US Navy research lab under microscope in Indonesia

JAKARTA (AFP) — The future of a major US Navy research laboratory in Indonesia is in doubt amid allegations, dismissed as “crazy” by US diplomats, of espionage and secret experiments.

Negotiations between Washington and Jakarta over the renewal of the operating contract of US Naval Medical Research Unit-2, or Namru-2, have stalled over a range of issues including diplomatic immunity for its US staff.

Established in Indonesia in 1970 and charged with researching infectious diseases of military importance, the facility employs 19 Americans and more than 100 Indonesians and is based in Indonesian health ministry grounds.

Its operations have attracted suspicion from a number of quarters in the world’s largest Muslim country, from anti-US religious hardliners to outspoken Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari and Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono.

“We’ll conduct some checks on their presence in Indonesia,” Vice President Jusuf Kalla said after Friday prayers last week.

Supari, whose ministry has worked with the US laboratory on projects including malaria research and bird flu early warning systems, has thrown fuel on to the diplomatic fire.

“Until today there have been no significantly useful results for the people (from Namru-2’s research),” she said last month.

“Problems with contagious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are still relatively the same… My people ask me why is there a health laboratory working together with a foreign military?”

Some parliamentarians have demanded the laboratory’s operating contract, which expired in 2005, be torn up and its facilities taken over by Jakarta.

Parliamentary foreign affairs commissioner Mutamimul Ula called Thursday for an “investigation into allegations that Namru-2 staffers were involved in intelligence operations.”

“There is this flavour of intelligence activities… This can’t be avoided in the eyes of the public. It is part of the defence organism of a foreign country,” Ula said.

The controversy and the delays in the renewal of the contract appear to be causing a degree of angst among US officials in the departments of health and state, reflecting the importance Washington attaches to the facility.

Namru-2 has been a major point of US-Indonesian cooperation over the years, including times when relations over other issues were strained. US President George W. Bush mentioned the facility in a joint statement with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono when he visited Jakarta in 2006.

Apparently stung by the latest whirlwind of allegations, some of which stretch back several years, the US embassy has issued a statement entitled “The Truth About Namru-2.”

“There’s been rumours over the last 10 years that we had to respond to,” US embassy deputy chief of mission John A. Heffern told AFP.

“It’s just crazy,” he said of the allegations of spying and secret experiments, adding that Namru-2 was “totally unclassified, totally transparent.”

“If the Indonesian ministry of health wants the raw data, it’s totally open to them,” he said.

“Hopefully we will resume our negotiations. This doesn’t help.”

Sticking points in the negotiations have included the US’s insistence that all American staff at the laboratory be given diplomatic immunity.

Complicating matters is a separate dispute between Washington and Jakarta over bird flu samples.

Jakarta is insisting on “the recognition of sovereign rights of states over their biological resources,” and fears the flu samples will be used by foreign companies to make vaccines, which will be too expensive for Indonesians.

US officials have slammed the position, with US Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recently stressing the importance of international cooperation to tackle the bird flu threat.

“The United States has very important relationships here in Indonesia, that involve joint work in laboratories in various levels of research, and we have pledged to continue that,” Leavitt said after meeting Yudhoyono last month.

Indonesia has the highest number of human bird flu victims, with 108 people known to have died in the sprawling archipelago from the disease.

The World Health Organisation, which has designated Namru-2 as a Collaborating Centre on disease research, has warned that Indonesia is putting its own population in danger by failing to share its samples.

Israel, aligned with US for Iran war

Israel has tacitly aligned itself with Washington, raising the specter of a war on Iran even if it has to go ‘alone with the problem’.

In a Friday interview with the Yediot Aharonot, senior Israeli minister Ehud Barak made his newest accusations against Iran, claiming that Tehran is attempting to develop a nuclear bomb in two years.

“It’s possible that it may take another two years, maybe four …it’s all the same if international pressure and other possibilities don’t stop the process,” claimed the official.

Barak then threatened Iran, suggesting that Israel is fully prepared to launch a military attack on Tehran but refrained to elaborate on the subject.

“Israel is the strongest country in the entire region, even at a range of 1,500 kilometers,” Barak continued. Israel is ‘prepared to be alone with the problem’.

His comments follow a burst of media speculation that the Tuesday entry of a second US aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, in what the Pentagon had termed a ‘reminder’ of US power, was a tacit declaration of war on Iran.

Israel has been preparing for war for several months now. It recently launched a five-day preparation operation to ‘test emergency response’ against what it calls ‘raining missiles’ from countries like Iran and Syria.

This is while the Islamic Republic has never waged war on any other country and comments used by Israeli officials to demonize Tehran have been clearly manipulated to their benefit and according to Iran have been ‘taken out of context’.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54039§ionid=351020101

Critic accuses Hollywood of vilifying Arabs

BEIRUT (Reuters) – American films and TV dramas shot since the September 11 attacks have reinforced screen images of Arabs and Muslims as fanatics and villains, ingraining harmful stereotypes, argues an author on the subject.

In his book “Guilty — Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11″, Jack Shaheen praises some post-September 11 films for offering a more sympathetic image of Arabs and Muslims, who he argues have been castigated for decades by Hollywood.

But he says that too many have portrayed them in ever darker shades, criticizing films including “The Kingdom” (2007) and “The Four Feathers” (2002) and condemning the creation of a new “Arab-American bogeyman” in TV dramas such as “24″.

“In the United States, you can say anything you want about Islam and Arabs and get away with it. In other words, as someone said, ‘You can hit an Arab free’,” said Shaheen — also author of “Reel Bad Arabs — How Hollywood Vilifies a People”.

Shaheen, an American of Lebanese descent, has examined the treatment of Arabs and Muslims in some 1,000 films, including more than 100 shot since September 11.

From action movies such as “True Lies” (1994) to comedies including “Father of the Bride Part II” (1995) and Disney’s animated “Aladdin” (1992), Shaheen identifies films that have perpetuated damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims.

“The images have remained primarily fixed and have only been changed in the sense that they have become more vindictive and damaging,” he told Reuters in an interview in Beirut.

“What enables these images to persist and prevail? One of the primary reasons is silence,” said Shaheen, a retired professor of mass communications who worked as a consultant on “Syriana” (2005) and “Three Kings” (1999).

“There’s nobody in authority, no political leader, no Hollywood personality who has taken a stand and said that demonizing Arabs and Muslims is the same as demonizing Jews or blacks or Asians or any other racial or ethnic group.”

“SELECTIVE FRAMING OF RADICALS”

In “Guilty”, Shaheen credits films including “Babel” (2006) and “Rendition” (2007) for “more complex, even-handed Arab portraits”. But “very few people are listening”, he said.

“It’s been very difficult, it’s like being a salmon trying to swim upstream.

“What is done is selective framing of radicals: people saying ‘death to America’. You cannot deny the reality — there are people who really want to kill Americans. But those are basically the only images we see.”

He describes last year’s “The Kingdom” — an action movie about FBI agents hunting terrorists in Saudi Arabia — as one of the most damaging depictions of Arabs of recent times in which “even Arab children cannot be trusted”.

Shaheen also charts a new trend of turning American Arabs and Muslims into “the new bogey person” and criticizes the TV drama “24″ for its “vicious images of loathsome Muslim Americans as well as Americans with Arab roots”.

Hollywood’s depiction of Arabs has eased the path for U.S. administration policy, he argues. Decades of portraying Arabs and Muslims as the enemy “made it that much easier for us to go into Iraq”, he said. “There were very few people protesting.

“The images help enforce policy,” he said. “As the policy becomes more even-handed, perhaps films will reflect that.

“Plato said: ‘Those who tell the stories rule society’. Nothing has changed, and the story tellers of today have a tremendous impact on the world as we perceive it.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSL0132230620080501?sp=true

America’s Germ Warfare Capabilities developed

 in secret in US Corporate Labs

Sherwood Ross

The costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted having germ warfare capability is going forward under President Bush and in apparent defiance of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention of 1925 that bans biological agents.

And this program, involving some of the world’s deadliest and most loathsome pathogens, many of which could trigger plagues and epidemics, is being conducted largely in secret without adequate oversight and in flagrant contempt of NIH’s own rules.

113 UNIVERSITIES, VA HOSPITALS, PHARMACEUTICAL HOUSES CHARGED WITH REFUSING TO REVEAL BIOTECH RESEARCH OPS AS REQUIRED BY LAW

Some 113 university, government, hospital and corporate laboratories engaged in research often with potential to be used for germ warfare have refused to disclose their operations to the public as required by Federal rules, a nonprofit watchdog agency has charged.

Instead of shutting their operations down, however, the National Institutes of Health(NIH), of Bethesda, Md., the government agency tasked with oversight of these laboratories, allows them to continue to operate, a peculiar stance for an entity that describes itself as “the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation.”

From California to New Jersey and from Boston to San Antonio, often in the heart of major centers of population, biological warfare labs lavishly financed with their share of about $20-billion by the Bush administration since 2001 are literally crawling with deadly germs from Spanish flu to plague to anthrax to tularemia to rift valley fever. Reportedly, in some of the laboratories security is lax and safety procedures inadequate to protect the public from exposure to deadly pathogens.

Under U.S. law, recipients of Federal funds for biotech research must comply with guidelines issued by the NIH. These include making available to the public the minutes of the labs’ Institutional Biosafety Committees(IBC)meetings, describing their operations and plans. In a number of instances, these IBC’s have never bothered to hold a meeting. In other cases, the minutes they furnish are devoid of substance.

Basically, their operations in many cases are being kept secret, according to watchdog Sunshine Project of Austin, Tex., a nonprofit that attempts to protect the public from the risks of biotechnology experiments. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention(BWC), which the US signed, prohibits research on offensive biological weapons. If the work is performed in secret, however, weapons designed for offensive use could be concealed. In the 1930s, the Japanese military masked its secret germ warfare scheme as a water purification project.

As the government-funded labs engage in “dual-use research,” (pathogen research having both offensive and defensive applications), Sunshine’s Edward Hammond reports he “has encountered grave problems with the system.” These include “risky experiments approved with dubious safety precautions and/or inadequate IBC review, dysfunctional and otherwise noncompliant committees, and other types of biosafety problems.”

Francis Boyle, an international legal expert at the University of Illinois, Champaign , puts it more bluntly. He called the in-house university committees “a joke and a fraud” that provide “no protection to anyone.” Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by Congress, states the Pentagon “is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted “without public knowledge and review” in 2002.

Last November 7th, Hammond lodged a complaint with Dr. Amy Patterson, director of the Office of Biotechnology Activities at NIH, citing 113 institutions “for non-compliance with the NIH Guidelines,” specifically for refusing to honor requests for IBC meeting minutes.

“Honoring these requests is not only mandatory under the NIH Guidelines that you are charged with enforcing (but) transparency is also a moral duty of institutions that conduct research, such as rDNA and select agent work that could endanger the public,” Hammond added. He wrote Patterson, “Failing prompt compliance by these institutions we note that your office must do its duty under NIH Guidelines and terminate funding.”

NIH’s Dr. Patterson apparently had troubles of her own obtaining information from labs on the Federal payroll. On Dec. 6, 2004, she issued a “reminder” to universities engaged in research that stated “compliance with the NIH Guidelines is critical to the safe conduct of research and to the fulfillment of an institutional commitment to the protection of staff, the environment, and public health.”

Since 9/11, biotech houses, military laboratories, and State and private universities across America, and others sited in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, have collectively lapped up record sums in Federal R&D dollars.

How big is this enterprise? At just one venue, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research(SFBR) in San Antonio, Tex., there are 6,000 caged chimpanzees, baboons, and other primates, Sunshine reports, whose upkeep alone costs U.S. taxpayers $6-million annually. SFBR genetically engineers monkeys and harbors some of the world’s most dangerous viruses such as Ebola and Lassa, authorities state.

Again, the Battelle National Biodefense Institute(BNBI) of Columbus, Ohio, has just received a $250-million, five-year award from the Department of Homeland Security to run the new biodefense analysis center under construction at Fort Detrick, Md., according to The Washington Post of December 25, 2006. Earlier, on July 30th of last year, The Post reported much of what transpires at the center may never be publicly known as the Bush administration “intends to operate the facility largely in secret.” Battelle also does not maintain an effective IBC, Sunshine charges.

“Some of the resarch falls within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons,” The Post reported. “The administration dismisses these concerns, however, insisting that the work…is purely defensive and thus fully legal. It has rejected calls for oversight by independent observers outside the (Homeland Security) Department’s network of government scientists and contractors.”

The paper quoted Milton Leitenberg, a weapons expert at the University of Maryland stating, “If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty. You can’t go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs —about which we know very little —when we’ve got all this going on.”

The Post reported the operation would encompass about 160,000 gross square feet of working area and accommodate a staff of about 120. The Post noted, “Fort Detrick’s history as the incubator of germ warfare research casts a long shadow over the new lab. When the fort held the Pentagon’s very highly classified and long abandoned biological warfare program, it was a magnet for antiwar protests in the Vietnam War era.” In such labs, scientists can create new strains of disease for which those attacked would have no ready defense. Such weapons, once loosed, are notoriously difficult to control, and could ignite epidemics to sicken and terrify civilian populations.

Hammond believes there are about 400 bioweapons agents labs across the U.S., some of which encounter unexpected difficulty when they try to comply with the law. David Perlin, president of the Public Health Research Institute(PHRI) of Newark, N.J., told Sunshine the FBI requested PHRI to enter into an agreement with them to “not publicly disclose which specific select agent pathogens and/or strains are stored at our facility.”

Those who tend to dismiss NIH’s laxity about enforcing its own regulations have only to recall the October, 2001, anthrax attacks on Congress and the media. The deadly strain released is believed to have come from a U.S. germ warfare lab at Fort Detrick although there is no certainty as the FBI has never solved the murders. Since then, the vast proliferation of such labs by the Bush administration has educated many new employees — in some cases undergraduate students — in germ warfare ops. Four employees at Fort Detrick are known to have died after performing lab work.

Lack of transparencey is cause for concern if only because of the history of secret CIA and Pentagon experiments in germ warfare that used the American people as guinea pigs. In “ Rogue State,” (Common Courage Press) reporter William Blum noted those agencies over two decades “conducted tests in the open air in the United States, exposing millions of Americans to large clouds of possibly dangerous bacteria and chemical particles.”

Between 1949 and 1969, the Army tested the spread of dangerous chemical and bacterial organisms over 239 U.S. populated areas including San Francisco , New York and Chicago with no warnings to the public or regard for the health consequences, Blum wrote. The Pentagon even sprayed navy warships to test the impact of germ warfare on U.S. sailors.

Even deadlier cocktails were secretly provided to dictator Saddam Hussein for his war of aggression against Iran. Washington denied supplying them but as Robert Fisk reported in Great Britain’s “The Independent” last December 31st, “prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq,” including anthrax. Fisk gives this eye-witness account of what he saw on a military hospital train carrying stricken men from the front back to Tehran:

“I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs — the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows— and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja.”

Thus, the Reagan administration, which escalated germ warfare research and allowed the sale of the pathogens to Hussein, took its place in the dark annals of military history along with Italy under Benito Mussolini, whose aviators dumped mustard gas on the Ethiopians and Japan under Emperor Hirohito, whose Imperial Army’s germ warfare attacks killed thousands of Chinese civilians.

Because of their comparative cheapness to manufacture, biological weapons have been dubbed “the poor man’s nuclear bomb.” Yet their potential may be even deadlier. Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Biotech Century”(Penguin), noted a government study in 1993 found “the release of just 200 pounds of anthrax spores from a plane over Washington DC could kill as many as three-million people.”

The secret operations of the labs’ would be less ominous if the Bush administration hadn’t led the fight to demolish the international inspection system. Jackie Cabasso, executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, Oakland, Calif., warned, “Last year (2001), the U.S. single-handedly blew apart an international system for inspections of these kinds of (biological) laboratories, a system that would have made great strides toward ensuring that biodefense labs aren’t abused for offensive purposes. Having thumbed our nose at the world, the US is now massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in secretive facilities.”

According to Boyle, President Bush “sabotaged the Verification Protocol for the BWC” as it was on the verge of conclusion and success. He said the U.S. “fully intended to get back into the research, development and testing of illegal and criminal offensive biowarfare programs.”

Boyle is the author of “Biowarfare and Terrorism,” Clarity Press. And Elisa Harris, former arms control official under President Clinton, told The New York Times in 2003 “It (the administration’s actions) will raise concerns in other capitals in part because the United States has fought tooth and nail to prevent the international community from strengthening the germ treaty.”

Among pharmaceutical houses not in compliance with NIH disclosure requirements are Abbott Laboratories of Abbott Park and Worchester, Agencourt Bioscience Corp.; Antibody Science, Inc.; BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb and its Pharmaceutical Research Institute of Connecticut; Centocor, Inc.; Chiron; Discovery Genomics Inc.; DuPont Central Research and Development; Embrex, Inc.; Genentech, Inc., Genzyme Corp. of Cambridge and Framingham, Mass.; GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Inc. and its Rahway, N.J., research site; Integral Molecular; Introgen Therapeutics; L2 Diagnostics LLC; Merck & Co. Inc., West Point; Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, N.J.; Meridian Bioscience Inc.; Monsanto Co. Mystic, Conn., research; New Link Genetics; NovaFlora, Inc.; NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals; OSI Pharmaceuticals; Pfizer Inc., and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals of St. Louis, Roche Bioscience, Schering-Plough Research Institute; SelectX Pharmaceuticals; Serono Research Institution; Third Wave Technologies; and Vaxin, Inc. Federal entities involved include the Center for Disease Control, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, VA hospitals in Stratton, Va.; the Jerry Pettis Memorial hospital and the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Also, the Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Plum Island Animal Disease Center of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Navy Medical Research Center.

Other fund recipients include AERAS Global TB Vaccine Foundation, Battelle, CBR Institute for Biomedical Research, Inc.; Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Children’s National Medical Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Columbus Children’s Research Institute, Hadassah Medical Organization, Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration, and Scripps Clinic.

Among universities in non-compliance: Alabama A&M, Albany Medical College, Ball State, Brigham Young, Bucknell, Central Michigan, Drexel College of Medicine, Hackensack University Medical Center, Hunter College, Indiana State University, Purdue University, Loma Linda, Missouri State, New York Medical College, and Queens College of City University of New York.

Also, Rider, Rockefeller University, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, South Dakota State University, St. John’s University, State University of New York at Binghamton, Brockport, and Buffalo; Towson, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School(UMDNJ), and University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. Also, the universities of Arizona, California at San Francisco, Maryland, Massachusetts, Miami, Fla.; Mississippi; Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Southern Mississippi, Texas at Arlington and San Antonio, Tulsa, Utah State, Wake Forest, Washington University in St. Louis, Western Kentucky and Wilkes.

Foreign institutions include the University of Sydney, Australia; the University of British Columbia , and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa . This listing covers most, but not all, of the names submitted to NIH by the Sunshine Project. Three years ago, Sunshine said if it had to pick the labs with the worst biosafety record-keeping, he would choose Princeton University, the University of Texas Southwestern at Dallas; the University of Vermont at Burlington and the University of Delaware at Newark.

Sunshine’s Hammond said there has yet to be any formal response to his letter of last November from NIH. He added, “I doubt I will ever get one.” The NIH was asked to respond to the charges contained in this article but has yet not done so.

In sum, the costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted having germ warfare capability is going forward today under President Bush and in apparent defiance of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention of 1925 that bans biological agents. What’s more, where once the use of germ warfare was an isolated happenstance — such as when an English general in 1767 gave smallpox-laced blankets to the Indians that decimated their tribes — research in this grim area today suggests it has been elevated to an instrument of national policy. And this program, involving some of the world’s deadliest and most loathsome pathogens, many of which could trigger plagues and epidemics, is being conducted largely in secret without adequate oversight and in flagrant contempt of NIH’s own rules. Why?

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/359455.html?c=on#c163983

High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror

A variety of current and former high-level officials have recently warned that the Bush administration is attempting to instill a dictatorship in America, and will itself carry out a fake terrorist attack in order to obtain one.

FBI agents, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and The Washington Post and Rolling Stone have all stated that the administration has issued terror alerts based on scant intelligence in order to rally people around the flag when the administration was suffering in the polls. This implies — as an initial matter only — that the administration will play fast and loose with the facts in order to instill fear for political purposes

More to the point, a former prominent republican congressman stated that the U.S. is close to becoming a totalitarian society and that the Bush administration is using fear to try to ensure that this happens.

General Tommy Franks stated that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States “the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government”.

Current U.S. Congressman Ron Paul stated, the government “is determined to have martial law”, and that the government is hoping to get the people “fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse”

And Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said “if there is another terror attack, “I believe the president will get what he wants”, which will include a dictatorship.

Terror on U.S. Citizens by American Government?

But would the government actually kills its own people to instill sufficient fear so that it can get what it wants? Read what the following very smart people are saying, and then judge for yourself:

A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:

“We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want.”

The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to “play fast and loose” with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag

The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the “Father of Reaganomics”, who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said:

“Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging “terrorist” attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?” He goes on to say:

If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the “unitary executive” at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush’s declaration of “national emergency” and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives’ Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel’s complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

Think about it. If another 9/11-type “security failure” were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has “a gut feeling” that America will soon be hit hard?

A member of the British Parliament stated that “there is a very real danger” that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically

A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.

President Carter recently impliedly acknowledged the risk of staged provocation in order to start a war against Iran.

Former Senator Gary Hart warned Americans that the White House might create a “Gulf of Tonkin” or “remember the Maine” type incident to justify war against Iran (starting at 7:15 minutes)

The former UN Weapons Inspector, an American, who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government.

And an allegedly-leaked GOP memo touts a new terror attack as a way to reverse the party’s decline.

No way, That’s Nuts

Sounds nuts, right?

Sorry to have to tell you, but “false flag terror” — that is, state-sponsored terrorism, blamed on the “bad guys” of choice — is an age-old trick which has been used by governments around the world for thousands of years to consolidate power and create support from their people. See this article on the Reichstag fire, and this article on the perennial ploy of those grabbing power.

But even recent events provide a glimpse into the world of false flag terror:

The well-respected former Indonesian president believes that the government may have had a role in the Bali bombings (see also this video).

And Americans dressed as Arabs have apparently been setting off car bombs in Iraq (apparently, when it was discovered that some of the cars used in Iraqi bombings recently came from the U.S., the cover story became American cars were involved in car bombings only because they had recently been stolen from the U.S. and then shipped to Iraq — but does it make sense that Iraqi insurgents would steal cars in the U.S. and ship them all the way to Iraq?)

Similarly, Britain’s false flag attacks in Iraq made the news. And the press has acknowledged that the death of the lead investigator into the Basra incident was mysterious.

And the former director of the National Security Agency said “By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation”(the audio is here)

History proves that the officials’ warnings of a terror attack by our own government are well-founded.

Link