Chris Black Serves a Course in Correction to Another London Flack.

[I have no idea who this scribbler Ollie Kamm is—and I think I'll keep it that way. If you absolutely have to find him, try here: http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/12/extremes-collide.html But it seems our Commissar of the Defense, Maitre Chris Black, has just danced a little blogger's pas-de-deux with this mendacious, libelous, self-proclaimed former-hedge fund hustler over some Times-online tub-thumping for his Business Betters at the great global terrorist clubs run out of The City and Wall St., NATO and the US DoD. It's one thing, I guess, to make big bank from caressing and cajoling your ignorant and frightened marks out of their old-age pensions—Is there any hope at all as long as bought-off flacks like this Kamm and Ed Vulliamy and David Rohde and Roy Gutman are so highly rewarded for offering so little comfort to the afflicted and absolutely no affliction to the comfortable?—but when, in bringing aid and comfort to the mass murderers who continue to waste our collective life in service of the simple-minded avarice of 'free markets' and 'free enterprise' and ‘free-floating (virtual) value,’ the intellectually halt and morally comatose (Kammatose?) dare to ridicule those in every way superior beings, those thinkers and writers whose sole reward is the knowledge that they righteously serve the best interests of the vast majority of their fellow (and gal) citizens (and here, another Kamm foe, the good Neil Clark, springs to mind), then it's time to shut these motherfuckers down. But let's let Chris serve the writ on this punk. --mc] ************************** The Times Online December 13, 2009 Extremes collide Oliver Kamm ............ Dear Mr. Kamm, I must apologize for my second post as it appeared you had unfairly removed my first, which really irritated me. So I beg your pardon for my intemperate remarks. But I must thank you for posting my first post in its entirety and bringing to the attention of your readers my positions on these various issues. First of all, I reiterate my remarks about the alleged massacre at Srebrenica. President Milosevic and others at the Hague tribunal knocked down that American-KLA canard a long time ago. That you keep repeating US-KLA propaganda only shows that you have no interest in the facts or the evidence. As for my representation of President Milosevic, yes, it was an honor to represent such a brave and principled man whose only crime was to continue to fight for socialism against the fascism of the US and its axis. He was completely innocent of those fabricated charges, as was stated in the report I made at the request of the American Association of Jurists after his initial arrest in Belgrade by the DOS regime. In an interview with the Deputy Minister of Justice and the investigating judge, I asked if there was any substance to the charges and they told me, no, it was fabricated, but they were forced to do so as the Americans wanted his head. They told me that if they had refused to charge him, the Americans threatened to resume the bombing of Belgrade. You try to damage my credibility by telling your readers that I also deny that there was a genocide in Rwanda. Well, Mr. Kamm, if you, or your newspaper, had even superficially followed the trials at the Rwandan war crimes tribunal, you would know that I am correct. The war in Rwanda, begun by Uganda and backed by the US and the UK in order to prepare the invasion of the Congo, was long and bloody. The evidence is that in 1990, the RPF (part of the Ugandan Army), along with American Special Forces, and, from 1993, assisted by a supposedly neutral UN force headed by Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, invaded the country and massacred tens of thousands of Rwandans, mostly Hutus. Several ceasefires were arranged, and every one of them was broken by the RPF, who, in each case, massacred thousands more Hutus. Finally, on April 6th, 1994, they, with the assistance of the Canadian and Belgian UN forces, conducted a sneak attack on the Rwandan president’s plane, assassinating two democratically-elected Hutu presidents (of Rwanda and Burundi) and then immediately attacked all Rwandan Army units in Kigali and the north of Rwanda and began to massacre Hutus all across the country. The RPF forces, assisted by airdrops of soldiers and equipment by US C130 Hercules (Clinton lied), in 6 hours wiped out the gendarme camp at Remera, attacked all the main Rwandan Army camps and gendarme camps, bombarded the civilian refugee camp at Nyaconga, just north of Kigali, where a million Hutu refugees (fleeing RPF terror) were located, and proceeded to kill everyone in their path. In that attack on the refugee camp, they killed thousands with high-explosive shells. The Rwandan Army was overwhelmed. UN officers there testified that the RPF was firing thousands of Katysuha rockets at Kigali without cessation, while the Rwandan Army even ran out of hand grenades within ten days and were reduced to trying to fight off the RPF with homemade grenades. Even the testimony of Dr. Alison Des Forges from Human Rights Watch is that the RPF killed everyone in every village they entered. I have in my possession statements from RPF officers, which are exhibits in the trials at the ICTR, that Paul Kagame ordered the massacre of all civilians (mainly Hutus but also Tutsis) in the stadiums of several towns, including Byumba and Gitarama. I will send them to you if you wish. We also have statements of RPF officers that the Interahamwe, an organization headed by Tutsis, was infiltrated by RPF commandos, who committed massacres at roadblocks in such a way as to cast blame on the Rwandan forces and discredit them in the eyes of the world. We presented to the ICTR a video of UN officers distributing machine guns and flak jackets to Interahamwe leaders during this period. You can also get that from the ICTR. The Rwandan Army retreated from Kigali for one reason only: they ran out of ammunition and could not get any more, while US and Canadian aircraft were supplying the RPF with tons of materiel every day. The evidence now is that most of the people killed in those 12 weeks were Hutus. There were also many Tutsis killed, both by the RPF and by Hutu civilians angered by the mass killings carried out by the RPF forces. We estimate 2 million Hutus were killed (this was the claim of an RPF officer in a letter to the UN in 1999). The RPF and US, in order to discredit and demonize the Rwandan Army and majority population, claimed that the Hutus had committed genocide against the Tutsis, when the exact opposite occurred. As an example, the RPF claimed that 250,000 Tutsis were killed in Kigali. But in 1994, there were only 40,000 Tutsis in Kigali, and Dallaire and Bernard Kouchner, who were there at the time, have stated that most of them survived. So, it is clear that most of those bodies are not Tutsis, but are Hutus massacred by the RPF when they took the city. This is all evidence presented before the trial chamber at the ICTR. I can send you the transcripts if you are interested. One other thing your readers should be told regarding the alleged genocide: The Rwandan Army was a multiethnic force that included in its ranks many Tutsi officers and men. Everyone of them stayed with the army and fought the RPF, and when the Rwandan Army retreated into the Congo, these Tutsi soldiers stayed with the army rather than join the RPF. How on earth can anyone claim that an army partly composed of Tutsis could engage in a genocide of their own people? It’s absurd. Antoine Nyetera, a Tutsi prince and the son of the last king, testified at the ICTR and stated he was in Kigali all through the alleged genocide and saw no massacres by the Rwandan Army against Tutsis. He added that the massacres were committed by the RPF forces during their attacks and later when they took the city. A journalist testified that she saw RPF soldiers taking Hutu refugees out of Amahoro stadium in Kigali, where Dallaire and the UN had their headquarters, and shooting them en masse, and that Dallaire and other UN officers watched and did nothing to stop it. She has some credibility having later won an award for journalism from the UN in another context. As regards the man I defend at the ICTR, the evidence from General Dallaire and Professor Des Forges and many others is that he was considered pro-RPF and protected many Tutsis during that period. Even the prosecution presented evidence to that effect. Bill Clinton stated that the US failed to act in Rwanda and has since used that as an excuse for other wars. But as UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated in 2004, “The Americans are 100% responsible for what happened in Rwanda .” I also have in my possession a letter from Paul Kagame, dated August 1994, referring to the assistance he received from Museveni and the Americans, British and Belgians, and referring to their coming plans for Zaire (Congo). I can send that to you if your paper would care—or dare—to publish it. So, millions have died in Central Africa all for access to the immense resources there, and all you can do is swallow wholesale the bald faced lies of the Americans, British, Belgians and Canadians, who are really responsible for that terrible war and the installation of a mass murderer, Paul Kagame, in Kigali. Re North Korea: You quote me correctly. You don’t believe me? Well, ridicule will not get you very far. People want to know facts. Have you ever been to North Korea? I doubt it. So how can dare you ridicule me—if you are an honest man? But since you doubt me, I invite to come with me to the DPRK and see for yourself. You may not agree with me from what you have been fed by the US propaganda machine, but I am no liar. I invite you to see for yourself that the North Koreans have attained something most Britons can only wish they had: a civilized, humane society in which people and individuals come first, not money and power. You do not discredit me by repeating my findings (I was one of a team of mainly American lawyers who were invited to the DPRK by the Democratic Lawyers Association of North Korea.) As for the alleged connection between a virus and what is termed AIDS, I draw your attention to any number of published scientific papers that point out that no one has yet isolated any such virus, or explained the cause of the syndrome as a particular viral agent. I refer you in particular to the Perth Group and the work of Drs. Turner and Papadoupolos as a starting point. Their website is a good place to begin. The HIV theory is bankrupt. A sounder theory is that AIDS is caused by malnutrition and chemical poisoning, particularly from the use of amyl nitrates (poppers) and other oxidating agents. The HIV theory is full of holes, explains nothing and, moreover, is dangerous, as it leads to misdiagnosis and mistreatment of the problem. But whether you accept that or not, the point is that there is a vigorous debate in the scientific and medical communities about what really does cause AIDS, and the HIV theory is losing ground daily. Instead of smirking at this debate you might want to read the opposing theories and become enlightened. By the way I am not a Trotskyite. I had some appreciation for Trotsky’s critiques of the USSR, but, by and large, most of them are the Right masquerading as the Left. Finally, I wrote to your blog to object to your use of ridicule to attack three important intellectuals whose views are carefully considered and researched, and whose contributions too learning and truth are incontestable. If you disagree with them then you should argue the facts. But to descend into sarcasm, false connections to deniers of the murder of the Jews by the Nazis and so on, is not only unfair, it is dishonest and a disservice to your readers and to History. Christopher Black Barrister, International Criminal Lawyer Lead Counsel, International War Crimes Tribunal For Rwanda. Toronto, Canada * Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Open Letter to Amnesty International," MRZine , November 22, 2009: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/hp221109.html . * Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "In Response to the Bosnia Genocide Lobby," MRZine , December 8, 2009: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/hp081209.html . * Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Open Letter to Amnesty International," MRZine , November 22, 2009: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/hp221109.html . * Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "In Response to the Bosnia Genocide Lobby," MRZine , December 8, 2009: http://www.monthlyreview.org *********************** PS: Kamm wrote: You must reconcile yourself to the prospect that The Times will in no circumstances publish such grotesque libels. Then Chris wrote back: Dear Mr. Kamm, Sincerely, they are not libels. They are the facts. What you don't know about what really happened in Rwanda would curl your hair. Dallaire (whom I have met personally aside from cross-examining him) was a close friend of my client and was involved up to his neck in blood. The Canadian Army is little more than an auxiliary force for the Americans. Whenever they need someone to do their dirty work--especially when they need men who can speak French--they use them. E.g., the overthrow of Aristide in Haiti was accomplished with the help of Canadian commandos who secured the airport when Arisitide was taken out at the point of a gun. And a Canadian commando (member of the JTF2 commando) published a book about all this in Montreal just last year, Les Invincibles. But I find it surprising that you find my statements potentially libelous, but your statements about Milosevic et al. are not. The Canadian government under Jean Chretien worked hand in glove with the Americans to overthrow the coalition government in Rwanda (a government composed of Hutu and Tutsi ministers) because it would not cooperate in overthrowing Mobutu in Zaire. All I have reconciled myself to is that the Times will publish all sorts of grotesque libels against those people the state has declared to be enemies, but will not provide its readers with the facts about war criminals declared to be the friends of the state. CB .

Netanyahu's 10-month settlement "freeze" a sham -- by W.E. Gutman

Palestinian family mourns

Netanyahu’s 10-month settlement “freeze” a sham -- by W.E. Gutman

[Our friend Willy Gutman (blessedly no relation to Roy) sends us this piece on Benjamin Netanyahu and his bogus 'settlement freeze.' Bibi was one of the leading figures in the Zeitgeist transplant that exchanged a played-out anti-Communism for a far more maniacally irrational anti-Terrorism.

At the end of the 1970s, with Carter's Nat’l Security Adviser Zorro Brzezinski’s bear baiting an enfeebled USSR into defending its Afghan neighbor against the systematic ravages of its political and social organizations by a CIA/MI6/Mossad campaign of mercenary (mujahedeen) murders, and the rest of the Middle East, from Beirut to Baghdad to Tehran also falling into Reagan’s pre-Alzheimer’s militarized chaos--with the US and Israel supplying the firepower to all sides and the Muslim street supplying the body-count--it was apparent that the 'Red Menace' would need some kind of Max Factor make-over.

In the introduction to our 2007 post, '90 Years After: Russia and the West, Socialism and Terrorism -- Zyuganov in 12 July 2007 Pravda'--found here:

http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2007/7/19/3104716.html

We can sample (yet again) Thierry Meyssan's take on the origins of 9/11 and the War on (or as Borat prefers, War OF) Terrorism from the sequel to his monster bestseller 'L'Effroyable Imposture,’ surprisingly enough called 'L'Effroyable Imposture 2,’ where he describes Netanyahu's formation of the Jonathan Institute, ostensibly to honor his brother, Yoni, who died in the Entebbe (Uganda) raid, but really to launch a campaign involving the intelligence agencies of the most powerful countries to hasten the fall of the USSR. The hook was that all heretofore national terrorist movements, like the IRA or ETA or The Red Army Faction, would be subsumed under the rubric of Arab or Islamic Terrorism, and then that would be linked through sponsorship to Soviet Imperialism—the kind of ‘Imperialism-in-reverse’ that really broke and brought down the SU.

With the end of the 1980s, this paradigm-shift--really a reconfiguration of the old Nazi dream--was successfully brought off. But, as with the end of WWII, the insatiable concupiscence of the Great Powers for high turnover military production and the vast, indiscriminate destruction it produces, could not be calmed. All cheerful chirping in the Clinton White House about divvying up a 'Peace Dividend' was seamlessly modulated into a dreadful oration against the oppression of religious and ethnic and national minorities, for delivering justice to the victims (a fancy call for revenge), and, especially, Stopping the Fucking Genocides.

The Middle Eastern wars of the 1980s carried right on into the 1990s and the new Millenium--with peripheral outbreaks in Southeastern Europe and Central Africa--and eventually in Central Asia and Russia's 'near abroad.' But in this decades-long tug-of-war between Good and Evil, the rope was never out Bibi Netanyahu's bloody hands.

Now he is back behind the Israeli PM's desk and will certainly exert significant pull against any tendencies my president Obama might demonstrate toward actually earning that Nobel Peace Prize at the expense of the Israeli military/medical/financial (i.e., organ banking) complex.

So we are truly blessed to have the Good Will of W.E. Gutman speaking from the Hebrew traditions of Reason and Tolerance against what promises to be another Hell-bent on Self-Wasting Israeli military regime.

I can only think that had Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoken Gutman's words (as he seems to have done on several occasions), he would most assuredly be trashed, tarred and re-tarred as a 'revisionist,' a 'negationist,' or just an 'Anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.' But our Mr. Gutman is far too eloquent in far too many languages to ever be so mistranslated or misunderstood. --mc]

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Netanyahu’s 10-month settlement “freeze” a sham
--W. E. Gutman

In an editorial published back east in August 1997 I urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. I opposed the expansion of settlements in Israeli-occupied areas of Palestine and called for an immediate and permanent cessation to the expropriation of Arab lands, a practice still regarded around the world as a blatant provocation and an open invitation to unrest and violence.

I further argued that dastardly alliances with jingoist generals, unholy covenants with religious zealots in Brooklyn and in Jerusalem who use ideological extortion to force a theocracy on a largely secular society; the inexplicable compulsion to scuttle peace negotiations, a wrathful disdain toward international censure, a savage antipathy toward the Palestinian people -- all hallmarks of an administration oscillating between clumsiness and aberration – posed grave dangers to peace in the Middle East.

In short, Mr. Netanyahu’s regime, I said, was a calamity and a recipe for disaster.

My views, roundly criticized in the press, would be validated by ensuing events. Mr. Netanyahu’s stern and capricious governance brought not one iota of security -- perceived or actual -- to Israel. Instead, as successive political crises between his government and the Palestinian Authority deepened, Jews and Arabs became mired in frustration and endless conflict.

His combative style and pugnacious rhetoric exhumed and re-ignited old hatreds, reopened unhealed wounds, fomented a new swell of cynicism, misgivings and suspicions. Israelis were demoralized. Israel’s friends abroad were exasperated. Negotiating partners were unnerved. Bitterness and rancor deepened with every stroke of his ministerial pen, with every hostile decree, every calculated vacillation, every broken word, every rubber bullet fired at stone-throwing youths.

This pernicious alchemy, in the name of national defense, yielded confusion, anxiety, sorrow and, yes, insecurity. Stimulated by the wild possibility of a peaceful settlement of their protracted conflict, Israelis and Palestinians were now bewildered and apprehensive. Neither side could endure the suspense and agony of occupation, piecemeal concessions and erratic, snail-paced progress routinely nullified by spasms of retributive violence.

Last, echoing the musings of distinguished Israeli journalist Yosef Lapid, who wrote that the prime minister exhibited “a crass disregard for reality and humanism,” I described Mr. Netanyahu’s vision of peace and security as “trapped in paranoia and the corruptive forces of chauvinism.”

Twelve bloodstained years later, and after weeks of infighting, Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected Prime Minister. It was clear from day one that he was putting Israel on a new collision course with the Palestinians, Arab neighbors and even its long-time American ally. His elegant oratory, which betrayed his notorious ultra-nationalism, his intransigence and deep-rooted hostility toward Arabs, ruled out any possibility that a modus vivendi could ever be reached.

MIT-educated Netanyahu laid waste to the delicate foundations for peace that were being erected. Issued from the sword and resting on the Bible, his policies have daunted and discouraged serious attempts to bring about regional security and stability. His lifelong antagonism toward the Palestinians, whom he considers “a sinister and divisive element,” has palliated the religious Right, whose enormous financial resources helped underwrite his campaign and whose gluttonous territorial expansionist objectives he has vigorously endorsed.

Prodded by the Obama administration to freeze settlements as a way of jump-starting the comatose “peace process,” Mr. Netanyahu grudgingly announced a 10-month ban on new housing projects in the West Bank.

“How can we believe the words of a prime minister who promised that our communities would flourish,” asked the spokesman of a settler group on the West Bank -- “and now freezes them?”

Valid point. A better question might be: “How can the rest of the world trust the pronouncements of a man whose actions have clearly betrayed a strategic distaste for peace?” The answer may astonish the settlers but will surprise few political pragmatists. First, the freeze excludes East Jerusalem. Second, Mr. Netanyahu, who has immodestly asked that the Palestinian Authority “take advantage of the 10-month window and resume negotiations,” will exploit any predictable disturbance to rescind the freeze.

Given these sobering realities and the volatile political landscape on which he has cast his shadow, it is disheartening to conclude that the once-and-yet-again prime minister, his colossal ambitions fulfilled and his hawkish supporters placated, is simply unable to understand that hard line begets hard line, that security by intimidation, repression and economic persecution produces animosity and insecurity, that he who sows the wind reaps the tempest.

Meanwhile, as the Palestinians, outnumbered, marginalized, strangers in their own land, are fighting to preserve fragments of their patrimony, a new synagogue is rising on confiscated land.
__________
W. E. Gutman is a widely published veteran journalist and author, and a former press officer at Israel’s Consulate General in New York. .

9/11 NYC - 4/6 Kigali -- What Really Happened? and Who Done It?

4/6 Falcon 50 wreckage

9/11 NYC - 4/6 Kigali -- What Really Happened? and Who Done It?

9/11 NYC - 4/6 Kigali --What Really Happened? and Who Done It?

[CM/P has never stopped looking at 9/11 or for 'Who Done It?' But recent events in the US, France and Rwanda, seem to be conspiring to return this by-now mythologized event to the crucible of geopolitical analysis--where it will be compounded with its historical antecedent, the April 6, 1994 (4/6), double assassination of the duly-elected Hutu (i.e., majoritarian, democratic) heads of state, presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi.

These two terrorist attacks are circumstantially similar in many respects besides their being prime examples of the military uses of civil aviation disasters, but their most striking similarity seems to be how they have both escaped any real investigation and, thereby, had any phenomenal reality fuzzed out of the public consciousness. By the considered dissemination of fear-driven, sentimentality-laden ignorance (esp the fear of being excluded altogether from the discussion by catching a 'negationist', 'revisionist', or even 'Holocaust denier's' jacket), an effective countervailing drag to the ever-more spirited demands for serious research into the truth surrounding these events has been achieved.

Thierry Meyssan was one of the first important interrogators of the 911 dossier. Yet he has also been as consistently an obscurantist on the Rwandan 4/6 case. His Réseau Voltaire posted early US government and mainstream media images of the Pentagon immediately after it had been hit on that Tuesday morning in September 2001--and titled it 'Hunt the Boeing.' These images, mined from the Internet and demonstrating to all who had eyes to see the brazen lie that was the US government's fantasy of an American Airliner (AA 77) having crashed into this most defended of all government buildings, became the nucleus of a cut/paste runaway bestseller in Europe, 'L'Effroyable Imposture,' entitled '9/11: The Big Lie,' in its English language rendition. Some leftist scholars I know who had books they had worked very hard on coming out at this time, immediately joined the Western military/intelligence agencies in neutralizing Meyssan's character with extreme prejudice: his gay activism got him tagged as a collector of pedo-porn, and the NYRB (1 May 2003), in Tony Judt's article on French Anti-Americanism, reviewed his first big bestseller as an Anti-Semetic tirade. So reflexive has become this 9/11-questioner=9/11-denier=anti-Semite trope, that when our dear friend Pierre Péan, in his monumental history of the Rwandan drama, 'Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs,' sought to invalidate some of Meyssan's egregious writing in defense of the murderous Kagame/RPF regime (e.g., his unseemly trivialization of the Bruguière report on the RPF terrorism of 4/6 as an apology for French imperialism's involvement in the Rwandan genocide.), the always rigorous Péan chose to trash Meyssan's seminal, though totally non-rigorous, work on 9/11.

Now that France and Kagame's Rwanda have agreed to renew diplomatic relations--relations that Kagame had unilaterally broken off two years ago in response to French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière's issuing of international arrest warrants for nine of the Rwandan military strongman's inner circle (the dictator, himself, getting a pass only because of his executive privilege as a sitting head of state, though Bruguière recommended Kagame's prosecution to the ICTR) after his 8-year investigation into the deaths of the three-man French flight crew of the Rwandan presidential jet found that Kagame's RPF (Tutsi) rebels had been responsible not only for the terrorism of 4/6 but also for the four year reign of terror that began with its 1 October 1990 invasion of Rwanda from Uganda and culminated in the nationwide RPF military offensive that was triggered by the 4/6 missile strike on Habyarimana's plane--and was later made over by certain so-called STFG organizations like Ibuka and Survie into a '100-day genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus'--and led directly to the two invasions of Congo in 1996 and 1998 and the hunting down and massacring of millions of Rwandan and Congolese unarmed civilians.

But breaking off diplomatic relations was not enough to occult the sort of primal crimes against the Peace that were 4/6 and 9/11--esp after Kagame all but confessed to murdering his predecessor on the BBC's 'Hard Talk' (like Larry Silverstein admitting he ordered the demolition [dixit: 'pull it'] of WTC 7.) To neutralize the Bruguière report, Kigali put out the Mucyo Commission Report, an attempt to implicate France in the arming and training of 'Extremist' Hutu militias and even taking part in the genocide itself by helping the fleeing genocidaires, with their genocidaire wives and genocidaire kids, escape into Congo. But this slapdash piece of overwrought propaganda and its parade of false witnesses was easily rebutted by the UN political prisoners in Arusha and did noting to impeach Bruguière's finding of Kagame's responsibility in the double assassination that triggered the so-called Tutsi genocide. So immediately after the Mucyo report came out, Kigali promised a report on the 4/6 shoot-down.

Just as with anything like a real investigation of 9/11, we're still waiting for the RPF's explanation of what really happened on 4/6. While we were waiting, Kagame and Rwanda have been lavished with an endless array of Humanitarian/Capitalist awards: from Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential list, to a Man of Peace prize from the sectarian pervert Rick Warren of the Saddleback Congregation, to a Global Achievement award from the secular war criminal Bill Clinton; concurrent with the renewal of French/Rwandan diplomatic relations, formerly-Francophone Rwanda was accepted into the British Commonwealth; and, my all time fave of a Rwandan parable because it really tells the story of how fucked up are today's geopolitical values:

--The UNICEF country chief, Joseph Foumbi, has congratulated [the Kigali] government for being the first country in the world to be declared landmine free. Rwanda was declared land mine free last week by the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-Free World in Colombia.--

Of course, all those mines were laid, in the first place, by the current Rwandan government after they invaded from Uganda in October 1990. But is even this joke going to be enough to quiet the questions on 4/6?

Soon KSM and some other of the so-called 9/11 co-conspirators are going to be brought from Gitmo to stand trial in a public court in NYC. Can these trials go down without the dossier on 9/11 being reopened to inspection?

Here is one of the first questioner's story of what happened on that dark Tuesday, that election day in NYC, on September 11, 2001. We've cleaned it up a bit--Meyssan should really kick down some of the royalties from his cut/paste instant bestsellers to pay for fact checking and simple proofing.

But credit where credit is due: Bravo et Cou-cou, Thierry. --mc]

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Did GWB Ever Tell the Truth About 9/11?
by Thierry Meyssan*

Thierry Meyssan started the international campaign that questioned the Bush version of the 9/11 attacks eight years ago. Today he recaps the issues for Odnako, a new Russian periodical, but not before criticizing the media’s tight “iron curtain” around NATO member populations that isolates them from the rest of world opinion. Under heavy media pressure, these populations are still convinced that only fringe activists are contesting the official version of 9/11.
Meyssan also points to the gullibility of Westerners who believe the comic strip storyboard about how some 20 extremists could strike at the heart of the world’s largest military empire.

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Historic Event or Local Interest News Item?

On October 7, 2001, the UK and US ambassadors to the United Nations formally notified the Security Council that their armed forces had entered Afghanistan in exercise of their right to self defense as a result of the 9/11 attacks that had thrown America into mourning. US ambassador John Negroponte further wrote in his statement that his government had obtained “clear, irrefutable” information that Al Qaeda, an organization supported by the Taliban government of Afghanistan, played a key role in the attacks.

On June 29, 2002, Pres. Bush disclosed in his annual State of the Union address that Iraq, Iran and North Korea covertly supported terrorism and that this “Axis of Evil” had entered into a secret pact to destroy the USA. Of course, these three “rogue states” have been keeping lower profiles since Washington crushed the Taliban, but they had not abandoned their common aim.


[On February 11 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell lied to the “international community” in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. He claimed that Pres. Saddam Hussein was sheltering Al Qaeda leader Abu al Zarkawi and operating a chemical weapons factory.]

On February 11 2003, the accusations became more detailed. Secretary of State Colin Powell personally told the UN Security Council how Iraq had supported the perpetrators of 9/11. After holding up a vial he claimed contained enough anthrax to wipe out an entire continent, he showed a satellite image of an Al Qaeda base in northern Iraq that included a chemical weapons facility. He then produced an organization chart to illustrate the terrorist network headed by Abu al Zarkawi in Baghdad. On the strength of this “clear, irrefutable” information, UK and US forces exercised their right to legitimate self-defense in the wake of 9/11 and crossed into Iraq with the support of troops from Australia and Canada.

As ordnance rained down on Baghdad, the 9/11 argument was so useful that the US Congress accused Syria of supporting terrorism on October 15, 2003, and authorized Pres. Bush to attack it, too, if he saw fit. However, Syria was only small change; the real prize was Iran. In July 2004, the president’s 9/11 commission published its final report. At the last minute, two pages were added to describe Iran’s links to Al Qaeda, claiming that the Shia government in Tehran had longstanding ties to Sunni terrorists, allowed them to circulate freely on its territory and had provided them facilities in Sudan. A new war now seemed inevitable and this scenario held the international media in suspense for two years.

The only trouble with all that is that, eight years after 9/11, all the “clear irrefutable proof” of Al Qaeda’s responsibility still has not been submitted to the UN Security Council, which has since forgotten all about asking for it. In addition, (1) nobody still considers Al Qaeda a well-structured organization and there is only talk of it as a vague, impalpable “movement;” (2) the world’s largest military power still hasn’t captured Mr. Osama bin Laden; (3) the CIA has disbanded the unit that was supposed to find him; (4) the secret pact binding Iran, Iraq and North Korea, plays like a broken record and nobody dares mention the term “Axis of Evil” anymore; (5) Ex-Secretary of State Powell has publicly admitted that the information he presented to the Security Council was fabricated; and (6) the US leadership still keeps asking Iran and Syria to help to manage the mess in Iraq. Nonetheless, the “diplomatically correct” thing for everyone to do is to pretend that everything is as plain as day: a bearded madman holed up in an Afghan cave managed to strike at the heart of the biggest empire in world history and escape its righteous wrath.

Everyone? Um, not quite. First, the leaders of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Syria did not just deny any hand in the 9/11, they explicitly accused the US military industrial complex of perpetrating the events itself and willfully killing 3,000 of its own people. Secondly, after these denials from those directly accused of involvement in 9/11, the next leaders happy to lampoon the Bush version of 9/11 were Cuba, Venezuela and other countries on poor terms with Washington. Finally, there were national leaders who intended to protect their good relationship with the USA but would not just sit back and buy into a pack of lies: if they remained silent about 9/11 itself, they did state that there was no legal basis for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These countries were as diverse as Malaysia, Russia, the UAE and now even Japan. Clearly, such a list of skeptics should have nothing to do with being pro- or anti-US, but rather with each country’s definition of national sovereignty and the means at its disposal to assert it.


[On January 11 2008, the Defense and Foreign Affairs Commission of the Japanese Diet refused to commit more troops to Afghanistan after Councilor Yukihisa Fujita denounced US lies about 9/11.]

Journalists are not subject to the same rules of secrecy as diplomats, so we’ll tell you what happened on September 11 2001.


Hollywood Blockbuster Budget with a Lame Screenplay

The official story is that a diabolic Islamic extremist called Osama bin Laden had a grudge against US “infidels” for having sullied the sacred soils of Saudi Arabia by littering it with US military bases, so he organized a large-scale terrorist operation with insignificant resources consisting of 19 fanatical commandos, some boxcutters and a few flying lessons.

He lives in a well-appointed cave right out of a James Bond film. He infiltrates his people into the USA just like in the Chuck Norris film presciently called “Ground Zero”.

Four sign up at a flight school. They skip the lessons on take-offs and landings and focus all their attention on actual piloting. Operating in four teams on the agreed day, these fanatics hijack airliners by threatening to slit the throats of the cabin crew with boxcutters.

At 08.29, American Airlines receives a radio message that says the caller is a crewmember on American Airlines flt 11 (Boston/Los Angeles) and that the aircraft has been hijacked. Standard operating procedure is to notify the military immediately and scramble fighters for an intercept within less than eight minutes. But when the World Trade Center suffers the first impact 17 minutes later, the fighters were all still on the ground.

At 08.47, United 175 (Boston/Los Angeles, too) turns off its transponder. Civilian radar can now only track it as an unidentified blip. This triggers the alert although air traffic control (ATC) still has no way of knowing whether the dead transponder is due to hijacking or equipment malfunction. When the second plane hits the WTC at 09.07, fighters still have not been scrambled to establish a visual contact.

At 08.46, a Boeing 757 strikes the North Tower of the WTC. It hits the exact center of the façade. Given that the wingspan of a B757 is 63 meters and a speed in excess of 700 kph, the error margin for the maneuver is 3/10ths of a second. Few fighter pilots could repeat that feat, yet we are told that a student pilot did it. The same feat happens again at 09.03 when a second B757 slams into the South Tower, but flying upwind this time.

Still at exactly 09.03, a missile crosses the field of a camera belonging to New York One channel. It was fired from an aircraft behind the smoke on a diagonal trajectory towards the ground. This incongruous footage has not been heard of ever since.

The first witnesses say the two aircraft were cargo planes with no windows. Only later were they re-identified as two regular commercial flights, American 11 and United 175. There is only one video of the first impact, but six of the second. Zoom views of the fuselage present no sign of windows.

However, zooms do show a dark, unusual fixture on the underside of each craft. Frame by frame viewing shows, for each aircraft, a flash of light emanating from the point of impact just before actual impact. The aircraft do not crash against the façade but plunge straight in and disappear entirely, with the facade and pillars offering no resistance.

At 08.54, American 77 (Washington DC/Los Angeles) changes heading without ATC authorization, its transponder goes dead and it disappears from civilian radar screens.

At 09.25, the Herndon Command Center determines a major emergency has occurred. It forbids all takeoffs nationwide, orders all airborne craft to land immediately and reroutes all transatlantic flights to Canada. Meanwhile, the New York City Port Authority shuts all bridge and tunnel links to Manhattan.

Still at 09.25, Richard Clarke, the US president’s antiterrorism adviser, holds a video conference for the White House, Departments of Defense, Justice and State, plus the CIA and FAA.

From aboard American 77, Fox Anchor Barbara Olson calls her husband on her cellphone. Theodore Olson is now the Attorney General after defending Pres. Bush's election before the Supreme Court. She tells him her plane has just been hijacked and they exchange emotional farewells. At 09.30, ATC declares AA77 missing. It apparently crashed in a national park in West Virginia before any fighter intercept.

However, also at 09.30, ATC at Dulles Airport in Washington DC picks up an unidentified aircraft with the speed and handling characteristics of a military jet. It penetrates the restricted flying zone around the Pentagon. The Pentagon’s automatic air defense batteries do not respond. After making a turn to avoid a highway cloverleaf, the craft penetrates the wall of the Pentagon building before detonation and kills 125 persons. Witnesses identify the craft as a missile. Surviving wall clocks read 09.31.

Forty minutes later, the damaged walls and floors collapse. The CNN reporter on the scene states there is no sign of any aircraft in view. CNN then shows Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helping rescuers evacuate an injured victim on a stretcher. He then tells Pentagon staffers he saw the wreckage of a Boeing airliner inside the burning building. The missile now becomes American 77.


[US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (second from the right) leaves his office to help carry a stretcher. Source: CNN]

Using secret presidential transmission codes, an anonymous caller phones the White House to say it is the next target.

At 09.35, Antiterrorism Adviser Richard Clarke triggers the Continuity of Operations Plan and Pres. Bush interrupts a visit to a Florida grade school to return to Air Force One. Meanwhile, Vice Pres. Richard Cheney goes to the emergency command bunker under the White House. Congressmen and administration officials are instructed to remove to bunkers as well.

At 09.42, ABC airs live footage of flames consuming two floors of the White House annex housing the offices of presidential and vice-presidential staffers. This fire has never been explained and all mention has long since ceased. Troops deploy MANPADS (Man-portable air-defense systems) around the White House to thwart any paratroop drops. These moves are consistent with precautions against a military coup.

Reeling back to 09.24, ATC learns United 93 (Newark/San Francisco) has unauthorized persons on the flight deck. Radio contact is lost, the transponder goes off and the flight is flagged as a hijack. At 10.03, the aircraft vanishes from ATC radar. It apparently exploded in mid-air over Pennsylvania. The crash site shows a large empty crater and wreckage dispersed across several miles.

In a sidewalk press conference, Mayor Rudy Giuliani states the Twin Towers might collapse and orders their evacuation.

At 09.58, an explosion at the base of the South Tower unleashes a massive cloud of dust. Smaller explosions then run top to bottom along the building, releasing small dust clouds horizontally. The building collapses in 10 seconds and covers Manhattan in dust.

Considered potential targets, United Nations HQ in New York and Federal offices in Washington DC are evacuated.

At 10.28, the North Tower collapses identically.

At 10.54, Israel locks down all diplomatic legations worldwide.

At about 11.00, Mayor Giuliani orders the evacuation of Building 7. This structure suffered no aircraft attacks and the authorities claim no link to the attacks on the North and South towers; indeed, Building 7 is not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s final report.

At 13.04, the major TV networks air a short message from Pres. Bush in which he states that government continues to function and that the nation will be defended.

At 13.30, a state of emergency is declared in the nation’s capital and the Pentagon puts two carrier battle groups on full alert to interdict any attempt to disembark enemy troops within reach of Washington. The US considers itself in a war situation.

At 16.00, CNN confirms that the US Government has identified Saudi citizen Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the attacks. Thus there was neither military coup nor third world war.

At 17.21 Building 7 collapses just like the North and South towers, except its collapse took only 6-1/2 seconds because of its lower height.

At 18.42, Defense Secr. Donald Rumsfeld holds a Pentagon press conference flanked by members of the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee to affirm they stand united in the face of this national tragedy.

By nightfall, damage assessment still remains sketchy and reports speak of 40,000 deaths. At 20.30, Pres. Bush addresses the nation to state that the danger has passed and that America will engage its enemies. War is in the air.


Controlled Demolition of the World Trade Center

The day’s traumatizing events happen too quickly for any serious evaluation of their coherence in real time. We shall now review the key inconsistencies. First, why did the two towers and Building 7 collapse?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says the burning kerosene contributed much more to the collapse than the impact of the two aircraft. They add that flames spread to Building 7, causing it to collapse in the same way.

Alas, experts respond to this theory with skeptical grins because (1) the Twin Towers were built to withstand impact by an airliner, (2) structural steel melts at 1,538°C and kerosene burns at 700°C to 900°C, (3) fires have ravaged numerous skyscrapers worldwide but collapsed none, (4) neither tower toppled but collapsed straight down upon its footprint, and, above all, (5) all three buildings collapsed at freefall speed, i.e., no floor encountered any resistance from the floor beneath it on the way down – each floor disintegrated before it suffered any pressure from the floor above it.

New York City firefighters are adamant: they heard and saw a series of explosions that destroyed the building from top to bottom. There is video footage with sound to support their statements.

Finally, Prof. Niels Harrit at the University of Copenhagen published an article in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal to report finding traces of nanothermite at Ground Zero. Nanothermite is a military explosive.

In short, explosive charges were methodically laid throughout the towers in such a way as to cut the base of the metal columns for subsequent destruction floor by floor from top to bottom. Photos taken immediately after 9/11 show cleanly-sliced metal columns with no evidence of heat deformation.

In violation of standard criminal investigation procedures, samples of the metal columns were not collected for laboratory analysis. Instead, they were rapidly removed by Carmino Agnello’s scrap metal enterprise and exported for sale on the Chinese market. Mr. Agnello allegedly heads the Gambino crime syndicate.

On Building 7, WTC owner/operator Larry Silverstein stated in a TV interview that he had “told them to pull it” after being warned that it might collapse. Mr. Silverstein later retracted that remark but the video recording lives on.

Building 7’s noteworthy tenants, included the New York City Crisis Center and a CIA station second in size only to its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. That station spied on UN delegations and, since the Clinton Administration, on the finances of major corporations in NYC. If, indeed, it served as the command post for 9/11 attacks, the “pulling” of Building 7 destroyed any material evidence of such a function.

In late July 2001, Mr. Silverstein (who is also Benjamin Netanyahu’s election fund treasurer) would seem to have struck a poor bargain in acquiring the WTC because of all the asbestos it contained, which was already a violation of the building code. He did however have the lucky hunch to insure it against terrorist attack with payout based on the number of attacks rather than actual losses incurred. Thus, he claimed for two attacks, one for each aircraft and cashed in twice for a total of USD 4.5 billion.

However that may be, it would have taken complex math operations to develop a demolition plan and several days of work to install the nanothermite charges throughout Building 7. WTC security would not have failed to detect the installing demolition teams.

Mr. Silverstein had outsourced WTC security to Securacom, headed by Marvin Bush, the US president’s brother.


3,000 Victims

On the evening of September 11, Mayor Giuliani ordered extra equipment and consumables so that NYC morgues could cope with the 40,000 deaths he had estimated. After several updates, the final death toll fortunately fell to just under 2,200 civilians and 400 rescuers. The numbers include no senior executives of any major corporation; most were maintenance staff and office workers. How do we explain this miracle?

At about 07.00, Odigo employees received cellphone text messages warning them not to go to their offices across the street from the WTC because of an impending attack on it. Odigo is a small Israeli company with leading edge text messaging technology. Owners are the Netanyahus and Aman, aka Israeli military intelligence.


[Warren Buffet saved the lives of every top executive based in the WTC by inviting them to Offutt AFB on Sept. 11 2001 where Pres. Bush joined them early that afternoon. Mr. Buffett is now the world’s richest person.]

At about 08.00, Mr. Warren Buffett opened his annual benefit breakfast at Offutt AFB in Nebraska where he is based. Setting one precedent, he invited every top executive with an office in the WTC. Setting a second precedent, he hosted them on a USAF base, not an upscale hotel. Offutt AFB is headquarters to the US Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear deterrent. The guests had arrived the night before and slept on base. Breakfast was interrupted by announcement of an accidental aircraft collision into the North Tower, followed by announcement of the second collision into the other tower. Guests now realized the collisions were deliberate. This was confirmed by 55th wing commander Gen. Gregory Power’s sudden departure to the underground command bunker. US airspace was locked down, grounding all the top corporate executives at Offutt AFB.

After 9/11, Mr. Buffett became the world’s richest individual, with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as an occasional rival. He campaigned for Barack Obama but declined that president’s offer to become Treasury Secretary.

In the early afternoon of 9/11, Air Force One landed at Offutt AFB and Pres. Bush made a video conference call from the command bunker to the White House and various Federal agencies. He also recorded an initial TV speech there.

Within minutes of the first impact, FEMA emergency teams deployed to the WTC. As luck would have it, they had arrived in NYC on September 10 for a training exercise on September 11 to respond to a simulated biological or chemical attack on the WTC. This prepositioning enabled fast response that saved many lives. FEMA was headed by Joe Allbaugh, Pres. George W. Bush’s election campaign treasurer who would later handle all government tendering in occupied Iraq.


The Pentagon Missile

The fully-automated air defense systems protecting the restricted flying zone around the Pentagon did not react to the craft that penetrated its perimeter. This could only happen if (1) they had been shut down, leaving the building undefended, or (2) the system identified the intruder as a friendly. Every aircraft carries a friend/foe identification unit that enables authorized aircraft to circulate safely inside that zone.

To strike the Pentagon, the intruder had to make a turn to avoid a cloverleaf intersection. It hit the building wing furthest from the defense secretary’s personal office.

Offices inside the killbox had two purposes. Some of the offices were for the US Navy chief of staff but under renovation while others belonged to the Auditor General. Staff in the latter offices were investigating the largest embezzlement of Defense funds in history. This explains why no general/flag officers were killed and why the fraud investigation was dropped after destruction of all documents.

The missile penetrated one reinforced wall and detonated well inside the building. The heat was so intense that firefighters needed asbestos suits to operate. Water was chosen for their purpose because of its high heat absorption properties. They used water, not flame retardants, as would be the case in the presence of burning kerosene, and flatly stated they had seen no evidence of kerosene or aircraft wreckage. Finally, contrary to Def. Secr. Rumsfeld’s claim, no one in a business suit, as he was, could have reached the point of detonation.

The authorities then proceeded to destroy and rebuild the entire damaged wing. The rubble was removed by a firm equipped to vitrify it. Vitrification is expensive and used to stabilize radioactive waste. In all likelihood, the cruise missile was jacketed with depleted uranium in order to enhance its ability to penetrate concrete and Kevlar. It also likely had a shaped charge in order to obtain a very brief explosion of intense heat.

As plainly visible in the first photos taken after impact, the missile entered the building without damaging the façade. It flew at ground level and entered through a delivery vehicle entrance. It damaged neither door cases nor window frames.

The Pentagon grounds are under constant video surveillance. The missile was necessarily picked up by at least 80 CCTV cameras. The authorities have refused to release all but a handful of the video footage and stills showing the explosion; none shows the aircraft itself.

The Pentagon lawn also escaped unblemished. The explosion totally destroyed two helicopters and numerous cars in the parking lot. There was much metal wreckage but none that can be traced to a Boeing airliner, not even the engines. The authorities made much of a photo showing a metal fragment about 90cm long that presented traces of a dedicated aeronautic paint on one side, plus red, white and blue markings on the other. Actually, this fragment does not match anything on an Boeing sporting an American Airlines paint scheme. It is however of aeronautical origin and probably belonged to one of the two helicopters at the heliport.

In a bid to buttress the official version, the Pentagon’s top physician identified human remains in the Pentagon killbox as belonging to American 77 passengers. Cremation ashes were presented to victims’ families and the urns specified whether they had been identified by DNA or fingerprint analysis.

However, the Pentagon later said the extreme heat had vaporized the entire airliner wreckage, engines included. If so, it is hard to see how human flesh would have survived such vaporization.


Manual Hijacking or Autopilot?

The hijack theory is based on (1) assuming that the aircraft were airliners and (2) release of inflight cellphone calls to people on the ground.

A number of people have reported receiving inflight calls from relatives. The content of these calls was pieced together into a story of flight attendants taken hostage with boxcutters and the passenger mutiny aboard United 93. United 93 became the basis for two full-length feature films. However, FBI agents at the trial of suspected terrorist Zacarias Massaoui testified that cellphone calls to the ground from airliners at altitude were technologically impossible in 2001. After verification, all reports of inflight cellphone calls received on September 11 proved false. Either the people receiving the calls were lying or they had been duped.

The FBI had made no comments about Theodore Olson, Pres. Bush’s personal lawyer during the election campaign, who was later to become Solicitor General. Mr. Olson too claimed to have received two cellphone calls from Fox Anchor Barbara Olson just before her death on American 77.


[Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson lied about receiving two cellphone calls from his wife onboard American 77. He alleged she had supplied him details of the hijacking but the FBI said there were no calls from her cellphone that day.]

The declassified archives of ex-Def. Secr. Robert McNamara suggest another theory. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented Pres. John F. Kennedy with Operation Northwoods, a false flag operation that would justify an invasion of Cuba. The plan was to shoot down an airliner with MiG fighters painted over in Cuban Air Force markings.

The USAF had already acquired the needed jets from a developing country and repainted them to order. An entire cast was recruited to fly out of Miami after making home movies for later distribution to the news media. Once airborne, the airliner was to shut down the transponder so that civilian radar could no longer identify it. At this point it would be replaced inflight by an empty airliner except for a crew that would bail out after turning on the autopilot. The MiGs would then shoot it down over Miami Bay in front of thousands of witnesses on the ground. For enhanced credibility, the JCS wanted to include people posing as Cuban spies to make telephone calls the FBI would intercept.

Applying this template to 9/11, it would explain (1) why the transponders ceased transmitting, (2) release of faked cellphone calls and (3) absence of windows on the aircraft that struck the WTC. The only update is that in 2001, a crew is no longer needed to fly a Boeing 757. It can operate in drone mode. This obtains more operational flexibility.

Domestic flights are very frequent in the USA and airlines regularly overbook. Passengers simply wait for the next free seat. Yet the four allegedly hijacked flights were filled to only 1/3 of seating capacity.

After a detailed study, the Iranian daily Kheyan concluded that all the passenger victims were close relatives of Defense Department employees, defense contractors or connected in some way to the White House, e.g., Barbara Olson.

The possibility of an airliner striking the Pentagon roof (not façade) was examined in the 1990s. The Defense Department even ran a series of such simulations under the direction of Capt. Charles Burlingame (USN). This officer then resigned from active duty and signed on with American Airline. He was captain aboard American 77 when it allegedly hit the Pentagon.


No Hijacking Means No Hijackers

It took the Justice Department three days to process the passenger cellphone call information, establish the modus operandi of the hijackers, identify them and piece together their biographies. The call from a flight attendant on American 11 said there were five hijackers and that their leader had been assigned Seat 8D, marking him as Mohammed Atta.

However, we now know the cellphone calls were all faked and the actual airliners replaced inlfight with drones. Even more inconveniently, the passenger lists released by the airlines shortly after the 9/11 attacks show that none of the 19 alleged hijackers had ever boarded.


[Attorney General John Ashcroft lied when he named 19 hijackers: none of their names appears on any passenger list released by the airlines.]

Nonetheless, there is one piece of evidence that Mr. Atta was aboard the airliner that struck the North Tower. A few days after 9/11, a police officer found Mr. Atta’s passport in perfect condition among the smoking debris of the WTC. Everything had been destroyed except this godsend of absolute proof.

The Bush Administration followed up this unconvincing discovery with CCTV footage showing Mr. Atta and his friend Mr. al Omari embarking. Although the footage was indeed shot on September 11th, it was unfortunately shot at Portland Airport where they were making a connection and not at Boston Airport, from where American 11 took off.

Never short of ideas, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times published in 2006 a US Defense Department video dated to 2000 that showed Mr. Atta at one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.

Scrutiny of the official list of kamikaze hijackers has more surprises. Some turned out to be alive, e.g. Walid al Asheri, who was supposed to be a member of Atta’s skyjack team – he actually works as a commercial pilot for Royal Air Maroc. He lives in Casablanca and started giving press conferences until the king asked him to keep a lower profile.

That said, 13 of the 19 alleged hijackers were mercenaries who had taken part in various terrorist operations organized by Prince Bandar bin Sultan on behalf of the CIA in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzogovina and/or Russia. They are Khalid Almihdhar; Salem and Nawaf Alhazmi; Ahmed Alhaznawi; Ahmed and Hamza Alghamdi; Mohand, Wail and Waleed Alshehri; Ahmed Alnami; Fayez Ahmed Banihammad and Majed Moqed. They fought as readily for the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate as for Ichkeria, the hoped-for Chechen state.

Prince Bandar became Saudi ambassador to Washington in 1982, as soon as King Fahd took over from his predecessor who was killed by a drug-addicted prince armed by the CIA. He remained ambassador until King Fahd’s final days in 2005. George Bush Sr. considered him as his adopted son and throughout the Arab world, he is known as “Bandar Bush.” Exploiting the many privileges at his disposal, Bandar ran a slush fund for the CIA for over 20 years that was funded by kickbacks on arms sales such as the al Yamamah deal that compromised several prominent British political leaders. He also hired Islamic fundamentalists for covert operations anywhere from Morocco to Xinjiang, China.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration preferred to keep the spotlight on Osama bin Laden and duck questions about the 19 alleged hijackers. The Saudi golden boy’s brother was Salem bin Laden, a business associate of Pres. Bush at Harken Energy Corporation, a small oil and gas producer. US President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had hired him in Beirut in the late 1970s, at which time he joined the World Anti-Communist League (now World League for Freedom and Democracy) and organized funding for the mujahideen fighting the USSR in Afghanistan. His “Arab Legion” would later serve in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other combat zones. In a move to set him up as a front for Prince Bandar’s doings, the CIA changed his image from that of a jetset socialite into one of a religious fanatic. Indeed, no self-respecting Islamic radical would have anything to do with the corrupt, disreputable King Fahd, but many found it palatable to subscribe to the fundamentalist, anti-Western rhetoric of “Sheik Osama”, who remained a key pawn on the CIA’s Middle East chessboard. One Arab head of state gave me details of his personal visit to bin Laden in 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai, where he was undergoing major therapy for his kidneys. He added that Osama’s CIA interfaces were present at bin Laden's bedside when he arrived.

In 2001, bin Laden was unknown to the US general public except for fans of “Ground Zero” by filmmaker Chuck Norris. Over an eight year period, the Bush Administration released a series of videos and voice tapes of “Sheik Osama” to prop up its anti-terrorism soap opera.

One of the most famous videos shows bin Laden claiming he calculated how two airliners could take down the Twin Towers and how he ordered the attack on the Pentagon. We now know that’s not how it happened.

In 2007, the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland examined the voice and video recordings. Dalle Molle is reputedly the world leader in voice and video identification. They said they were 95% certain that all bin Laden recordings after 2001 were fakes. That includes the confession tape.


[CIA Director George Tenet lied when he confirmed the authenticity of the bin Laden voice and video recordings made after late September 2001. Dalle Molle, which is certified to testify at international courts, has established those recordings were all faked.]

Do the US Armed Forces Exist?

The data presented so far invalidate the Bush Administration’s version but should not distract attention the oddest fact of all: On September 11th, the “world’s most powerful armed forces” were powerless, if not AWOL.

Standard operating procedure is for fighter jets to establish visual contact with hijacked airliners within a matter of minutes yet not a single fighter ever got anywhere near the hijacked airliners. Asked to explain this, Vice JCS Chairman Gen. Richard Myers (who was filling in for his boss away on business in Europe on September 11th) became flustered in front of congressional investigators. Gen. Myers told the Congressmen he did not remember what he did that day and kept contradicting himself throughout the hearing.


[Afflicted with amnesia while serving as Acting JCS Chairman, Gen. Richard Myers (USAF) told Congressional investigators he didn’t remember what he did on September 11th.]

Yet the US armed forces were indeed on alert that day. They were holding Global Vigilance, their largest annual military exercise. This war game simulates an incoming air attack from Russia across Canadian airspace. It mobilizes the entire USAF and the nation’s entire satellite surveillance capability. The war game is headquartered at Offutt AFB, where Mr. Buffet and his WTC friends happened to be, and where Pres. Bush joined them early that afternoon.

On that day more than any other, the skies were thick with US warplanes, backed by prepositioned satellites linked to command centers tracking every airliner in order to prevent accidental collisions.

Not only were US forces on maximum alert, but so were the general staffs of other major powers in order to monitor and evaluate US performance in the war game. When the 9/11 attack happened, each tried to discover its origin and monitor developments.

In Moscow, Pres. Vladimir Putin tried a hotline call to Pres. Bush to assure him that Russia had nothing to do with it and thereby prevent unwarranted retaliation. However, Pres. Bush refused to take the call, almost as if he found such confirmation pointless. Russian JCS Chairman Gen. Leonid Ivashov ordered investigations of disturbing questions as soon as they arose. His staff concluded that the straight-down collapse of the towers indicated the official story was only intended as a diversion to mask a vast pre-orchestrated set-up. It took him three days to reconstitute the substance of 9/11 and affirm that the attack resulted from a clash of interests among US leaders. He said the operation was ordered by a faction within the US military industrial complex and carried out by a private security contractor.


Grassroots Wake-Up

Public opinion was dazed and incapable of hard thinking after the blitz of heavyhanded propaganda that included national days of mourning in some countries and a mandatory minute of silence throughout the European Union. Afghanistan soon heard the sound of boots on the ground.

Yet this author was already publishing online articles skeptical of the official story. First written in French, translations appeared and became the subject of public debate. Six months later, the book 9/11, The Big Lie was published and translated into 28 languages and it triggered a worldwide movement. From there, ex-German Defense Minister Andreas von Bülow added more details, as did ex-CIA Regional Director Oswald Le Winter in Portugal, Political Scientist Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in the UK and Historian Webster Tarpley in the USA. The movement developed along two tracks.

This author led a worldwide campaign, met with top military officers, statesmen and diplomats, and enlisted international organizations. These initiatives have been helping to limit the lethality of Neo-Conservative plans for a “clash of civilizations” by raising awareness about their nature.

Meanwhile, the families of 9/11 victims in the USA stopped condemning our movement, started asking questions and ultimately demanded a new investigation. The Bush Administration intimidated these troublemakers, forcing some like the billionaire Jimmy Walter to go into exile; it then blocked any Congressional inquiries and set up a presidential commission. The commission issued a report that unsurprisingly concluded that that Al Qaeda was guilty and the Bush Administration, innocent. However, it never produced the “clear, irrefutable proof” expected of it. Private individuals created “Loose Change” and other video animations to illustrate the inconsistencies of the official story over the Internet. Professional associations of architects, firefighter, engineers, lawyers, physicians, clerics, academics, artists and political leaders have been set up to find out the truth about the 9/11 attacks. Today tens of thousands of their members have convinced most Americans that Washington lied. They have found a leader in David Ray Griffin, professor of philosophy of religion and theology.

The mainstream media have so far managed to contain the impact of this dissidence. First, it has managed to keep the public in the dark about the worldwide discussion of this issue. Tucked behind a new iron curtain, the mainstream media ignored any public statements by world leaders or foreign governments that questions the official story. It also handled any Western dissidents as leftwing lunatics or, worse still, as rightwing anti-Semitic extremists.

Pres. Obama’s election has not changed this situation. The White House website, which invites citizens to express their concerns, has been flooded with demands for a new 9/11 investigation and the official reply was laconic: “The new Administration wants to “look forward” and not revive the pains of the past.

During his campaign, Obama had his speeches reviewed by Benjamin Rhodes, the young scholar who drafted the final report of the 9/11 Kean-Hamilton commission. Rhodes ensured that no reference would be made to 9/11 or anyone involved in it, lest it open a can of worms. He now works for the White House and sits on the National Security Council. All Obama appointees have been required to retract any prior reservations they may have stated on the record about the official 9/11 story. Van Jones had to resign his appointment precisely because he refused to do that.

However, events of the highest importance may be opening the door to new information about 9/11. King Fahd died in August 2005. His successor, King Abdullah, has been trying to work out the suffocating network of ties between Saudi Arabia and the USA. At first, Prince Bandar was national security adviser but the relationship deteriorated, and, in early 2009, Bandar unwisely tried to kill the king so that his father could ascend the throne. Since then, Prince Bandar has not been heard from, while 200 members of his family either went to prison or followed him into exile in Morocco. Tongues may soon loosen.

Thierry Meyssan

[French political analyst, founder and chairman of the Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace conference. He publishes columns dealing with international relations in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. Last books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.]

THE PREPARED TESTIMONY & STATEMENT for the RECORD of Wayne MADSEN

by Duci Simonovic

THE PREPARED TESTIMONY & STATEMENT for the RECORD of Wayne MADSEN

[This is a document, really, an old document--a pre-911 document--posted here to furnish some of the back-up that's been demanded for what we’ve called "The Diabolical International Plan Against Congo," taken and translated from the French-language journal, Grands-Lacs Confidentiel, of 10 January 2005.

http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2005/1/11/237836.html

The gist of the article is that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Western, primarily Anglo-Saxon, powers set about through their military superiority, on which their domestic economies had become insatiably dependent, to reassert their influence in those regions of the post-colonial Second and Third Worlds: throughout Eastern Europe, from the Baltics to the Balkans, and in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Pacific Rim, to intervene in or otherwise sabotage Russian and Chinese financial and commercial dominion there; and, in Africa, from the Horn to Central Africa through to Zimbabwe and South Africa, in a similarly intentioned seige of Congo.

The concurrent globalization wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, whose strikingly creepy similarities culminate with the single shared Appeals Chamber of these only geographically separate International Criminal Tribunals--known as 'ad hocs' because of their illegal creation by the UN Security Council to deal with just these two fronts of the Western Waste Capitalist aggressions against Europe and Africa. That is to say, the same appeals court, headed by the Shakespeare and Serbian death camp aficionado--who still hangs Penny Marshall and Ed Vuillamy's potted portrait of Fikret Alic on the wrong side of the chicken wire at Trnopolje--Judge Teodor Meron--the same court that acquitted Protais Zigiranyirazo, the brother-in-law of martyred Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, of genocide charges, was the court that instructed the Trial Chamber at the ICTR in the Military 1 case to take 'Judicial Notice' of the Rwandan genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus--i.e., that the trial chamber should accept the Tutsi genocide as a given, a donnée, without it having to be proved. Thus the Arusha Tribunal was able to acquit of any conspiracy or planning in this mega-crime all the Military 1 defendants, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, Brigadier General Gratien Kabiligi, Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, and Major Aloys Ntabakuze, the so-called ‘brains of the 1994 genocide,’ while sentencing them to life imprisonment for not intervening to stop ‘crimes of genocide’ committed by those under their command.

These unwholesome and bumbling Siamese twins reflect ever-more grimly on their UN/NATO parentage and patronage. To cover their intimations of immorality, a great deal of bogus data, disinformation fraught with sentimentality, has been churned out by all sides about how different the two Tribunals really are; how different the European and African 'genocides' are--to the Serbs, the Rwandan genocide is ‘a real genocide,’ while the genocide at Srebrenica is a fake, and Carla Del Ponte was fired from the Rwanda Tribunal (a righteous Tribunal, prosecuting a righteous genocide) because she refused to make a strong enough case against the real genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus, while devoting all her time to persecuting Serbian heros like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic--and gloating over her complicity in the murder of President Slobodan Milosevic. For the Rwandan survivors of the genocide, Srebrenica is cat’s piss (8,000 in Bosnia compared to more than 100 times that in Rwanda), and Del Ponte got broomed because she suggested she might open files on the other perpetrators of the other genocide--General Paul Kagame’s (putatively Tutsi) RPF, the mass murderers of the Hutu refugees in Rwanda and Congo. The Rwandan defenders even lavish praise on the miserable Florence Hartmann’s snide, insinuating, shitty little book, Peace and Punishment, for its two whole pages on how Del Ponte was concerned by war crimes and crimes against humanity in Central Africa that are still off the Tribunal’s docket.

But all these false distinctions are just shabby cover for the involvement of the US military and its various vassal armies in the conquest of these formerly ‘non-aligned’ (read: Francophone) regions. It is seldom discussed about Rwanda, but, like Yugoslavia/Serbia, the revolutionary (majoritarian Hutu) governments of Gregoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana were very close to the Communist governments of the USSR, People’s China and North Korea.

But if any doubt remains as to just why all this military wastage was necessary--why between three and six million had to die; why the minority Tutsis had to be so hated by the majority Hutus; and the Slavic (Orthodox) Serbs had to feel such murderous unto genocidal rage against the Muslims of Bosnia and the Catholic (Aryan) Croats: one need look no further than the agenda of the US DoD, and the private industrial combine it fronts--or any of its numerous private military affiliates like MPRI or Dyncorp--and count the number of American bases that have broken out in these former-theaters of ethnic, religious or tribal wars.

And that will bring you right back to Wayne Madsen’s testimony before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights Committee on International Relations.

--And, as a hopeful end note: Pierre Péan told me he is finishing up a book on the US military involvement in Central Africa and Congo. Now to get his work into Englsih. --mc]

***********************************

Prepared Testimony and Statement for the Record of Wayne Madsen, Investigative Journalist and author of
“Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999.”


On: Suffering and Despair: Humanitarian Crisis in the Congo--
Before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights Committee on International Relations,
United States House of Representatives



Washington, DC, May 17, 2001



My name is Wayne Madsen. I am the author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999[1], a work that involved some three years worth of research and countless interviews in Rwanda, Uganda, France, the United Kingdom, United States, Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands. I am an investigative journalist who specializes on intelligence and privacy issues. I am grateful to appear before the Committee today. I am also appreciative of the Committee’s interest in holding this hearing on the present situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.



I wish to discuss the record of American policy in the DRC over most of the past decade particularly involving the eastern Congo region. It is a policy that has rested, in my opinion, on the twin pillars of military aid and questionable trade. The military aid programs of the United States, largely planned and administered by the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), have been both overt and covert.



Prior to the first Rwandan invasion of Zaire/DRC in 1996, a phalanx of U.S. intelligence operatives converged on Zaire. Their actions suggested a strong interest in Zaire’s eastern defenses. The number-two person at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali travelled from Kigali to eastern Zaire to initiate intelligence contacts with the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ) rebels under the command of the late President Laurent Kabila. The Rwandan embassy official met with rebel leaders at least twelve times.[2]



A former U.S. ambassador to Uganda - acting on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – gathered intelligence on the movement of Hutu refugees through eastern Zaire. The DIA’s second ranking Africa hand, who also served as the U.S. military attaché in Kigali, reconnoitered the Rwandan border towns of Cyangugu and Gisenyi, gathering intelligence on the cross border movements of anti-Mobutu Rwandan Tutsis from Rwanda.[3]



The Defense Intelligence Agency’s African bureau chief established a close personal relationship with Bizima (alias Bizimana) Karaha, an ethnic Rwandan who would later become the Foreign Minister in the Laurent Kabila government. Moreover, the DIA’s Africa division had close ties with Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), an Alexandria, Virginia, private military company (PMC), whose Vice President for Operations is a former Director of DIA.



The political officer of the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, accompanied by a CIA operative, traveled with AFDL-CZ rebels through the eastern Zaire jungles for weeks after the 1996 Rwandan invasion of Zaire. In addition, it was reported that the Kinshasa embassy official and three U.S. intelligence agents regularly briefed Bill Richardson, Clinton’s special African envoy, during the rebels’ steady advance towards Kinshasa.[4] The U.S. embassy official conceded that he was in Goma to do
more than meet rebel leaders for lunch. Explaining his presence, he said, “What I am here to do is to acknowledge them [the rebels] as a very significant military and political power on the scene, and, of course, to represent American interests.”[5] In addition, MPRI was reportedly providing covert training assistance to Kagame’s troops in preparation for combat in Zaire.[6] Some believe that MPRI had actually been involved in training the RPF from the time it took power in Rwanda.[7]




THE BA-N’DAW REPORT



The covert programs involving the use of private military training firms and logistics support contractors that are immune to Freedom of Information Act requests is particularly troubling for researchers and journalists who have tried, over the past several years, to get at the root causes for the deaths and mayhem in the DRC and other countries in the region. These U.S. contractor support programs have reportedly involved covert assistance to the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries - the major backers of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la démocratie (RCD factions and – as reported by the UN’s “Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC”—are responsible for the systematic pillaging of Congo’s most valuable natural resources. The UN panel - chaired by Safiatou Ba-N’Daw of Cote d’Ivoire—concluded.



“Top military commanders from various countries needed and continue to need this conflict for its lucrative nature and for temporarily solving some internal problems in those countries a well as allowing access to wealth.”



There is more than ample evidence that the elements of the U.S. military and intelligence community may have - on varying occasions - aided and abetted this systematic pillaging by the Ugandan and Rwandan militaries. The UN Report named the United States, Germany, Belgium, and Kazakhstan as leading buyers of the illegally exploited resources from the DRC.



Sources in the Great Lakes region consistently report the presence of a U.S.-built military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda, near the Congolese border. The base, reported to have been partly constructed by the U.S. firm Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Haliburton, is said to be involved with training RPF forces and providing logistics support to their troops in the DRC. Additionally, the presence in the region of black U.S. soldiers supporting the RPF and Ugandans has been something consistently reported since the first invasion of Zaire-Congo in 1996. On January 21, 1997, France claimed it actually recovered the remains of two American combatants killed near the Oso River in Kivu province during combat and returned them to American officials. The U.S. denied these claims.[8]



COVERT AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR THE COMBATANTS



As U.S. troops and intelligence agents were pouring into Africa to help the RPF and AFDL-CZ forces in their 1996 campaign against Mobutu, Vincent Kern, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, told the House International Operations and Human Rights Subcommittee on December 4, 1996, that U.S. military training for the RPF was being conducted under a program called Enhanced International Military Education and Training (EIMET). Kathi Austin, a Human Rights Watch specialist on arms transfers in Africa, told the Subcommittee on May 5, 1998, that one senior U.S. embassy official in Kigali described the U.S. Special Forces training program for the RPF as “killers . . . training killers.”[9]



In November 1996, U.S. spy satellites and a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion were attempting to ascertain how many Rwandan Hutu refugees were in eastern Zaire. The P-3 was one of four stationed at old Entebbe Airport on the shores of Lake Victoria. Oddly, while other planes flying over eastern Zaire attracted anti-aircraft fire from Kabila’s forces, the P-3s, which patrolled the skies above Goma and Sake, were left alone.[10]



Relying on the overhead intelligence, U.S. military and aid officials confidently announced that 600,000 Hutu refugees returned home to Rwanda from Zaire. But that left an estimated 300,000 unaccounted for. Many Hutus seemed to be disappearing from camps around Bukavu.



By December 1996, U.S. military forces were also operating in Bukavu amid throngs of Hutus, less numerous Twa refugees, Mai Mai guerrillas, advancing Rwandan troops, and AFDL-CZ rebels. A French military intelligence officer said he detected some 100 armed U.S. troops in the eastern Zaire conflict zone.[11] Moreover, the DGSE reported the Americans had knowledge of the extermination of Hutu refugees by Tutsis in both Rwanda and eastern Zaire and were doing nothing about it. More ominously, there was reason to believe that some U.S. forces, either Special Forces or mercenaries, may have actually participated in the extermination of Hutu refugees. The killings reportedly took place at a camp on the banks of the Oso River near Goma.[12] Roman Catholic reports claim that the executed included a number of Hutu Catholic priests. At least for those who were executed, death was far quicker than it was for those who escaped deep into the jungle. There, many died from tropical diseases or were attacked and eaten by wild animals.[13]



Jacques Isnard, the Paris based defense correspondent for Le Monde supported the contention of U.S. military knowledge of the Oso River massacre but went further. He quoted French intelligence sources that believed that between thirty and sixty American mercenary “advisers” participated with the RPF in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees around Goma. Although his number of Hutu dead was more conservative than the French estimates, the U.N.’s Chilean investigator, Roberto Garreton, reported the Kagame and Kabila forces had committed “crimes against humanity” in killing thousands [emphasis added] of Hutu refugees.[14] It was known that the planes the U.S. military deployed in eastern Zaire included heavily armed and armored helicopter gunships typically used by the Special Forces. These were fitted with 105 mm cannons, rockets, machine guns, land mine ejectors, and, more importantly, infra red sensors used in night operations. U.S. military commanders unabashedly stated the purpose of these gunships was to locate refugees to determine the best means of providing them with humanitarian assistance.[15]



According to the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, a French DC-8 Sarigue electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft circled over eastern Zaire at the time of the Oso River massacre. The Sarigue’s mission was to intercept and fix the radio transmissions of Rwandan military units engaged in the military operations. This aircraft, in addition to French special ground units, witnessed U.S. military ethnic cleansing in Zaire’s Kivu Province[16].



In September 1997, the prestigious Jane’s Foreign Report reported that German intelligence sources were aware that the DIA trained young men and teens from Rwanda, Uganda, and eastern Zaire for periods of up to two years and longer for the RPF/AFDL-CZ campaign against Mobutu. The recruits were offered pay of between $450 and $1000 upon their successful capture of Kinshasa.[17] Toward the end of 1996, U.S. spy satellites were attempting to ascertain how many refugees escaped into the jungle by locating fires at night and canvas tarpaulins during the day. Strangely, every time an encampment was discovered by the space-based imagery, Rwandan and Zaire rebel forces attacked the sites. This was the case in late February 1997, when 160,000, mainly Hutu refugees, were spotted and then attacked in a swampy area known as Tingi Tingi.[18] There was never an adequate accounting by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies of the scope of intelligence provided to the RPF/AFDL-CZ. An ominous report on the fate of refugees was made by Nicholas Stockton, the Emergencies Director of Oxfam U.K. & Ireland. He said that on November 20, 1996, he was shown U.S. aerial intelligence photographs which “confirmed, in considerable detail, the existence of 500,000 people distributed in three major and numerous minor agglomerations.” He said that three days later the U.S. military claimed it could only locate one significant mass of people, which they claimed were identified as former members of the Rwandan armed forces and the Interhamwe militia. Since they were the number one targets for the RPF forces, their identification and location by the Americans was undoubtedly passed to the Rwandan forces. They would personnel in central Africa [sic] said that any deaths among the Hutu refugees merely constituted “collateral damage.” When the AFDL-CZ and their Rwandan allies reached Kinshasa in 1996, it was largely due to the help of the United States. One reason why Kabila’s men advanced into the city so quickly was the technical assistance provided by the DIA and other intelligence agencies. According to informed sources in Paris, U.S. Special Forces actually accompanied ADFL-CZ forces into Kinshasa. The Americans also reportedly provided Kabila’s rebels and Rwandan troops with high definition spy satellite photographs that permitted them to order their troops to plot courses into Kinshasa that avoided encounters with Mobutu’s forces.[20] During the rebel advance toward Kinshasa, Bechtel provided Kabila, at no cost, high technology intelligence, including National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite data.[21]




AMERICAN MILITARY SUPPORT FOR THE SECOND INVASION OF CONGO



By 1998, the Kabila regime had become an irritant to the United States, North American mining interests, and Kabila’s Ugandan and Rwandan patrons. As a result, Rwanda and Uganda launched a second invasion of the DRC to get rid of Kabila and replace him with someone more servile. The Pentagon was forced to admit on August 6, 1998, that a twenty man U.S. Army Rwanda Interagency Assessment Team (RIAT) was in Rwanda at the time of the second RPF invasion of Congo. The camouflaged unit was deployed from the U.S. European Command in Germany.[22] It was later revealed that the team in question was a JCET unit that was sent to Rwanda to help the Rwandans “defeat ex-FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) and Interhamwe” units. A U.S. Special Forces JCET team began training Rwandan units on July 15, 1998. It was the second such training exercise held that year. The RIAT team was sent to Rwanda in the weeks just leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in Congo.[23] The RIAT, specializing in counter insurgency operations, traveled to Gisenyi on the Congolese border just prior to the Rwandan invasion.[24] One of the assessments of the team recommended that the United States establish a new and broader military relationship with Rwanda. National Security Council spokesman P. J. Crowley, said of the RIAT’s presence in Rwanda: “I think it’s a coincidence that they were there at the same time the fighting began.”[25]



Soon, however, as other African nations came to the assistance of Laurent Kabila, the United States found itself in the position of providing military aid under both the E-IMET and the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) programs. U.S. Special Operations personnel were involved in training troops on both sides of the war in the DRC - Rwandans, Ugandans, and Burundians (supporting the RCD factions) and Zimbabweans and Namibians (supporting the central government in Kinshasa). As with the first invasion, there were also a number of reports that the RPF and their RCD allies carried out a number of massacres throughout the DRC. The Vatican reported a sizable killing of civilians in August 1998 in Kasika, a small village in South Kivu that hosted a Catholic mission station. Over eight hundred people, including priests and nuns, were killed by Rwandan troops. The RCD response was to charge the Vatican with aiding Kabila. The Rwandans, choosing to put into practice what the DIA’s PSYOPS personnel had taught them about mounting perception management campaigns, shepherded the foreign press to carefully selected killing fields. The dead civilians were identified as exiled Burundian Hutu militia men. Unfortunately, many in the international community, still suffering a type of collective guilt over the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, gave the Rwandan assertions more credence than was warranted. The increasing reliance by the Department of Defense on so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) is of special concern. Many of these PMCs -- once labeled as “mercenaries” by previous administrations when they were used as foreign policy instruments by the colonial powers of France, Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa—have close links with some of the largest mining and oil companies involved in Africa today. PMCs, because of their proprietary status, have a great deal of leeway to engage in covert activities far from the reach of congressional investigators. They can simply claim that their business in various nations is a protected trade secret and the law now seems to be on their side.




PROFITING FROM THE DESTABILIZATION OF CENTRAL AFRICA



America’s policy toward Africa during the past decade, rather than seeking to stabilize situations where civil war and ethnic turmoil reign supreme, has seemingly promoted destabilization. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was fond of calling pro-U.S. military leaders in Africa who assumed power by force and then cloaked themselves in civilian attire, “beacons of hope.” In reality, these leaders, who include the current presidents of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Eritrea, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, preside over countries where ethnic and civil turmoil permit unscrupulous international mining companies to take advantage of the strife to fill their own coffers with conflict diamonds, gold, copper, platinum, and other precious minerals - including one - columbite-tantalite or “coltan”—which is a primary component of computer microchips and printed circuit boards. Some of the companies involved in this new “scramble for Africa” have close links with PMCs and America’s top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo’s civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on African matters.[26]



The United States has a long history of supporting all sides in the DRC’s civil wars in order to gain access to the country’s natural resources. The Ba-N’Daw Report presents a cogent example of how one U.S. firm was involved in the DRC’s grand thievery before the 1998 break between Laurent Kabila and his Rwandan and Ugandan backers. It links the Banque de commerce, du developpement et d’industrie (BCDI) of Kigali, Citibank in New York, the diamond business and armed rebellion. The report states: “In a letter signed by J.P. Moritz, general manager of Societe miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA), a Congolese diamond company, and Ngandu Kamenda, the general manager of MIBA ordered a payment of US$3.5 million to la Generale de commerce d’import/export du Congo (COMIEX), a company owned by late President Kabila and some of his close allies, such as Minister Victor Mpoyo, from an account in BCDI through a Citibank account. This amount of money was paid as a contribution from MIBA to the AFDL war effort.” Also troubling are the ties that some mining companies in Africa have with military privateers.



UN Special Rapporteur Enrique Ballesteros of Peru concluded in his March 2001 report for the UN Commission on Human Rights, that mercenaries were inexorably linked to the illegal diamond and arms trade in Africa. He stated, “Mercenaries participate in both types of traffic, acting as pilots of aircraft and helicopters, training makeshift troops in the use of weapons and transferring freight from place to place. Ballesteros added, “Military security companies and air cargo companies registered in Nevada (the United States), in the Channel Islands and especially in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, are engaged in the transport of troops, arms, munitions, and diamonds.”



In 1998, America Minerals Fields purchased diamond concessions in the Cuango Valley along the Angolan-Congolese border from International Defense and Security (IDAS Belgium SA), a mercenary firm based in Curacao and headquartered in Belgium. According to an American Mineral Fields press release, “In May 1996, America Mineral Fields entered into an agreement with IDAS Resources N.V. (“IDAS”) and IDAS shareholders, under which the Company may acquire 75.5% of the common shares of IDAS. In turn, IDAS has entered into a 50-50 joint venture agreement with Endiama, the Angola state mining company. The joint venture asset is a 3,700 km2 mining lease in the Cuango Valley, Luremo and a 36,000 km2 prospecting lease called the Cuango International, which borders the mining lease to the north. The total area is approximately the size of Switzerland.” [27]



America Mineral Fields directly benefited from America’s initial covert military and intelligence support for Kabila. It is my observation that America’s early support for Kabila, which was aided and abetted by U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda, had less to do with getting rid of the Mobutu regime than it had to do with opening up Congo’s vast mineral riches to North American-based and influenced mining companies. Presently, some of America Mineral Fields’ principals now benefit from the destabilization of Sierra Leone and the availability of its cut-rate “blood diamonds” on the international market. Also, according to the findings of a commission headed up by Canadian United Nations Ambassador, Robert Fowler, Rwanda has violated the international embargo against Angola’s UNITA rebels in allowing them “to operate more or less freely” in selling conflict zone diamonds and making deals with weapons dealers in Kigali.[28]



One of the major goals of the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma faction, a group fighting the Kabila government in Congo, is restoration of mining concessions for Barrick Gold, Inc., of Canada. In fact, the rebel RCD government’s “mining minister” signed a separate mining deal with Barrick in early 1999.[29] Among the members of Barrick’s International Advisory Board are former President Bush and former President Clinton’s close confidant Vernon Jordan. Currently, Barrick and tens of other mining companies are helping to stoke the flames of the civil war in the DRC. Each benefits by the de facto partition of the country into some four separate zones of political control. First the mineral exploiters from Rwanda and Uganda concentrated on pillaging gold and diamonds from the eastern Congo. Now, they have increasingly turned their attention to coltan.



It is my hope that the Bush administration will take pro-active measures to stem the conflict in the DRC by applying increased pressure on Uganda and Rwanda to withdraw their troops from the country. However, the fact that President Bush has selected Walter Kansteiner to be Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, portends, in my opinion, more trouble for the Great Lakes region. A brief look at Mr. Kansteiner’s curriculum vitae and statements calls into question his commitment to seeking a durable peace in the region.



In an October 15, 1996, paper written by Mr. Kansteiner for the Forum for International Policy on the then-eastern Zaire, he called for the division of territory in the Great Lakes region “between the primary ethnic groups, creating homogenous ethnic lands that would probably necessitate redrawing international boundaries and would require massive ‘voluntary’ relocation efforts.” Kansteiner foresaw creating separate Tutsi and Hutu states after such a drastic population shift. It should be recalled that the creation of a Tutsi state in eastern Congo was exactly what Rwanda, Uganda and their American military advisers had in mind when Rwanda invaded then-Zaire in 1996, the same year Kansteiner penned his plans for the region. Four years later, Kansteiner was still convinced that the future
of the DRC was “balkanization” into separate states.



In an August 23, 2000, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Kansteiner stated that the “breakup of the Congo is more likely now than it has been in 20 or 30 years.” Of course, the de facto break up of Congo into various fiefdoms has been a boon for U.S. and other western mineral companies. And I believe Kansteiner’s previous work at the Department of Defense where he served on a Task Force on Strategic Minerals - and one must certainly consider coltan as falling into that category—may influence his past and current thinking on the territorial integrity of the DRC. After all, 80 per cent of the world’s known reserves of coltan are found in the eastern
DRC. It is potentially as important to the U.S. military as the Persian Gulf region.



However, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, which have supported Uganda and Rwanda in their cross-border adventures in the DRC, have resisted peace initiatives and have failed to produce evidence of war crimes by the Ugandans and Rwandans and their allies in Congo.



The CIA, NSA, and DIA should turn over to international and congressional investigators intelligence-generated evidence in their possession, as well as overhead thermal imagery indicating the presence of mass graves and when they were dug. In particular, the NSA maintained a communications intercept station in Fort Portal, Uganda, which intercepted military and government communications in Zaire during the first Rwandan invasion. These intercepts may contain details of Rwandan and AFDL-CZ massacres of innocent Hutu refugees and other Congolese civilians during the 1996 invasion.



There must be a full accounting before the Congress by the staff of the U.S. Defense Attaché’s Office in Kigali and certain U.S. Embassy staff members in Kinshasa who served from early 1994 to the present time. As for the number of war casualties in the DRC since the first invasion from Rwanda in 1996, I would estimate, from my own research, the total to be around 1.7 to 2 million - a horrendous number by any calculation. And I also believe that although disease and famine were contributing factors, the majority of these deaths were the result of actual war crimes committed by Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, AFD-CZ, RCD, and military and paramilitary forces of other countries.



SUMMARY



It is beyond time for the Congress to seriously examine the role of the United States in the genocide and civil wars of central Africa, as well as the role that PMCs currently play in other African trouble spots like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Cabinda. Other nations, some with less than stellar records in Africa - France and Belgium, for example - have had no problem examining their own roles in Africa’s last decade of turmoil. The British Foreign Office is in the process of publishing a green paper on regulation of mercenary activity. At the very least, the United States, as the world’s leading democracy, owes Africa at least the example of a critical self-inspection. I appreciate the concern shown by the Chair and members of this committee in holding these hearings.



Thank you.



Notes:
[1] Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Wales, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.



[2] Colum Lynch, “U.S. agents were seen with rebels in Zaire: Active
participation is alleged in military overthrow of Mobutu,” BOSTON GLOBE, 8
October 1997, A2.



[3] Ibid.



[4] Ibid.



[5] David Rieff, “Realpolitik in Congo: should Zaire’s fate have been
subordinate to the fate of Rwandan refugees?” THE NATION, 7 July 1997.



[6] Georges Berghezan, “Une guerre cosmopolite,” (“A cosmopolitan war,”),
Marc Schmitz and Sophie Nolet, editors, Kabila prend le pouvoir (“Kabila
Takes Power) (Paris: Editions GRIP, 1998), 97.



[7] André Dumoulin, La France Militaire et l’Afrique (The French Military
and Africa) (Paris: Éditions GRIP, 1997), 87.



[8] “Fighting with the rebels,” ASIA TIMES, 1 April 1997, 8; Jacques
Isnard, “Des ‘conseillers’ américains ont aidé à renverser le régime de M.
Mobutu” (“American advisers helped to oust the regime of Mr. Mobutu”), Le
Monde, 28 August 1997; “Influence americaine” (“American influence”), La
Lettre du Continent, 3 April 1997.



[9] Dana Priest, “Pentagon Slow to Cooperate With Information Requests,”
THE WASHINGTON POST, 31 December 1998, A34.



[10] Christian Jennings, “U.S. plane seeks “missing” refugees in east
Zaire,” Reuters North American Wire, 26 November 1996.



[11] Lynch, op. cit.



[12] Hubert Condurier, “Ce que les services secrets français savaient”
(“What the French Secret Services Knew”), VALEURS ACTUELLES, 30 August
1997, 26 27.



[13] “Priests Speak of Massacres, Destitution,” All Africanews...

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