaken that Bliar is popularly unelectable. I am afraid the electorate in the UK is now so dumbed down (just the same here in Italia, btw) that Iraq happened somewhere in the Old Testament, ...". He wrote that he thought there'll be a new openly 'National Socialist' movement, building on the rather successful New Labour model, except this will be a mass movement with distinct fascist overtones and organisation. "Somewhere in London", he wrote, "the blueprints are being worked on right now. The elimination of all opposition groups will lead the way to compulsory membership if there's to be any kind life for the ordinary individual: jobs, access to health and education, housing, even food - and the right to travel, especially abroad. Of course it won't happen overnight, it will 'evolve' with the assistance of a few dramatic false flags here and there". It's a chilling thought, but if you look at Tony Blair's website and you understand Orwellian newspeak, it's believable.

Tony Blair came under attack from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in The Observer, in an article explaining why he refused to share a platform with Tony Blair at the 'Discovery Invest Leadership Summit' in Johannesburg the previous week. He wrote that those responsible for the suffering and loss of life arising from the invasion of Iraq in 2003 "should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague".

It was a good time to bury bad news for the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war. Publication of the findings of the inquiry, which began in 2009, has been delayed for at least a further year, owing to the refusal of the government to release cabinet papers. However, the Chilcott committee has had access to those papers; the only issue is whether the papers can be released to the public. So why can't Chilcott go ahead with the report, even if it is partly based on evidence which they cannot publish? According to The Guardian article: "Chilcot has said Blair's claim that MI6 established 'beyond doubt' that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was 'not possible to make on the basis of intelligence'".

The Daily Mail reacted with an editorial, beginning:

"Tony Blair stands accused, by this paper among many other observers, of one of the most serious abuses of power a prime minister can commit. The charge is that he made a private agreement with George Bush to join the US in an offensive war against Iraq. Then, with the aid of spin doctor Alastair Campbell, he wildly exaggerated evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a deadly threat to this country, so as to persuade the Cabinet, Parliament and the British people that the invasion was justified".

What puzzles me is that the Daily Mail can condemn Tony Blair for deception over the Iraq War but remain quiet on deception over the Afghan War. Shortly after 9/11 Tony Blair told Parliament that he had proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, and that he would make the evidence available to MPs, who would be able to read it after the debate in the House of Commons Library. The document he deposited there said little more than he had told the Commons, and he could just as easily have presented that to the Commons as the speech he gave. That was plain deception. <

Now history is repeating itself, with talk of possible use of chemical weapons by Syria, and development of a nuclear bomb by Iran, with Israel threatening to bomb Iran and presidential candidate Mitt Romney giving them the green light if he is elected as US President. If Israel were to carry out its threat it's unlikely they could disrupt any underground nuclear facility in Iran, unless they themselves dropped a nuclear bomb on Tehran in order to wipe out all the people involved. In carrying out any bombing campaign they would have most of the world against them, including many in Israel and the US. And if Tehran did have a nuclear bomb, could they use it? Their Muslim neighbours in Pakistan haven't used theirs yet.

In this war rhetoric against Iran, Mitt Romney stated that Iran had "seized embassies". That is exactly what UK Foreign Secretary William Hague threatened to do to the London embassy of Ecuador, in order to arrest Julian Assange, who has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, and is now residing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. On 19 August Julian Assange gave a speech from the embassy balcony, but beforehand, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gave a speech outside, in which he stated:

"The Vienna Convention is absolutely plain. The Vienna Convention of 1961 is the single most subscribed international treaty in existence, and it states in article 22 section 1 that the diplomatic premises of an embassy are inviolable. Full Stop. Are inviable. You can not invade the embassy of another country. As Tariq [Ali] rightly said, there were times when I sheltered Uzbek citizens from their government within the confines of the British embassy in Uzbekistan. Even during the height of the tensions of the Cold War the opposing parties never entered each other's embassies to abduct a dissident. The fact that William Hague now openly threatens the Ecuadorians with the invasion of their sovereign premises is one further example of the total abandonment of the very concept of international law by the Neoconservative juntas that are currently ruling the former Western democracies [cheering]".

He went on to say:

"And I tell you this: in international law and in Ecuadorian law, whatever British domestic legislation may say, if the Metropolitan Police enter the premises of the Ecuadorian embassy they are subject to Ecuadorian law, and they are committing a crime under Ecuadorian law [cheering] and for this as individuals policemen are quite likely liable to prosecution [cheering]".

Answering a question from a journalist, Craig Murray said that the British diplomatic service was extremely unhappy at this threat by William Hague, and that it makes every British embassy around the world liable to invasion. The video and a full transcript were published on the Democracy Now website.

Craig Murray wrote in his blog the following day that a Guardian editorial claimed that he had omitted all mention of the sexual allegations against Julian Assange, and that the Guardian had made no attempt to indicate the gist of what he had actually said. He wrote that even the New York Times had at least got to the point, when reporting: "a former British diplomat, Craig Murray, asserted that Mr. Assange had been 'fitted up with criminal offenses' as a pretext".

The Guardian had earlier been working with Julian Assange in publishing some of the material which he had provided.

"The Guardian's shrill and vitriolic campaign against Assange is extraordinary in its ferocity, persistence and pointless repetition", he wrote, "The sad truth is that its origins lie in the frustration of the Guardian's hopes to make a great deal of cash from involvement in Assange's putative memoirs".

Perhaps the sad truth is that otherwise the Ecuadorian embassy might get a little overcrowded.

The following day, Craig Murray appeared on Newsnight, and said, "I think there are elements of a set-up", and outlined why. He was widely criticised for naming Anna Ardin as one of the women who had made allegations against Julian Assange. He defended this on the grounds that this information was already widely known, and, indeed, Anna Ardin had herself publicised her case by giving interviews to the press. He also pointed out that the BBC had repeatedly named Nafissatou Diallo, the alleged rape victim of Dominique Strauss Kahn, while the criminal investigation into the alleged rape was still in progress. "Why the contradiction?", he asked.

In the same edition of Newsnight, a video clip of Respect Party MP George Galloway was shown, in which he stated: 'The Julian Assange Sex Crime Allegations, If True, Are Not Rape'. This attracted widespread condemnation in the press, though I don't recall any similar condemnation when former cabinet minister and now veteran anti-war campaigner Tony Benn told the Stop the War Coalition on 7 February 2011, "The charge of rape simply doesn't stand up to examination". It's important to point out, though, that Julian Assange hasn't been charged; he's only wanted for questioning. The Swedish government's website states: "Within the EU the procedure for extradition has in general been replaced by surrender according to the European Arrest Warrent".

So I'm confused.

US feminist Naomi Wolf told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that the Assange case was being treated differently from other similar alleged rape cases in Sweden.



Canadian author Naomi Klein, too, on December 2010 tweeted: "Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women's freedom was used to invade afghanistan. Wake up!"

Australian author and film director John Pilger wrote on 23 August that the British government's threat to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London and seize Julian Assange is of "historic significance". "Hague has made a laughing stock of Britain across the world", he wrote. "It is as if the Olympics happy-clappery has been subverted overnight by a revealing display of colonial thuggery", he continued, going onto the "Guardian's perfidious role in the whole Assange affair". He also wrote of a Pentagon document which described how Julian Assange would be destroyed with a smear campaign leading to "criminal prosecution".

I have to say that there has been some scepticism within the 9/11 Truth Movement concerning Wikileaks. The amount of information and the amount of editing would suggest that there must be a national intelligence agency at work behind it. Some commentators whose analyses I generally value were taking this line, such as Gordon Duff of Veterans Today, who in December 2010 thought that Wikileaks was a Mossad operation and Webster Tarpley argues that Wikileaks is a CIA operation.

It's possible, of course, that Julian Assange himself doesn't know where the information is coming from, since Wikileaks is the publisher rather than the spying network. It's quite possible that such an operation would be used by national intelligence agencies. One possibility that no-one ever seems to consider is that Russia could be behind Wikileaks. Julian Assange has had his own show on Russia Today, and the Russian intelligence services would surely not let their television station fall into such a trap. Russia does have an interest in limiting NATO's advance throughout the world, as we all have, and it would be expected that they would have some operation to counter the CIA/MI6 subversion that they are reporting across the globe, including Russia. Selective reporting would be expected, even if only to avoid revealing their sources. Russia Today does regularly interview people who are active in the truth movement in Britain and the US.

Daniel Estulin, famous for his revelations on the secretive Bilderberg meetings, has just published a book called 'Deconstructing Wikileaks'. The author "freely admits to some ambivalence in his opinion of Wikileaks".

Whatever the truth, the propaganda war continues. John Pilger's latest film 'The War You Don't See' is now available to watch online. It's about the role of journalists in military propaganda. "If people really knew the truth", British prime minister Lloyd George told the editor of The Manchester Guardian in 1917, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know".

"Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public."

"What are you going to do about it?", asked John Pilger four times on 26 April 2012 in an article headed 'You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?'. I intend to do exactly what I have been urging others to do, and what we in '9/11 Keep Talking' are doing, and what John Pilger, Craig Murray and many others have been doing: Keep Talking!

Sunday, 12 February 2012

Governments should have nothing to hide

January 2012

January has passed, and we still don't know who we are going to wage war on this year. The Establishment is trying very hard to fix something up, but it seems they are having problems.

I saw on Russia Today demonstrations outside the US Embassy in London with banners saying 'Don't attack Iran' (28 January).

The Anti-War Coalition held a 'Don't attack Iran' conference at which former MP George Galloway gave a dire warning of the consequences of going to war with Iran:







Link


Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, told Russia Today that suggestions that Iran's leaders had been involved in 9/11 was nothing but a ploy


They tried to implicate Saddam Hussain in 9/11, too, but that turned out to be just war propaganda. As with Iraq, they are now talking of weapons of mass destruction in Iran, when the main proliferation of nuclear weapons seems to have been in US bases in non-nuclear countries. On 30 January Michel Chossudovsky gave a further interview, saying that an invasion of Iran had been on the cards since 1995, and warning of an 'unthinkable outcome', a possible World War III scenario, if an attack were to take place (rt.com/ news/us-iran-ww3-chossudovsky-025).


"Almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel's military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions, a former chief of the country's defence forces told The Independent yesterday".



Things are hotting up in Syria, too, but it is becoming more and more clear that things aren't as they appear in the mainstream media. The Guardian has now broken ranks, with a blog by Jonathan Steele on 17 January on its 'Comment is Free' site, with a headline: ' Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media'.


According to an opinion poll commissioned from Qatar, 55% of Syrians want Assad to stay, they say. "The pity is that it was ignored by almost all media outlets in every western country whose government has called for Assad to go", writes the blogger.

When news of that blog circulated in the UK truth movement, US researcher and writer Webster Tarpley wrote: "During my own trip to Syria last November, I estimated 65%. In any case, Assad has the support of an overwhelming landslide majority".


He also gave a link to an interview on France 24 with the Archbishop of Aleppo in Syria, Jean-Clément Jeanbart. The Archbishop estimated that about 70% of Syrians back Assad.


He also told listeners that most of Syria was in fact peaceful, a very different impression from the one one gets from the Western mainstream media.

And now, a leaked copy of the Observers' Mission Report of the League of Arab States to Syria has just appeared on the Internet.


Michel Chossudovsky concludes: "While the Mission does not identify the foreign powers behind 'the armed entity', the report dispels the mainstream media lies and fabrications. It largely confirms independent media reports including Global Research's coverage of the armed insurrection since April 2011".


A United Nations human rights panel expressed alarm at reports claiming that Syrian security forces were torturing children. Writing in Alex Jones' Prison Planet, Kurt Nimmo compares this with disinformation about Saddam Hussain's people throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion of 1991 Link.

It turned out not to be true. But why would it be necessary to unleash such mendacious war propaganda on the US public when Saddam had just invaded a sovereign nation? That, in turn, is reminiscent of what historian monk Robert of Reims wrote some twenty years after the call to arms by Pope Urban II which led to the First Crusade: "They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. ..."

I doubt whether the pope actually said those words, but it was all part of the war machine. Isn't it about time, after nearly a thousand years, that we stopped believing them? Nick Kollerstrom wrote in Terror on the Tube: "Deep in the Anglo-Saxon psyche, one finds a collective reassurance, a togetherness, that is gained from that hate-and-fear image. People have been reared on films in which the enemy threatens our whole way of life, and has to be blasted to bits in the last reel, and ordinary citizens are actually grateful to their leader for telling them who to hate and fear - just as George Orwell predicted"

I think Anglo-Saxon acceptance of the ruling elite goes back to 1066, when the Normans became the ruling class. They were propagandist French-speaking Vikings who had overseas expansionism in their blood. Not much has changed since the days of Guillaume le Conquerant, and the crusading adventures of his great great grandson Richard Coer de Leon, who lived in the South West of France and spoke langue d'oil. Whilst we in state schools were learning "An Englishman's word is his bond", the ruling elite were earning the epithet "La perfide Albion".

So what happens if there's another event like 7/7 in London during the Olympic Games? With 13 000 troops in the capital it sounds as if there'd be a military clamp-down, like that following the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. Or what happens if they start bombing Syria or Iran or Pakistan, or Somalia? It will not only be an excellent opportunity for burying bad news, but an opporunity to ban demonstrations in London. People could be thrown into jail as terrorists for merely opposing the government in its latter-day Viking quest for conquest. Perhaps the same could be said of anyone protesting about the sponsorship by Dow Chemical, the company which shirked its responsibility in Bhopal for compensating the human beings whose lives they wrecked in 1984. I think with knowledge of all this if I were involved with the Olympic Games by now I'd have withdrawn.


This isn't just speculation. Banning demonstrations during the Olympic Games has been on the agenda since last year, when The Independent reported: "Ministers are planning legal action to restrict public protests during the Olympics, amid fears that Britain could be disrupted by lengthy and high-profile demonstrations".


"The coalition appears to be abandoning any attempt to behave like a democratic government", said one protester at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest outside St Paul's.

Protesters were reported to be infuriated by a police memo which put the London Occupy movement in the same context as Al Qaeda. "We are clearly nothing to do with extremists or terrorists, we are a peaceful group and we do use direct action to raise our point but definitely not terrorism", said one protester.

The police document mentions a forthcoming 'Bank of Ideas' meeting, suggesting that that may lead to an increase in "urban exploration activity". The opening of the Bank of Ideas was reported in The Independent: "The Occupy London group, who have also occupied space outside St Paul's Cathedral and Finsbury Square in Islington, north London, have organised a series of events to mark the opening".







"We have raised one important issue, which is that the financial system is corrupt.", says the video, "It's about bringing people together; it's about solidarity". Now I know one or two people who went to the Bank of Ideas meeting and did some filming. Mark Windows showed the video at the January meeting of Keep Talking in London, and then posted it on the Internet as 'INSIDE OCCUPY AND BANK OF IDEAS with land of the free uk'.







"We just ask questions", says the video. The process used was the Delphi Technique, but what they seemed to be finding was an "invisible hierarchy". The first question that cropped up was on how the Climate Camp was associated with the action, and why the finances were going into their bank account. Later in the video they go to the camp outside St Paul's, where one of the protesters says, "Well when I first came down here it was a real grass-roots movement … since the GA's have moved in and started to take control over the camp a lot has changed, and the way they did it was very stealthily … they began to enforce rules …". Mark Windows then states: "There's no reason why we can't film here now, but they've gone to get their Tranquility Team now. This is how it's turned out at St Paul's. It seems it's no longer the 99%".

One guy in the video offers a possible explanation: "There are some people who are travelling around this planet, who are training people in countries all over the world, and train people on how to hold these revolutions that are democratic - new democracy revolutions - and what we're experiencing on the ground, inside of this thing, is it's basically the government that's pushing a New Age agenda". So are government agent provocateurs taking over the Occupy movement in London in time for the Olympics?


Meanwhile, BBC's Newsnight has been figuring out what British troops were doing in the Libyan campaign last year. Despite a UN resolution, Newsnight found that UK forces were on the ground in Libya, alongside the anti-Gaddafi forces.


An analysis appeared in The Daily Bell, a free-market alternative news site based in Liechtenstein, under the heading 'BBC admits anglosphere destabilised Libya'

Well, it's not quite the BBC itself; the BBC is not yet a homogenous beaurocracy headed by a Stalinist clique, though since the coup of 2004 when their Director General, Greg Dyke, was forced to resign because he let out a bit of truth about the Weapons of Mass Destruction deception, it does seem to be going in that direction.

The BBC's best-known journalist, Jeremy Paxman, giving a lecture about Newsnight in August 2007, stated about the BBC: "Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin's Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can't even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin's Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever".

Whilst some programmes, such as their 'Consipracy Files', could be mistaken for, if not Stalinist propaganda, Nazi-type propaganda, there are still investigative journalists there who are doing what they can under difficult circumstances. Jeremy Paxman does an excellent job in trying to squeeze drips of truth out of politicians, but often he's interviewing the wrong people. Here's what he said in the same lecture: "When we learned a few weeks ago that 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' meant that thousands of prisoners were going to be released early, it was an opportunity to have a sensible, grown-up discussion about why we lock so many people up in this country, what we do with them while they're there, and whether releasing them a few weeks early makes any difference. That discussion might have involved people who know about penal policy, maybe a prison governor, and perhaps a thoughtful ex-con. Instead of which what did we end up with on Newsnight (and elsewhere)? The latest prison minister and his conservative shadow. Why do we do that? Because we're too close to Westminster politics, and because when the production desk is being run ragged, looking for guests, the one thing you can be sure about is a politician's willingness to spout confidently". So there's hope yet!

Of even greater concern now is freedom of speech over the Internet. On Wednesday, 18th January Wikipedia shut down access to its English-language pages for the day, in protest against new legislation being talked about in Washington, which could bring to an end the Internet as we know it.

"SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively", they explain, "SOPA is short for the 'Stop Online Piracy Act,' and PIPA is an acronym for the 'Protect IP Act.' ('IP' stands for 'intellectual property.') In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet". They add that, the bill would give the US government extraordinary, ambiguous, and loosely-defined powers to take control over content and information on the free web".

But it gets worse. There have been large-scale demonstrations in Poland in protest at the signing by their government of an international copyright agreement ACTA in Poznan. The Western media have been rather quiet about this, but Russia Today reported: "In Poland, the cyber-offensive has sparked massive protests since Tuesday. On Thursday, tens of thousands flooded onto the streets, with demonstrators clashing with police in Kielche. With public anger still high, the demos are expected to continue". Activists are saying that the ACTA treaty amounts to Internet censorship and gross violation of human rights.

I found a page of explanations about ACTA headed: 'ACTA = Global Internet Censorship - Now Even Foreign Governments Will Be Able To Have Your Website Shut Down'.


The technical news site The Register has reported on the signing of ACTA amongst EU states, under the heading 'Most EU states sign away internet rights, ratify ACTA treaty'. Out of the EU countries, they say, only Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands have held off on signing the treaty, which will give authorities even more power to enforce copyright than was contained in aforementioned online-piracy legislation currently on hold in the US. So why should the Poles be holding widespread demonstrations, in temperatures of -15C, when others are remaining quiet? When I was in Poznan recently I got the impression that the Poles were good at interpreting old Soviet-style propaganda but rather unsuspecting when it came to more subtle Western propaganda. Perhaps I didn't speak with enough people there, or perhaps the honeymoon with Western democracy is now over. Poland has throughout history been caught between the East and the West, which is why the idea of Esperanto started there. Perhaps the Poles are waking up. I see this as a positive development, one that is essential if the truth movement is to survive. Let us join together in a spirit of solidarnosc.

I wrote at the beginning of this newsletter that we still don't know who we are going to wage war on this year. David Cameron keeps telling us, "We are all in this together". He's right; they are all in this together. As the late US comedian George Carlyn pointed out, "It's a big club, and you ain't in it". We aren't waging war; they are. 'They' includes Hillary Clinton, who in March 2011 declared that they are losing the information war.

SOPA, PIPA and ACTA clearly form part of their new offensive for 2012 to regain control in the dissemination of untruths, and malicious war propaganda that will enable them to expand the anglosphere empire. As George Carlyn concluded in the same speech, "It's called the American dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it".

If governments and corporations have to resort to such crude devices to suppress the truth, rather than the more traditional and subtle manipulation from within, then they must really be feeling under pressure. It gives the truth movement the moral highground. As Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". One more step to go!

We need to bring governments to account. Why are they quietly signing such draconian legislation in our name? What do they have to hide? Wherever you do that, whether in the streets, in the pub, at your Internet terminal, or in your MPs surgery, do keep talking.