PEOPLE AND PLACES: FALSE KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN: Records of “bin Laden raid” buried by the CIA

FALSE KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN: Ten Years in Afghanistan

The wiping out of 30 US special forces in the Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan comes at a time when Washington’s official version of how it carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden was falling apart from incredulity. Among the 38 dead in the helicopter disaster – the biggest single loss of American lives in the 10-year Afghanistan war of occupation – are believed to have been 17 US Navy Seals. The dead also include other members of US special forces and Afghan commandos.

Early Western news media reports indicated that the Chinook may have been involved in a significant military operation against Afghan militants when it went down in Wardak Province, not far west from the capital, Kabul, early Saturday. Taliban sources are reported to have claimed that its militants shot down the Chinook with rocket fire. US military officials say they are investigating the cause of the crash. However, significantly, unnamed US sources have told media outlets that they believe the helicopter was shot down. This unofficial US briefing seems a bit odd. Why would US military sources want to hand enemy combatants a stunning propaganda coup? Perhaps, it serves US interests to divert from the real motive and cause of the helicopter crash, whether it was it hit by a rocket or not. US officials have admitted that the dead Navy Seals were part of the Team Six unit that allegedly carried out the assassination in May of the supposed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

From the outset, Washington’s account of how its special forces murdered Bin Laden in his residential compound in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan, has been riven with contradictions. Why was the liquidated Bin Laden buried hurriedly at sea? How could the world’s “No 1 Terrorist” have resided inconspicuously only miles from the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi?

Most glaringly, several informed sources are convinced that Bin Laden died from natural causes years ago. Author Ralph Schoenman dismissed the alleged Navy Seal execution as “a big lie”. Schoenman cited evidence on this subject from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, among others, for their confirmation that Bin Laden had died from kidney failure years earlier.

More recently, as Paul Craig Roberts reports [1], Pakistani locals have claimed that the Navy Seal operation in Abbottabad ended in disaster, with one of three US helicopters exploding as it took off from the ground near the compound. The other two choppers had not landed and, according to witnesses, they flew from the scene immediately after the explosion. As Roberts points out, that means there was no Bin Laden corpse to dispose of at sea, as Washington maintains.

The key people who would know the truth about Washington’s incredible Bin Laden assassination are now unavailable for comment. Case sealed.

Records of “bin Laden raid” buried by the CIA

By Jim Fetzer and by Richard Lardner

For those who missed the memo, Osama bin Laden actually died on or about 15 December 2001 in Afghanistan and was buried in an unmarked grave there in accordance with Islamic practice. Barack Obama found it so useful to clear the front page of questions about his birth certificate, having troops stationed in Pakistan and having failed to close Guantanamo that he resurrected Osama and had him die for the second time. A new article by Richard Lardner explains how the Pentagon’s records of the raid in Pakisan have been moved to the CIA to make them inaccessible to the public, even though this is a blatant violation of the Freedom of Records Act. So here is a reminder of what actually happened and the continuing efforts of the Obama administration to keep the truth from the public.

Zero Dark Forty: The deeper, darker truths

by Jim Fetzer-PRESS TV

A film that may even take the Academy Award for “Best Picture of 2012” raises serious moral issues; glorifies a political stunt and is based on an historical fiction. It is the latest in Obama propaganda. Osama bin Laden was not killed on 2 May 2011 during the raid on a compound in Pakistan. He actually died in Afghanistan on or about 15 December 2001 — and he was buried there in an unmarked grave. Local obituaries reported Osama’s death at the time. Even FOX News subsequently confirmed it. He was buried in an unmarked grave in accord with Muslim traditions. He did not die in Pakistan.

Nick Kollerstrom has published about it, “Osama bin Laden: 1957-2001″. David Ray Griffin has a book about it,Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive. And Scholars for 9/11 Truth has written about it. The film suggests that torture produces actionable intelligence, when virtually every military and intelligence expert will confirm that you are told what those being tortured think you want to hear to stop the pain.

As TIME and The Huffington Post have reported, the film’s depiction of torture has created a controversy that may affect its chances for an Oscar. Among the most notable commentaries is one by Matt Tiabbi.

A columnist for Rolling Stone, he has raised serious questions:

“[I]f it would have been dishonest to leave torture outof the film entirely, how is it not dishonest to leave out how generally ineffective it was, how morally corrupting, how totally it enraged the entire Arab world, how often we used it on people we knew little to nothing about, how often it resulted in deaths, or a hundred other facts? Bigelow put it in, which was “honest,” but it seems an eerie coincidence that she was “honest” about torture in pretty much exactly the way a CIA interrogator would have told the story, without including much else.”

Osama was “our man in Afghanistan”

Even more importantly, the political context has been all but lost to history. Obama was on the hot seat for an apparently fake birth certificate, having troops in Pakistan and not closing Guantanamo.

By alleging that the tip had come from a prisoner held there and using troops stationed in Pakistan, in a brilliant political stroke, he took his birth certificate off the front page, positioning himself for re-election.

Osama was “our man in Afghanistan.” During the uprising against its occupation by Soviet forces, he was instrumental in securing Stinger missiles, which were used to shoot down their helicopters and planes.

In an earlier film about Afghanistan, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Osama’s role was conveniently omitted. It would have been embarrassing to have acknowledged “the man behind 9/11” had been working for us.

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the military/industrial complex scrambling for some new “boogie man” to justify massive expenditures on military weapons and curtail any “peace dividend.”

Nothing could be more useful than a shadowy “terrorist” threat that has no geographical boundaries, where you can commit a terrorist act any time it’s most politically convenient, as with the Bali bombing.

Australia had been reticent about joining the “war on terror.” What could be a greater inducement than to slaughter many Australians by means of a fabricated attack to motivate its enthusiasm for that war.

Analogously, what could have been more beneficial to Obama than to “take out” a man who was already dead by executing a political stunt that most Americans would not be in a suitable position to contest?

Problems with the “Official Account”

But there were problems. Local residents had never seen Osama. They identified the man in the photo as the compound’s owner, who was not bin Laden. The SEALs performed their task and were gone.

A photograph of the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State was widely circulated as engrossed in watching it go down in real time. But the photo itself would turn out to have been
staged.

Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, let the cat out of the bag by noting that there had been no visual footage of the raid during its first 20-25 minutes, which was more than the lapsed time for the whole event.

The body was allegedly identified by DNA comparisons in less time than scientifically possible — and was then dumped into the sea “in accordance with Islamic practice,” which was a ridiculous contention.

Burial at sea is disrespectful of the body, which can be consumed by sharks, fish and crustaceans. That is not a Muslim tradition, but it conveniently disposed of the most powerful proof of fakery and fraud.

When most of the SEAL team involved in the raid were killed when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan a few months later, it was not implausible to suppose that they might have been silenced.

Osama and al-Qaeda, which was the name given to “our base” in Afghanistan, had nothing to do with 9/11. Osama denied that he was involved in 9/11, implicating a “government within the government.”

Another prominent figure who has acknowledged the existence of a “government within the government” is William Jefferson Clinton, who admitted that this is an entity over which he exercised no control.

Research by experts at The Vancouver Hearings (15-17 June 2012) has vindicated his claim, where US neo-cons — with assistance from the Mossad and the complicity of the Pentagon — orchestrated 9/11.

There are many articles about this, including “Peeling the 9/11 Onion: Layers of Plots within Plots” (with Preston James) and “James H. Fetzer: 9/11 IRAN REVIEW Interview”. Or read “9/11: Have we been bamboozed?” The second death of Osama does not stand alone.

Via PRESS TV

Secret move keeps bin Laden records in the shadows

By Richard Lardner

WASHINGTON (AP) – The nation’s top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act.

An acknowledgement by Adm. William McRaven of his actions was quietly removed from the final version of an inspector general’s report published weeks ago. A spokesman for the admiral declined to comment. The CIA, noting that the bin Laden mission was overseen by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta before he became defense secretary, said that the SEALs were effectively assigned to work temporarily for the CIA, which has presidential authority to conduct covert operations.

“Documents related to the raid were handled in a manner consistent with the fact that the operation was conducted under the direction of the CIA director,” agency spokesman Preston Golson said in an emailed statement. “Records of a CIA operation such as the (bin Laden) raid, which were created during the conduct of the operation by persons acting under the authority of the CIA Director, are CIA records.”

Evading the Freedom of Information Act

Golson said it is “absolutely false” that records were moved to the CIA to avoid the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.

The records transfer was part of an effort by McRaven to protect the names of the personnel involved in the raid, according to the inspector general’s draft report.

But secretly moving the records allowed the Pentagon to tell The Associated Press that it couldn’t find any documents inside the Defense Department that AP had requested more than two years ago, and could represent a new strategy for the U.S. government to shield even its most sensitive activities from public scrutiny.

“Welcome to the shell game in place of open government,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private research institute at George Washington University. “Guess which shell the records are under. If you guess the right shell, we might show them to you. It’s ridiculous.”

McRaven’s directive sent the only copies of the military’s records about its daring raid to the CIA, which has special authority to prevent the release of “operational files” in ways that can’t effectively be challenged in federal court. The Defense Department can prevent the release of its own military files, too, citing risks to national security. But that can be contested in court, and a judge can compel the Pentagon to turn over non-sensitive portions of records.

Under federal rules, transferring government records from one executive agency to another must be approved in writing by the National Archives and Records Administration. There are limited circumstances when prior approval is not required, such as when the records are moved between two components of the same executive department. The CIA and Special Operations Command are not part of the same department.

The Archives was not aware of any request from the U.S. Special Operations Command to transfer its records to the CIA, spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman said. She said it was the Archives’ understanding that the military records belonged to the CIA, so transferring them wouldn’t have required permission under U.S. rules.

Special Operations Command also is required to comply with rules established by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that dictate how long records must be retained. Its July 2012 manual requires that records about military operations and planning are to be considered permanent and after 25 years, following a declassification review, transferred to the Archives.

Also, the Federal Records Act would not permit agencies “to purge records just on a whim,” said Dan Metcalfe, who oversaw the U.S. government’s compliance with the Freedom of Information Act as former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy. “I don’t think there’s an exception allowing an agency to say, ‘Well, we didn’t destroy it. We just deleted it here after transmitting it over there.’ High-level officials ought to know better.”

It was not immediately clear exactly which Defense Department records were purged and transferred, when it happened or under what authority, if any, they were sent to the CIA. No government agencies the AP contacted would discuss details of the transfer. The timing may be significant: The Freedom of Information Act generally applies to records under an agency’s control when a request for them is received. The AP asked for files about the mission in more than 20 separate requests, mostly submitted in May 2011 – several were sent a day after Obama announced that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been killed in a firefight. Obama has pledged to make his administration the most transparent in U.S. history.

Records not forthcoming

The AP asked the Defense Department and CIA separately for files that included copies of the death certificate and autopsy report for bin Laden as well as the results of tests to identify the body. While the Pentagon said it could not locate the files, the CIA, with its special power to prevent the release of records, has never responded. The CIA also has not responded to a separate request for other records, including documents identifying and describing the forces and supplies required to execute the assault on bin Laden’s compound.

The CIA did tell the AP it could not locate any emails from or to Panetta and two other top agency officials discussing the bin Laden mission.

McRaven’s unusual order would have remained secret had it not been mentioned in a single sentence on the final page in the inspector general’s draft report that examined whether the Obama administration gave special access to Hollywood executives planning a film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the raid. The draft report was obtained and posted online last month by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington.

McRaven, who oversaw the bin Laden raid, expressed concerns in the report about possible disclosure of the identities of the SEALs. The Pentagon “provided the operators and their families an inordinate level of security,” the report said. McRaven also directed that the names and photographs associated with the raid not be released.

“This effort included purging the combatant command’s systems of all records related to the operation and providing these records to another government agency,” according to the draft report. The sentence was dropped from the report’s final version.

Since the raid, one of the SEALs published a book about the raid under a pseudonym but was subsequently identified by his actual name. And earlier this year the SEAL credited with shooting bin Laden granted a tell-all, anonymous interview with Esquire about the raid and the challenges of his retiring from the military after 16 years without a pension.

Current and former Defense Department officials knowledgeable about McRaven’s directive and the inspector general’s report told AP the description of the order in the draft report was accurate. The reference to “another government agency” was code for the CIA, they said. These individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter by name.

There is no indication the inspector general’s office or anyone else in the U.S. government is investigating the legality of transferring the military records. Bridget Serchak, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, would not explain why the reference was left out of the final report and what, if any, actions the office might be taking.

“Our general statement is that any draft is pre-decisional and that drafts go through many reviews before the final version, including editing or changing language,” Serchak wrote in an email.

The unexplained decision to remove the reference to the purge and transfer of the records “smells of bad faith,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “How should one understand that? That adds insult to injury. It essentially covers up the action.”

McRaven oversaw the raid while serving as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive outfit in charge of SEAL Team Six and the military’s other specialized counterterrorism units. McRaven was nominated by Obama to lead Special Operations Command, JSOC’s parent organization, a month before the raid on bin Laden’s compound. He replaced Adm. Eric Olson as the command’s top officer in August 2011.

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command, referred questions to the inspector general’s office.

Controlling the “official account”

The refusal to make available authoritative or contemporaneous records about the bin Laden mission means that the only official accounts of the mission come from U.S. officials who have described details of the raid in speeches, interviews and television appearances. In the days after bin Laden’s death, the White House provided conflicting versions of events, falsely saying bin Laden was armed and even firing at the SEALs, misidentifying which of bin Laden’s sons was killed and incorrectly saying bin Laden’s wife died in the shootout. Obama’s press secretary attributed the errors to the “fog of combat.”

A U.S. judge and a federal appeals court previously sided with the CIA in a lawsuit over publishing more than 50 “post-mortem” photos and video recordings of bin Laden’s corpse. In the case, brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, the CIA did not say the images were operational files to keep them secret. It argued successfully that the photos and videos must be withheld from the public to avoid inciting violence against Americans overseas and compromising secret systems and techniques used by the CIA and the military.

The Defense Department told the AP in March 2012 it could not locate any photographs or video taken during the raid or showing bin Laden’s body. It also said it could not find any images of bin Laden’s body on the USS Carl Vinson, the aircraft carrier from which he was buried at sea. The Pentagon also said it could not find any death certificate, autopsy report or results of DNA identification tests for bin Laden, or any pre-raid materials discussing how the government planned to dispose of bin Laden’s body if he were killed. It said it searched files at the Pentagon, Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and the Navy command in San Diego that controls the Carl Vinson.

The Pentagon also refused to confirm or deny the existence of helicopter maintenance logs and reports about the performance of military gear used in the raid. One of the stealth helicopters that carried the SEALs in Pakistan crashed during the mission and its wreckage was left behind.

The Defense Department also told the AP in February 2012 that it could not find any emails about the bin Laden mission or his “Geronimo” code name that were sent or received in the year before the raid by McRaven. The department did not say they had been moved to the CIA. It also said it could not find any emails from other senior officers who would have been involved in the mission’s planning. It found only three such emails written by or sent to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and these consisted of 12 pages sent to Gates summarizing news reports after the raid.

The Defense Department in November 2012 released copies of 10 emails totaling 31 pages found in the Carl Vinson’s computer systems. The messages were heavily censored and described how bin Laden’s body was prepared for burial.

These records were not among those purged and then moved to the CIA. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said the messages from the Carl Vinson “were not relating to the mission itself and were the property of the Navy.”

Top US Government Insider: Bin Laden Died In 2001, 9/11 A False Flag (confirmed!)

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations Steve R. Pieczenik says he is prepared to tell a federal grand jury the name of a top general who told him directly 9/11 was a false flag attack

“Bin Laden had already been “dead for months,” and that the government was waiting for the most politically expedient time to roll out his corpse. Pieczenik would be in a position to know, having personally met Bin Laden and worked with him during the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the early 80′s”

Top US government insider Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a man who held numerous different influential positions under three different Presidents and still works with the Defense Department, shockingly told The Alex Jones Show yesterday that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001 and that he was prepared to testify in front of a grand jury how a top general told him directly that 9/11 was a false flag inside job.

Pieczenik cannot be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist”. He served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. A former US Navy Captain, Pieczenik achieved two prestigious Harry C. Solomon Awards at the Harvard Medical School as he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT.

Recruited by Lawrence Eagleburger as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Management, Pieczenik went on to develop, “the basic tenets for psychological warfare, counter terrorism, strategy and tactics for transcultural negotiations for the US State Department, military and intelligence communities and other agencies of the US Government,” while also developing foundational strategies for hostage rescue that were later employed around the world.

Pieczenik also served as a senior policy planner under Secretaries Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, George Schultz and James Baker and worked on George W. Bush’s election campaign against Al Gore. His record underscores the fact that he is one of the most deeply connected men in intelligence circles over the past three decades plus.

The character of Jack Ryan, who appears in many Tom Clancy novels and was also played by Harrison Ford in the popular 1992 movie Patriot Games, is also based on Steve Pieczenik.

Back in April 2002, over nine years ago, Pieczenik told the Alex Jones Show that Bin Laden had already been “dead for months,” and that the government was waiting for the most politically expedient time to roll out his corpse. Pieczenik would be in a position to know, having personally met Bin Laden and worked with him during the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the early 80′s.

Pieczenik said that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001, “Not because special forces had killed him, but because as a physician I had known that the CIA physicians had treated him and it was on the intelligence roster that he had marfan syndrome,” adding that the US government knew Bin Laden was dead before they invaded Afghanistan.

Marfan syndrome is a degenerative genetic disease for which there is no permanent cure. The illness severely shortens the life span of the sufferer.

“He died of marfan syndrome, Bush junior knew about it, the intelligence community knew about it,” said Pieczenik, noting how CIA physicians had visited Bin Laden in July 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai.

“He was already very sick from marfan syndrome and he was already dying, so nobody had to kill him,” added Pieczenik, stating that Bin Laden died shortly after 9/11 in his Tora Bora cave complex.

“Did the intelligence community or the CIA doctor up this situation, the answer is yes, categorically yes,” said Pieczenik, referring to Sunday’s claim that Bin Laden was killed at his compound in Pakistan, adding, “This whole scenario where you see a bunch of people sitting there looking at a screen and they look as if they’re intense, that’s nonsense,” referring to the images released by the White House which claim to show Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton watching the operation to kill Bin Laden live on a television screen.

“It’s a total make-up, make believe, we’re in an American theater of the absurd….why are we doing this again….nine years ago this man was already dead….why does the government repeatedly have to lie to the American people,” asked Pieczenik.

“Osama Bin Laden was totally dead, so there’s no way they could have attacked or confronted or killed Osama Bin laden,” said Pieczenik, joking that the only way it could have happened was if special forces had attacked a mortuary.

Pieczenik said that the decision to launch the hoax now was made because Obama had reached a low with plummeting approval ratings and the fact that the birther issue was blowing up in his face.

“He had to prove that he was more than American….he had to be aggressive,” said Pieczenik, adding that the farce was also a way of isolating Pakistan as a retaliation for intense opposition to the Predator drone program, which has killed hundreds of Pakistanis.

“This is orchestrated, I mean when you have people sitting around and watching a sitcom, basically the operations center of the White House, and you have a president coming out almost zombie-like telling you they just killed Osama Bin Laden who was already dead nine years ago,” said Pieczenik, calling the episode, “the greatest falsehood I’ve ever heard, I mean it was absurd.”

Dismissing the government’s account of the assassination of Bin Laden as a “sick joke” on the American people, Pieczenik said, “They are so desperate to make Obama viable, to negate the fact that he may not have been born here, any questions about his background, any irregularities about his background, to make him look assertive….to re-elect this president so the American public can be duped once again.”

Pieczenik’s assertion that Bin Laden died almost ten years ago is echoed by numerous intelligence professionals as well as heads of state across the world.

Bin Laden, “Was used in the same way that 9/11 was used to mobilize the emotions and feelings of the American people in order to go to a war that had to be justified through a narrative that Bush junior created and Cheney created about the world of terrorism,” stated Pieczenik.

During his interview with the Alex Jones Show yesterday, Pieczenik also asserted he was directly told by a prominent general that 9/11 was a stand down and a false flag operation, and that he is prepared to go to a grand jury to reveal the general’s name.

“They ran the attacks,” said Pieczenik, naming Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Condoleezza Rice amongst others as having been directly involved.

“It was called a stand down, a false flag operation in order to mobilize the American public under false pretenses….it was told to me even by the general on the staff of Wolfowitz – I will go in front of a federal committee and swear on perjury who the name was of the individual so that we can break it open,” said Pieczenik, adding that he was “furious” and “knew it had happened”.

“I taught stand down and false flag operations at the national war college, I’ve taught it with all my operatives so I knew exactly what was done to the American public,” he added.

Pieczenik re-iterated that he was perfectly willing to reveal the name of the general who told him 9/11 was an inside job in a federal court, “so that we can unravel this thing legally, not with the stupid 9/11 Commission that was absurd.”

Pieczenik explained that he was not a liberal, a conservative or a tea party member, merely an American who is deeply concerned about the direction in which his country is heading.

October 7th, 2011 will marked the tenth anniversary of US and allied troops in Afghanistan. Four weeks after September 11th, 2001, troops were sent into the nation in retaliation for the attack and on a mission to find Osama Bin Laden and root out Taliban soldiers. 2008 has been the deadliest year for coalition forces in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001.

If the US government was really trying to solve the crimes of 9/11, and if it really believed that Osama Bin Laden was a terrorist mastermind, it would have done everything possible, including sacrificing the lives of as many soldiers as necessary, to take Bin Laden alive.

If he was really an al-Qaeda mastermind, Bin Laden would have possessed critically important information about his terrorist network. If government conspiracy theories are true, Bin Laden’s organization might even have obtained WMD and targeted American cities. By killing Bin Laden rather than taking him alive and interrogating him, the US might have condemned hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans to death by al-Qaeda WMD attack. And even if this were only a 1% possibility, as Dick Cheney tells us, the government would have to treat it as if it were definitely going to happen.

So when the US government tells us it made no real effort to capture Bin Laden alive, but instead just staged an execution-style killing of the most important terror witness in history, it is obviously lying.

The story of the alleged Bin Laden killing is full of contradictions and absurdities. First we were told that Obama and his cabinet watched the killing as it happened; we were even shown photos of Hillary Clinton shrieking in pleasure at the sight. Then we were told that this never happened.

We were shown a fake photo purporting to show Bin Laden’s corpse. It turned out to be a bad photoshop hoax.

In fact, there are no photos of Bin Laden’s body. There was no autopsy. There was no positive identification that it was Bin Laden, no transparent, public DNA evidence with a chain of custody, no witnesses…no evidence at all, in fact. And nobody saw the body being thrown into the ocean, “in accordance with Islamic burial custom” !

The Associated Press and the London Daily Mail recently published an article headlined:

“Pentagon DELETES files about Osama bin Laden raid after transferring them to CIA where they can’t be made public
- Military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout have been purged from Pentagon computers
- Associated Press requested information on the raid some 20 times in 2011 but requests were rejected
- A line in an inspector general’s draft report states the files were purged from the defense department to another government department to prevent certain information about the raid being made public
- The sentence was removed from the final report released weeks ago”

If the government account is true, the secrecy makes no sense. If they really killed Bin Laden, every scrap of information about the raid – every second of video, every photograph, every memo, every DNA test, every autopsy file, every debriefing – would be proudly waved before the world.

If the government account were true, there would be no need to “prevent certain information about the raid being made public.”

So what are they covering up? Did they kill a Bin Laden double rather than Bin Laden himself, who (according to numerous reports) died in December, 2001? Or was the whole raid just a drill – a theatrical staged event like the Boston bombings…and like 9/11 itself?

VERY SMART libertarians often make an argument against muscular counterterrorism efforts (I prefer this term over “war on terror,” because “war on terror” reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld).

It goes like this: Why do we obsess over terrorism when a) guns, b) drunken drivers, c) any number of terrible diseases and d) bathtubs kill so many more people each year than radical Islamists ever have?

The latest distillation of this argument came this week from Conor Friedersdorf, on the Atlantic’s website. He acknowledges that the Sept. 11 attacks were, in fact, terrifying — we are in agreement on this point — and says that, like most Americans, he hasn’t let the specter of mass terrorism stop him from enjoying life.

We’re in agreement here as well. I’ve argued that resiliency is the key to successful counterterrorism. This is why I thought that the runners who couldn’t finish the Boston Marathon after the bombings on April 15 should have been allowed to finish the race the very next week. It’s also why I’m troubled by a government that appears ready, in response to the threat of terrorism, to alter the nature of our open society by putting in place legal and technical measures that would allow for the creation of a comprehensive surveillance state.

But Friedersdorf spends most of his post arguing against the idea that terrorism poses much of a danger at all: “Terrorism isn’t something we’re ceding liberty to fight because the threat is especially dire compared to other dangers of the modern world. All sorts of things kill us in far greater numbers.”

He continues: “Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism. But consider some hard facts. In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack — by far the biggest in its history — roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S. Let’s put that in context. That same year in the United States: 71,372 died of diabetes. 29,573 were killed by guns. 13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.”

He goes on to cite a commonly trafficked statistic that the annual risk of drowning in a bathtub is one in 800,000, while the annual risk of being killed by a terrorist is one in 20 million.

Bathtub conspiracies

These things are true. Bathtubs are dangerous. Guns in the hands of dangerous people are very dangerous. (And by the way: There are hundreds of thousands of police officers fighting violent crime in this country.) But here is something else that is true, which Friedersdorf neglects to mention: The fear of terrorism isn’t motivated solely by what terrorists have done, but what terrorists hope to do. Although it’s true that bathtub accidents account for a too-large number of deaths, it isn’t true that bathtubs are engaged in a conspiracy with other bathtubs to murder ever-larger numbers of Americans.

We know for certain, however, that al-Qaida, its offshoots, and other organizations and individuals in the Islamist orbit seek unconventional weapons that would allow them to kill a far- larger number of Americans than died on Sept. 11.

As early as 1998, Osama bin Laden asserted that Islam required him to use weapons of mass destruction in the conduct of his jihad, and he made the acquisition of these weapons a high priority. The al-Qaida leader Sulaiman Abu Ghaith famously argued that Muslims had the right to “kill four million Americans, including one million children, displace double that figure, and injure and cripple hundreds and thousands.” (For a fuller understanding of al-Qaeda’s WMD ambitions, see this Rolf Mowatt-Larssen article in Foreign Policy.)

Is there anyone who actually believes that al-Qaida or its offshoots would hesitate to use chemical or biological weapons against Western targets if they could? The only reason radical Islamists haven’t used such weapons is that they haven’t been able to acquire them — mainly, I think, because of effective American countermeasures.

I don’t think it’s probable that Islamists will one day be able to launch a nonconventional attack on an American target. But I think it’s plausible, and now that mass stockpiles of chemical weapons may be in flux in a highly unstable Syria, the likelihood that these weapons will fall into the hands of al- Qaeda-influenced organizations is going up, at least slightly.

There are other reasons that deaths from drowning or diabetes or lightning strikes aren’t comparable to deaths caused by terrorism. Sustained terror campaigns against civilian targets do, whether Friedersdorf or I like it or not, undermine trust and openness across a society. They demand the adoption of security procedures that may be effective but are still onerous and debilitating.

Spy-operation approval

Already, polls show that Americans broadly approve of domestic-spying operations. Imagine how the ordinary parent might feel after an unconventional attack. Suffice it to say that libertarians and the American Civil Liberties Union — whose voices already aren’t heard loudly enough — would be marginalized or even discredited if the core of their argument had been that terrorism posed no significant threat.

It isn’t incompatible to argue for a culture of rigorous civil liberties and acknowledge simultaneously that terrorism poses actual and unique challenges. We can oppose indiscriminate domestic spying — remember, the Sept. 11 attacks succeeded not because the U.S. failed to collect data, but because it failed to properly analyze the data it had — and endorse greater openness in the way we discuss surveillance and counterterrorism. But we should also acknowledge that Islamist terrorists are still plotting to kill larger numbers of Americans than they have so far been able to kill.

“Zero Dark Thirty”: The deeper, darker truths

By Jim Fetzer-PRESS TV

Osama bin Laden was not killed on 2 May 2011 during the raid on a compound in Pakistan. He actually died in Afghanistan on or about 15 December 2001 — and he was buried there in an unmarked grave.

Local obituaries reported Osama’s death at the time. Even FOX News subsequently confirmed it. He was buried in an unmarked grave in accord with Muslim traditions. He did not die in Pakistan.

The film suggests that torture produces actionable intelligence, when virtually every military and intelligence expert will confirm that you are told what those being tortured think you want to hear to stop the pain.

A columnist for Rolling Stone, he has raised serious questions:

“[I]f it would have been dishonest to leave torture outof the film entirely, how is it not dishonest to leave out how generally ineffective it was, how morally corrupting, how totally it enraged the entire Arab world, how often we used it on people we knew little to nothing about, how often it resulted in deaths, or a hundred other facts? Bigelow put it in, which was “honest,” but it seems an eerie coincidence that she was “honest” about torture in pretty much exactly the way a CIA interrogator would have told the story, without including much else.”

Osama was “our man in Afghanistan”

Problems with the “Official Account”

But there were problems. Local residents had never seen Osama. They identified the man in the photo as the compound’s owner, who was not bin Laden. The SEALs performed their task and were gone.

A photograph of the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State was widely circulated as engrossed in watching it go down in real time. But the photo itself would turn out to have been
staged.

Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, let the cat out of the bag by noting that there had been no visual footage of the raid during its first 20-25 minutes, which was more than the lapsed time for the whole event.

From the fans at Citi Field in Flushing to the mobs at the White House gates, “USA, USA,” was the chant heard across the nation. Jubilant Americans celebrated the breaking news that Public Enemy No.1, terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden was dead.

Ten years have passed since the Twin Towers toppled and the Pentagon was whacked. After two failing wars and billions of dollars spent on the global manhunt to bring in Bin Laden “Dead or Alive,” America has now claimed victory. “This is bigger than the moon landing, this is huge,” exclaimed Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera.

“Justice has been done,” intoned President Barack Obama announcing Bin Laden’s death. He not only called it “a good day for America,” but also declared that “The world is safer. It is a better place because of the death of Osama Bin Laden.”

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed the sentiment that “justice has been served,” she evidently took issue with the Presidential vision of a “safer” world, warning that terror “won’t stop with the death of Bin Laden, we must redouble our efforts.”

If it’s a “safer” world, why the need to “redouble our efforts”? These were but two of the contradictions coming from the White House in the early hours of the breaking story, and many discrepancies would follow. Some of them would be noted and debated, but totally absent from the 24/7 news coverage, political “high-fives” and patriotic triumphalism was the simple question: Why did Osama Bin Laden, former mujahedin ally of the United States, turn against it to become Public Enemy No.1?

Was it that he and his Al Qaeda fighters suddenly decided to hate America’s “freedom and liberties” as George W. Bush maintained? Or was it remotely possible that the attacks were motivated by US foreign policy – with its unconditional support of Israel and concomitant support of the same Middle East monarchs, autocrats and dictators now being toppled in the wave of revolution?

Also absent from America’s non-stop exultation and self-congratulation, absent from the acres of newsprint and the countless hours of air time, was any discussion of the practical consequences of the death of Bin Laden who, before making it back into the headlines, had been both a fading memory and a non-issue.

Osama Bin Who?

So irrelevant had Bin Laden and his jihad rhetoric become that, in the months preceding his assassination, every one of the uprisings occurring throughout the Middle East and North Africa was secular and in direct opposition to Bin Laden’s militant pan-Islamic vision.

In a sentence: There were no practical consequences whatsoever attending the death of Osama Bin Laden. It would do nothing to:

Help America win losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lower the unemployment rate.
Stop the US or European nations from sinking deeper into recessions and depression.
Revive failing real estate markets or solve the debt and deficit crises.
Lower oil and food prices.
Reverse the damage or stop the radioactive fallout from Fukushima.

On Wednesday, April 27^th, just four days before Bin Laden was killed, a new Public Enemy No.1 held his organization’s first ever press conference. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the world that the United States would continue its low interest rate polices and, in effect, continue to flood the world with cheap money.

The global equity markets immediately responded to the predictably destructive consequences. Before Bernanke ended the press conference, gold prices shot up $20 an ounce, silver $2, and the dollar fell to a 3 year low against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. Despite the Chairman’s claims to the contrary, the US dollar would continue to devalue and subsequently dollar based commodity prices would soar.

Needing neither a mountain lair nor sequestration behind closed Fed doors, the new Public Enemy No.1, “Osama” Ben Bernanke committed, in broad daylight, an act of financial terrorism that would have far reaching and long lasting implications for the American public. As the value of the dollar went down, the cost of nearly everything would go up…excepting the cost of “risk.”

This meant that financiers could continue to speculate and exploit the equity markets, with the profits going only to the 10 percent of Americans that owned 90 percent of the stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Moreover, the Fed reasoned the cheap dollar would also give a competitive edge to big US exporters. But as exports rose, so did the price of imports, putting further strains on average consumers whose real wages fell ever further behind the pace of inflation.

Bombs Away

What Osama Bin Laden’s death also did was to deflect attention from the US/NATO “humanitarian” mission in Libya, which, just two days earlier, had delivered several humanitarian bombs upon the home of Muammar Qaddafi’s son, killing him and three of his children.

The bungled attempt to assassinate Qaddafi (who had been visiting his son) was condemned by Russia, brought recriminations against NATO from other UN members for overstepping the UN mandate, and called into question the legality of the air strike. With a groundswell of public sympathy building around the world for Qaddafi’s murdered grandchildren, the very purpose and future of the entire mission was being called into question.

Whether a real terror attack happens or not, Barack Obama, as he has done before, will take a page from the G.W. Bush playbook and keep the American public in a state of fear and hysteria for his reelection. And should terror strike the US, UK, France or other NATO ally, their governments, media “presstitutes,” pundits, and the public at large will debate and deplore the “cowardly act” and demand “swift justice.” They will blame Bin Laden sympathizers, Al Qaeda cells, Muammar Qaddafi, radical Islamists…but never will they blame themselves. They will refuse to acknowledge that what they called “terror” was nothing more than “revenge”; reprisal for foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations, or retaliation for military invasions launched by the US, UK, France or other NATO ally upon a sovereign nation.

Meanwhile, back in DC, the Chairman of the Fed, Public Enemy No.1, “Osama” Ben Bernanke, will mastermind the destruction of the American dollar, the US economy and the purchasing power of the American people.

As we have been forecasting for years, gold, despite its recent pull back, is on-trend to reach $2000 per ounce (and possibly higher). And while Ben Bernanke claims that inflation is merely “transitory,” considering his penchant for printing trillions of digital dollars not worth the paper it’s not printed on, we see inflation as both entrenched and rising.

The War in Afghanistan was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks. Wrong!!The current military strikes against Afghanistan were planned long before the supposed terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As early as December 2000, Frederick Starr, Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, reported that:

"[T]he United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out the Taliban. Until it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its territory for such a purpose."

Meetings between government American, Russian and Indian government officials took place at the end of 2000 "to discuss what kind of government should replace the Taliban." Starr observed that: "[T]he United States is now talking about the overthrow of a regime that controls nearly the entire country, in the hope it can be replaced with a hypothetical government that does not exist even on paper." The U.S. also supported a one-sided UN resolution:

"... that would strengthen sanctions against foreign military aid for the Taliban but take no action against its warlord opponents, who control a mere 3 to 5 percent of the country's territory. These warlords, when they ruled in key areas, showed a brutal disregard for human rights and for other minorities that was comparable to the Taliban at its worst. Yet the fragment of a government they support limps on and, with U.S. backing, occupies Afghanistan's seat in the United Nations... These shifts add up to a fundamental redirection of American policy toward the world's largest and most vexed zone of conflict. All this is occurring without public discussion, without consultation with Congress and without even informing those who are likely to make foreign policy in the next administration."

Canadian journalist Eric Margolis reported in the same month the existence of extensive military plans to invade Afghanistan, topple the Taliban regime, and install a government subservient to Western interests:

"The United States and Russia may soon launch a joint military assault against Islamic militants, and against the leadership of Taliban, Afghanistan's de facto ruling movement. Such an attack would probably include US Delta Force and Navy Seals, who would join up with Russia's elite Spetsnaz and Alpha commandos in Tajikistan, the Central Asian state where Russian has military bases and 25,000 troops. The combined forces would be lifted by helicopters, and backed by air support, deep into neighboring Afghanistan to attack supposedly Bin Laden's fortified base in the Hindu Kush mountains."

The plans clearly have little to do with aiding the Afghan people, and more to do with eliminating the current danger to US interests in the region. As the Guardian rightly observes, "Another missile attack will merely add to Afghanistan's misery."

First of all, Bin Laden's initial reaction to 9/11 was not to take credit for the crime at all. In fact, he continually denied any involvement in 9/11 up until the 'confession' video was mysteriously presented. Almost no one in the U.S. has read Bin Laden's first statement in response to 9/11, which so conflicts the later 'confession'. Here it is, from September 17, 2001:

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons. I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations."

We've been asked to accept without question his other statements of 'confession'. So how do we make sense of the above statement? Or how do we make sense of his second public statement in regards to 9/11, given on October 16, 2001:

"I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle."

These comments obviously do not prove that Bin Laden did not orchestrate 9/11. But they do raise a crucial question. Why would a man spend six weeks denying a crime, then suddenly flip-flop 180 degrees and happily start taking responsibility for the originally denied crime? Most people - including scientists, CIA analysts, FBI, and other independent investigators, etc. - who have a working familiarity with the 'confession' video, know the answer to this question. And that is that the man in the video making the 'confession' is almost certainly not Osama Bin Laden, and the tape is a fake. The man shown in the video, though bearded, Arabic, and of darkish complexion, is much heavier than all known photos and videos of the actual Bin Laden. The man in the video is seen writing something down with his right hand. Bin Laden is well-known to be left-handed. And there are scores of other reasons to question the validity of the tape. In fact, "the FBI's page on bin Laden as a 'Most Wanted Terrorist' does not list him as wanted for 9/11, and when asked why, a FBI spokesman said, 'because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11'." (Debunking 9/11 Debunking, pg. 21, David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2007.)