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By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi
Sunday, 23 November 2008

India is in something of a state of shock after learning from official sources that its first Hindu terror cell may have carried out a series of deadly bombings that were initially blamed on militant Muslims. The revelation is forcing the country to consider some difficult questions.

At least 10 people have been arrested in connection with several bomb blasts in the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon in the western state of Maharashtra in September, which left six people dead. But reports suggest that police believe the cell may also have carried out a number of previous attacks, including last year's notorious bombing of a cross-border train en route to Pakistan, which killed 68 people. Among the alleged members of the cell are a serving army officer and a Hindu monk.

Bomb attacks are not uncommon in India – there has been a flurry in recent months – but police usually blame them on Muslim extremists, often said to have links to militant groups based in either Pakistan or Bangladesh. As a result, the recent cracking of the alleged Hindu cell has forced India to face some difficult issues. A country that prides itself on purported religious and cultural toleration – an ambition that in reality often falls short – has been made to ask itself how this cell could operate for so long. India's military, which prides itself on its professionalism, has been forced to order an embarrassing inquiry.

More.................

Mumbai Attackers were 'Hindus' and 'White Men'

"Tying a red thread or cord around the wrist is a Hindu practice and it is unlikely a Muslim, especially one politicized enough to carry out an attack such as this, would observe it.

"I think this provides more evidence that this was a false flag operation or at least an attack by a non-Muslim group. For more information about the significance of the red thread see wikipedia and this blog post.


"Looks Indian, in his twenties. Looks like he's been to hell, brainwashed and back. Manchurian candidate.

"The LTTE have refined this art, and one wonders to what extent the RSS has some linkages with the LTTE.

(The LTTE are Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia / The RSS are the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

"Whilst others mentioned seeing White males, blond with punk rock hairstyles.

From the Guardian:

"One police officer who encountered the gunmen as they entered the Jewish centre told the Guardian the attackers were "white" (all of them? How many of them), although this could mean they were paler-skinned Indians from the country's north.

"I went into the building late last night," he said. "I got a shock because they were white. I was expecting them to look like us. They fired three shots. I fired 10 back."

"In India the term white refers to people of European stock, and not to fair-skinned North Indians (Aryans).( the word Ghora..... which means white but also means foreigner from Europe........Firingi...old term, and numerous other words and terms). There are some blonds of Pakistani and Indian extraction, but highly unlikely that any of would have punk hairstyles.

It seems that was also the case with other sites, where people saw blond, white people posing as the attackers.

From the BBC:

"Then, the "foreign looking, fair skinned" men, as Mr Mishra remembers them, simply carried on killing."

"Locals say the orgy of killings in Mumbai began here. Three men walked into the cafe, drank beer, settled their bills and walked out. Then they fished out guns from their bags and began firing."

At the Leopald cafe.

"They did not look Indian, they looked foreign. One of them, I thought, had blonde hair. The other had a punkish hairstyle. They were neatly dressed," says Mr Amir."                                                                    More......................

by Gilad Atzmon / November 29th, 2008

At the time I am writing these notes it is far from being clear what really happened in Mumbai. The questions I ask myself are the same ones most everyone else is asking: Who were the attackers? Who was behind them and what did they try to achieve? However one thing is evident. The War on Terror is a total disaster. The so-called ‘terrorists’, whoever they are, have won. America and its allies have been defeated.

But it doesn’t stop there, throughout this war America has lost its primacy as a super power. It is now financially ruined. Its leadership is regarded by most people around the world as a solid core of evil. It doesn’t take a genius to gather that this enormous defeat is an outcome of a chain of events that started with a single orchestrated attack that took place in September 2001. To those who fail to remember, the 19 terrorists who devastated the world on 9/11 didn’t carry a nuclear bomb, they weren’t equipped with some advanced weaponry. All they carried were box cutters. As bizarre as it may sound, all it took to bring the American empire down was 19 highly motivated people armed with box cutters.

Unfortunately, America and Britain, on their way down, have managed to get themselves involved in some war crimes of colossal magnitude. Two million Iraqis and Afghans are dead. Many more millions are gravely wounded, millions of others are refugees. Each of these victims is a direct outcome of an illegal war launched by the Anglo American democracies.                                                           More...........................

by Robert Weitzel / November 28th, 2008

With [traditional Israeli defense strategists] it’s all about tanks and land and controlling territories … and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are worthless.
– Incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

Soon after the sand settled following the Six Day War in 1967, Jewish settlements began dotting the hills in the occupied territories. These settlements are typically located on the high ground to better control the surrounding landscape. Today there are 127 Jewish settlements with a population exceeding 468,000 in the West Bank, the Golan Heights and in the suburbs of East Jerusalem—the last of nearly 8,000 settlers were removed from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

According to a recent Amnesty International report, “In the first six months of 2008 Israel has expanded settlements in the West Bank/East Jerusalem at a faster rate than in the previous seven years.”                                       More.......................                        

by Rodrigue Tremblay / November 28th, 2008

Obviously he [Rahm Emanuel] will influence the president to be pro-Israel, why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.
– Binyamin Emanuel (father of President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel)

I don’t want to just end the [Iraq] war, …I want to end the mindset that got us into war.
– Candidate Sen. Barack Obama (January 31, 2008)

What Washington is really telling you is that you should keep doing the same old things over and over and over again and somehow expect a different outcome. And that’s the definition of madness, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different.
– Candidate Sen. Barack Obama (December 27, 2007, to a crowd in Carroll, Iowa)

Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil! [The more things change, the more they remain the same!]
– Old French dictum

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama ran a successful campaign on an anti-Iraq war, anti-Washington establishment and pro-change platform. With the assistance of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation, he prevailed in obtaining a clear governing mandate. Most Americans have no other choice than to want him to succeed in delivering on his promises. But the issuance of vague political promises and the hard reality of governing while relying on an efficient decision-making process, are two different things.

President-elect Obama has so far concentrated on not repeating former president Jimmy Carter’s mistakes in his difficult relations with Congress, and he has surrounded himself with people who are directly connected with the Democratic congressional majority. However, in so doing, he has given the impression that he has enthusiastically joined the Washington political establishment that he so vehemently decried only a short while ago. The real question is whether he has brought Washington insiders into his own political tent, or whether he has simply joined the same corrupt Washington establishment that he himself decried. Only the future will tell for sure.                                                                       More...............................

Saturday, 22 November 2008

Fighters with Afghanistan's Taliban militia stand on a hillside at Maydan Shahr in Wardak province, west of Kabul

I sit on the rooftop of the old Central Hotel – pharaonic-decorated elevator, unspeakable apple juice, sublime green tea, and armed Tajik guards at the front door – and look out across the smoky red of the Kabul evening. The Bala Hissar fort glows in the dusk, massive portals, the great keep to which the British army should have moved its men in 1841. Instead, they felt the king should live there and humbly built a cantonment on the undefended plain, thus leading to a "signal catastrophe".

Like automated birds, the kites swoop over the rooftops. Yes, the kite-runners of Kabul, minus Hollywood. At night, the thump of American Sikorsky helicopters and the whisper of high-altitude F-18s invade my room. The United States of America is settling George Bush's scores with the "terrorists" trying to overthrow Hamid Karzai's corrupt government.

Now rewind almost 29 years, and I am on the balcony of the Intercontinental Hotel on the other side of this great, cold, fuggy city. Impeccable staff, frozen Polish beer in the bar, secret policemen in the front lobby, Russian troops parked in the forecourt. The Bala Hissar fort glimmers through the smoke. The kites – green seems a favourite colour – move beyond the trees. At night, the thump of Hind choppers and the whisper of high-altitude MiGs invade my room. The Soviet Union is settling Leonid Brezhnev's scores with the "terrorists" trying to overthrow Barbrak Karmal's corrupt government.

Thirty miles north, all those years ago, a Soviet general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, imperialist "remnants" – the phrase Kabul communist radio always used – who were being supported by America and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Fast forward to 2001 – just seven years ago – and an American general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, the all but conquered Taliban who were being supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Russian was pontificating at the big Soviet airbase at Bagram. The American general was pontificating at the big US airbase at Bagram.

This is not déjà-vu. This is déjà double-vu. And it gets worse.                                     More................................

Born in sin

Russia Today

November 17, 2008   Israel’s latest blockade against Gaza, imposed more than a week ago in retaliation for rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, is causing great suffering among ordinary people. For some it has become a struggle for life itself. About half of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents lost power a week ago after Israel stopped the flow of fuel to the territory. For many, the blackouts are a great inconvenience. But for one paralysed Palestinian boy, the fuel shortage poses a deadly threat. Eight-year-old Makher Al-Asli is completely dependent on an artificial respirator. His one is powered by a diesel generator. Makher's family members spend days on fuel-finding missions, just to keep Makher alive. "Tomorrow we'll have to visit all petrol stations to find a couple of gallons of diesel," Makher's father says.

These documents have never been made public.

A few weeks back, a 7th grader who hangs around the neighborhood told my kids that Obama was a stupid Muslim terrorist and that if that “nigger” got elected he and his family were moving to Canada.

A week ago, my 10-year-old daughter related the new joke going around her elementary school: What’s the difference between Obama and Simba? Simba is an African lion and Obama is a lyin’ African.

And the day after the election, in a high school lunch-line, a kid standing behind my 15-year-old son appeared to be sulking. A teenage girl asked him what was wrong. “There’s a Nigger in the White House now,” he said. “Yeah, I know,” the girl replied. “I don’t like him either.”

As a parent of mixed-race children, I obviously find the ignorance inherent in these sentiments offensive. But I am not upset with the children who parrot them. I’m unhappy with their parents.

Teenagers are not genetically predisposed to call African-Americans “niggers.“ That kind of prejudice starts at home. Ten-year-olds don’t independently question Barrack Obama’s integrity or sit up thinking of ways to mock half of his ethnicity. It’s something they get from mom or dad as he or she relates a joke from work. And young middle school students don’t instinctively suspect Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist; this kind of obtuseness starts at the parental level.

The “trickle-down” approach to economics may have been proven to be to a terrible blunder of late, but the moniker itself is solid. It’s simply misapplied.

Wealth doesn’t trickle down. Ignorance does.

If a child’s parents are members of the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation or are simply active, vocal racists, chances are that child will also pursue repugnant ideologies or discriminate against ethnic minorities. If a child’s father hangs out on street corners holding up signs that say “God Hates Fags,“ the chances of that child someday becoming a homophobic bumpkin who is afraid of gay marriage increase exponentially.

If mom and dad are shallow, xenophobic Neocons who mock anyone whom they’re instructed to feel threatened by or disagree with, little Timmy is much more inclined to mock or denigrate anyone he is instructed to feel threatened by or disagree with.

To an absurd, sinister degree, racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and insensitivity are passed down thru too many families in this country, from the grandparents to the parents and from the parents to the kids, like precious family heirlooms.

Hence, ignorance and cruelty continually dim our collective future by trickling down from generation to generation, miring us in an unsavory wealth of malevolence and woe.

I think the American poet Anne Sexton put it best when she wrote “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.”

If you’re so eat up with hate and fear that you can’t abide the skin color or free will or liberty of others because your fascist, close-minded daddy and/or mommy or “good” book told you so, fine. But keep it to yourself.

No offense, but the world would be a better place if the chains for which you are a part of are broken. And if you’ll stop stuffing your children like Thanksgiving turkeys with your paranoia and prejudices, they might grow up with minds of their own, figuring out things for themselves.

Trust me, as a fellow parent–for my kids and yours–life is too short for them to spend years trying to transcend what we’ve done to them.

It’s worth a try, right? Who knows? Unencumbered by our historical flaws and cultural failings, they might even be president someday.

Saturday, 8 November 2008

How is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself?

American lawyers defending six Algerians before a habeas corpus hearing in Washington this week learned some very odd things about US intelligence after 9/11. From among the millions of "raw" reports from American spies and their "assets" around the world came a CIA Middle East warning about a possible kamikaze-style air attack on a US navy base at a south Pacific island location. The only problem was that no such navy base existed on the island and no US Seventh Fleet warship had ever been there. In all seriousness, a US military investigation earlier reported that Osama bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post office on a US military base in east Asia.That this nonsense was disseminated around the world by those tasked to defend the United States in the "war on terror" shows the fantasy environment in which the Bush regime has existed these past eight years. If you can believe that bin Laden drops by a shopping mall on an American military base, then you can believe that everyone you arrest is a "terrorist", that Arabs are "terrorists", that they can be executed, that living "terrorists" must be tortured, that everything a tortured man says can be believed, that it is legitimate to invade sovereign states, to grab the telephone records of everyone in America. As Bob Herbert put it in The New York Times a couple of years ago, the Bush administration wanted these records "which contain crucial documentation of calls for a Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Indiana, and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Alabama, to help in the search for Osama bin Laden". There was no stopping Bush when it came to trampling on the US Constitution. All that was new was that he was now applying the same disrespect for liberty in America that he had shown in the rest of the world.                                            More...........................

Ted Galen Carpenter

November 7, 2008

The central theme of Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency was his call for "change"—albeit often with few details. There is an imperative need for change in America’s foreign policy. Even during the cold war, Washington’s strategy led to security free-riding by allies and clients, caused the republic to blunder into ill-advised military crusades, most notably the Vietnam War, and imposed unnecessary financial burdens on taxpayers.

Matters have become even worse since the end of the Cold War. U.S. forces have intervened in places as diverse as Panama, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and the Persian Gulf, and Washington’s formal and informal security commitments have expanded enormously. America’s strategic over-extension and muddled priorities reached new levels under George W. Bush, with the utopian goal of implanting democracy in the Middle East and other unpromising regions.

America’s foreign policy cries out for drastic change, but it remains uncertain whether president-elect Obama will bring the right kind of change. Many of his foreign-policy positions are sketchy, and in those cases where he has provided details, there are as many reasons for uneasiness and skepticism as there are for hope and confidence.

He shows no willingness, for example, to reconsider Washington’s commitment to the hoary North Atlantic alliance. Indeed, he advocates further expansion of NATO, including membership for Ukraine and Georgia, despite the certainty of provoking Russia. Obama has praised NATO’s interventions in both Bosnia and Kosovo during the Clinton years, and he embraced the February 2008 decision to grant Kosovo independence over Moscow’s vehement objections.

His attitude is most unfortunate, since many U.S. policies reek of obsolescence or misplaced priorities. For example, Obama’s reflexive enthusiasm for NATO ignores mounting evidence that the alliance lacks either the cohesion or strategic rationale to play a worthwhile security role in the twenty-first century. NATO’s bumbling performance in Afghanistan is only the most visible example. Worse, adding small-security clients creates dangerous liabilities for the United States as the leader of the alliance. An obligation to defend Georgia, for instance, could entangle America in the deservedly obscure dispute between Tbilisi and Moscow over the status of Georgia’s secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. President Obama should ask himself how risking a confrontation with a nuclear-armed power over such meager stakes would benefit America.

It is on the issue of humanitarian intervention, though, that Obama’s attitude—and that of some of his likely foreign policy appointees—is most worrisome. His article, "Renewing American Leadership," in the July/August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs included a dubious and troubling assumption. He insisted that "the security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. The mission of the United States is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity." That assumption about the alleged indivisibility of destinies is not materially different from the sentiments that President Bush expressed in his second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."                              More......................

James Corbett The Corbett Report

Friday, Nov 7, 2008

A source connected to the previously unreleased footage of the collapse of WTC1 and WTC7 which suddenly appeared on internet video-sharing site Veoh.com last weekend has revealed details about the footage to The Corbett Report.

According to the source, the videos available on the internet come from a DVD that was compiled from raw footage taken in New York on September 11. The video on the internet has not been edited or manipulated in any way from the footage on the DVD, although the ‘replay’ of each collapse has been slowed down by 50 percent. The source indicated, however, that the raw footage had been edited before it was put on the DVD, thus explaining the sudden cut from a close-up of the North Tower to a long shot of the entire building with the collapse already underway.

This source also dismisses internet speculation that the person who took the footage was connected in any way to the collapses themselves. A number of posters on internet discussion boards and forums have claimed that the WTC7 video is suspicious as it zooms out just moments before the collapse, as if the person taking the footage knew what was about to happen. The source notes that the footage starts with a close-up of the windows breaking out on the north side of the building, which would have been a visual cue to anyone watching the building at that moment that something was taking place in the building.

As The Corbett Report previously reported, the videos were released anonymously on the internet on November 1, 2008 with no further information. Watch the video in the player below:

The video shows perhaps the clearest view yet of World Trade Center 7 as it collapses directly into its own footprint at freefall gravitational speed in the late afternoon on September 11, 2001. This collapse has long interested 9/11 researchers as the building was not struck by a plane and only had two isolated office fires burning in it that afternoon before its sudden and complete collapse, an unprecedented event in the history of modern steel-framed skyscrapers. The video of the North Tower also shows an extremely detailed view of the bottom half of the building as the collapse reaches the lower levels, including a brief, clear glimpse of the ’spire’ of interior columns before they disappear into the pyroclastic dust cloud at the base of the building, a feature not found in ordinary office collapses and also seen in the wake of the WTC7 collapse. Both videos also show clear views of the blast squibs preceding the collapses, another sign of controlled demolition.

There is still no word from prominent researchers of the collapses regarding the new footage. Richard Gage was contacted for comment on this story but has not yet replied to the request for comment.