01/13/15

Why Was Putin a No-show in Paris?

With good reason, media attention has been focused on President Barack Obama’s curious absence from the Paris march against terrorism. Obama became a “Where’s Waldo?” character, whose whereabouts were unknown. Observers looked for him at the march of world leaders in France, hoping to spot him somewhere. But where was Russian leader Vladimir Putin? This may have been the bigger story.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a source of concern in Europe, may have been a factor in his absence. But it’s also true that Putin has documented pro-terrorist credentials that should have made him persona non grata at any such event. Instead, Putin sent Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Paris to represent his regime.

Putin was a KGB spy for many years and ran the FSB, the successor to the KGB, which trained the notorious terrorist once based in France known as Carlos the Jackal. Carlos, a name given to him because of his roots in Latin America, has been linked to communist-run international terror networks that always had an Islamic component and a strategy in the Middle East that includes the destruction of Israel.

The name “Carlos the Jackal” is well-known globally because he was the reported godfather behind such attacks as the murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and the seizure of hostages at a meeting of the oil-producing countries, known as OPEC, in Vienna in 1975. But less well-known is the international terrorist support network organized by the Soviet Union and Cuba which backed him.

President Obama may want people to believe that Russia and Cuba are no longer involved in terrorism, but hearings conducted by Congress in the 1980s, such as “The Role of Cuba in International Terrorism and Subversion,” cannot be ignored. Castro was given a role in the “Liberation of Palestine” account made by the KGB, the hearings showed, as well as promoting communism in Latin America and Africa.

Before that, in 1974, the House Committee on Internal Security produced a report, “Terrorism: A Staff Study,” analyzing Soviet, Chinese and Cuban support for international terrorism.

Today, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) now runs the West Bank, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) continues to call Israel the “Zionist/Imperialist Project,” a typical Soviet term.

Tragically, the Senate and House committees or subcommittees on security and terrorism were dismantled and there is no such body in Congress today that specifically examines international terrorist activity and its U.S. support networks.

Former KGB officers and intelligence analysts say the PLO was created by the Soviet KGB, and that the PLO’s long-time chairman, Yasser Arafat, was an agent of the Soviet intelligence service.

Indeed, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the former Soviet bloc, says KGB dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who was living in London, was killed by the KGB because he spilled the beans on how Soviet intelligence spawned Islamic terrorism and trained al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

But there is another fascinating aspect to the story that brings this matter up to date. Although a Marxist terrorist for much of his life, Carlos converted to Islam and is now serving a life sentence in a prison in France. He announced in 2003 that he had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

While Obama seems preoccupied with the rights of terrorists and whether they are being treated properly, French Special Forces kidnapped Carlos in Sudan in 1994 using a practice known as “rendition,” a practice used by the Bush administration against terrorists that has only reluctantly been embraced by the Obama administration.

In what Obama might describe as a violation of his terrorist “rights,” Carlos was reportedly injected with a tranquilizer, bound, stuffed into a sack, and transferred to France, where he was put on trial, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

Putin, in response to the Charlie Hedbo massacre, said through a spokesman, “Moscow strongly condemns terrorism in all its manifestations,” adding, “Moscow is sure that no terrorist acts can be justified.”

Moscow’s words need to be “parsed,” as the saying goes.

The American author Claire Sterling’s 1981 book, The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism, still stands as the authoritative analysis of the international terror networks that emerged in the late 1960s under the sponsorship of Russia and Cuba. Carlos was a key Soviet KGB operative in this effort.

Sterling identifies Carlos as someone who was under KGB control and running a terror network directly out of Paris in 1974 and 1975. He killed two French agents who tried to capture him and fled France, moving around in various Arab countries and what was then East Germany, where a young KGB spy by the name of Vladimir Putin would be based. Carlos continued carrying out attacks in France and other nations through his terror network.

Carlos was born in Venezuela as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. His first name was given by his Marxist parents as a tribute to Soviet communist leader Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Carlos “studied” at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, notes Jill Dougherty, once CNN’s Moscow Bureau Chief.

In fact, according to former KGB officers, the “university” was essentially run by the KGB, which used it to recruit foreign students as agents or terrorists.

The authoritative Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, which was published in France, states categorically that Carlos worked for the KGB, carrying out terrorist activities on its behalf.

Carlos also “studied” at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966. A conference of this kind and scope, Sterling wrote, “had never been seen since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the world would never be the same.” She noted that its “General Declaration” urged close collaboration between the Soviet-style “Socialist countries” and the “national liberation movements,” in order to mount “a global revolutionary strategy” against “American imperialism.”

This is the strategy that resulted in hundreds of acts of terrorism across Europe and in the United States through such groups as the Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican FALN.

Numerous reports put Carlos at the KGB-supervised Cuban terrorist training camp known as Mantanzas, where he “studied” guerrilla warfare, sabotage techniques and bomb-making.

Former KGB agents, including Alexander Litvinenko and Konstantin Preobrazhensky, confirmed published accounts that Carlos was in fact an agent of the KGB. The 1991 book, KGB: The Inside Story, by Christopher Andrew and former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, also confirms his terrorist training by the Soviets and Cubans.

Interestingly, when a TV movie was aired in 2010 about Carlos the terrorist, the Kremlin propaganda channel Russia Today (RT) ran a story saying his KGB connections were murky and had been “questioned” by the movie director. However, the director of the film did say, “He (Carlos) grew up in a Marxist family in Venezuela; his parents sent him to Lumumba University in Moscow; then he was expelled from the university for bad behavior. Then he re-emerges with a gun in his hand in Jordan at the side of the Palestinian from the PFLP, led by Wadih Haddad, who was a KGB agent. So what exactly were the KGB connections of Carlos? It’s a very difficult subject.”

The director was quoted as saying, “it is debatable whether Carlos the Jackal, a supporter of radical Islamism, had KGB connections.”

Such a claim only makes sense from the perspective of a network that serves Putin’s propaganda interests and wants to distance Moscow from the carnage the Soviets inflicted, with the collaboration of the Cuban communists, on Europe and the United States.

The KGB connections of Carlos went far beyond the PFLP. What’s more, the late Herbert Romerstein, an expert on security and terrorism, had noted that the “expulsion” from Lumumba University was a diversion. He said that Carlos had left Moscow with a letter of introduction from a representative of the PFLP stationed in Moscow, and had joined that Soviet-backed Arab terrorist organization.

Carlos is in prison, but Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the PLO, has a similar background. . Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority, did his Ph.D. work at the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, where he wrote a report claiming that there was no Holocaust, and that the Jews murdered during World War II were actually killed by Zionists working with the Nazis.

The Obama and Putin no-shows in Paris were eclipsed by the attendance of Abbas, who is now seen internationally as someone opposed to the terrorism his organization has sponsored and carried out for decades. It was a clever propaganda display that Putin must have enjoyed.

12/19/14

Interview with an Interrogator: Megyn Kelly Gets the Scoop

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly got a big interview this week following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogations in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001. It was compelling TV, and journalism. Dr. James Mitchell, a former Air Force psychologist, contracted with the CIA to help develop a program to interrogate CIA detainees while America, and those tasked to protect this country, prepared for a second wave of attacks.

Mitchell had spoken with the British newspaper, The Guardian, back in April, after an executive summary of the Senate Intelligence report had been leaked to McClatchy News. At the time, as reported by The Guardian, Mitchell “mounted a full-throated defense of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism policies and attacked ‘partisan Democrats’ for ‘throwing me under the bus’ and ‘rewriting history.’” Now he clearly feels even more free to speak out.

Mitchell was never interviewed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) committee. In fact, none of the CIA people involved in the interrogations, nor the directors or deputy directors, were interviewed. In other words, the purpose of this report was not to actually get to the truth of what happened. It was an attempt, for various political and PR reasons, to accuse and indict the Bush administration and the CIA for allegedly using torture on the detainees.

Mitchell revealed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) didn’t break, or provide information that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, because of waterboarding, but rather because of other EITs (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques). The technique that did work on KSM, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, was sleep deprivation. But Mitchell revealed something that KSM did tell him: “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told me personally, ‘Your country will turn on you, the liberal media will turn on you, the people will grow tired of this, they will turn on you, and when they do, you are going to be abandoned.’”

What comes through in Megyn Kelly’s interview is a thoughtful, patriotic American who was moved by the image of Americans leaping out of World Trade Center buildings, and by the courage of those on Flight 93 who helped bring the plane down, rather than allow it to successfully strike the third of three targets of the “decapitation” that Mitchell said was their goal. The terrorists hit our financial center in New York, they hit the Pentagon—the headquarters of the U.S. military—and the third plane was intended to crash into the Capitol building in Washington, DC.

America is divided over this, but a recent Washington Post – ABC poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly think that “the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists” was justified, by a margin of 59% to 31%. Clearly a significant majority believe the CIA was trying to protect this country at that time, and aren’t too worried about the few cases of excess—even death—that occurred. They don’t see it as a “stain” on our country. In fact, many view the stain as this one-sided report that cherry-picked information and revealed selective portions of emails, contradicted by other portions not revealed in the report—if that’s what they needed to make their case. Many believe that the release of this report has given aid and comfort to America’s enemies, and put American lives at increased risk.

It turns out that KSM was right about the “liberal media,” but it seems that a significant majority of the American people are quite okay with what was done to these terrorists—and other detainees—and don’t believe it damaged us as a country. Many of those in the liberal media—such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker (who actually interviewed Dr. Mitchell back in 2005), and Erin Burnett of CNN—freely call what happened “torture.” To them, it’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.

Kudos to Megyn Kelly for getting the interview, which aired in two parts on Monday and Tuesday nights this week. I urge you to watch for yourself, and to also read this column, “The Feinstein Report is Going to Cost Us,” by Andrew McCarthy. He was the lawyer who successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh, the man responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. McCarthy has a lot of interesting things to say about the report, such as this: “As I have frequently argued here over the years, there is a world of difference between what is couched in political rhetoric as ‘torture,’ a conversation stopper that the Left cavalierly applies to every instance of prisoner abuse, and the federal crime of torture, which has a strict legal definition and is a difficult offense to prove, precisely to ensure that torture is not trivialized.”

You can watch Kelly’s interview with Dr. Mitchell here.

12/17/14

Playing the Torture Card

12/15/14

Mike Morell: Going to see Sydney attack in the US in “next year or so, guaranteed”

Hat Tip: BB

Behind The Hostage Attack In Sydney? The Massive Raids On IS Terrorists In September…Update: Revealed Possible Target Of Martin Place

12/14/14

Judge Jeanine Pirro – 12/13/14

Hat Tip: BB

12/13/14

Media Struggle to Save Obama, Not the Country

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A story in Thursday’s Washington Post about establishing Obama’s “foreign policy legacy” goes a long way toward explaining why the Senate Democrats and the media have been trashing the Bush administration’s very productive enhanced interrogation program as “torture.”

Titled “Obama’s foreign policy plans collide with wars abroad and politics at home,” the story by Greg Jaffe and Juliet Eilperin made it clear that CIA director John Brennan’s defense of the agency had thwarted Obama’s plan “to move the country beyond what he [Obama] has described as the fearful excesses of the post-9/11 era.” While Obama has banned what he calls “torture,” he has failed to close the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Gitmo), established by the Bush administration to house terrorist suspects. Other problems outlined in the Post article include the continuing war in Afghanistan and a new war in Iraq and Syria against ISIS.

What Obama calls “torture” is what the media call “torture.” If you needed any more proof of a pro-Obama media bias, just look at how regularly the personalities on CNN, supposedly more moderate than MSNBC, have adopted his terms of the debate. This is the media’s way of saying that Obama was right and that it’s good he has banned this way of getting information from terrorists. Never mind that Obama’s way of murder through drone strikes is decidedly more “harsh.” Bush grilled them, Obama kills them.

Without a foreign policy “legacy” of some kind, Obama’s two terms will look like a failure and the Democrats will be doomed in 2016.

Domestically, his only real “accomplishment” at this point looks like the Eric Holder policy of suspending enforcement of federal marijuana laws. This will be a “legacy” of interest to fellow pothead members of Obama’s “Choom Gang” in Hawaii, and the emerging cannabis industry. But it’s doubtful most people will appreciate this historic development.

Obama’s signature “accomplishment” in domestic affairs, Obamacare, has been exposed as a massive fraud and deception. According to a new CBS News poll, race relations have dramatically deteriorated under the first black president. It’s true he is moving forward unconstitutionally with amnesty for illegal aliens. But House Republicans are promising to do something about that next year. The economy is still lackluster. So foreign policy is really his only hope of doing anything positive, and he’s running into the facts of life there, too. The terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans is only one part of his legacy. The legacy of that attack hurts both Obama and Hillary Clinton, his former Secretary of State and likely 2016 Democratic candidate. And it’s doubtful that an Iran with nuclear weapons would qualify as a positive foreign policy legacy for Obama, either.

One can suppose that Obama will try to claim he was the one who got Osama bin Laden. But Brennan made it clear on Thursday that the enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) from the Bush-era played a role in killing the terrorist kingpin. Brennan said, “It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful and was used in the ultimate operation to go against bin Laden. Again, intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used in that. Again, I am not going to attribute that to the use of the EITs; just going to state as a matter of fact, the information that they provided was used.”

What Brennan is saying is that he cannot pinpoint with any degree of accuracy that a particular form of interrogation led to the terrorists divulging certain information. That’s because nobody was taking precise notes on when terrorist X or Y said one thing or another at any particular time in the interrogation process. But the record is clear that the EITs contributed to the terrorists getting to the point where they decided to spill their guts.

CNN, which is increasingly trying to sound like MSNBC, headlined the Brennan news conference as “Brennan: No Proof Harsh Tactics Led to Useful Info.” How can his phrase that “intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used” to get bin Laden be interpreted as “proof” that it wasn’t useful? CNN was lying. CNN gave the opposite impression of what he actually said.

Before he held his news conference, Brennan met with Obama and was probably instructed to finesse his language somewhat so that a certain amount of ambiguity could be left in some minds. CNN and other media tried to take advantage of that for Obama’s sake. Still, Brennan’s statement was a vindication of the Bush policy. That means that any attempt by Obama to claim credit for the death of bin Laden will ring hollow. There goes his foreign policy legacy.

These facts help explain the desperation of the media and why they have adopted Obama’s rhetoric on “torture.” They must figure that if they use the term often enough, many people will assume that the techniques were, in fact, torture. In order to drive that point home, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News used the Brennan news conference to mention some of the techniques. She referred to “waterboarding, near drowning, slamming people against the wall, hanging them in stress positions, confining them in small boxes or coffins, threatening them with drills, waving guns around their head as they are blindfolded…”

She could have mentioned the horrible deaths suffered by those in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or Flight 93 on 9/11. She could have mentioned the 9/11 jumpers—the people who jumped from the towers rather than be burned to death.

But Mitchell didn’t think it was worth mentioning any of that.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper have been fixated by a phrase in the Senate Democratic report on “rectal rehydration.” Tapper called it a form of torture. In fact, it’s a medical procedure to keep the terrorists alive when they resist sustenance. Would Tapper have preferred that the terrorists be allowed to die? Then the program would have come in for even stronger criticism. This goes to show that all of this discussion is just another attempt to tarnish the Bush presidency and make Obama look good by comparison. Tapper said he was dumbfounded by the talk of “rectal rehydration.”

No, he was just dumb.

Obama, the Senate Democrats and the media look foolish and unpatriotic. It looks like they are deliberately playing into the hands of America’s enemies in order to score partisan political points. Obama has abandoned proven techniques to get information from, and about, terrorists and has adopted in their place a policy of killing the terrorists and their families through drone strikes that don’t yield any intelligence data at all. How on earth does this make any sense?

From an objective point of view, does a Hellfire missile hitting a human being look more or less “harsh” than waving a gun over someone’s head, turning on a drill, or pouring water on a terrorist?

The answer should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. But most of our media are so determined to save Obama’s presidency that they can’t think clearly.

The Post and other media are desperate to construct a “legacy” for America’s first black president. The real concern should be saving the country, not Obama’s presidency.

12/13/14

Feinstein ‘Torture Report’ outs C. Martel as Islamophobe

By: Komissar al-Blogunov
The People’s Cube

Diane Feinstein’s recently released report on controversial CIA interrogation practices indicts, not only the Bush administration, but also all previous administrations going back to the controversial leader of the Franks, Charles Martel, and his victory over the moderate Muslim community at Tours in 732 AD, which can only be described as a gross law enforcement misconduct and hate crime.

Citing inside information from medieval Latin and Arabic sources, the report prepared by Feinstein’s staffers details a shocking degree of intolerance and Islamophobia on the part of Charles Martel’s administration and the army of Franks, who countered the peaceful expansion of moderate Muslims into Europe via Spain with such violent hatred that historians suspect could only be explained by racist motives.

“Clearly this was racial profiling on part of the Frankish administration,” determined Yale historian Dr. Hussein al-Isis. “Franks and other white Europeans were simply uncomfortable around brown Middle Easterners, no matter how harmless their intentions.”

While mostly white contemporary historians crowed about a “Christian victory over Islam,” understandably bitter and disaffected members of the Muslim community, victimized by Martel’s extremist policies, were compelled to fend for themselves while retreating through the Pyrenees shouting, “Hands up, don’t spear me!” and “Death to Infidels!” Through no fault of their own, villages were plundered and citizens killed by some of the elements within the otherwise peaceful group of Muslim protesters, who became radicalized as a result of racism and gross civil right violations.

“I was disgusted at what we uncovered,” said an indignant Senator Diane Feinstein. “Instead of empathizing with the Muslim community and hearing their side of the story – instead of trying to find common ground and a mutually acceptable compromise through interfaith dialogue and negotiations, the bigoted leader of Franks chose to kill the Muslim leader, Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi.”

“For this sickening display of barbarism,” added Feinstein, “he received the nickname of Martel, meaning ‘the Hammer,’ and has continued to symbolize the greatest threat to world peace and harmony until his title “the Hammer” was passed to the Republican leader Tom Delay.

“We have only ourselves to blame for this mess,” opined foreign policy expert and former presidential candidate, Ron Paul. “If Martel had not unilaterally meddled in Middle Eastern affairs, then there wouldn’t have been any of that blowback. The fact that Islam was spreading by violent conquest a century before the Battle of Tours is a direct result of Martel’s misguided foreign adventures.”

At a White House press conference, President Obama informed reporters that “I just found out about the Battle of Tours while watching History Channel, and let me tell you, nobody is angrier about this than I am. I have asked our outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder, to immediately investigate Martel’s activities, to get to the bottom of this issue, and if possible, to take legal action against Charles Martel and the Frankish Kingdom. We will not rest until we have a conviction.”

Nevertheless, the president did appeal for restraint. “As you protest, you’re probably thinking like I’m thinking: this is the result of over a millennia of documentable Islamophobia. You know, this touches me on a personal level: Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi looks just like Michelle with a beard. This isn’t just a Shia problem, or a Sunni problem, or a Sufi problem, it’s an American problem. While I understand the rage, the calls for Jihad, the desire to impale all white Christians and burn down their churches, let’s everybody stay calm and let social justice take its course.”

Meanwhile, protesters holding posters of al-Ghafiqi were blocking major highways in large cities across America, and NFL players were seen charging onto the field, then collapsing and shouting, “Hands up, don’t spear me!”