Who are the Terrorists??

There are many, many good writers on the Internet and I enjoy cruising around and reading different pieces. With how busy my days can become I don't always have the time to spend the hours that it takes to pull together good written pieces with sources so I've been getting lazy and posting others written work. I don't think this is a bad thing as maybe you haven't read their articles so it is worth giving their articles more exposure. Plus it opens up your eyes to other websites that you may not have explored yourself.

That having been said, here is a good piece from the Winter Patriot blogspot. I encourage you to check all the links and read all the material offered to get a good and thorough understanding of all the issues. It's the only way to really understand everything..

"Who Is The Real Terrorist?" Reports From Pakistan And Afghanistan Differ
Sunday, January 20, 2008

A couple of days ago I lost the only draft of a piece that was half-finished and already so complicated it made my head hurt. In that piece I had quoted Chris Floyd quoting Scott Horton quoting Carlotta Gall and David Rohde and Barnett Rubin. Are you with me so far?

The subject was Pakistan and Afghanistan: The piece by Gall and Rhode talked about Pakistan having lost control of the extremists that had been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, before Pakistan joined the War on Terror. The Rubin piece linked this loss of control to the bombing of the Serena Hotel [photo], Kabul's luxury spot for foreign visitors.

I don't have the heart to reproduce the post as I originally intended it, especially since reading it might make your head hurt, too. So I will try to give you more or the less the same information in a very different way.

I once read that the best blog entries consist of links, quotes, and comments. Maybe that's the secret.

Carlotta Gall and David Rohde in the New York Times: Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say
Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.
...

One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other people close to the agency, acknowledged that the ISI led the effort to manipulate Pakistan’s last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Pervez Musharraf.

A person close to the ISI said Mr. Musharraf had now ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and denied that the agency was working to rig the vote. But the acknowledgment of past rigging is certain to fuel opposition fears of new meddling.
...

The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.

Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.
...

After 9/11, the Bush administration pressed Mr. Musharraf to choose a side in fighting Islamist extremism and to abandon Pakistan’s longtime support for the Taliban and other Islamist militants.

In the 1990s, the ISI supported the militants as a proxy force to contest Indian-controlled Kashmir, the border territory that India and Pakistan both claim, and to gain a controlling influence in neighboring Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the United States supported militants, too, funneling billions of dollars to Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan through the ISI, vastly increasing the agency’s size and power.

Publicly, Mr. Musharraf agreed to reverse course in 2001, and he has received $10 billion in aid for Pakistan since then in return. In an interview in November, he vehemently defended the conduct of the ISI, an agency that, according to American officials, was under his firm control for the last eight years while he served as both president and army chief.

Mr. Musharraf dismissed criticism of the ISI’s relationship with the militants. He cited the deaths of 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers in battles with the militants in recent years — as well as several assassination attempts against himself — as proof of the seriousness of Pakistan’s counterterrorism effort.
...

One militant leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, typifies how extremists once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency’s control, turned against the government and joined with other militants to create powerful new networks.

In 2000, Mr. Azhar received support from the ISI when he founded Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Army of Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group fighting Indian forces in Kashmir, according to Robert Grenier, who served as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002. The ISI intermittently provided training and operational coordination to such groups, he said, but struggled to fully control them.

Mr. Musharraf banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and detained Mr. Azhar after militants carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament building in December 2001. Indian officials accused Jaish-e-Muhammad and another Pakistani militant group of masterminding the attack. After India massed hundreds of thousands of troops on Pakistan’s border, Mr. Musharraf vowed in a nationally televised speech that January to crack down on all militants in Pakistan.

“We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in terrorism inside the country or abroad,” he said. Two weeks later, a British-born member of Mr. Azhar’s group, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded by his captors. Mr. Sheikh surrendered to the ISI, the agency that had supported Jaish-e-Muhammad, and was sentenced to death for the kidnapping.

After Mr. Pearl’s killing, Pakistani officials arrested more than 2,000 people in a crackdown. But within a year, Mr. Azhar and most of the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed. “I never believed that government ties with these groups was being irrevocably cut,” said Mr. Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll, a risk consulting firm.

At the same time, Pakistan seemingly went “through the motions” when it came to hunting Taliban leaders who fled into Pakistan after the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, he said.

Encouraged by the United States, the Pakistanis focused their resources on arresting senior Qaeda members, he said, which they successfully did from 2002 to 2005. Since then, arrests have slowed as Al Qaeda and other militant groups have become more entrenched in the tribal areas.

Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani government did not move against the leading Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Sirajuddin, who are based in the tribal areas and have long had links with Al Qaeda, one senior ISI official said it was because Pakistan needed to retain some assets of its own.
...

“Pakistan would certainly be better off if the ISI were never used for domestic political purposes,” said Mr. Grenier, the former C.I.A. Islamabad station chief. “That goes without saying.”

Continue with reading the story here.

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What Do a Renowned 9/11 Physicist and a N.Y. Times Best Selling Novelist Have in Common? Harassment by Dis-Information?

January 10, 2008 at 15:10:18

by Bill Douglas

http://www.opednews.com

In the last 48 hours, N.Y. Times best selling novelist, Steve Alten, author of, "The Shell Game," was recently shocked and dumbfounded that he’d become the victim of harassment, when someone not only put a map of his home and his personal private phone number and home address up on the internet, . . . but also either remotely accessed or intercepted personal private email between he and his publicist . . .

. . . and all because of the impending release of his new novel, "The Shell Game." http://theshellgame.net/ (See 9/11 truth links in the “911 Links” section of his site, to learn why this impending block buster novel may be causing such actions).

Having been a patriotic citizen working to expose the deceptions leading us to war, I’d personally become fascinated with Alten’s new novel, “The Shell Game.” I’d contacted him through his website after a high school English teacher told me about “The Shell Game,” because it dealt with oil, war, and deceptions leading us to war.

So, when I learned this novelist had become increasingly a victim of bizarre harassment, I suspected “why” this may have happened, and then decided it might be instructive to explain it to others. So I wrote this oped this morning. For this, in my opinion, represents yet another event in the chronology of a movement for truth that has been attacked and maligned for years now.

For the novelist who wrote, “The Shell Game,” it’s just a bizarre experience, for he’s just trying to write a good novel, and from his perspective, well if it happens to spur discussion of important issues, well that’s about as American as apple pie.

I think most people will think, if this novel has caused him to be targeted for such harassment, even before its release . . . well, it must have something “very interesting” to say. And in my opinion it does. http://theshellgame.net/

However, the bizarre harassment of this best selling author, from my perspective, is part of a long time pattern of harassment that those of us who’ve been working along side the 9/11 families who have demanded a new independent 9/11 investigation, have experienced over and over again. Even the Jersey Girls, the 9/11 widows who fought Washington to get the 9/11 Commission, were victims of it when Anne Coulter said they enjoyed their husband's deaths.

This best selling novelist may have set off to only write a good novel, but it has cast him into a world of intrigue and duplicity that many good people have lived in for years now.

Read the rest of the story here.

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The incompetence excuse: Could a bunch of sociopathic screw-ups really pull off the crime of the century?

January 11, 2008 at 09:54:32

by Warren Pease

http://www.opednews.com

Many who deny government complicity in 9/11/01 maintain that some of the best evidence against official involvement lies in the Bush administration's laughable record of sheer incompetence, an argument bolstered by the perception that key members of the administration, notably The Commander Guy, spent that entire day running around like headless chickens.

On the contrary, they did no such thing. Rather, the administration was highly competent and enormously successful that day -- they just had different criteria for success than would sane people. And they've been highly competent ever since. You just have to adjust your standards for evaluating success, then view the past six years through the PNAC/neocon lens. Let's review some of their primary accomplishments -- on 9/11 and in the six eternal years since:

• They got the entire world to believe that a ragtag organization called Al Qaeda, fronted by a seriously ill guy in a cave armed with only a laptop and a phone, managed to orchestrate an unbelievably complex plan that had involved years of planning and training, much money, split-second timing and ridiculously good luck.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that four hijackers who couldn't fly single-engine Cessnas well enough to graduate from flight school suddenly became the Blue Angels when at the controls of large, twin-engine Boeing jetliners, and this during the most stressful moments of their short lives.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that the crime of the century was pulled off by 19 guys with box-cutters whose names (or any other Arabic names) don't appear on any passenger manifests and at least four of whom have been seen alive and well in the Middle East since 9/11/01, (this one even interviewed by the BBC).
  
  
• Better yet, they got the entire world to believe their evidence linking these 19 guys to the hijackings, using for proof a few cell phone calls that couldn't have happened with 2001 technology. Then there's the famous carry-on bag supposedly left behind by alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta containing, among other things, a copy of the Koran, a Boeing flight manual and his will (and that's surely something you'd take with you on a flight you knew was going to be vaporized). And then the kicker, a passport allegedly belonging to Atta that miraculously survived a massive explosion and temperatures we're told were high enough to soften steel and fluttered unsullied to the ground, where it was eventually found among the debris a couple of blocks away from what used to be the World Trade Center.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that the seriously ill guy in the cave had such vast control over US armed forces that he ordered four exercise scenarios -- Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Guardian and Northern Vigilance -- which diverted to northern Canada or Alaska many of the NORAD fighter jets that would have been scrambled per standard operating procedure in the event of a suspected hijacking in the northeast corridor.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that this same guy in the cave was able to insert at least 11 and as many as 21 false radar blips (according to FAA administrator Jane Garvey) onto air traffic controller screens throughout the northeast corridor. As a result, controllers had no idea which blips represented planes that had been hijacked, which ones represented non-hijacked flights still in the air and which blips were phantoms. They were thus incapable of following the actual moves of the four hijacked jets and/or coordinating with the FAA to relay warnings to NORAD interceptors (most of which, again, were screwing around over the arctic wastes).
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that the remaining NORAD forces -- which had been a perfect 67 for 67 in 2001 prior to 9/11 -- managed to fail completely in their missions four separate times that morning.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that it was only a coincidence that a fifth exercise was taking place at the same time, this one designed to test emergency response capabilities at the National Reconnaissance Office in the event that an off-course plane from nearby Dulles airport crashed into one of the NRO's four office towers.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that two planes took down three skyscrapers, WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7, and that for the first and only time in history, fire brought down reinforced steel and concrete structures and caused them to collapse vertically rather than keel over sideways and take out a few blocks of the New York City financial district.
  
  
• They got the entire world to absolve them of any complicity in "the events of 9/11," even though the above list of "coincidences" is inexplicable without the knowledge, involvement, approval and direction of people high up in the federal food chain.

And that was only the beginning . . . Read the rest of the story here.

Good article. Check out the comments - looks like the writer is getting harassed by Cointelpro commentors- they are everywhere now...

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CIA Destroys Interrogation Tapes

This is great...

According to the CIA director Michael Hayden, the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects because they no longer had any "intelligence value" and they posed a security risk. The tapes were made in 2002 and destroyed in 2005.

Okay now Al Qaeda is supposed to be the bad guys, right? And we, us Americans, are supposed to be the good guys, right? So how come the CIA can destroy the videos without penalty (well, it's "troubling") but yet we have to keep reams of paper, for years, in cardboard boxes just in case the IRS audits us, when in fact, we really don't even have to pay taxes in the first place?

It's a very fair and balanced system that we have here in the United States but in the wrong direction. Love and take care of your enemies and fuck your people.

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