ISIL selling human organs from its victims -- but to whom? by Wayne Madsen

February 21, 2015, 8:33 pm

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 ISIL selling human organs from its victims -- but to whom?

by Wayne Madsen
Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations Mohamed Alhakim has made a startling announcement: the bodies of victims of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have been found by Iraqi authorities buried in mass graves and they show surgical incisions where kidneys and other body parts have been removed.

Alhakim also stated that a dozen doctors were executed by ISIL in Mosul for refusing to engage in organ harvesting. Outgoing UN envoy to Iraq Nikolay Mladenov confirmed there have been increasing reports of ISIL engaged in human organ harvesting but he would say no more on the subject. The reason is simple. Mladenov, the foreign minister of Bulgaria from 2010 to 2013, was, between 1996 and 1998, the program director of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation in Sofia. Thereafter, Mladenov took a job with the World Bank in Sofia. Discussing human organ harvesting in such trouble spots as the West Bank of Palestine and the Balkans is a political "death sentence" for many journalists and politicians, especially someone like Mladenov who once suckled from the bank account teats of Soros. The reason is simple: the global headquarters for human organ harvesting is Israel.

On February 22, 2008, WMR reported:

"Dr. Francis Delmonico is Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and practices transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the director of medical affairs for the Transplantation Society and an adviser on human transplantation for the World Health Organization (WHO) . . .
Delmonico said there were practical reasons to oppose the commercial marketing of human organs. They include the fact that current transplant resources are shifting away from younger people with 'longer life years from transplant' (LYFT) to older persons with limited longevity and that if a commercial market for kidneys takes shape the "market" will shift away from post-death donors of hearts, pancreas, lungs, and livers, thus impacting the altruistic donor population in favor of the commercial sales of kidneys market.

Delmonico decried the fact that Israel is outsourcing kidney and liver transplants to Colombia and the Philippines. Israel has, in the past, been a center for dubious human organ trafficking operations. It is also the case that Palestinian prisoners in Israel have sought to sell their kidneys to feed their children. The Israel Medical Association is opposing a bill that would allow the donors of certain organs to be reimbursed by the state. The group claims this will 'open the door' to organ sales."A year after our report, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that Palestinian prisoners who died at the hands of Israeli troops had their organs harvested. The Swedish report was met with howls of "blood libel,""anti-Semitism,""hate speech," and other typical histrionics from Jewish groups around the world, which can always be expected to act on cues from their deep-pocketed financiers. Aftonbladet withstood the Jewish onslaught and stuck by its story. It was later vindicated when a 2000 interview with
Yehuda Hiss, then director of Israel's L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, saw him admit that he had harvested organs from dead Palestinians in the 1990s and that the permission of the Palestinian families was never requested. The transplants began with corneas, expanded to skin, and then included kidneys and other organs.

Now comes the charges from Iraq's ambassador that ISIL is removing human organs from its victims. But who are the buyers? Given Israel's tacit support for Syrian rebels, including ISIL and groups like the Al Nusra Front that are allied with it, Israel is the likely customer for the Iraqi body parts in a quid pro quo that only a Dr. Frankenstein could admire. For a nation like Israel that is full of anti-Arab zealots and racists, that sort of animosity does not seem to extend, even under bizarrely antiquated Jewish religious laws, to placing Arab kidneys, livers, and pancreas into the bodies of Israeli Jews in need of organ transplants.


Are one or possibly two Israelis now sporting Kayla Mueller's kidney or kidneys, courtesy of ISIL?

Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and Mossad agents have been witnessed transferring weapons to ISIL units in Iraq's western Anbar province as well as in the area around Quneitra, near the Golan Heights of Syria. In addition, wounded Syrian rebels fighting the government of Bashar al Assad, have been medically evacuated across the Israeli border for treatment in Israeli hospitals. Many of these wounded rebels are either members of ISIL or sympathizers with Al Nusra. In return for Israeli support, ISIL never trains its long-range weapons at Israeli positions but keep them focused on Syrian government forces.  There have also been credible reports that Mossad and the IDF have supplied ISIL with intelligence on Lebanese Hezbollah units in Syria in order that the jihadist radicals launch attacks on the Shi'a Lebanese positions. In fact, ISIL religious dogma instructs its followers that the Shi'as are worse enemies of ISIL than are Jews. U.S. intelligence sources claim that American sources, mostly signals intelligence intercepts of Israeli government communications [carried out by the National Security Agency "special Arabic" linguists, named as such because NSA does not want Jewish members of Congress criticizing it for eavesdropping on Hebrew language communications] have yielded information on Israel's grand design to assist ISIL in Syria in order to destroy Hezbollah.Abdul-Ilah al-Bashir al-Noeimi, the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Council (SMC) of the Free Syrian Army, which has refused to expel Al Nusra, Al Qaeda, or ISIL members from its ranks, secretly trained in Israel in 2013 under the guise of his being admitted to thec ountry to undergo medical treatment for wounds he is alleged to have received in Syria.

On a visit to South Africa, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir said that it was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel that provided support to ISIL and Boko Haram. Bashir told Euronews: "I said CIA and the Mossad stand behind these organizations [ISIL and Boko Haram] . . . There is no Muslim who would carry out such acts." Bashir's information on Israeli support for ISIL is complemented by a number of Syrian military statements confirming the Jewish state's support for takfiri radicals, including ISIL, fighting in Syria. Israel has also refused repeated Jordanian requests for the IDF to attack ISIL positions in Syria.

Bashir is adding his voice to those who claim that ISIL is not even Muslim but a death cult crafted by Western and Israeli intelligence to split apart the Arab and Muslim worlds so that Israel can take advantage of the chaos.

Some right-wing American Jews insist that the Obama administration uses the term "ISIL" in reference to the Islamic State because the administration covertly wants to stress the similarities of the names "ISIL" and "ISRAEL." If so, the Obama administration deserves much credit for subliminally telling the world who and what is actually behind the rise of ISIL.

ISIL now stands ready to supply Israel with a commodity more precious to Israelis than diamonds or gold: fresh human organs from prisoners executed by ISIL.

So, for the members of the U.S. Congress who will continue to travel to Israel to pay fealty to the Zionist state, remember one thing. One of those Israelis you meet who is all for colonizing the West Bank and who relish in Arab on Arab violence may have inside them the kidney of Kayla Mueller, the U.S. aid worker in Syria kidnapped by ISIL and who also helped the Palestinians in the West Bank, or a liver from an Egyptian Copt executed on a beach in Libya. Think about that before you enjoy your free buffet of kreplach, kneidlach, and kishka.

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The long history of CIA penetration of Danish intelligence by Wayne Madsen

February 21, 2015, 8:37 pm

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 The long history of CIA penetration of Danish intelligence
by Wayne Madsen
Although he was named as the gunman who attacked a freedom of speech conference and a synagogue in Copenhagen, Danish police were still reticent to name Danish national Omar Abdel-Hamid El-Hussein as a member of a global jihadist network or even, as of February 17, a suspect in the attack.

El-Hussein, a Danish-Palestinian, grew up, from the age of 15, as a violent gang member in Denmark. In 2013, while said to be high on heroin, El-Hussein began stabbing other passengers and served time in prison. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service (PET), which is officially part of the national police, usually follows the orders of its closest allies: First and foremost, the Central Intelligence Agency, and secondly, Israel's Mossad.

The Danish Prison Service, which admitted it sent a report on El-Hussein's radical thoughts he was said to have picked up in prison, to the PET. As with similar reports maintained by French police on its own alleged Muslim radical assassins, no action was taken by authorities to monitor the future "terrorists." The PET claims that it did not believe that El-Hussein's reported "radicalization" in prison merited any type of special surveillance of him after his release.

The PET statements, themselves, are providing ammunition for those who believe that European police have developed "patsies" to take the blame for a number of terrorist attacks that are being used to justify more intrusive police surveillance in Denmark, France, Belgium, Germany, and other countries outside of Europe, including Canada and Australia.

A review of recent killings in Europe, as well as at the Boston Marathon, which were blamed on Islamist radical supporters of the "Islamic State" and other such groups have yielded a number of similarities. First, those accused of the killings were already known to various intelligence agencies either from their time in prison or from travels to the Middle East, particularly to Syria, and in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two Boston bombers, to the Republic of Georgia, a NATO applicant, and Dagestan, a primarily Islamic autonomous republic of Russia in the Caucasus.

Tamerlan was included on the Central Intelligence Agency's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) and the Russian Federal Security Bureau notified the FBI of his ties to jihadist terrorists. No action was taken by either agency to forestall the Boston bombing. In addition, the Tsarnaev brothers' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni (née Tsarnaev) was the son-in-law of retired CIA official Graham Fuller whose interests included liaison with anti-Russian Islamists in places like Dagestan and Georgia, where Tamerlan had spent time before returning to the United States to allegedly carry out the Boston Marathon bombing.

Franco-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, arrested in Marseille, was charged with carrying out the May 30, 2014 shootings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. He denied the charges through his attorney. French authorities knew Nemmouche traveled to Syria to fight against the Damascus government in 2013. In fact, Nemmouche's travels were known to about a half dozen intelligence agencies before is is said to have carried out the Brussels attack. French and Turkish intelligence tracked Nemmouche to Istanbul in 2013. In February 2014, Nemmouche traveled to Malaysia and Singapore, where Malaysian and Singaporean intelligence picked up his trail. Nemmouche arrived in Frankfurt in 2014. German federal police passed Nemmouche and his arrival to French intelligence agencies.
Amedy Coulibaly, the chief suspect in the hostage-taking and shooting at the Hyper Cacher Jewish market in Paris was well-known to French police. He had spent time in prison for an attempt to free from French penal detention the Franco-Algerian Islamist cleric Smain Ait Ali Belkacem. While in prison, Coulibaly met one of the accused Charlie Hebdo shooters, Cheriof Kouachi, another Franco-Algerian, who was serving three years in prison for assisting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of ISIL. French authorities were aware of the "radicalization" of Coulibaly and Cherif Kounachi in prison but took no special precautions when both were released.

In 2009, Coulibaly, an employee of Coca Coca, met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace.

Kouachi's brother Said, traveled to Yemen between 2009 and 2011 where he met and befriended Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who was permitted to board Northwestern flight 253 at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in 2009 without a passport but special "refugee" papers provided to him at Schiphol, where security is overseen by an Israeli company, by an unknown English-speaking interlocutor. Abdulmutallab later tried to detonate explosives in his underpants as the plane began its descent to Detroit International Airport.

In March 2012, Franco-Algerian Mohammed Merah, who, like El-Hussein of Denmark and Coulibaly, served time in prison for criminal behavior not tied to any religious extremism, was accused of killing French troops in Montauban and Toulouse and three children and their teacher at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. A French intelligence document stated that Merah was under surveillance by French authorities since 2006. French intelligence concluded that Merah led a "double life" that allowed him to drin alcohol at nightclubs while secretly visiting Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan in order to plot attacks for Al Qaeda. In 2008, Merah is said to have tried to join the French military but was rejected because of his criminal past. However, he also tried to join the French Foreign Legion, where one's criminal past is no detriment. It was after Merah tried to enlist in the Foreign Legion that he became the subject of French intelligence surveillance. Or was he being monitored for his loyalty to the counter-espionage arm of the Foreign Legion?

On December 11, 2010, Swedish-Iraqi national Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly was said to have died when the bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely in downtown Stockholm. Al-Abdaly is said to have carried out a previous bombing in Stockholm, reported around the world to be the first Islamist "suicide" attack in Scandinavia. In 2010, Al-Abdaly named his son "Osama," yet the Swedish security police (SAPO) supposedly took no notice.


Similarities between "Islamist" attacks and young Muslim men

Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly	28	Stockholm: Killed by prematurely exploded suicide bomb
Mohammed Merah	23	Toulouse: Killed in a police raid. Took videos of his shootings with a Go-Pro camera. Attempted to enlist in French Army and Foreign Legion.
Said Kouachi	34	Dammartin-en-Goële: Killed in police raid.
Cherif Kouachi	32	Dammartin-en-Goële: Killed in police raid.
Amedy Coulibaly	32	Paris: Killed in police raid. Took videos of his shootings with a Go-Pro camera.
Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein	22	Copenhagen: Killed in police standoff.
Mehdi Nemmouche	29	Marseille: Arrested by police.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev	26	Boston: Killed by police.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev	21	Boston: Injured in police shootout. Currently on trial.

As seen in the chart above, out of nine Islamist terrorist incidents, seven of the assailants were killed in police encounters. Only Nemmouche, who has declared his innocence, and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, who pled not guilty to 30 criminal charges brought against him, remain alive. Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. would seek the death penalty against Tsarnaev.

As for the Danish PET providing cover for a set of CIA-inspired false flag attacks in Copenhagen, the Danish agency has long had a subservient role with the CIA since the days of the Vietnam War. In those days, Denmark became a refuge for U.S. servicemen who went AWOL rather than be transferred to duty in South Vietnam. Copenhagen also became the host for a diplomatic office of the Viet Cong's National Liberation Front. Danish public pressure forced the Social Democratic government of Prime Minister Anker JØrgensen and the center-right "VKR" government of Liberal Prime Minister Poul Hartling to allow Denmark to become a headquarters for the anti-Vietnam War movement in Europe. The CIA was not happy about this and it relied on the PET to infiltrate the U.S. servicemen organizations and anti-war Danish Vietnam Committees in the country. All this time, the PET was acting directly against the policies of the Danish government. The CIA set up an infiltration office a Kastanievej Number 5 in Copenhagen manned by three non-official cover CIA agents.


Dead men tell no tales: El Hussein lies dead on pavement in Copenhagen's NØrrebro district, once the nexus for CIA operations in the Danish capital

The CIA office was, on paper, Interland Marketing Research, Inc. (IMR), with its headquarters in Frankfurt, West Germany and was said to track the financial liquidity of companies. However, the firm showed up nowhere on the Danish government's listing of registered companies and it did not even have an office telephone. IMR was as much a CIA proprietary company as was Business International Corporation of New York, which employed a young Columbia graduate named Barack Obama in 1983.

Ironically, the center for the CIA's surveillance of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Copenhagen was NØrrebro, the very same neighborhood where Omar Abdel-Hamid El-Hussein was shot dead by police outside an Internet café. 

Bomb-making terrorists are being trained on U.S. soil -- by the CIA

April 8, 2015, 12:37 pm

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Bomb-making terrorists are being trained on U.S. soil -- by the CIA
by Wayne Madsen
The FBI claimed another "success" in the war against terrorism when it arrested two female roommates in Queens, New York. Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, for attempting to construct crude bombs using propane tanks. The pair were said to have watched videos on YouTube produced by the Islamic State. The FBI's "success" story, however, appears to be yet another entrapment of two hapless individuals who managed to fit a "profile" established by the FBI for those likely to fall for a sting operation.

Once again, as with a number of such cases, the two women had an FBI undercover "handler" who coached them on procuring fertilizer, propane, copper wires, potassium gluconate, table salt, a pressure cooker, and "jihadist" literature until the FBI could launch its sting arrest.

While the FBI has arrested a number of individuals in similar "coached" operations, including the "Liberty City Seven" in Miami, the Times Square "fizzle" bomber, and the "Lackawanna Six" in Buffalo, the Central Intelligence Agency, either directly, or through proxies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and U.S. Special Operations Command, has trained on U.S. soil irregular foreign forces, including mercenaries, to construct bombs and deploy them in terrorist attacks.

Currently such training takes place at the super-secret CIA "bomb school" at Harvey Point, North Carolina. As reported by WMR on March 4, 2011, Harvey Point has been used to train terrorists in bomb making and other tactics for decades. Among those terrorists trained at Harvey Point have been those within the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army; anti-Castro commandos of Brigade 2506 and Alpha 66; Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas, some of whom later joined Al Qaeda; Lebanese Phalangist paramilitary forces; anti-Qaddafi Libyan guerrillas; Chechen Islamist guerrillas, El Salvadorean death squads under the command ofMajor Roberto d'Aubuisson; some of whom now fight for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq; and the infamous Honduran death squadMovimiento Anti-Communista Hondureno (MACHO). The terrorists were trained at Harvey Point in the use of sophisticated fuses, timers, and explosives, as well as remote-control devices for triggering mines and bombs.

Before Harvey Point became the CIA's favorite terrorist training school, the agency relied on a secret "counterinsurgency school" near Los Fresnos, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. The school was operated under the aegis of the U.S. Border Patrol, but funded with CIA money through Langley's favorite government financial laundry, USAID.
At Los Fresnos, CIA instructors trained terrorists in tactics and weapons. The school offered such courses as the nondescript four week-long "Technical Investigations Course" but also more telling courses with the names:

• Terrorist Concepts
• Terrorist Devices
• Fabrication and Functioning of Devices
• Improvised Triggering Devices (today called Improvised Explosive Devices or "IEDs")
• Incendiaries
• Assassination Weapons: A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin
• Bomb Making

Senator James Abourezk (D-SD) exposed the terrorist training at Los Fresnos in 1973. USAID officials admitted in testimony that the Los Fresnos school did not train personnel in bomb disposal but in actual bomb making. One USAID official testified that "The thrust of the instruction ... introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques . . . in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries.... Different types of explosive devices and 'booby-traps' and their construction and use by terrorists are demonstrated." Trainees were schooled on the use of terrorist devices when they were sent back home by their CIA handlers. Most of the students came from Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Thailand, El Salvador, and Panama. The results of the CIA training was later seen in horrific terrorist attacks carried out in Nicaragua, Lebanon, Kosovo, Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Palestine, Somalia, and today, in Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. 

One of the most infamous graduates of Los Fresnos was Major Alexander Hernandez, who commanded the blood thirsty 3-16 Battalion death squad in Honduras.



The old CIA "terrorist bomb making" school at Los Fresnos, Texas

The FBI does not need to entrap and sting "useful idiots" like the two women from Queens in order to grab terrorists. The CIA headquarters entrance in Langley is well-marked along the George Washington Parkway, a 15-minute car ride from FBI headquarters in Washington. If the FBI is truly interested in bringing terrorists to justice, it can start by arresting CIA director John Brennan and then work its way down the ranks of the active agents and retirees and contractors.

Jeb Bush's CIA "NOC" work in Venezuela

April 8, 2015, 12:38 pm

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Jeb Bush's CIA "NOC" work in Venezuela

by Wayne Madsen
Former Florida Governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush may have thought he could pass himself off as "Hispanic" when he ticked off that ethnic option on his 2009 voter registration form but he was not able to easily pass himself off as a "banker" in Venezuela in the late 1970s.

One of the last things then-Central Intelligence Agency director George H. W. Bush did for his son Jeb, whose actual name is John Ellis Bush from which the "Jeb" is derived as an acronym, is to have him hired by the international division of the Texas Commerce Bank as a CIA "non-official cover" officer or "NOC." Texas Commerce Bank was an optimal cover for CIA activities. The bank was founded by the family of James Baker. All the elder Bush had to do was to call his close friend Baker to have his son hired by the bank's international division, the usual branch where CIA NOCs were placed within banks and investment firms. Other banks used by the CIA for NOC embeds included Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover.

Texas Commerce Bank, bought by Chemical Bank in 1987 and which is now part of J.P Morgan Chase, had the right pedigree to enable it to work closely with the CIA. In 1977, its board members included Lady Bird Johnson and the recently-defeated President Gerald Ford. In the 1980s, Kenneth Lay, who founded the CIA-connected Enron, became a board member of Texas Commerce Bank. Howard Hughes's CIA-linked Summa Corporation used Texas Commerce Bank to purchase a number of properties on the Las Vegas strip.

In 1977, a short time after his father left the CIA as director, Jeb, fluent in Spanish as a result of his time as an exchange student in Guadalajara, was sent, along with his Mexican wife Columba, to Caracas, Venezuela to work as a "branch manager" and "vice president" at the young age of 24. But Jeb was no ordinary "branch manager." He was, officially, Texas Commerce Bank's top point man in the Venezuelan capital and, unofficially, the CIA's main financial liaison to the Venezuelan oil industry and the Colombian narcotics cartels. Jeb would regularly report to his CIA "official cover" counterpart attached to the U.S. embassy in Caracas as a State Department "diplomat."

 
Jeb as a CIA "NOC" in Caracas for Texas Commerce Bank, owned by James Baker

Jeb helped lay the groundwork for the future Reagan-Bush administration's 1980s covert war against Nicaragua and leftist guerrillas in El Salvador by establishing banking and money laundering links between the CIA and the Medellin and Cali drug cartels. Jeb's friends in the Colombian cartels, particularly Medellin cartel boss Pablo Escobar, would helped finance the Nicaraguan contras in return for CIA-supplied weapons. While in Venezuela, Jeb cleverly managed to hide the Colombian cartel's drug revenues as oil industry revenues of "front" companies. Texas Commerce Bank was the bank of choice for Latin American drug cartels. It was later discovered to have stashed $7 million in drug profits for the Gulf cartel of Mexico.

Jeb ready to continue the CIA's lock on the White House

Baker sold Texas Commerce Bank's Houston skyscraper to the head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, in 1985. Bin Mahfouz was later identified as a key member of Saudi Arabia's support network for the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, which is noted in the still-classified 28 pages of U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on 9/11 intelligence failures. Bin Mahfouz, who lived in the River Oaks section of Houston near George H. W. Bush, died suddenly in 2009 at the age of 59. Bin Mahfouz, who was also an Irish citizen, threatened with confiscatory lawsuits any publication that reported his links to 9/11 and his family ties to Osama bin Laden.

Jeb had no problems with the Venezuelan government in providing financial support for the Colombian cartels. For much of Jeb's stay in Venezuela, the extremely corrupt Carlos Andres Perez, known as "CAP," was president. His extravagant spending using Venezuela's revenue from the recently-nationalized oil industry earned his government the nickname of "Saudi Venezuela." Although CAP nationalized the oil industry and created the Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) state-owned oil firm, he also was generous to American firms bidding for work with PdVSA. One of them was Bechtel Corporation, the firm of future Reagan-Bush cabinet members George P. Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. With a number of Bechtel employees in Venezuela, Jeb was not the only CIA "NOC" present in the country. But, he was the most influential.

During CAP's second term as president from 1989 to 1993, a young army officer named Hugo Chavez attempted to overthrow the corrupt CAP in a coup. Many of Venezuela's elite who Jeb befriended during his days as Langley's main NOC in Caracas later became involved with repeated CIA attempts to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Today, they and their progeny live in the Miami-Dade area, particularly in Doral, nicknamed "Doralzuela," and are among Jeb's strongest and most deep-pocketed political supporters.

In 1989, CAP crushed popular protests against his government by killing as many as 3000 protesters. The massacre is known as the "Caracazo" massacre. After leaving office the second time, Andres Perez was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 28 months in prison.

After leaving Venezuela in 1980 to help with his father's presidential and vice presidential campaigns, Jeb hooked up with Cuban-American Miami businessman Armando Codina, who had his own connections with CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in south Florida. It was Codina who helped Jeb make millions of dollars in the real estate business and eventually help launch him on his political career that took him to the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee. Jeb, as a principal of the Codina Group, was able to arrange the sale of high-priced condos and mansions in the Miami area to his elite friends in Venezuela, with Jeb receiving handsome sales commissions.

One of Jeb's close Miami associates was Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch. Bosch was a key figure in the CIA's Operation Condor, which was an alliance of Latin American military dictatorships that targeted leftist leaders for assassination across international borders. Bosch helped carry out the October 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455, which was en route from Barbados to Jamaica. All 73 passengers and crew were killed in the attack, including children and the Cuban fencing team.

The Cubana bombing plot was discussed at a 1976 meeting in Washington between Bosch; another Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles; and Michael Townley of the CIA. Jeb's father, the CIA director, was fully aware of the plot, as well as another plot to kill former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier. Letelier and Roni Moffitt, his American associate, were killed when their car exploded on Sheridan Circle in front of the Irish embassy in Washington on September 21, 1976, a few weeks before the Cubana airliner was blown out of the sky off Barbados.

Codina, Bosch, and Posada Carriles were all part of Jeb's inner circle of friends, which also included Cuban businessman Camilo Padreda, a former spy for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Hernandez Cartaya, both later indicted for systematically embezzling funds from the Jefferson Savings and Loan of McAllen, Texas. Padreda and Cartaya were also identified as CIA agents who helped skim funds from Jefferson and other S&Ls to fund the Nicaraguan contras. Jeb's work for the CIA in Caracas in 1977 came a few months after the CIA's worst terrorism spree in history, which also happened to coincide with George H. W. Bush's single year as CIA director.

After his father became Vice President, Jeb served as the liaison for the Nicaraguan contras and he arranged meetings between them and their supporters and the White House point man for covert assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels, one Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Oliver North. Another one of Jeb's Cuban cronies, Miguel Recarey, owner of Miami-based International Medical Center, an HMO, was awash in ill-gotten Medicare funds. Recarey and his brother, who had close ties to the CIA, were also funded by Florida Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., a co-conspirator in several CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and a suspected co-plotter in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A Jeb Bush presidency would maintain the CIA's lock on the White House. Barack Obama's and his family's CIA connections are a historical fact. George W. Bush ensured the CIA's control over the presidency for eight years and before him, Bill Clinton, who had his own links to the CIA's contra-cocaine network through Mena, Arkansas, has seen his Clinton Foundation benefit from a $1 million contribution from one of Jeb's old Cuban-Venezuelan friends, Gustavo Cisneros, the multi-billionaire "Berlusconi of Venezuela." Cisneros, now exiled in the Dominican Republic, was involved in the CIA's 2002 abortive coup against Chavez.

Obama displays "gringo" imperialism" South of the Border"

April 9, 2015, 4:06 pm

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Obama displays "gringo" imperialism "South of the Border"

by Wayne Madsen
President Obama is displaying typical American "gringo" imperialism during his attendance at the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) summit in Jamaica and the Summit of the Americas in Panama. In both cases, Obama has in tow Canada's arch-neocon prime minister Stephen Harper, the only other Western Hemisphere leader who has supported Obama's antagonistic attitude toward Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil, and other countries in the region.

While Obama has displayed diplomatic courage on Iran in facing down Israeli and American critics, as well as members of the U.S. Congress funded by large campaign donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he still remains in the clutches of right-wing Latin American billionaires and millionaires, whose interests are overseen by the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson. Jacobson, who displays the same undiplomatic traits as her gruff counterpart for European affairs Victoria Nuland, has managed to infuriate a number of progressive Latin American leaders.

The main issue for Jacobson is that many wealthy opponents of the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua live in exile in Florida, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Israel, and Panama and Jacobson sees it as her mission to ensure that these oligarchs return to their positions of control in their home countries. In some cases, a few of the most deep-pocketed AIPAC supporters are also among the ranks of Latin America's wealthiest right-wing business tycoons. Among the most noted opponents of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the current president, Nicolas Maduro, is the family of Venezuelan shopping mall magnate Salomon Cohen Levy. A number of Venezuelan Cohens, who consider themselves "cohanim" [Jewish priests], publicly damned Chavez when he was president for condemning the State of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians. The cohanim prayed that something bad would happen to Chavez in return. Chavez died in 2013 after contracting pelvic cancer. Many Venezuelan Jews claim that Chavez's death was caused by their God's vengeance that was brought down on the Venezuelan leader for his "insolence."

However, in preparation for the two summits in Jamaica and Panama, Jacobson walked back the U.S. policy that Venezuela posed a "threat" to U.S. national security. That statement, contained in a U.S. sanctions order against seven senior Venezuelan official, causes a tremendous backlash from Latin America, including from normally pro-U.S. Mexico and Colombia. Jacobson now insists the "national security threat" statement was merely a pro forma statement contained in all sanctions orders and not intended to mean that Venezuela posed some sort of existential threat to the United States.

Obama will be at the Jamaica and Panama summits with Suriname's leftist president Desi Bouterse, who son, Dino Bouterse, was indicted and imprisoned in New York after being kidnapped in Panama in 2013. Desi Bouterse is currently serving as the rotating chairman of CARICOM.

In a gross display of yanqui hubris, the younger Bouterse was accused of trying to assist Lebanon's Hezbollah, a valid political party, in establishing a base in Suriname. The U.S. ambassador to Suriname, Jay Anania, has been caught providing material assistance to Bouterse's political enemies in the country. The always-dubious U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, sought and received a 16-year prison sentence for Bouterse. One could imagine the tenseness of such an Obama-Bouterse encounter if the tables were turned and Bouterse's government held Malia Obama, the president's oldest daughter, in a Surinamese prison for a 16-year sentence based on bogus drug charges. Obama's hostile attitude toward Suriname arises from the Israeli government influence and Jerusalem's two main influence peddlers within the White House Latin America policy apparatus, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and Jacobson.

Obama will be meeting in Panama City with Cuban "human rights" activists attending the Summit of the Americas "civil society" forums. "Civil society" is a term used by George Soros-funded organizations to describe their interference in the domestic affairs of nations opposed to U.S. policies.

Former Central Intelligence Agency officer and assassin Felix Rodriguez, the man who led the team that assassinated Cuban revolutionary leader Ché Guevara in 1967, will be attending the civil society forums in Panama alongside the Cuban human rights activists. Cuba's official delegation has demanded that Rodriguez be expelled from the forums. Cuba's government has condemned the presence at the summit of "well known mercenaries."

CIA agent Felix Rodriques [left] with captured Cuban revolutionary leader Ché Guevara [right] in Bolivia in 1967 moments before Rodriguez led the firing squad that assassinated Guevara. Rodriguez will be the guest of honor at "civil society" forums organized by the George Soros and Roberta Jacobson crowd in tandem with the Summit of the Americas in Panama.

“well known” and paid “mercenaries”

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/UPDATED-Che-Guevara-Murderer-Attending-Summit-of-the-Americas-20150408-0010.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

well known” and paid “mercenaries”

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/UPDATED-Che-Guevara-Murderer-Attending-Summit-of-the-Americas-20150408-0010.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

The "civil society" activities are a personal project of Jacobson, who has also been agitating in Cuba among that nation's Jewish community. US Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor Alan Gross was imprisoned for espionage by Cuba for covertly installing computer and communications networks for Cuba's Jewish community. His release came amid the thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations.

Obama's bellicose Latin American foreign policy has been largely crafted by Jacobson and General John F. Kelly, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which is based in Miami where senior SOUTHCOM officers often conspire with the exiled right-wing oligarchs to formulate coups and street disturbances in their home countries.


Obama will have to deal with Suriname's president Desi Bouterse, whose son Dino [above in courtroom sketch] has been incarcerated in a U.S. prison for 16 years in a political trial over alleged Hezbollah influence in Suriname staged by the Israeli-influenced Southern District of New York court and U.S. Attorney's Office.

True to form, Obama will focus on military and security issues at CARICOM in Jamaica. Obama is pushing a meme that the Caribbean is a source for Islamist radicals traveling to the Middle East to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Just as with the fear-mongering over Hezbollah that landed Dino Bouterse in a U.S. prison, Obama's concentration on the ISIL threat in the Caribbean is baseless and intended on moving the Caribbean nations away from their dependence on Venezuela's PETROCARIBE discount oil supply operations and contracting for more expensive U.S. energy exports. General Kelly has also beat the drum on ISIL, claiming that Caribbean "sleeper cell" recruits, who make their money from illegal narcotics smuggling, have gone to the Middle East from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname. Kelly's, Jacobson's, and Obama's imaginary "Made in Hollywood" Caribbean-ISIL villain seems to have conveniently originated with Miami's influential Latin American Jewish and Israeli fear mongers.

There's more nepotism in 2016 POTUS race than you may know

April 11, 2015, 3:12 pm

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There's more nepotism in 2016 POTUS race than you may know
by Wayne Madsen
While a number of Democrats and Republicans grumble aloud about the 2016 presidential race turning out to be a replay of 1992's "Clinton versus Bush" campaign, which saw 2016 Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton's husband, Bill Clinton, defeat GOP frontrunner Jeb Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, for re-election, there is nepotism within the Republican primary race. The prospect of another Bush v. Clinton election prompted former Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley, himself a contender for the Democratic nod, to remark: "The presidency of the United States is not some crown to be passed between two families."

But nepotism does not only affect the presidential race but also, possibly, the vice presidential stakes. As previously reported by WMR and recently re-investigated by additional sources in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, on-and-off again GOP frontrunner, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, is a cousin of Jeb Bush.

Wisconsin insiders believe that the candidacies of Bush and Walker are designed to give the GOP faithful the false impression that there is a real contest within the Republican Party for the presidential nomination, when, in fact, Walker would settle for the vice presidential spot on a Bush ticket after giving Jeb Bush a spirited fight for the nomination. Such an outcome could ensure future control of the presidency and vice presidency, at least for one term, by members of the same extended family.
 
Cousins Scott Walker [left] and Jeb Bush [right] prepare to hoodwink GOP primary voters by pretending to run against one another for the nomination. Get ready for a Bush-Walker ticket ensuring the same extended family will control the White House for the next sixteen years

On May 4, 2012, WMR reported: "A cousin of Wisconsin's unpopular Republican Governor Scott Walker, who is running in a rare recall election, has informed WMR that Walker is a member of the Bush-Walker family of former Presidents George H. W. Bush and George Walker Bush.

Governor Walker's cousin does not support his cousin's gubernatorial bid in Wisconsin."

Our report added that Walker's cousin reported that Scott Walker, like George Herbert Walker and George Walker Bush, is allegedly a descendant of George Herbert Walker, a wealthy banker originally from St. Louis. Walker eventually became the President of the W. A. Harriman & Co. in New York. Walker's daughter Dorothy married Prescott Bush. Dorothy and Prescott were the parents of George H. W. Bush.

Our original report stated, "George Walker owned a number of railroads, including the Missouri Pacific Railroad, that employed Scott Walker's relatives throughout the West, including Colorado.

In 2010, Scott Walker jokingly referred to George W. Bush as his 'cousin' because of their close political views. However, Scott Walker, who was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado,  is a descendant of the same Walker-Bush clan that sired both Presidents Bush."

Scott Walker's ancestor is said to have been George Herbert ("Bert") Walker, the St. Louis-born railroad and banking magnate. The promontory at the Bush family Kennebunkport, Maine estate, Walker Point, got its name from its original owner, Bert Walker, Jeb Bush's great grandfather.

Bert Walker's daughter Dorothy married the son of Ohio steel executive Samuel Prescott Bush, future Connecticut Republican senator and father of George H. W. Bush, Prescott Bush. The Ohio-based Samuel Bush made a small fortune selling steel from his Buckeye Steel Castings Company to Remington Arms, owned by John D. Rockefeller's first cousin, Percy Rockefeller. The Buckeye steel was used to make the barrels for the rifles used in World War I.

Before and after World War II, Prescott, who worked for Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, provided financial services for a number of German war industry firms, including Hamburg-American Line, Union Banking Corporation, Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, Silesian-American Company, I.G. Farben, and Thyssen Industries.

Scott Walker's father, Llewellyn Walker, was a Baptist minister who moved from Colorado Springs to Iowa when Scott was 3-years old. The family ultimately moved to Wisconsin. Wikipedia, which excels at only providing partial biographies, conveniently states that two of Llewellyn Walker's grandparents were from Wales but makes no mention of his family ties to Bert Walker.


The railroad ties that bind: The Bush family-Scott Walker links via the Missouri Pacific Railroad, owned by Bert Walker and which employed Scott Walker's grandparents in Colorado.

There is also a family link between right-wing politician financiers Charles and David Koch and the Bushes. Dorothy ("Doro") Bush Koch, the sister of Jeb Bush, is married to Robert ("Bobby") Koch of the industrialist Koch family of Kansas. Although Bobby Koch worked for Democratic congressmen Tony Coelho and Richard Gephardt, he is now the head of the non-partisan Wine Institute, the lobbyists for the corporate wine industry.

Charles and David Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries, have given millions of dollars to Republican candidates, including Scott Walker and George W. and Jeb Bush. The founder of Koch Industries, Texas oil man Fred Koch, reportedly joined Prescott Bush in providing commercial assistance to Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Koch is said to have sold oil to Germany via Prussia's port of Königsberg, where a relative of his, Erich Koch, was Adolf Hitler's appointed local Prussian governor.

Fred Koch was also one of the founders of the Wisconsin-based far-right John Birch Society.


Scott Walker's parents: Back row, left to right: Pat and Llewellyn Walker with Scott Walker and younger brother David. Llew Walker is a direct descendant of the Walker railroad family that provided the Bush clan with its initial wealth

Speech at Summit of the Americas By Raul Castro Ruz

April 13, 2015, 3:33 pm

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Speech at Summit of the Americas
By Raul Castro Ruz

April 13, 2015 "ICH" -

His Excellency Juan Carlos Varela, President of the Republic of Panama;

Presidents and Prime Ministers;

Distinguished guests; 

I appreciate the solidarity of all Latin American and Caribbean countries that made possible Cuba’s participation in this hemispheric forum on equal footing, andI thank the President of the Republic of Panama for the kind invitation extended to us. I bring a fraternal embrace to the Panamanian people and to the peoples of all nations represented here.

The establishment of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) on December 2-3, 2011, in Caracas, opened the way to a new era in the history of Our America, which made clear its well-earned right to live in peace and develop as their peoples freely decide, and chart the course to a future of peace, development and integration based on cooperation, solidarity and the common will to preserve their independence, sovereignty and identity.

The ideals of Simón Bolívar on the creation of a “Grand American Homeland” were a source of inspiration to epic campaigns for independence.

In 1800, there was the idea of adding Cuba to the North American Union to mark the southern boundary of the extensive empire. The 19^thcentury witnessed the emergence of such doctrines as the Manifest Destiny, with the purpose of dominating the Americas and the world, and the notion of the ‘ripe fruit’, meaning Cuba’s inevitable gravitation to the American Union, which looked down on the rise and evolution of a genuine rationale conducive to emancipation.

Later on, through wars, conquests and interventions that expansionist and dominating force stripped Our America of part of its territory and expanded as far as the Rio Grande.

After long and failing struggles, José Martí organized the “necessary war”, and created the Cuban Revolutionary Party to lead that war and to eventually found a Republic “with all and for the good of all” with the purpose of achieving “the full dignity of man.”

With an accurate and early definition of the features of his times, Martí committed to the duty “of timely preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America.”

To him, Our America was that of the Creole and the original peoples, the black and the mulatto, the mixed-race and working America that must join the cause of the oppressed and the destitute. Presently, beyond geography, this ideal is coming to fruition.

One hundred and seventeen years ago, on April 11, 1898, the President of the United States of America requested Congressional consent for military intervention in the independence war already won with rivers of Cuban blood, and that legislative body issued a deceitful Joint Resolution recognizing the independence of the Island “de facto and de jure”. Thus, they entered as allies and seized the country as an occupying force.

Subsequently, an appendix was forcibly added to Cuba’s Constitution, the Platt Amendment that deprived it of sovereignty, authorized the powerful neighbor to interfere in the internal affairs, and gave rise to Guantánamo Naval Base, which still holds part of our territory without legal right. It was in that period that the Northern capital invaded the country, and there were two military interventions and support for cruel dictatorships.

At the time, the prevailing approach to Latin America was the “gunboat policy” followed by the “Good Neighbor” policy. Successive interventions ousted democratic governments and in twenty countries installed terrible dictatorships, twelve of these simultaneously and mostly in South America, where hundreds of thousands were killed. President Salvador Allende left us the legacy of his undying example.

It was precisely 13 years ago that a coup d’état staged against beloved President Hugo Chavez Frías was defeated by his people. Later on, an oil coup would follow.

On January 1^st, 1959, sixty years after the U.S. troops entered Havana, the Cuban Revolution triumphed and the Rebel Army commanded by Fidel Castro Ruz arrived in the capital.

On April 6, 1960, barely one year after victory, Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory drafted a wicked memorandum, declassified tens of years later, indicating that “The majority of Cubans support Castro […] An effective political opposition does not exist […]; the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support [to the government] is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship […] to weaken the economic life of Cuba […] denying it money and supplies to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

We have endured severe hardships. Actually, 77% of the Cuban people was born under the harshness of the blockade, but our patriotic convictions prevailed. Aggression increased resistance and accelerated the revolutionary process. Now, here we are with our heads up high and our dignity unblemished.

When we had already proclaimed socialism and the people had fought in the Bay of Pigs to defend it, President Kennedy was murdered, at the exact time when Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, was receiving his message seeking to engage Cuba in a dialogue.

After the Alliance for Progress, and having paid our external debt several times over while unable to prevent its constant growth, our countries were subjected to a wild and globalizing neoliberalism, an expression of imperialism at the time that left the region dealing with a lost decade.

Then, the proposal of a “mature hemispheric partnership” resulted in the imposition of the Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA), –linked to the emergence of these Summits– that would have brought about the destruction of the economy, sovereignty and common destiny of our nations, if it had not been derailed at Mar del Plata in 2005 under the leadership of Presidents Kirchner, Chavez and Lula. The previous year, Chavez and Fidel had brought to life the Bolivarian Alternative known today as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America.

Excellencies;

We have expressed to President Barack Obama our disposition to engage in a respectful dialogue and work for a civilized coexistence between our states while respecting our profound differences.

I welcome as a positive step his recent announcement that he will soon decide on Cuba’s designation in a list of countries sponsor of terrorism, a list in which it should have never been included.

Up to this day, the economic, commercial and financial blockade is implemented against the Island with full intensity causing damages and scarcities that affect our people and becoming the main obstacle to the development of our economy. The fact is that it stands in violation of International Law, and its extraterritorial scope disrupts the interests of every State.

We have publicly expressed to President Obama, who was also born under the blockade policy and inherited it from 10 former Presidents when he took office, our appreciation for his brave decision to engage the U.S. Congress in a debate to put an end to such policy.

This and other issues should be resolved in the process toward the future normalization of bilateral relations.

As to us, we shall continue working to update the Cuban economic model with the purpose of improving our socialism and moving ahead toward development and the consolidation of the achievements of a Revolution that has set to itself the goal of “conquering all justice.”

Esteemed colleagues;

Venezuela is not, and it cannot be, a threat to the national security of a superpower like the United States. We consider it a positive development that the U.S. President has admitted it.

I should reaffirm our full, determined and loyal support to the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to the legitimate government and civilian-military alliance headed by President Nicolas Maduro, and to the Bolivarian and chavista people of that country struggling to pursue their own path while confronting destabilizing attempts and unilateral sanctions that should be lifted; we demand the repeal of the Executive Order, an action that our Community would welcome as a contribution to dialogue and understanding in the hemisphere.

We shall continue encouraging the efforts of the Republic of Argentina to recover the Falklands, the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and supporting its legitimate struggle in defense of financial sovereignty.

We shall maintain our support for the actions of the Republic of Ecuador against the transnational companies causing ecological damages to its territory and trying to impose blatantly unfair conditions.

I wish to acknowledge the contribution of Brazil, and of President Dilma Rouseff, to the strengthening of regional integration and the development of social policies that have brought progress and benefits to extensive popular sectors, the same that the thrust against various leftist governments of the region is trying to reverse.

We shall maintain our unwavering support for the Latin American and Caribbean people of Puerto Rico in its determination to achieve self-determination and independence, as the United Nations Decolonization Committee has ruled tens of times.

We shall also keep making our contribution to the peace process in Colombia.

We should all multiply our assistance to Haiti, not only through humanitarian aid but also with resources that help in its development, and, in the same token, support a fair and deferential treatment of the Caribbean countries in their economic relations as well as reparations for damages brought on them by slavery and colonialism.

We are living under threat of huge nuclear arsenals that should be removed, and are running out of time to counteract climate change. Threats to peace keep growing and conflicts spreading out.

As President Fidel Castro has said “[…] the main causes rest with poverty and underdevelopment, and with the unequal distribution of wealth and knowledge prevailing in the world. It cannot be forgotten that current poverty and underdevelopment are the result of conquest, colonization, slavery and plundering by colonial powers in most of the planet, the emergence of imperialism and the bloody wars for a new division of the world. Humanity should be aware of what they have been and should be no more. Today, our species has accumulated sufficient knowledge, ethical values and scientific resources to move forward to a historical era of true justice and humanism. Nothing of what exists today in economic and political terms serves the interests of Humanity. It cannot be sustained. It must be changed,” he concluded.

Cuba shall continue advocating the ideas for which our people have taken on enormous sacrifices and risks, fighting alongside the poor, the unemployed and the sick without healthcare; the children forced to live on their own, to work or be submitted to prostitution; those going hungry or discriminated; the oppressed and the exploited who make up the overwhelming majority of the world population.

Financial speculation, the privileges of Bretton Wood, and the unilateral removal of the gold standard have grown increasingly suffocating. We need a transparent and equitable financial system.

It is unacceptable that less than ten big corporations, mostly American, determine what is read, watched or listened to worldwide. The Internet should be ruled by an international, democratic and participatory governance, particularly concerning its content. The militarization of cyberspace, and the secret and illegal useof computer systems to attack other States are equally unacceptable. We shall not be dazzled or colonized again.

Mister President;

It is my opinion that hemispheric relations need to undergo deep changes, particularly in the areas of politics, economics and culture, so that, on the basis of International Law and the exercise of self-determination and sovereign equality, they can focus on the development of mutually beneficial partnerships and cooperation in the interest of all our nations and the objectives proclaimed.

The adoption in January 2014, during the Second Summit of CELAC in Havana, of the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Peace Zone made a transcendental contribution to that end, marked by Latin American and Caribbean unity in diversity.

This is evident in the progress we are making toward genuinely Latin American and Caribbean integration processes through CELAC, UNASUR, CARICOM, MERCOSUR, ALBA-TCP, SICA and the ACS, which underline our growing awareness of the necessity to work in unison in order to ensure our development.

Through that Proclamation we have committed ourselves “to have differences between nations resolved peacefully, through dialogue and negotiation, and other ways consistent with International Law.”

Living in peace, and engaging in mutual cooperation to tackle challenges and resolve problems that, after all, are affecting and will affect us all, is today a pressing need.

As the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Peace Zone sets forth, “the inalienable right of every State to choose its political, economic, social and cultural system, as an essential condition to secure peaceful coexistence between nations” should be respected.

Under that Proclamation we committed to observe our “obligation to not interfere, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of any other State, and to observe the principles of national sovereignty, equality of rights and free determination of the peoples,” and to respect “the principles and standards of International Law […] and the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter.”

That historical document urges “all member states of the International Community to fully respect this Declaration in its relations with the CELAC member States.”

We now have the opportunity, all of us here, as the Proclamation also states, of learning “to exercise tolerance and coexist in peace as good neighbors.”

There are substantial differences, yes, but also commonalities which enable us to cooperate making it possible to live in this world fraught with threats to peace and to the survival of the human species.

What is it that prevents cooperation at a hemispheric scale in facing climate change?

Why is it that the countries of the two Americas cannot fight together against terrorism, drug-trafficking and organized crime without politically biased positions?

Why can we not seek together the necessary resources to provide the hemisphere with schools, hospitals, employment, and to advance in the eradication of poverty?

Would it not be possible to reduce inequity in the distribution of wealth and infant mortality rates, to eliminate hunger and preventable diseases, and to eradicate illiteracy?

Last year, we established hemispheric cooperation to confront and prevent Ebola, and the countries of the two Americas made a concerted effort. This should stimulate our efforts toward greater achievements.

Cuba, a small country deprived of natural resources, that has performed in an extremely hostile atmosphere, has managed to attain the full participation of its citizens in the nation’s political and social life; with universal and free healthcare and education services; a social security system ensuring that no one is left helpless; significant progress in the creation of equal opportunities and in the struggle against all sorts of discrimination; the full exercise of the rights of children and women; access to sports and culture; and, the right to life and to public safety.

Despite scarcities and challenges, we abide by the principle of sharing what we have. Currently, 65 thousand Cuban collaborators are working in 89 countries, basically in the areas of healthcare and education, while 68 thousand professionals and technicians from 157 countries have graduated in our Island, 30 thousand of them in the area of healthcare.

If Cuba has managed to do this with very little resources, think of how much more the hemisphere could do with the political will to pool its efforts to help the neediest countries.

Thanks to Fidel and the heroic Cuban people, we have come to this Summit to honor Martí’s commitment, after conquering freedom with our own hands “proud of Our America, to serve it and to honor it […] with the determination and the capacity to contribute to see it loved for its merits and respected for its sacrifices.”

Thank you.

Color revolution being re-primed in Macedonia by Wayne Madsen

April 27, 2015, 4:26 am

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 Color revolution being re-primed in Macedonia

In an effort to throw up a road block to the Russian "Turkish Stream" pipeline that is to bring natural gas from Russia through Turkey and into Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary, the Obama administration has set about to foment another "color revolution," this time in Macedonia.

The strategy of the Obama/George Soros interventionists is to bury the Macedonian government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski with unfounded charges that it engaged in massive wiretapping of some 20,000 Macedonians, including leaders of the opposition. The source of the transcripts of intercepted communications of Macedonian citizens allegedly came from the former chief of the Macedonian intelligence service,  Zoran Verushevsky, who may have had assistance in collecting the wiretaps from his friends in British and U.S. intelligence. The intercepts have been used by Social Democratic opposition leader Zoran Zaev, a favorite of the Soros network and the U.S., to hammer Gruevski for allegedly eavesdropping on the opposition. Somehow, Zaev gained possession of copies of the intercepts, which he then used to attack the government.

The Balkans destabilization strategy has also seen the rise of Albanian nationalist irredentism along the fragile Kosovo-Albanian border with a recent attack on a Macedonian police border post at Gošince by 40 armed men wearing the insignia of the outlawed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). That action came at the same time that Kosovo's Foreign Minister, Hashim Thaci, the former leader of the KLA, defied threats by Serbian authorities to arrest him for terrorist charges brought in 2007 and visit Belgrade to attend a conference. The arrest of the Kosovo foreign minister would set the stage for a NATO/EU confrontation with Serbia, another critical partner in not only the Turkish Stream pipeline but the Chinese-funded Balkan railway part of the Silk Road project that will link the Greek port of Piraeus to Budapest through Macedonia and Serbia.

Reappearing on the Macedonian side of the Kosovo border: the patches of the outlawed Kosovo Liberation Army, once led by Kosovo foreign minister Hashim Thaci who once "sexually serviced" U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in return for U.S. recognition of Kosovo independence. Perhaps the leaders of Kurdistan, Somaliland, Baluchistan, and other aspirant states should all line up to provide Albright with "drilling services" in exchange for independence. After all, it worked for South Sudan with Albright's god-daughter Susan Rice.

The attack by the restored KLA on the Macedonian border post, where Macedonian police officers were held hostage before the Albanian raiders returned to Kosovo, could not have been possible without the knowledge of Kosovo's military protector, NATO, which operates its largest military base in Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. In 2001, when KLA forces, allied with Macedonian Albanian nationalists, fought Macedonian forces in the town of
Aračinovo, Macedonia, forces of the U.S. private military firm, Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI) were involved with both sides. The Ochrid Agreements saw Macedonia grant generous autonomy rights to its Albanian population in an effort to keep the violence that wracked Kosovo and Bosnia from spilling over into generally peaceful Macedonia. The attempt by the Soros network to foment violence within the Albanian community is a clear attempt to pry away the Albanian party, theDemocratic Union (DUI) led by Ali Ahmeti, from the six year-old VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition government led by Gruevski.

The U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, Jess Baily, has made waves in Skopje by publicly supporting the putsch being called for by former Social Democratic prime minister and president Branko Crvenkovski, a native of Sarajevo, Bosnia who has been at the forefront of calling on Macedonian youth and college students to hit the streets of Skopje to stage a color revolution against the democratically-elected government of Gruevski. If all this sounds familiar, it should. It was U.S. ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt who, working with his boss, State Department European Affairs Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, who conspired with Ukrainian opposition leaders in late 2013 and early 2014 to organize the Euromaidan protest that eventually saw the democratically-elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, toppled from power and the subsequent outbreak of the Ukrainian civil war.

By stoking opposition desires for a similar color revolution in Macedonia, Baily is playing with fire by also fomenting problems by using Albanian nationalists. Such a combination would start a violent civil war that would rival that between Kiev and the Russian population of eastern Ukraine. Macedonian and Serbian Slavs pitted against Albanians in Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia's Sanjak region would not only bring another violent war to the Balkan peninsula but would also spell the end of the Turkish Stream pipeline through the Balkans and the Chinese-financed rail link from Greece to Budapest. The Balkans would remain a NATO frontline war zone under the total domination of the United States and European Union. Two Albanian political leaders, Prime Minister Edi Rama and former prime minister Prime Minister Sali Berisha have spoken out in favor of a "Greater Albania," consisting of Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and parts of Greece. The message for the Balkans is clear: if it continues to entertain the Turkish Stream pipeline plans and the Chinese rail project, the Albanians will rise up and resort to civil war to protect NATO's and the EU's domination over the peninsula. The Albanians, it should be noted, were the most loyal people of the Balkans in providing support for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

After Verushevksy was arrested for being the source of the communications intercepts and Zaev was caught with his passport while attempting to flee Macedonia, the Soros-financed color revolution teams switched strategies to foment problems with the country's large Albanian minority, representing a third of the population. Today, Macedonia teeters on the brink of renewed ethic violence, with Nuland and her gang of neo-conservative Zionists waiting anxiously for the beginning of a new Balkans body count.

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A tale of two Jewish-Americans killed in a U.S. drone strike by Wayne Madsen

April 27, 2015, 4:35 am

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A tale of two Jewish-Americans killed in a U.S. drone strike

On April 23, President Obama made the startling announcement that three U.S. citizens, Warren Weinstein, a Jewish-American contractor for the ever-suspicious U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); frequent Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn (Pearlman), a Jewish convert to Christianity and then to Islam; along with a Muslim-American Al Qaeda leader named Ahmed Farouq, were killed in a January 2015 U.S. drone strike launched against an Al Qaeda compound on the Afghan-Pakistani border in North Waziristan. Obama did not say whether the deaths resulted from one or more operations, although it was revealed that two drone strikes were launched against suspected Al Qaeda targets in January. The White House issued a statement saying, "neither [Gadahn/Pearlman and Farouq] was specifically targeted, and we did not have information indicating their presence at the sites of these operations." Obama admitted that the information on the January deaths of the three Americans was classified until he decided to release the news of the operation or operations that killed them.

USAID contractor Warren Weinstein, a fluent Urdu speaker from Rockville, Maryland, worked for J. E. Austin Associates, Inc. of Arlington, Virginia. Little is known about the firm, which chose not to make any public statement upon Obama informing the nation that Weinstein, along with Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, were accidentally killed in the U.S. strike. Weinstein was taken captive from his Lahore compound on August 13, 2011, four days prior to his return to the United States. Weinstein's capture came two years after Alan Gross, a fellow Maryland Jewish contractor for USAID, Alan Gross, was arrested and imprisoned in Cuba for carrying out espionage associate with installing an Internet system for Cuba's Jewish community. Gross, who lived in Potomac, Maryland, worked for Development Alternatives, Inc. of Bethesda, a USAID contractor, about which, as is the case with J. E. Austin Associates, relatively little is known. Both firms are believed to have connections to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Weinstein's widow criticized the U.S. government for failing to keep hostages' families informed about the status of kidnapped Americans. In a Christmas 2013 video, Weinstein made a direct appeal to Obama for his release: "Nine years ago, I came to Pakistan to help my government, and I did so at a time when most Americans would not come here. And now, when I need my government, it seems that I have been totally abandoned . . ."

For Weinstein to have ended up in captivity with Gadahn/Pearlman must have seemed surreal. Weinstein, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Togo and Ivory Coast may have had contact with Gadahn, who was termed the chief propagandist for Al Qaeda. As reported by WMR on September 9, 2007, many of the videotaped speeches of Osama Bin Laden were written by Gadahn. Los Angeles native Gadahn was born Adam Pearlman, (aka Azzam the American), and ultimately became the number three man in charge of Al Qaeda. Gadahn/Pearlman's grandfather, Carl K. Pearlman, was a member of the board of the Anti Defamation League (ADL), an important component of the Israeli Lobby in the United States.
 
The man purported to be Osama Bin Laden [left] with his cable TV remote shortly before U.S. forces shot him to death in a raid in Pakistan. Weinstein [right] in December 2013 videotape appeal to Obama for his release. "Bin Laden" and Weinstein apparently had the same taste in hats.

Carl Pearlman, a prominent California urologist, was also the chairman of the Orange County, California "Bonds for Israel" campaign and the United Jewish Welfare Fund.

Curiously, a list of Al Qaeda officials published by the United Nations in 2007, omitted Gadahn/Pearlman from the roster even though he was then considered the number three man in charge of the terrorist group.

A number of purported Bin Laden video and audio tapes, with some of the videotapes showing an almost motionless Bin Laden, were, according to U.S. intelligence sources written entirely by Gadahn/Pearlman. The tapes were exclusively provided to the corporate media by the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, a Washington, DC-based research institute with links to Israeli intelligence.

The classic "fly on the wall" may have heard some interesting conversations between Weinstein, the Urdu-speaking aid worker who dressed in Pakistani garb, and Gadahn/Pearlman, the Jewish convert to Wahhabist Islam who served as Bin Laden's main speechwriter. Although the White House is indicating Gadahn/Pearlman was killed in a drone attack, there have been reports in the past about his death following U.S. attacks. Nevertheless, what Gadahn/Pearlman may have told Weinstein about 9/11, the alleged Bin Laden "death" in Abbottabad, and Gadahn/Pearlman's connections with SITE may have resulted in a decision by America's chief drone attack official, the CIA's John Brennan, to eliminate all three Americans lest some unsavory information end up in the public domain.

May 2-3, 2011 -- Bin Laden: Body buried at sea, shoddy proof of death -- another "Made in Hollywood" performance from "Ari Gold"

The Day After Damascus Falls: the Beginning of the End for the American Republic By Robert Parry

May 1, 2015, 1:30 pm

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The Day After Damascus Falls: the Beginning of the End for the American Republic

By Robert Parry

If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets the same fate as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, much of Official Washington would rush out to some chic watering hole to celebrate – one more “bad guy” down, one more “regime change” notch on the belt. But the day after Damascus falls could mark the beginning of the end for the American Republic.

As Syria would descend into even bloodier chaos – with an Al-Qaeda affiliate or its more violent spin-off, the Islamic State, the only real powers left – the first instinct of American politicians and pundits would be to cast blame, most likely at President Barack Obama for not having intervened more aggressively earlier.

A favorite myth of Official Washington is that Syrian “moderates” would have prevailed if only Obama had bombed the Syrian military and provided sophisticated weapons to the rebels.

Though no such “moderate” rebel movement ever existed – at least not in any significant numbers – that reality is ignored by all the “smart people” of Washington. It is simply too good a talking point to surrender. The truth is that Obama was right when he told  New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in August 2014 that the notion of a “moderate” rebel force that could achieve much was “always … a fantasy.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in front of a poster of his father, Hafez al-Assad.

As much fun as the “who lost Syria” finger-pointing would be, it would soon give way to the horror of what would likely unfold in Syria with either Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front or the spin-off Islamic State in charge – or possibly a coalition of the two with Al-Qaeda using its new base to plot terror attacks on the West while the Islamic State engaged in its favorite pastime, those YouTube decapitations of infidels – Alawites, Shiites, Christians, even some descendants of the survivors from Turkey’s Armenian genocide a century ago who fled to Syria for safety.

Such a spectacle would be hard for the world to watch and there would be demands on President Obama or his successor to “do something.” But realistic options would be few, with a shattered and scattered Syrian army no longer a viable force capable of driving the terrorists from power.

The remaining option would be to send in the American military, perhaps with some European allies, to try to dislodge Al-Qaeda and/or the Islamic State. But the prospects for success would be slim. The goal of conquering Syria – and possibly re-conquering much of Iraq as well – would be costly, bloody and almost certainly futile.

The further diversion of resources and manpower from America’s domestic needs also would fuel the growing social discontent in major U.S. cities, like what is now playing out in Baltimore where disaffected African-American communities are rising up in anger against poverty and the police brutality that goes with it. A new war in the Middle East would accelerate America’s descent into bankruptcy and a dystopian police state.

The last embers of the American Republic would fade. In its place would be endless war and a single-minded devotion to security. The National Security Agency already has in place the surveillance capabilities to ensure that any civil resistance could be thwarted.

Can This Fate Be Avoided?

But is there a way to avoid this grim fate? Is there a way to wind this scenario back to some point before this outcome becomes inevitable? Can the U.S. political/media system – as corrupt and cavalier as it is – find a way to avert such a devastating foreign policy disaster?

To do so would require Official Washington to throw off old dependencies, such as its obeisance to the Israel Lobby, and old habits, such as its reliance on manipulative PR to control the American people, patterns deeply engrained in the political process.

At least since the Reagan administration – with its “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” fascination via “public diplomacy” and “perception management” – the tendency has been to designate some foreign leader as the latest new villain and then whip up public hysteria in support of a “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of Perception Management.”]

In the 1980s, we saw the use of these “black hat/white hat” exaggerations in Nicaragua, where  President Ronald Reagan deemed President Daniel Ortega “the dictator in designer glasses” as Reagan’s propagandists depicted Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” and the CIA-trained Contra “freedom fighters” the “moral equal of the Founding Fathers.”

And, since Ortega and the Sandinistas were surely not the embodiment of all virtue, it was hard to put Reagan’s black-and-white depiction into the proper shades of gray. To make the effort opened you to charges of being a “Sandinista apologist.” Similarly, any negative news about the Contras – such as their tendencies to rape, murder, torture and smuggle drugs – was sternly suppressed with offending U.S. journalists targeted for career retaliation.

The pattern set by Reagan around Nicaragua and other Central American conflicts became the blueprint for how to carry out these post-Vietnam War propaganda operations. Afterwards came Panama’s “madman” Manuel Noriega in 1989 and Iraq’s “worse than Hitler” Saddam Hussein in 1990-91. Each American war was given its own villainous lead actor.

In 2002-03, Hussein was brought back to reprise his “worse-than-Hitler” role in a post-9/11 sequel. His new evil-doing involved sharing nuclear weapons and other WMD with Al-Qaeda so the terror group could inflict even worse havoc on the innocent United States. Anyone who questioned Official Washington’s WMD “group think” was dismissed as a “Saddam apologist.”

Amid this enforced consensus, there was great joy when the U.S.-led invasion overthrew Hussein’s government and captured him. “We got him,” U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer exulted when Hussein was pulled from a “spider hole” and was soon heading to the gallows.

However, some of the triumphal excitement wore off when the U.S. occupation forces failed to discover the promised caches of WMD. Hussein’s ouster also didn’t produce the sunny new day that America’s neocons had promised for Iraq and the Middle East. Instead, Al-Qaeda, which had not existed under Hussein’s secular regime, found fertile soil to plant its “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” a radical Sunni movement which pioneered a particularly graphic form of terrorist violence.

That brutality, often directed at Shiites, was met with brutality in kind from Iraq’s new Shiite leadership, touching off a sectarian civil war. Meanwhile, the war against the U.S. occupation turned into a messy struggle between America’s high-tech military and Iraq’s low-tech resistance.

Lessons Unlearned

What Americans should have learned from Iraq was that just because the neocons and their liberal-interventionist friends identify a foreign “bad guy” – and then exaggerate his faults – doesn’t mean that his violent removal is the best idea. It might actually lead to something worse. There is wisdom in the doctor’s oath, “first, do no harm,” and there’s truth in the old warning that before you tear down a wall, you should ask why someone built it in the first place.

However, in the propaganda world of Official Washington, a different lesson was learned: that it is easy to create designated villains and no one of importance will dare challenge the wisdom of removing that villain through another “regime change.”

Instead of the neocons and their liberal helpers being held accountable and removed from the corridors of power, they entrenched themselves more deeply inside the U.S. government, mainstream media and big-name think tanks. They also found new allies among the self-righteous “human rights” community espousing the theory of “responsibility to protect” or “R2P.”

Despite President Obama’s election – partly driven by the American people’s revulsion over the neocon excesses during President George W. Bush’s administration – there was no real purge of the neocons and their accomplices. Indeed, Obama kept in place Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the neocons’ beloved Gen. David Petraeus while installing neocon-lite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Around Obama at the White House were prominent R2Pers such as Samantha Power.

So, although Obama may have personally favored a more realist-driven foreign policy that would deal with the world as it is, not as one might dream it to be, he never took control of his own administration, passively accepting the rise of a new generation of interventionists who continued depicting designated foreign villains as evil and rejecting any discouraging word that “regime change” might actually unleash even worse evil.

In 2011, the R2Pers, as the neocons’ junior partners, largely initiated the U.S.-orchestrated “regime change” in Libya, which starred Muammar Gaddafi in a returning role as “the world’s most dangerous man.” All the old terror charges against him were resurrected, including some like the Pam Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 that he very likely didn’t do. But, again, no one wanted to quibble because that would make you a “Gaddafi apologist.”

So, to the gleeful delight of Secretary of State Clinton, Gaddafi was overthrown, captured, beaten, sodomized with a knife, and then murdered. Clinton made no effort to conceal her glee. “We came, we saw, he died,” she joked at the news of his murder (although it was not clear that she knew all the grisly details at the time).

But Gaddafi’s demise did not bring Nirvana to Libya. Indeed, Gaddafi’s warning about the need to attack Islamic terrorists operating in eastern Libya – his military offensive that led to the R2P demand that Obama intervene militarily to stop Gaddafi – proved to be prophetic.

Extremists grabbed control of much of Libya. They overran the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing the U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel. A civil war has now spread anarchy and mayhem across Libya and nearby countries.

Libya also now has its own branch of the Islamic State, which videotaped its beheadings of Coptic Christians along a beach on the Mediterranean Sea, a sickening sign of what could be expected after a possible Syrian “regime change” next. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The US Hand in Libya’s Tragedy.”]

On to Ukraine

While U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and other R2Pers took the lead in provoking the Libyan fiasco, neocon holdovers demonstrated their own “regime change” skills by turning a pedestrian political dispute in Ukraine – about how fast to build new economic ties to Europe while maintaining old ones with Russia – into not only a civil war in Ukraine but a revival of the Cold War between the United States and Russia.

In the Ukraine case, the neocons made elected President Viktor Yanukovych wear the black hat with Russian President Vladimir Putin fitted for even a bigger black hat. So, as Yanukovych and Putin were scripted as the new “bad guys,” the anti-Yanukovych protesters and rioters at the Maidan square were made into the white-hatted “good guys.”

Much as with the Sandinistas and the Contras in the 1980s, this dichotomy required assigning all evil to Yanukovych and Putin while absolving the Maidan crowd of all sins, including the key role played by neo-Nazi militias in both the Feb. 22, 2014 coup and the subsequent civil war. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.”]

As the Ukraine crisis has played out, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. news media have consistently placed all blame for the violence on Yanukovych – lodging the dubious charge that he had snipers kill both police and protesters on Feb. 20, 2014 – or on Putin – fingering him for the still-unsolved case of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down on July 17, 2014.

Evidence that suggests that right-wing Ukrainian elements were responsible for those pivotal events is sloughed off with anyone daring to dispute the conventional wisdom deemed a “Putin apologist.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.”]

Meanwhile, starting in 2011, the neocons and the R2Pers were both active in pushing for the overthrow of Syria’s President Assad, who – like all the other “bad guys” – has been made into a one-dimensional villain brutalizing innocent “moderates” who stand for all that is good and right in the world.

The fact that the anti-Assad opposition has always included Sunni extremists and terrorists drawing support from Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian Sunni Persian Gulf states is another inconvenient truth that usually gets kept out of the mainstream narrative.

Though it’s surely true that both sides in the Syrian civil war have engaged in atrocities, the neocon-R2P storyline – for much of the civil war – was to consistently blame Assad and to conveniently absolve the rebels. Thus, on Aug. 21, 2013, when a mysterious sarin gas attack killed several hundred people in a Damascus suburb, the rush to judgment blamed Assad’s forces, despite logic and evidence that it was more likely a provocation by rebel extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Fact-Resistant ‘Group Think’ on Syria.”]

Though it was less clear in August 2013, it soon became obvious that the most effective rebel fighters were Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State, which had evolved from the hyper-violent “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” into the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” before adopting the name, “Islamic State.” By September 2013, many of the U.S.-armed and CIA-trained fighters of the Free Syrian Army had thrown in their lot with either Nusra Front or Islamic State. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”]

No Self-Criticism

But the opinion leaders of Official Washington are not exactly self-critical when they misread a foreign crisis. To explain why the beloved Syrian “moderates” joined forces with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, the neocons and the R2Pers blamed Obama for not intervening militarily earlier to achieve “regime change” against Assad.

In other words, no lessons were learned from the experiences in Iraq and Libya – that “regime change” is a dangerous strategy that fails to take into account the complexities of the countries where the United States decides to overthrow governments.

The same unlearned lesson should have applied to Ukraine, a strategically important nation to Russia and one in which much of the population is ethnic Russian. But there neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland brushed aside the possibility of a costly showdown with Russia – a conflict that could potentially evolve into a nuclear conflagration – in order to pursue the “regime change” model.

While Ukraine today remains engulfed in chaos – the same as “regime change” experiments Iraq and Libya – the most potentially catastrophic “regime change” could come in Syria. The neocons and the R2Pers – as well as the mainstream U.S. media – remain set on ousting Assad, a goal also shared by Israel, Saudi Arabia and other hard-line Sunni states.

For his part, President Obama seems incapable of making the tough decisions that would avert a Syrian victory by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. That’s because to help salvage the Assad regime – as the preferable alternative to transforming Syria into the bedlam of “terror central” – would require cooperating with Iran and Russia, Assad’s two most important backers.

That, in turn, would infuriate the neocons, the R2Pers and the mainstream media. Obama would face a rebellion across Official Washington, where the debating points regarding “who lost Syria” are more valuable than taking realistic actions to protect vital American interests.

Obama would also have to face down both Saudi Arabia and Israel, something he does not seem capable of doing, especially as he tries to salvage an international agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program to peaceful purposes only – when Saudi Arabia and Israel want to enlist the U.S. military in another “regime change” war in Iran.

Indeed, the recent decision by the Saudi-Israeli alliance to go on the offensive against what it deems Iranian “proxies” is possibly the major reason why the United States is incapable of taking action to avert what may be an impending Al-Qaeda/Islamic State victory in Syria. Between Saudi Arabia’s power over finance and energy and Israel’s political and media clout, these “strange-bedfellow” allies wield enormous influence over Official Washington. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance?”]

This alliance is now entangling the United States in ancient Sunni-Shiite rivalries dating back to the Seventh Century. Saudi Arabia, Israel and their many U.S. backers are gluing black hats on Shiite-ruled Iran and its allies while adjusting white hats on the Saudi royals and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has unleashed the potent Israel Lobby to get Official Washington in line.

Israel also has intensified its airstrikes inside Syria, bombing targets associated with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia which is supporting the Assad regime. Israel rationalizes these attacks as designed to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining sophisticated weaponry but the practical effect is to weaken the forces battling Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, along with Turkey and some Persian Gulf states, has stepped up support for the Sunni Islamists battling Assad’s army, thus explaining the recent surge of new recruits and improved fighting capabilities of the rebels.

Yemen’s Suffering

In another front in this Sunni-Shiite regional war, Saudi Arabia – deploying sophisticated American warplanes – continues to pummel neighboring Yemen where Houthi rebels, belonging to a Shiite offshoot, have gained control of the capital Sanaa and other major cities.

On Tuesday, Saudi jets bombed Sanaa’s airport to prevent an Iranian humanitarian aid flight from landing, but the destruction also made the runway unusable for other supplies desperately needed by the Yemeni people. While the Saudis prevented this aid from the air, the U.S. Navy has mounted what amounts to a blockade at sea, turning back nine Iranian ships last weekend because of unconfirmed suspicions that weapons might be hidden in the food and medicine.

The combination of these interdictions is creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the poorest nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Navy, which likes to call itself “a global force for good,” has, in effect, been drawn into a strategy of starving the Yemeni people into submission as just more collateral damage in the Saudi war against Iranian influence.

Another consequence of the Saudi air campaign has been to boost “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” which has exploited the Saudi targeting of Houthi forces to seize more territory in Yemen’s east.

Yet, as tragic as the Yemeni situation is becoming, the more consequential crisis is emerging in Syria, where some analysts are seeing signs of a possible collapse of the Assad regime, a chief goal of the Saudi-Israeli alliance. Senior Israelis have been saying since 2013 that they would prefer a victory by Al-Qaeda over a victory by Assad.

For instance, in September 2013, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in an interview:

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. … We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, Oren expanded on this thinking at an Aspen Institute conference, extending Israel’s preference to include even the hyper-brutal Islamic State. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

During Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015 speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, he also downplayed the danger from the Islamic State – with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” – compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East. However, Iran has not gobbled up any nations in the Middle East. It has not invaded any country for centuries. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Inventing a Record of Iranian Aggression.”]

Yet, while the Saudi-Israeli alarums about Iran may border on the hysterical, the alliance’s combined influence over Official Washington cannot be overstated. Thus, as absurd and outrageous as many of the claims are, they are not only taken seriously, they are treated as gospel. Anyone who points to the reality immediately becomes an “Iranian apologist.”

But the power of the Saudi-Israeli alliance is not simply a political curiosity or an obstacle to sensible policies. As it creates the conditions for an Al-Qaeda/Islamic State victory in Syria – and the possible reintroduction of the U.S. military into the middle of the Middle East – the Saudi-Israeli alliance has become an existential threat to the survival of the American Republic.

As the nation’s first presidents wisely recognized, there are grave dangers to a republic when it entangles itself in foreign conflicts. It’s almost always wiser to seek out realistic albeit imperfect political solutions or at least to evaluate what the negative ramifications of the military option might be before undertaking it. Otherwise, as the early presidents realized, if the country plunges into one costly conflict after another, it becomes a martial state, not a democratic republic.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon andbarnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includesAmerica’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Israel, Iran and the Bomb: A Love Story By Jeffrey Cavanaugh

March 5, 2015, 11:40 am

≫ Next: The architect behind the secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli relationship by Wayne Madsen

≪ Previous: The Day After Damascus Falls: the Beginning of the End for the American Republic By Robert Parry

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Israel, Iran and the Bomb: A Love Story

Netanyahu wants to talk about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but why isn’t anybody talking about Israel’s not-so-secret arsenal?

By Jeffrey Cavanaugh

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On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington, D.C., and appeared before a joint session of Congress — not the Knesset — to give a speech on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Iran’s nuclear program, Netanyahu declared, poses a clear and present danger not just to the Jewish state he heads, but to the entire region, and the United States, too. In stern tones the implied “Senator from Tel Aviv” warned Congress that the nuclear deal being cobbled together by Washington and Tehran in order to ward off war between them was a bad deal that would leave Iran unacceptably close to possessing a bomb.

By his calculations, with the in-place nuclear infrastructure Washington’s deal would likely allow Iran to keep, Netanyahu estimated Iran would be able to build a nuclear weapon in a year or less.

“This is a bad deal — a very bad deal,” intoned Netanyahu. “We’re better off without it.”

It’s not exactly clear who the “we” Netanyahu referred to was – assuming, of course, that one sees some degree of difference between the interests of the U.S. and Israel. Yet the message the prime minister was trying to convey was easy enough to understand: Iran is a cheat and a liar that cannot under any circumstances be trusted.

The 200-kiloton elephant in the room

Israel’s Sorek nuclear reactor center near the central Israeli town of Yavne.

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Left totally unmentioned by Netanyahu and nearly all discussion of the speech in the U.S. media is any note of, no matter how slight, Israel’s own nuclear weapons program. Indeed, although Israel’s nuclear arms are undeclared and the state is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, its possession of these weapons has been an open secret since the 1980s, when a low-level Israeli nuclear technician by the name ofMordechai Vanunu leaked details of the program to a British newspaper. Vanunu was arrested, tried in a secret court and convicted. He would ultimately serve 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement.

What Vanunu revealed to the public was widely known in official circles for years, and in 1987 the U.S. Defense Department noted that, “as far as nuclear technology is concerned, the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. was in the fission weapon field circa 1955-1960.” The DOD went on to say that U.S. intelligence believed Israel was also well on its way to developing the technology it would need to produce hydrogen bombs, which are also now widely believed to be present in the Israeli arsenal. Although estimates of the size of the Israeli inventory vary, minimum calculations place it at 75 weapons and maximum at 400, with most placing it somewhere between 100-200 warheads.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute provides perhaps the best guess, which is that Israel has 80 intact nuclear weapons, with enough material for many more. Of that 80, it says, 50 are deployed on Jericho II medium-range ballistic missiles and the remaining 30 are aircraft-delivered gravity bombs. There is also speculation that some of Israel’s weapons are based at sea on its new Dolphin submarines, which means that Israel has not only nuclear weapons, but a fully functioning deterrent triad of missiles, bombers and subs. Israel, in other words, not only has a nuclear force as big as or bigger than North Korea’s, Pakistan’s or India’s, but one that possibly approaches the United Kingdom’s in terms of size and sophistication.

The story of the Israeli bomb

While there is debate over the size of Israel’s stockpile, how Israel got the bomb in the first place is far better known. Starting shortly after the birth of the Israeli state itself, David Ben-Gurion gave his country’s scientific establishment the mission of creating what was termed at the time “the bomb in the basement” – a last-resort option that would stave off final defeat by Arab armies, or at least make achieving that hideously costly. Funds gathered from overseas, including Jewish contributions to the State of Israel, were in part funneled to this project, and Israeli scientists and intelligence officials were directed to acquire information from foreign sources on how to build a bomb.

The best efforts to achieve this came in France, where a close relationship between the Israeli and the French defense establishments gave Israeli scientists access to French nuclear research sites. This relationship also eventually led to the purchase of the Dimona reactor complex. Indeed, during the late 1950s over 2,500 French technical experts were present at the reactor site and operated behind a veil of secrecy so thick that the workers were forbidden to write directly to relatives lest they give away their location. When questioned by the British and Americans, Israelis claimed Dimona was a grasslands research institute or a manganese processing plant. After Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1959, however, the Franco-Israeli nuclear alliance chilled — but not before Israel was able to acquire enough material and expertise to begin a full-fledged, independent weapons program of its own.

To succeed, though, Israel would have to overcome what was probably its greatest obstacle to acquiring nuclear weapons: the U.S. It should be remembered that in the early years of the Cold War Israel and the U.S. were not as close as they are today. At best Israel was seen as a nuisance and an electoral prop for Democrats like Harry Truman, and under Dwight D. Eisenhower the U.S. was often actively hostile. Indeed, Eisenhower opposed not just Israeli participation in the Suez Crisis of 1956 but forced Israel as well as Britain and France to retreat from their assault on Egypt with their tails tucked firmly between their legs.

Although not as skeptical of the utility of Israel as an ally as Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy nonetheless put the screws to Israel over its nuclear ambitions due to the experience he gained during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Seeing a need to push back against the threat of nuclear war after the close call over Cuba, Kennedy offered the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the world and pushed for countries to sign. Among the requirements, of course, were vigorous inspections to ensure that existing nuclear facilities in non-nuclear states would not be used to build weapons.

Although the U.S. was aware of Israel’s Dimona reactor by 1958, when U2 flights and on-the-ground assessments observed what the Israelis were doing, inspections of the type Kennedy was championing would expose just exactly what the Israelis were up to — drawing the wrath of the proliferation-phobic Kennedy and handing a propaganda coup to the Soviets and Moscow’s Arab allies. The Israelis did eventually give in and allow inspectors, but what ensued as U.S. technical experts poked and prodded Dimona was a kabuki-esque affair, wherein the American teams were stymied in almost every way via tactics any contemporary U.N. weapons inspector would recognize as an attempt to obfuscate, distract and cheat.

Acceptance of the Israeli bomb

This song and dance went on for the remainder of the Kennedy administration, only waning under the far more pro-Israel Lyndon Johnson, who, like Truman, used his support of Israel as a political prop. What’s more, as Moscow made inroads in Egypt and Syria and the likelihood of war between Arabs and Israelis increased, the decision was made in the U.S. and other Western countries to look the other way and, in effect, allow the Israelis to build their bomb.  By 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, it is believed that this acquiescence allowed the Israelis to secretly accumulate enough fissile material to build a crude nuclear bomb prior to the outbreak of hostilities on June 5 of that year.

Although Israel’s crushing victory in that war assured its bomb would not be used, the frightening encounter between Israel and its enemies led Israel to a crash program geared toward mass-producing nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. As in the 1950s resources were leveraged, the biggest obstacle to physically increasing Israel’s stockpile was overcome in 1968 via an audacious covert operation that stole up to 200 tons of yellowcake uranium from a Belgian mining company that the Mossad, in a complex operation, had shipped from Antwerp to Genoa and thence on to Israel.

Indeed, the Belgians weren’t the only ones who were robbed. In a memo on Israeli nuclear activities prepared for President Richard Nixon by Henry Kissinger himself, Kissinger noted that Israel’s nuclear program “is one where the Israelis have persistently deceived and may even have stolen from us.” Here, this was further implied when in 1976 CIA Deputy Director Carl Duckett informed officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some 200-600 pounds of highly enriched uranium had been stolen by Israel from a processing plant in Pennsylvania owned by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. It was, according to one of the officials privy to the secret at the time, one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear materials in history.

Eventually acknowledging their failure, the White House under Johnson and then Nixon created the present regime of official lies about Israeli nuclear capabilities by getting the Israelis to pledge to be the first to “not introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East — which the Israelis defined as agreeing to not officially test weapons or state officially that they possessed them. This concordant became a foundation of U.S.-Israeli relations when Nixon met Golda Meier after U.S. intervention in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which itself may have been forced by Israeli desperation and Israel’s implied threat to use their bombs to stave off imminent battlefield defeat.

A rogue is a rogue is a rogue

In the context of the Cold War, when Israeli actions against a Soviet client could have forced a nuclear response by Moscow — a response which would lead inevitably to an exchange with the U.S. and its other allies — it made eminent sense to protect Israel so it would not be forced to use its weapons and so cause that chain of events to occur, which came close to actually happening in 1973. It may have unfairly privileged Israeli interests over nearly everyone else in the Middle East in official Washington circles, but it nonetheless kept an unstable region and its nuclear powder keg under wraps for the remaining duration of America’s conflict with the Soviet Union.

But does this same logic hold sway today? To be sure, relations between Russia and the U.S. are frosty, but the degree to which American and Russian security interests are tied to the fates of their client states in the Middle East is far less than what it once was. Furthermore, American guarantees of security have profited the U.S. very little. In exchange for providing carte blanche protection for Israel in exchange for its nuclear silence, the U.S. has received little but Israeli intransigence on the issue of Palestine and next to no help on other important regional issues. Indeed, America’s very protection of Israel makes the U.S. widely hated in the region. The U.S. alliance with Israel is thus for the most part a one-way street from which America derives very little benefit.

So when you click on the news and see Netanyahu talk about the dangers of a bad deal and the threat of a rogue nuclear state, understand that he knows what he is talking about. After all, his country is experienced in fooling inspectors and lying to the U.S. about its nuclear intentions. It, too, has stolen nuclear materials and broken numerous international laws to build a secret nuclear weapons lab and stockpile. If the emerging narrative about what actually happened in 1973 is correct, it has even engaged in nuclear blackmail to get its way. Given all this, one wonders if maybe Israel couldn’t teach Iran a lesson or two in this particular area of statecraft.

The architect behind the secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli relationship by Wayne Madsen

May 4, 2015, 7:34 pm

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The architect behind the secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli relationship

The recent internal Saudi palace "coup" that saw King Salman replace his brother Muqrin Bin Abdulaziz as Crown Prince with Salman's nephew, Prince Mohammed bin Nayaf, is an indication that the decades-long but highly secret U.S.-Israeli-Saudi special alliance is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia's defense needs has had the quiet support of successive Israeli governments that saw the Saudis as a critical bulwark against Iran and any Shi'a-led revolutions in the Persian Gulf and on the Arabian peninsula. The effective Zaidi Houthi takeover of Yemen has resulted in even closer relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem. The Zaidis, a sect close to the Shi'as, are pro-Iranian. However, the American component of the tripartite alliance is no longer guaranteed as Washington seeks a nuclear deal with Iran and closer relations with Tehran  in other arenas.

Salman also replaced other Cabinet ministers, including the long-serving foreign minister Saud al-Faisal. Saud has been replaced by the long-serving Saudi ambassador to the United States, the non-royal Adel al-Jubeir, a favorite of the Israelis and Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, the former CIA station chief in Riyadh and a known Saudophile.

Salman's ambitious son, Mohammed Bin Salman, was named the new deputy Crown Prince. Salman's changes were seen by observers as bolstering the most anti-Iranian members of the Saudi regime, which, of course, is very welcomed by the Israeli government, which, under Binyamin Netanyahu's fourth term as prime minister, is the most right-wing and internationally aggressive in Israel's history.

The intellectual architect of the Riyadh-Jerusalem-Washington alliance was an Egyptian-Jewish Zionist and paid CIA consultant at Harvard University named Nadav Safran. In 1946, Safran, born Nadav Za’farani, moved from Cairo to a kibbutz in Palestine and fought as a commando against the British and Arabs in Israel's independence war, served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Although Safran died in 2003, his work on U.S.-Saudi relations, which on its face seems odd for an Israeli-American, laid the basis for the secret cooperation between the three countries, particularly with regard to Iran. In 1985, Safran published a book, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security, which closely examined Saudi security concerns and served as a virtual blueprint for future U.S. military aid to Saudi Arabia. The book was written pursuant to a secret CIA grant to Safran for $107,430. The Boston Globe published a copy of Safran's contract, dated April 13, 1982, with the CIA. Although Harvard University Press published the book, the university claimed it was unaware of the CIA contract with Safran.

In 1986, Safran resigned from the Center for Middle East Studies over his connections with the CIA. Safran's other books that significantly influenced U.S. Middle Eastern policy included, Israel: The Embattled Ally, published in 1978 during the Camp David negotiations, and Egypt in Search of Political Community, published the same year that President Anwar Sadat was assassinated.


The brains behind the not-so-secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli alliance was Israeli-American Nadav Safran, a CIA-paid academic who likely influenced the thinking of current CIA director John O. Brennan.

Harvard's Center for International Studies had a long association with the CIA. Furthermore, Harvard was well aware that in 1985, Safran received an additional $50,000 from the CIA to organize two seminars, one on Islamic fundamentalism and the other on the Persian Gulf. The CIA laundered much of the money through the RAND Corporation. Safran was a close colleague of another pro-Israeli ex-Harvard academic on the U.S. government's payroll, Richard Pipes, who, in the 1980s, taught at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Safran remained with Harvard's Department of Government until 1990 where he continued to maintain a relationship with the U.S. government in the months prior to the start of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq.

U.S. policymakers in the Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama administrations would use Safran's book to shape their own attitudes toward the Saudi regime. However, as the Obama administration seeks a breakthrough on U.S.-Iranian relations, the Safran book has lost much of its importance in the current environment.

Safran also served as a CIA conduit to the press and his conflict-of-interest would serve as a template for future academics and journalists who claimed independence while accepting covert payments from the U.S. intelligence and defense communities. In 1990, Safran penned an op-ed for The New York Times that called on the Bush 41 administration to reject any peace feelers from Saddam Hussein. Safran was pushing the Israeli and Saudi line that Saddam should be dealt with harshly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

One of Safran's colleagues at Harvard, Laurie Mylroie, became one of the chief purveyors of the bogus meme that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Mylroie's 2000 book, Study of Revenge; Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, was cited by former CIA director James Woolsey as "brilliant and brave." The book would later be cited as one of the reasons why the U.S. had to invade and occupy Iraq after 9/11.

Jeb Bush's CIA activities in Caracas under closer scrutiny by Wayne Madsen

May 4, 2015, 7:40 pm

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 Jeb Bush's CIA activities in Caracas under closer scrutiny
by Wayne Madsen
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the third member of the Bush family to aspire to the presidency, is under closer scrutiny for his "bank" work in Caracas, Venezuela, less than a year after his father departed Langley, Virginia as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bush started working as a branch manager and vice president of the Houston-based Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas as President Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, began cleaning hose of many of the cohorts of Bush within the agency's clandestine service. These included a number of Cuban expatriates who carried on their anti-Castro activities as part of a virtual "shadow CIA" established to stymie Turner's reforms.

The shadow CIA included a number of private sector operations, including banking, which financed shadow CIA operations in Latin America by laundering money for the Colombian drug cartels. While he worked for Texas Commerce Bank, Jeb Bush maintained close contacts with the anti-Castro Cuban community in Venezuela, as well as with the right-wing Colombian drug lords who supported their activities with cash and weapons. Jeb Bush's work in Caracas made him steadfast friends in the Miami-based Cuban exile community, including real estate mogul Armando Codina, who Bush would partner with in a number of dubious real estate ventures after leaving Caracas and setting up residence in Miami.
One of the CIA operations Jeb Bush may have played a significant role in was the Latin American support network of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet for right-wing opponents of Castro. These operations were primarily based in Caracas and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. In return for Chilean help, the Cuban exiles provided Chile's intelligence service, DINA, with CIA-trained assassins. This operation of weapons-for-assassins involved CIA/DINA professional assassin Michael Townley, who served a 62-month sentence for the 1976 car bombing assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier, a bombing that also killed Letelier's American assistant, Roni Moffitt, on Sheridan Circle in downtown Washington, DC. The man believed responsible for authorizing the "hit" on Letelier was the then-head of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, Jeb's father. Townley, who excelled in car bombings, was also charged with the car bombing assassination in 1974 of exiled Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires. Townley's father, John V. Townley, was a CIA veteran who served in Venezuela and Chile. Today, Michael Townley, after providing narrow evidence on DINA's role in Letelier's assassination but not the CIA's involvement, is protected as part of the Federal Witness Program. Townley testified that he hired five anti-Castro Cubans to place a bomb in Letelier's vehicle. Interestingly, Townley was also in Stockholm a week before the 1985 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
The Chilean- and CIA-backed anti-Castro operations in Caracas enjoyed the protection of the Venezuelan intelligence service, DISIP. One of the chief Chilean DINA agents involved with the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans in Caracas was Enrique Arancibia, who, like Jeb Bush, provided "banking services" for the Cubans. In 1977, Arancibia, who was involved in the assassinations of Letelier, Prats, and the 1970 murder in Santiago of Prats's predecessor as Chilean Army chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, traveled to California on "banking business" for DINA and the CIA.

Arancibia answered to Italian fascist and P-2 Masonic lodge operative Stefano Delle Chiaie. The P-2 lodge was a partner for a number of CIA "false flag" terrorist attacks in Italy. Delle Chiaie was arrested in Caracas in 1989 and extradited to Italy for the 1969 false flag terrorist bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan, as well as the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station. Chiaie, an operative of the CIA's Gladio operations in Italy, was acquitted by Italian courts on all the charges. Delle Chiaie also worked closely with Townley on the botched 1975 attempt to assassinate Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife in Rome in 1975. The P-2 lodge was closely linked to the activities of the fascist Opus Dei, a radical right wing order within the Roman Catholic Church, which supported Pinochet's and the CIA's Operation Condor assassination operations in Latin America and elsewhere.

Townley also worked closely in Miami and Caracas with Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, two of the primary Cuban culprits behind the terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines 455 after it took off from Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados in October 1976. George H. W. Bush was CIA director during the Cubana bombing and the Letelier/Moffitt assassinations, both of which involved CIA assets based in Caracas. Just a year later, Jeb Bush was dispatched to Caracas, under obvious CIA non-official cover (NOC), to potentially clean up for his father and help erase the CIA's fingerprints on all Condor, Gladio, DINA/DISIP, and Opus Dei operations in the Venezuelan capital.

Jeb Bush's conversion to Catholicism from Episcopalianism in 1995 after a legacy of supporting Cuban, Chilean, Venezuelan, and Italian figures identified as members of Opus Dei and the P-2 lodge deserves much more scrutiny than it is receiving from the corporate media.

Just after Jeb Bush's November 5, 1977 marriage to Columba Bush, the young couple moved to Caracas at a time when the Venezuelan capital was a hot bed of anti-Castro CIA activity.

While he was Vice President, George H. W. Bush championed the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada in order to eliminate the Cuban and Soviet "threat" to the island. The invasion came after the overthrow and execution by "extreme Marxists" of the popular prime minister, Maurice Bishop. However, Grenada was once an outpost for Pinochet's anti-Castro activities. While Jeb Bush was in Caracas, Chilean Navy ships began transporting weapons for anti-Castro Cubans to the port of St. George's in Grenada. Grenada's prime minister Eric Gairy, who was eventually ousted by Bishop, was one of Pinochet's closest allies in the Western Hemisphere. Gairy championed Pinochet at the United Nations while also calling for the world body to recognize the threat posed by unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The Chilean weapons shipped to Grenada were marked as "medical supplies," which is noteworthy since the Reagan-Bush administration used the "danger" posed to American medical students on Grenada to justify the 1983 invasion. The Grenada medical school was also linked to CIA activities in Jonestown, Guyana. In 1978, one-time CIA asset Jim Jones presided over a mass suicide at the Jonestown religious commune after his followers assassinated California Democratic Representative Leo Ryan and members of his investigative team. Jones waited to take any hostile action against Ryan or his flock until he was notified that Richard Dwyer, the CIA station chief at the U.S. embassy in Georgetown, Guyana, was safely exfiltrated from Jonestown.

Dwyer, a veteran CIA officer from the time that George H. W. Bush was a low-level operative in Houston involved in the Bay of Pigs affair, had been stationed as a CIA official cover officer in Cairo and Damascus. Dwyer's first stop after departing Jonestown was Grenada. There were credible reports at the time, including intelligence collected by Bishop, that the St. George's University Medical School provided cover for CIA mind control experiments after Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was ordered to shut down Operations MK-ULTRA and MK-DELTA.

Ironically, the experiments at the medical school were overseen by the school's chancellor, Sir Geoffrey H. Bourne, whose son, Peter Bourne, received a doctorate in medicine in 1962 and a master's degree in anthropology in 1969 and served as President Jimmy Carter's drug czar. Peter Bourne was also a U.S. Army Special Forces psychiatric research doctor in Vietnam and at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. Peter Bourne later became a vice chancellor at St. George's University Medical School, where his father also worked. Peter Bourne was married to Mary King, the Deputy Director of Action programs for the Peace Corps in the Carter administration. It was King who helped Jim Jones acquire the land in Guyana that became Jonestown. It is also very evident that author Robert Ludlum did not develop his Jason Bourne mind-controlled assassin character out of thin air.

The Chilean medical supplies from the Pinochet regime were off-loaded from Chilean Navy ships docked in St. George's  during the night and no trucks were ever seen transporting the supplies to any Grenadian medical centers. In fact, the crates contained weapons, which were then re-transported to Cuban exiles in Caracas and Santo Domingo. These operations took place beginning in November 1977, the same month Jeb Bush took up residence in Caracas and married his Spanish-speaking Mexican wife Columba, while ostensibly working for a Houston-based bank owned by the family of close Bush friend James Baker. Jeb remained in Caracas during 1978 and 1979, during the time frame that Caracas served as a major CIA station responsible for smaller stations in Georgetown, St. George's, Bridgetown, Kingston, Paramaribo, Cayenne, and Willemstad. It is time for Jeb Bush to come clean about his obscure activities in Caracas during some of the CIA's most egregious activities in the Caribbean region.

Broomstick by Boeing — she’s baaaaack!

May 19, 2015, 8:24 am

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Broomstick by Boeing—she’s baaaaack!

Submitted by Raymond Nat Turner 

by BAR Poet-in-Residence Raymond Nat Turner

“A little poison,” in her depleted uranium

The Iron Lady’s baaaack—in titanium!
Some vile, nightmarish, dream-like crack
But, it’s no dream—she’s baaaaaaaaaack!

Broomstick by Boeing — she’s baaaaack!

by BAR Poet-in-Residence Raymond Nat Turner

Fracking fluid bubbling and aglow
Cauldron supplied by Monsanto
Election monkeys flying at her side
Cackle, “We came, we saw, he died!”
“Poppies” from fields of Afghanistan
For ‘white’ women’s, “Yes, we can!”
Unsavory symbols of German Police—
Though we prayed she’d Rust In Peace
“A little poison,” in her depleted uranium
The Iron Lady’s baaaack—in titanium!
Some vile, nightmarish, dream-like crack
But, it’s no dream—she’s baaaaaaaaaack!

F-16 broomstick circling the world’s skies
Emitting shrill supersonic war cries—
Popping polygraphs with populist lies,
Dumping Roundup in women’s eyes
Flaunting false, fractured, feminist pride
Like Drone Man did on the ‘Black’ side
Contributions to her war chest—matched
Broomstick by Boeing, Hellfires attached
Willy Warlock, Nuland-Powers coven in tow
The Wicked Witch of The West is all GMO!
Radar confirming the FOX route she flew
Destination: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…

Raymond Nat Turner can be contacted at Raymond (at) upsurgejazz.com

When is terrorism not terrorism? by Wayne Madsen

May 25, 2015, 11:36 am

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When is terrorism not terrorism? by Wayne Madsen

When is an act of terrorism not deemed an act of terrorism? When it occurs in the heart of one of the U.S. capital's most affluent residential and diplomatic neighborhoods. Washington Metropolitan police chief Cathy Lanier slipped up when she said that the brutal torture and murder of Greek-American Washington businessman Savvas Savopoulos, his wife Amy, their 10-year old son Philip, and their Salvadorean housekeeper was being investigated by the DC area's Joint Terrorism Task Force. She quickly corrected herself to say the case was being looked at by the little-known "Joint Arson Task Force." 

A former U.S. Marine Corps recruit and native of Guyana, Damon Wint, a one-time welder of Savopoulos's construction company, American Iron Works, has been charged with the multiple homicide at the Savopoulos multi-million dollar mansion in DC's Woodley Park neighborhood. The home, which was damaged by a fire set by Wint and possible accomplices, is close to the Vice President's residence and that of Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

The last major terrorist incident to hit the Washington area was the anthrax attacks on Congress in late 2001. Those attacks, using the U.S. postal system, came as Congress was deliberating the passage of the Patriot Act. Although the FBI claimed that Fort Detrick scientist Brice Ivins was the perpetrator, that charge was never proven because Ivins allegedly committed suicide. However, the anthrax event so disrupted Congress, it quickly approved the Patriot Act without some members ever having even read it.

The Savopoulos multiple homicide conveniently came as the Senate was considering extending provisions of the Patriot Act that were due to end because of sunset clauses. While the anthrax attacks, which included the media as targets, were intended to strike fear into the public as much as Congress, a terrorist shock in DC a week before the Memorial Day weekend, when tourists and military family members descend upon the nation's capital, could not be revealed to the general public. Therefore, we saw Lanier quickly revise her mention of the word "terrorism." 

However, for key members of Congress, such a revelation that a potential sympathizer of the Islamic State from Guyana, where a few years ago a jihadist cell that planned to blow up the fuel lines leading to John F. Kennedy Airport was rounded up and extradited to the United States, would have a huge impact. It is one thing to threaten Washington's upper crust where they work, but it is an entirely different matter to hit them where they live. This is especially true in Woodley Park, where homes have elaborate security systems and uniformed Secret Service agents guard some of the many embassies in the area. Any reservations about the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone and Internet traffic would quickly melt away as members of Congress contemplated their own personal security as well as that of their families. Although the Senate rejected the renewal of the Patriot Act extension bill, it was because many of the Republican opponents felt the law did not go far enough in enabling NSA to collect communications data.

DC police are now admitting that Wint had help when he terrorized the Savopoulos family and extorted $40,000 in cash from a courier who was requested by Savvas Savopoulos to deliver the money to his home. The police say that "at least" one other person aided Wint. When the U.S. Marshal's Service and police arrested Wint, his brother, another man, and two females in College Park, Maryland, after Wint traveled back to DC from Brooklyn, only $10,000 of the $40,000 in cash was recovered. The cash recovered was in a rented box truck that left a Howard Johnson's Motel parking lot along with a Chevy in which Wint was riding. 

The Guyanese-Trinidadian terrorist cell that planned to blow up JFK Airport was largely based in Brooklyn. Did Wint hand off the rest of the cash to another cell operating out of Brooklyn? 

Oddly, the four other people apprehended with Wint in College Park were not charged with any crime and were released on May 24. Evidence now indicates that the man who stole Savopoulos's blue Porsche and abandoned and burnt it in New Carrollton had short hair. Wint sports long "dreadlocks."

The brutal terrorist-style murder of the Savopoulos family came as the Islamic State or ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, was making huge gains in Syria. The ancient Roman fortress of Palmyra fell to ISIL. ISIL jihadists believe in Koranic references, attributed to prophecies of the Prophet Mohammed, that in apocalyptic times, there will be final battle between the forces of Islam and the forces of the Church of "Rum" in Dabiq on the Syrian-Turkish border. Many in the West, including Western intelligence agencies, mistakenly believe that ISIL is referring to the "Church of Rome," or the Roman Catholic Church. This is factually incorrect. ISIL's Koranic reference to the "Church of Rum" is to the church of Byzantium, which was headquartered in Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Church of Byzantium is today the Greek Orthodox Church.

The jihadists believe that after the "Dajjal" [the anti-Christ] appears, the forces of the Islamic Caliphate, which ISIL has declared, will be reduced to a force of 5000. The jihadists believe that there will be a final battle between the caliphate and Dajjal at the gates of "Rum," now Istanbul. At that point, they believe that Issa ibn-Maryam, or Jesus, will appear and slay Dajjal with a spear, thus heralding the end of the world. 

Mr. Savopoulos was a member and financial supporter of St. Sophia's Greek Orthodox Church, located around the corner from his stately home on Woodland Drive. St. Sophia's is not only the largest cathedral for Washington's Greek Orthodox community but it also serves as an important cultural center for area Greek-Americans and Greek permanent and temporary residents of the United States. 

Whether Wint was either a willing adherent or a "useful idiot" dupe of an ISIL terrorist cell operating in Brooklyn and the Washington area, it really does not matter. The message that a group like ISIL could strike in that particular neighborhood in northwest Washington sends a stark message not only to the "Church of Rum" but also to the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican's Apostolic Nuncio is also located around the corner from the Savopoulos home and is directly across Massachusetts Avenue from the Vice President's residence. Across Massachusetts Avenue is St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church. The embassies of a few NATO countries are also in close proximity: Belgium, Great Britain, Norway, and Denmark. As for the Protestants, the towering National Cathedral of the Episcopalian Church, is within close proximity to the Savopoulos home. Offices of the Department of Homeland Security are located a few blocks away at Ward Circle at the junction of Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues. 


If ISIL wanted to strike a "soft target" in the heart of DC's government, religious, and diplomatic community, the Savopoulos residence, with a stark message to the "Church of Rum," was a prime candidate.

In many cases, the FBI has set up, through the use of confidential informants and professional entrapment agents, Muslim-Americans who are forced into pleading guilty to terrorism-related charges based on hearsay or planted evidence. In the case of the terrorist-like murders in Woodley Park, the FBI, in the interest of self-protection and not upsetting Washington's Memorial weekend tourism profit margins, may have decided to keep a real terrorist attack under wraps -- for now.

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DIA message confirms ISIL is a Western construct by Wayne Madsen

May 27, 2015, 7:07 pm

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DIA message confirms ISIL is a Western construct by Wayne Madsen
A formerly SECRET NOFORN (No Foreign Dissemination) message, dated August 5, 2012, to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from a redacted U.S. government agency, provides more evidence that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), otherwise known as the Islamic State or "Da'ish," was a construct of U.S. intelligence. As WMR reported in the past, ISIL was also incubated and sustained by the Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and Israeli intelligence services.

The message, declassified as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Judicial Watch, a conservative organization, indicates that the intelligence on ISIL was "not finally evaluated," which means it was not sanitized and editorialized by the political operatives within the U.S. intelligence community.

The message released is unusual in that some of the action and information "addees" have been redacted, which is not normally the case with declassified message traffic, whether it is originated by the Defense Department, State Department, or U.S. intelligence agencies.

The message leads off with the following: "The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Iraq." The message goes on to state: "The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the [Syrian] opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime." The "regime" is the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The message also states: "AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media . . . and conducted a number of operations in several under the name of Jaish al Nusra (Victorious Army), one of its affiliates."

There is also a direct reference to the similarity of Western support for the Syrian and Iraqi jihadists and those who emerged in Libya following the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi. This support was directed to internationally-supported "safe havens" harboring the jihadist and Salafist forces: "Opposition forces are trying to control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to the western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar), in addition to neighboring Turkish borders. Western countries, the Gulf countries and Turkey are supporting these efforts[emphasis added]. This hypothesis is most likely in accordance with the data from recent events, which will help prepare safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command center of the temporary government." What the message does not state is that the "safe havens" in Syria, Iraq, and Benghazi were the locations where the Islamic State and its allies declared a caliphate (the Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq) and an emirate (the Emirate of Derna in eastern Libya). 

The operative paragraph states that the "supporting powers to the opposition" want to establish "declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers [Western countries, the Gulf countries and Turkey} want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).



The Western powers -- the United States, Britain, France, and, more importantly, Israel -- working in concert with the Gulf countries [Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain], as well as Turkey, according to U.S. intelligence, created ISIL to destroy the Shia-dominated nations of Syria and Iraq. The fall of Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq are a result of this conspiracy of "supporting powers." The civil war in Yemen that has seen the very same "supporting powers," including Egypt, providing military forces to fight the Shi'a-aligned Houthi rebels is, like the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, of U.S. Saudi, Israeli, and Turkish design. Ultimately, Iran is the target for the "supporting powers" of ISIL and its allies.

WMR has been reporting on the NATO and Gulf Arab support for ISIL since the group first raised its black and white caliphate flag in Syria. Syrian rebels, who later formed the core of ISIL, were photographed with Senator John McCain during a covert foray by his and his assistant, Elizabeth O'Bagy, into a rebel-held "safe haven" in Syria. Among those photographed with McCain was the future Islamic State caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

In a three-part series in September 2014, WMR reported the following: "The deeper one digs into the operations surrounding the 'Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant' (ISIL), or, as it is variably called, 'Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham' (ISIS), 'Al Dawlah' (the State), or 'Da'ish' (a concatenation of 'al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham,' the more the Islamist insurgent group's links to Western and Israeli intelligence are revealed . . . There is every indication that ISIL has significant links to Israel. Although there are claims to the contrary, ISIL absorbed most of the ranks of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Nusra Front) Islamist insurgent group in Syria. Al Nusra Front has coordinated its seizure of Syrian army positions along the Golan Heights border with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Rather than hit back at Al Nusra positions on the Syrian side of the Golan frontier, the Israelis attacked Syrian army positions, giving a boost to the Syrian campaigns of Al Nusra in particular and ISIL in general. There are reports that the Israeli military has been given the coordinates of Syrian army and Hezbollah forces, as well as 'Committees for the Defense of the Homeland' militia forces of Alawites, Shi'as, Christians, and Druze, by Al-Nusra/ISIL to launch missile and drone attacks from the Israeli side of the border . . . 
The grand master of Israel's Zionist policies, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, recently stated that Iran was a bigger threat than ISIL. Prospective Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently lavishly praised Kissinger in a review of his new book, 'World Order.'"

Our September 2014 report continued: "ISIL/Al Nusra is enriching itself from ransom payments for hostages being received mostly from Qatar, a member of Obama's newly-formed 'coalition' to fight ISIL. The most recent ransom paid by Qatar to ISIL was for 45 Fijian peacekeepers captured by ISIL's Al Nusra allies in the Golan region of Syria bordering Israel. Qatar also paid ransom payments to Al Nusra-ISIL units for some Syrian nuns and captured Lebanese Army soldiers. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is, under Obama's 'coalition,' training so-called Free Syrian Army 'moderates' to fight ISIL/Al Nusra and the Assad government. In the past,  the Saudis have conducted such training to radicalize Sunni Muslim volunteers for the Syrian civil war and funnel them to ISIL units in Syria and Iraq."

As we previously stressed, the idea of moderate Syrian rebels is a ruse. The August 2012 U.S. intelligence report states that the core of the Syrian opposition was the Salafists, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the Muslim Brotherhood, none of which represent anything "moderate."

There were a number of other indications about the "supporting powers'" support for ISIL. A truck carrying factory-fresh black and white ISIL flags through northern Israel to the Syrian-Lebanese border drooped one of the bags and it was found by some local Israeli farmers. Israeli commandos were witnessed delivering weapons to ISIL forces in Iraq's western Anbar province. The details of the discovery of the ISIL flags in Israel was 
that gardeners in the northern Israeli city of Nazareth Illit discovered a bag containing about 25 new black-and-white ISIL flags." In May 2015, ISIL rings bearing the same Arabic inscription that appears on the ISIL flag were "confiscated" at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The rings were said to be destined for Gaza via Ramallah in the West Bank and had been shipped from Turkey.


ISIL rings "confiscated" at Ben Gurion Airport. They look good on the hands of "jihadists" while they are beheading hostages.

WMR also reported that "many of the ISIL guerrillas are ethnic Chechens who have either citizenship of or permanent residency in the Republic of Georgia. Moreover, ISIL has been selling oil from areas it occupies in Syria and Iraq to Ukraine via Turkish middlemen. ISIL/Jabhat al Nusra/Al Qaeda fighters, many of them Chechens but also some Syrian Arabs, are also suspected of assisting neo-Nazi Ukrainian Right Sector and 'Maidan Self-Defense Force' paramilitaries in carrying out the massacre of 48 Russian-speakers inside Odessa'sHouse of Trade Unions last May. Ironically, some of these ISIL units have also fought in eastern Ukraine alongside Ukrainian paramilitary battalions, including the Azov Battalion, funded by Ukrainian-Israeli billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. In return for their assistance in Ukraine, ISIL units are receiving military support in Syria and Iraq from Ukrainian military and paramilitary sources . . . ISIL and Turkish forces have been photographed embracing one another on the Turkish-Syrian frontier in Kobani as ISIL forces pound Syrian Kurdish forces trying to maintain control of the city."

On February 25, 2015, WMR reported on an ISIL affiliate operative who, in the past, worked for the French external intelligence service, Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure -- DGSE: "The ex-French agent is David Drugeon who is now a leader of the Khorasan Group in Syria. On October 5, 2014, McClatchy news service reported that Drugeon "defected" from DGSE to Al Qaeda. Although Western intelligence finds it useful to separate ISIL or the Islamic State, the Khorasan Group, Al Qaeda, and the Al Nusra Front, on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields these group fight under the same command and same black and white jihadist banner."

Our February report continued: "Israel's military and intelligence services have also reportedly provided assistance to Al Nusra in Syria and ISIL in Iraq. Hakem al-Zameli, the chairman of the Iraqi Parliament's National Security and Defense Committee, stated that Iraq's armed forces shot down two British planes that were carrying weapons to ISIL in Anbar province, the same province where Israeli commandos have been witnessed transferring weapons to ISIL forces. Al-Zameli also said that his committee is receiving daily reports from Anbar province about successive U.S. coalition planes airdropping weapons and and other materials for ISIL in areas held by the jihadist group.
Khalaf Tarmouz, the head of the Anbar Provincial Council said local officials have discovered U.S., European, and Israeli weapons from the areas liberated from ISIL in the Al-Baqdadi region. The Iraqi government has also reported U.S. coalition forces have airdropped weapons to support ISIL in Salahuddin, Al-Anbar and Diyala provinces. Member of Parliament Majid al-Gharawi said he was aware of U.S. airdrops of weapons for ISIL in Salahuddin and other Iraqi provinces.

Al-Zameli said, 'The US drops weapons for the ISIL on the excuse of not knowing about the whereabouts of the ISIL positions and it is trying to distort the reality with its allegations.' He said evidence has been provided by Iraqi army officers and other Iraqi forces.

Iranian Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri has confirmed the Iraqi government reports. He said, 'The U.S. and the so-called anti-ISIL coalition claim that they have launched a campaign against this terrorist and criminal group – while supplying them with weapons, food and medicine in Jalawla region [in Diyala Governorate].'

Western intelligence links to ISIL are beginning to be exposed around the world. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has stated that ISIL's leader, Ibrahim Samarrai, aka 'Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, [McCain's friend] is a Central Intelligence Agency operative who receives financial backing from Western intelligence services. From reports coming from Iraq and Syria, the links between the violent jihadists and their CIA, MI-6, DGSE, and Mossad overseers are becoming abundantly clear."
WMR reported the following month, March, the following: "Recently, the leader of Lebanon's Druze Progressive Socialist Party, Walid Jumblatt, who has been an erratic on-and-off supporter of Israel, concluded an agreement with the Al Nusra Front and its Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate. Jumblatt concluded the agreement even though his fellow Druze in Idlib, Syria have been given an ultimatum by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to convert to Wahhabi Islam and destroy their shrines and mausoleums to their religious icons or face execution. Jumblatt is reported by the Lebanese press to have arranged for the forced conversions of the Idlib Druze in exchange for their lives using the offices of the United Arab Emirates.

It has also been reported in the Lebanese press that Israel has helped arrange for contacts, using Jordanian intelligence interlocutors, between Al Nusra/Al Qaeda and the Syrian Druze. Israel has offered military and intelligence support to the Syrian Druze if they attack Syrian government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies in Syria.
Arab media has also reported that Iraqi Hezbollah captured three U.S.-Israeli 'advisers,' along with their U.S. and Israeli passports, and a fourth Israeli citizen in possession of a passport from an unnamed Persian Gulf country, at an ISIL command center in Mosul province. The ISIL command center was captured by Iraqi special forces troops in 'Operation Scorpion Sting' after word reached the authorities in Baghdad that U.S. and Israeli advisers had helped set up a state-of-the-art command center in Tal Abat, in Mosul province. WMR previously reported that Iraqi troops and local Sunni tribes have witnessed Israeli commandos handing over weapons to ISIL guerrillas in Anbar province."

The involvement of Canadian intelligence in support of ISIL was contained in the same report: "Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu revealed that Turkish authorities arrested a foreign intelligence agent, believed to be an asset of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), who was charged with helping three British schoolgirls travel from Britain through Turkey and then into Syria to join ISIL. Under the Stephen Harper government, Canadian intelligence has been ordered to assist Mossad in all matters requested by the Israelis. The arrested agent is Mohammed Mehmet Rashid, aka 'Doctor Mehmet Rashid,' Mohammed al Rashid, and Mohammad Al Rashed, who reported to Bruno Saccomani, the Canadian ambassador to Jordan and Iraq and a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer who was the head of Harper’s personal security detail until he was appointed ambassador to Amman." In addition: "Russian President Vladimir Putin's aide Alexander Prokhanov charged last December [2014] that Mossad was training ISIL's leadership . . .National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that British and U.S. intelligence and Mossad worked together to create ISIL in an operation dubbed 'Hornet's Nest.' . . . Adrian Kaba, who represents Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party on the Malmo City Council and the regional government, wrote in 2014 that Mossad provided training to ISIL. Kaba wrote on his Facebook page that 'ISIS is being trained by the Israeli Mossad. Muslims are not waging war, they are being used as pawns by other peoples’ game.' . . . Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested ISIL-style beheadings for Israeli Arabs suspected of supporting terrorism . . . According to former FBI agent John Guandolo, the Jesuit-educated Brennan secretly converted to Wahhabi Islam while he served as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s. In February 2013, Guandolo stated, 'Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia.' Guandolo also said Brennan's life 'was interwoven with individuals that were labeled as terrorists' and that Brennan has spoken in positive terms of 'jihad' or Islamic holy war."

The Saudi government's connection to ISIL is a solid as was its links to the 9/11 "terrorists." On July 2, 2014, WMR had this report: "[Saudi intelligence chief Prince] Bandar, on a pre-Sochi Olympics trip to Moscow, offered Russia a lucrative weapons deal if Russia ceased its support for Assad. Bandar also told Putin that if Russia rejected Saudi Arabia's offer,  Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists in the Caucasus region would be free to launch terrorist attacks on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Putin reportedly ordered Bandar out of his office in the Kremlin."

John McCain and his Syrian rebel friends, the future commanders of ISIL, in a protected Syrian "safe haven." ISIL's caliph, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, reportedly severely injured in a recent U.S. air attack, is circled in red.


One would think that committed ISIL jihadists would know the direction of Mecca during their photographed prayers. As they say in Hollywood, "poor directing."
While ISIL forces ransacked and destroyed Shi'a shrines and mosques in Iraq and Syria, Saudi war planes leveled Shi'a mosques and revered buildings in Yemen. In another example of how the Saudis and ISIL are on the same page, it was a Saudi military checkpoint that allowed an ISIL terrorist unit to enter the town of Qadih in eastern Saudi Arabia to bomb a Shi'a mosque.There was not one criticism of the Saudi regime in the official statement [below] issued by ISIL taking credit for the deadly blast at the mosque.

Kiev becomes the new center for mercenaries and brigands

May 31, 2015, 12:25 pm

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Kiev becomes the new center for mercenaries and brigands 

by Wayne Madsen

Just as Bangkok became a nexus for U.S. special forces and other ne'er-do-wells during the Indochina War and San Jose, Costa Rica and Tegucigalpa, Honduras (called "Tegu City" by American mercenaries and special forces) were focal points for the covert U.S. contra war against the Sandinstas in Nicaragua, Kiev has joined their ranks by attracting a motley crew of U.S. and NATO active duty personnel, Western intelligence operatives, mercenaries from private military contractors, and neo-Nazis from across Europe.

In an exclusive report to WMR, one hangout for these soldiers of fortune and social misfits is located just a five minute walk from Maidan Square, where Assistant Secretary of State fort European Affairs Victoria Nuland handed out rolls during the U.S.-backed "Euromaidan" revolt against the democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Part of the reason the pub attracts international military and mercenary personnel is its close proximity to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where many U.S. and Western military personnel on temporary duty, reside. The free Wi-Fi also attracts Westerners eager to read their e-mail  from abroad. This tidbit should be of interest to the Russian external security service, the SVR.

O'Brien's Irish Pub is the place to go if one wants to associate with ex-military and police from around Europe and the United States now employed in "security" positions in Ukraine. There have been credible reports that as few as 300 and as many as 500 mercenaries of the private military company Academi, the former Blackwater, are in Ukraine fighting for the Western-backed government. Russian news reports claim the Academi mercenaries are actually paid by Greystone, Ltd., a Barbados-based subsidiary of Academi that was used by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to dodge corporate reporting requirements in the United States, as well as U.S. taxes.

The service and food at O'Brien's are poor but good service and the "English-style" baked beans, which are actually red kidney beans doused in ketchup, are definitely not the reason for going there. Like Rick's Café in Casablanca, O'Brien's is a favorite smoke-filled gathering place for Kiev's new international cadre of mercenaries and active duty types, most of whom appear to have never served a day of combat in their lives. Televised football matches attract a number of British soccer fans who have the appearance of "military types."


The Western-initiated civil war in Ukraine has attracted a number of mercs and other dodgy types to Kiev. Many hang out at Western-style pubs like O'Brien's [above].

The general impression is that if the "green" soldiers of fortune who belt down pints of Guinness at O'Brien's ever encountered the seasoned Russian-speaking separatist armies of the eastern Donbas region the Western amateur soldiers would be easily slaughtered.

And for turning Kiev into Eastern Europe's version of Bangkok or Tegu City, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. What is even more astounding is that the nomination came from the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Oslo, Julie Furuta-Toy. Below is the May 29, 2015, letter from the Zionist chairman of the Ukrainian parliament (Rada) Volodymyr Groysman to Furuta-Toy thanking her for her nomination of Poroshenko.

Obama Declares Venezuela a Threat to National Security

March 9, 2015, 5:59 pm

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Obama Declares Venezuela a Threat to National Security

• President Barack Obama and Venezuelan head of state Nicolas Maduro. | Photo: Reuters

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Published 9 March 2015 (3 hours 57 minutes ago)

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U.S. President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order against Venezuela Monday aimed at interfering in the country’s sovereignty by declaring a national emergency based on arguments claiming that the South American nation is a threat to national security because of alleged human rights violations and widespread corruption.

“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, find that the situation in Venezuela, including the Government of Venezuela's erosion of human rights guarantees, persecution of political opponents, curtailment of press freedoms, use of violence and human rights violations and abuses in response to anti-government protests, and arbitrary arrest and detention of antigovernment protestors, as well as the exacerbating presence of significant public corruption, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat,” the order reads. ​

​Immediately after, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry announced the government of President Nicolas Maduro would “soon” respond to Obama's executive action against the Latin American country.

"We will soon make Venezuela's response to the extent and reach of these statements,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said in a news conference.

Also read: US Aggression Against Venezuela Fact Not Fiction

​Obama also ordered sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials, sayingthat they all would be banned from traveling to the United States and any and all assets and properties belonging to them would be frozen.

The officials affected by Obama’s sanctions are Antonio Jose Benavides Torres, Commander of the Strategic Region for the Integral Defense (REDI) of the Central Region of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB); Gustavo Enrique Gonzalez Lopez, Director General of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) and President of Venezuela’s Strategic Center of Security and Protection of the Homeland (CESPPA).

Also, Justo Jose Noguera Pietri, President of the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG), a state-owned entity, and Katherine Nayarith Haringhton Padron, a national level prosecutor of the 20th District Office of Venezuela’s Public Ministry, as well as Manuel Eduardo Perez Urdaneta, Director of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Police; Manuel Gregorio Bernal Martinez, Chief of the 31st Armored Brigade of Caracas of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Army; Bernal Martínez, who was the head of SEBIN on February 12, 2014, and against Miguel Alcides Vivas Landino, Inspector General of the FANB.

​"We now have the tools to block their assets and their use of U.S. financial systems," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement. 

"We are deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government’s efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents. Venezuela’s problems cannot be solved by criminalizing dissent," Earnest added.

Bipartisan members of Congress sponsor bills for declassification of 9/11 report segment - Bush family behind opposition to 28-pages declassification.

June 2, 2015, 3:37 pm

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SPECIAL REPORT. Bipartisan members of Congress sponsor bills for declassification of 9/11 report segment - Bush family behind opposition to 28-pages declassification.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, today urged support for a bill to declassify 28-pages from the joint congressional report on the failures of intelligence that led to the 9/11 attack. Joining Paul were members of the House of Representatives who previously introduced a companion bill urging that the 28-pahes be declassified by President Obama. Paul was flanked at a June 2 press conference in the Congressional Visitors Center by the House members who support the declassification of the pages believed to point to senior members of the Saudi government having provided financial and other support to the 9/11 hijackers. The House members joining Paul were Representatives Walter Jones (R-NC), Stephen Lynch (D-MA), and Thomas Massie (R-KY).

Paul and Jones both voiced their misgivings about the lack of interest of their colleagues of both parties in advancing the legislation. Paul's bill, the Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Victims Act, has two Democratic co-sponsors, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). However, the bi-partisan leadership of both parties has been virtually silent on supporting the bill. Former Senator Bob Graham (D-FL), the final author of the 9/11 Intelligence report as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also present at the press conference. Graham displayed a more voluminous copy of a Treasury Department report on Saudi financing of the 9/11 attack. Graham, leafing through the report from the press conference podium showed the press that it was entirely blacked out. Graham called on that report to also be declassified.


Rand Paul with 9/11 family members behind him


Former Senator Bob Graham [right]. To Graham's right, in order, Reps. Stephen Lynch, Thomas Massie, and Walter Jones (head bowed). At the far left is a former New York City fireman, a 9/11 first responder.

Paul said he would also introduce the declassification bill as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act next week. When asked why he would not simply read the 28-pages into the Congressional Record, which is the prerogative of all members of Congress, he replied that he was trying the standard method first before considering the use of senatorial automatic declassification privilege with regard to the Congressional Record.

A number of family members of the 9/11 victims joined the members of Congress behind the podium and they appealed to President Obama to order the declassification of the 28-pages as quickly as possible.


One page from the 28-pages

WMR spoke to a few congressional sources on background on the congressional leadership opposition to the declassification bill. We learned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has been under pressure from the family of George W. Bush, oil industry lobbyists, and the Saudi government to prevent the declassification.

WMR asked Senator Paul about his comment that declassification was even supported by the Saudi government. Considering that the present-Saudi King Salman was the Governor of Riyadh Province prior to and after 9/11 and that he reportedly facilitated the travel for and cash payments to Al Qaeda members, including some of the hijackers, to Pakistan and Afghanistan through Riyadh, WMR asked Paul whether Salman was also supporting declassification. Paul replied that he saw an account of a Saudi official having supported declassification and that he would have to try to locate the actual quote and the individual. After the press conference concluded, one of the members of Congress present who has read the 28-pages thanked this reporter for the question posed to Paul, saying it was a "good question."

SPECIAL REPORT. UPDATE. Jeb Bush received comprehensive CIA briefing when he worked for bank in Caracas by Wayne Madsen

June 13, 2015, 11:45 am

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SPECIAL REPORT. UPDATE. Jeb Bush received comprehensive CIA briefing when he worked for bank in Caracas by Wayne Madsen

WMR has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Central Intelligence Agency by Jeb Bush when he served as the top official of Texas CommerceBank in Caracas, Venezuela. On April 8, 2015, WMR first reported on the possibility that Bush, a recent college graduate, may have served as a CIA "non-official cover" (NOC) agent in Venezuela. The revelation about Bush's past links to the CIA comes two days before his expected announcement in Miami that he is a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

A June 7, 1977 letter on Texas Commerce Bank stationery from "Jeb Bush" of the bank's International Banking Division, using post office box 2558 in Houston, to Robert W. Gambino, director of security for the CIA thanks Gambino, who was in charge of issuing clearances for CIA official cover and NOC agents alike, for "arranging such a comprehensive and informative briefing" for Bush during his recent trip to Washington.

Bush also wrote, "I now understand why my father says that your agency has the most dedicated and professional group of people with which he has ever been associated." Bush again thanked Gambino and his associates for seeing him.

Upon entering office on January 20, 1977, President Jimmy Carter refused a request from George H. W. Bush that he be retained as CIA director. Instead, Carter chose his Annapolis classmate, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to take the helm at Langley. Although Turner dismissed a number of Bush clandestine service loyalists, many remained in the CIA's infrastructure.Update: One of the Bush loyalists was Gambino, the CIA security director who arranged for Jeb Bush's comprehensive briefing. In 1980, Gambino retired from the CIA to work for George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign. The elder Bush rewarded Gambino in 1991 when he was appointed director of the Selective Service, which registers young men for a potential draft.



In April of this year, WMR reported: "One of the last things then-Central Intelligence Agency director George H. W. Bush did for his son Jeb, whose actual name is John Ellis Bush from which the 'Jeb' is derived as an acronym, is to have him hired by the international division of the Texas Commerce Bank as a CIA 'non-official cover officer or 'NOC.' Texas Commerce Bank was an optimal cover for CIA activities. The bank was founded by the family of James Baker. All the elder Bush had to do was to call his close friend Baker to have his son hired by the bank's international division, the usual branch where CIA NOCs were placed within banks and investment firms. Other banks used by the CIA for NOC embeds includedBank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover.

Texas Commerce Bank, bought by Chemical Bank in 1987 and which is now part of J.P Morgan Chase, had the right pedigree to enable it to work closely with the CIA. In 1977, its board members included Lady Bird Johnson and the recently-defeated President Gerald Ford. In the 1980s, Kenneth Lay, who founded the CIA-connected Enron, became a board member of Texas Commerce Bank. Howard Hughes's CIA-linked Summa Corporation used Texas Commerce Bank to purchase a number of properties on the Las Vegas strip." Hughes also held major accounts at the bank.

A vanity book marking Texas Commerce Bank's centenary in 1986 and commissioned by bank president Ben Love in 1981 describes the bank's cozy relationship with George W. Bush and his Zapata Off-Shore Company. Zapata was linked to the CIA's abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. In 1985, Love also served on President Ronald Reagan's "President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control," also known as the Grace Commission.

The book describes how the "major predecessor of Texas Commerce, Texas National Bank," played a "significant role in helping finance the early development of Zapata Off-Shore Company . . . which grew to national prominence beginning in the mid-1950s." The book also states, "George Bush, who later became vice-president of the United States, and J. Hugh Liedtke, subsequently the head of Pennzoil, formed Zapata Petroleum Corporation with headquarters in Houston in 1953, the same year Texas National Bank (TNB) was created through the merger of South Texas National and Union National Bank.

TNB quickly established mutually profitable working ties with Zapata Off-Shore Company, an 80 percent-owned subsidiary of Zapata Petroleum . . . Loans from Texas National  to Zapata for drilling rigs and vessels to tend to the rigs established the growing company as one of the bank's most significant oil-related accounts in the late 1950s."

Three ships owned by Zapata and which were financed by TNB -- theHouston, Barbara J, and Zapata -- were loaned by George H. W. Bush's firm to the CIA for the 1961 invasion by exiled Cuban mercenaries of Cuba. Not coincidentally, the Bay of Pigs invasion was code-named OPERATION ZAPATA by the CIA.

Texas Commerce Bank officials often rubbed shoulders with Zapata officials at the swank Houston Club during Jeb Bush's two year stint in Caracas. It was not unusual to see Zapata's vice president for international operations H. Merle Myers at club events with John Whitmore, chairman of the board; Kenneth M. Williams, senior vice president; Henry F. LeMieux, director; Thomas Dean Hogan, vice president of the Trust Department, and John West, executive vice president of Texas Commerce Bank. Other oil executives who frequented the club were those from Halliburton, Pennzoil, Exxon, Texaco, Shell, Amerada Hess, Brown & Root, Gulf Oil, and Ashland Oil. In 1977, these and other Houston Club members would also welcome back to their fold longtime member George H. W. Bush who moved back to Houston following his year as CIA director.

Bush entered the University of Texas in 1971 after graduating from Andover in Massachusetts where his academic record was less than stellar. Bush was forced to redo the ninth grade at Andover. However, at the University of Texas, Bush majored in Latin American Studies and graduated in a phenomenal two-and-a half-years. An October 8, 1976 memo to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations Training cites the University of Texas graduate program as a favored recruiting ground for the CIA. The CIA's Southwest Regional recruiter spoke to some 50 graduate students and faculty at the LBJ School of Public Affairs about careers in the CIA. However, as the memo notes, the recruiter warned a reporter for the University of Texas daily newspaper covering the talk that certain information "should be off the record." The reporter agreed to the CIA's terms. One of those present was Dr. Sydney Weintraub, a former deputy Secretary of State and deputy administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The CIA recruiter also targeted graduate students and faculty at the University Center for Asian Studies and the center's director, Dr. P. Tomasson Jannuzi. George H. W. Bush was CIA director during the agency's full court press recruiting effort at the Austin campus.

In 1977, a short time after his father left the CIA as director, Jeb, fluent in Spanish as a result of his time as an exchange student in Guadalajara, was sent, along with his Mexican wife Columba, to Caracas, Venezuela to work as a 'branch manager' and 'vice president' at the young age of 24. But Jeb was no ordinary 'branch manager.' He was, officially, Texas Commerce Bank's top point man in the Venezuelan capital and, unofficially, the CIA's main financial liaison to the Venezuelan oil industry and the Colombian narcotics cartels."

Jeb Bush's dalliance with the covert world of CIA off-shore financing would introduce him to important future political benefactors and those who would help shape his brother George W. Bush's eight year presidency. Continuing our report from April 8, 2015:

"[James] Baker sold Texas Commerce Bank's Houston skyscraper to the head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, in 1985. Bin Mahfouz was later identified as a key member of Saudi Arabia's support network for the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, which is noted in the still-classified 28 pages of U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on 9/11 intelligence failures. Bin Mahfouz, who lived in the River Oaks section of Houston near George H. W. Bush, died suddenly in 2009 at the age of 59. Bin Mahfouz, who was also an Irish citizen, threatened with confiscatory lawsuits any publication that reported his links to 9/11 and his family ties to Osama bin Laden.

Jeb had no problems with the Venezuelan government in providing financial support for the Colombian cartels. For much of Jeb's stay in Venezuela, the extremely corrupt Carlos Andres Perez, known as 'CAP,' was president. His extravagant spending using Venezuela's revenue from the recently-nationalized oil industry earned his government the nickname of 'Saudi Venezuela.' Although CAP nationalized the oil industry and created the Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) state-owned oil firm, he also was generous to American firms bidding for work with PdVSA. One of them was Bechtel Corporation, the firm of future Reagan-Bush cabinet members George P. Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. With a number of Bechtel employees in Venezuela, Jeb was not the only CIA 'NOC' present in the country. But, he was the most influential.

A CIA report about Venezuela's growing international ties in 1977 was prepared during Jeb Bush's assignment in Caracas. Titled "Venezuelan Internationalism: Oil and Influence," dated July 1977 and classified Confidential, the report warns against Venezuela's "unprecedented series of agreements with Central American, Caribbean, and Andean countries" and its vigorous "global dialogue between the developing and developed countries." The report also warned that Andres Perez expanded Venezuela's new foreign policy orientation from that of his predecessor Rafael Caldera and "identified himself personally with Third World aspirations." The CIA report indicated particular alarm by Langley over Andres Perez's November 1976 trip to the Soviet Union and another trip to the Middle East in April 1977. What particularly irritated the CIA was Perez's plan to ship Venezuela's oil to Cuba -- petroleum that was normally supplied by the Soviet Union -- in return for the Soviets supplying the oil normally destined for Cuba, to Western Europe, particularly Italy, thus reducing transportation costs for all parties concerned.

At the center of all the high-stakes oil politics in Caracas was Jeb Bush.

During CAP's second term as president from 1989 to 1993, a young army officer named Hugo Chavez attempted to overthrow the corrupt CAP in a coup. Many of Venezuela's elite who Jeb befriended during his days as Langley's main NOC in Caracas later became involved with repeated CIA attempts to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Today, they and their progeny live in the Miami-Dade area, particularly in Doral, nicknamed 'Doralzuela,' and are among Jeb's strongest and most deep-pocketed political supporters.

In 1989, CAP crushed popular protests against his government by killing as many as 3000 protesters. The massacre is known as the 'Caracazo' massacre. After leaving office the second time, Andres Perez was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 28 months in prison.

After leaving Venezuela in 1980 to help with his father's presidential and vice presidential campaigns, Jeb hooked up with Cuban-American Miami businessman Armando Codina, who had his own connections with CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in south Florida. It was Codina who helped Jeb make millions of dollars in the real estate business and eventually help launch him on his political career that took him to the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee. Jeb, as a principal of the Codina Group, was able to arrange the sale of high-priced condos and mansions in the Miami area to his elite friends in Venezuela, with Jeb receiving handsome sales commissions.

One of Jeb's close Miami associates was Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch. Bosch was a key figure in the CIA's Operation Condor, which was an alliance of Latin American military dictatorships that targeted leftist leaders for assassination across international borders. From his base in Caracas, Bosch helped carry out the October 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455, which was en route from Barbados to Jamaica. All 73 passengers and crew were killed in the attack, including children and the Cuban fencing team.

The Cubana bombing plot was discussed at a 1976 meeting in Washington between Bosch; another Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles; and Michael Townley of the CIA. Jeb's father, the CIA director, was fully aware of the plot, as well as another plot to kill former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier. Letelier and Roni Moffitt, his American associate, were killed when their car exploded on Sheridan Circle in front of the Irish embassy in Washington on September 21, 1976, a few weeks before the Cubana airliner was blown out of the sky off Barbados.

Codina, Bosch, and Posada Carriles were all part of Jeb's inner circle of friends, which also included Cuban businessman Camilo Padreda, a former spy for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Hernandez Cartaya, both later indicted for systematically embezzling funds from the Jefferson Savings and Loan of McAllen, Texas. Padreda and Cartaya were also identified as CIA agents who helped skim funds from Jefferson and other S&Ls to fund the Nicaraguan contras. Jeb's work for the CIA in Caracas in 1977 came a few months after the CIA's worst terrorism spree in history, which also happened to coincide with George H. W. Bush's single year of 1976 as CIA director.

After his father became Vice President, Jeb served as the liaison for the Nicaraguan contras and he arranged meetings between them and their supporters, as well as to the White House point man for covert assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels, one Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Oliver North. Another one of Jeb's Cuban cronies, Miguel Recarey, owner of Miami-based International Medical Center, an HMO, was awash in ill-gotten Medicare funds. Recarey and his brother, who had close ties to the CIA, were also funded by Florida Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., a co-conspirator in several CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and a suspected co-plotter in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.