Some "hard lessons" from the Boston bombing

[James H. Fetzer]

by Jim Fetzer 

"The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?"—Trevor Aaronson

The Boston bombing patsies

In a performance that would have made the Marx Brothers proud, DHS and the FBI managed to turn themselves in an international joke with their amateurish "false flag" attack in Boston during the marathon.

The alternative media, such as Citizens for Legitimate Government (CLG) and Whatreallyhappened.com, were far ahead of the "official" investigation and had already turned up photos of men in military garb and distinctive baseball caps that featured a skull logo, talking on cell phones and carrying backpacks that looked just like those that had been used in the bombings.

There were other photos of others in similar attire, who appeared to be members of the DHS or of a private security team--which appears to have been Craft International, a private mercenary firm that was founded by C...--which was running this op on its behalf.

Exposing the fabricated attack was so threatening to DHS and the FBI that its Boston stooge, Richard DesLauriers, Agent in Charge, held a press conference during which he insisted that "the only photographs that the public should consider" were those of two other persons, one of whom appeared to have had his image photoshopped to look a l...--except that the image on his baseball cap was obfuscated so it could not be made out.

The only justification for restricting attention to these photographs, however, would have been if the photographic record had been exhaustively explored where every person in every photograph had been identified and cleared of any culpability, which is absurd.

This was a transparent effort to divert attention from what the alternative media had already discovered. The real perps appear to be part of a military-style deployment, which was conducting a "drill" officials are attempting to deny:

 

 

In "Caught but not about to be arrested: Craft International Trained M... (19 April 2013), therebel presents a host of photographs, which provide convincing proof that Craft International was conducting this op on behalf of DHS, and writes,

 

 

"What does this mean? The images were uncovered first by 4Chan but I don’t know if they knew that the location where they were photographed was so close to ground zero.

"It’s been revealed that at least two men, possibly a third man with them, were photographed at the bombing scene in Boston wearing matching military grade boots and khaki pants and carrying large black backpacks that match the description of the ones the bombs were in.

"They were photographed just feet away from where one of the bombs was detonated before the attack.

"I have noticed that one of them is wearing a hat from Craft International, a mercenary training company set up by former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle and at least one of them is wearing an earpiece, the type the Secret Service use to communicate on site during operations.

"It might be worth noting also that Chris Kyle was killed a few months ago in a rather suspicious shooting at a gun range. I wrote about his shooting in relation to the ongoing American Glad.... And now here we have a guy wearing a hat from his company so close to ground zero with a backpack that matches the description of the one that had a bomb in it?"

The "Russian terrorist" cover-story

To distract attention from the real perps, therefore, the news abounds with stories of a fiery chase, another explosion and a shoot out leaving one dead and the other on the run. The actual conspirators, who appear to include DHS and the FBI, adopted the novel tactic of attributing the attack to a pair of Russians from Chechnya. The AP has released this story, which includes the following "background information":

In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.

Those raids included a raid in Moscow in October 2002 in which a group of Chechen militants took 800 people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 Chechen hostage-takers. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.

Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia. An explosion at the international arrivals hall at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in January 2011 killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 140.

While what the AP reports about Chechen militants appears to be correct, there is no apparent motive for them to have come to the United States and plant bombs at the Boston marathon.

But there is an urgent need for DHS and the FBI to concoct some fantastic scenario that will draw attention from the public's dawning realization--already supported by ample proof--that this was a "false flag" attack and that Chechen terrorists had nothing to do with it.

The FBI as an instrument of terror

This is hardly the first time that the FBI has been used to cover up crimes, including ones as major as JFK and the plane crash that took the life of Sen. Paul Wellstone. Even more pointedly, while efforts have been made to create the impression that the FBI has been attempting to defeat terrorist acts, the evidence points in the opposite direction.

We have had a series of "terrorist events", including the shoe bomber, the Times Square bomber, and the subway bomber, where those and other alleged incidents appear to have been orchestrated by the FBI:

Over the past year, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley have examined prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, as defined by the Department of Justice. Our investigation found:

• Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violations. (For more on the details of those 508 cases, see our charts page and searchable database.)
• Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.
• With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. (The exceptions are Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian who opened fire on the El-Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport; and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.)
• In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case.
• Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.

"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," says Martin Stolar, a lawyer who represented a man caught in a 2004 sting involving New York's Herald Square subway station. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror."

 Click here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjW03McCgfw

What most Americans do not know--principally because the main stream media is controlled by the government, which does not want the public to know--is that a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Intelligence issued a report on 3 October 2012 based upon its own study of 680 "fusion center" reports (where fusion centers merge federal, state and local "anti-terrorism" activities) spanning 2009-10 and found no indications of any domestic terrorist activity: NONE! ZIP! ZERO! NADA! That, however, must have come as most unwelcome news to the DHS, which has an agenda of its own to take control.

Which means, given the size of the sample and that those who were conducting the investigations being reported were zealous in its pursuit, that there is virtually no domestic terrorist threat! It is safe to infer that events like the Boston bombing are intended to compensate for that dearth of terrorism in the United States.

If they can't find a real reason for DHS, they are going to contrive one. We appear to be living through the reincarnation of "Operation Northwoods", which was a false flag op to conduct terrorist attacks in the US and blame them on Fidel Castro as a justification for the invasion of Cuba, which JFK rebuffed.

The "false flag" meme has broken through

 

But Obama is no JFK--and appears to be complicit. Indeed, what is remarkable in this case is that the "false flag" meme seems to have broken through. There is so much about the outrageous conduct of the FBI and its clumsy attempt to distract attention from the real perps to the patsies in this case that it may be impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube!

As Kevin Barrett has observed, Yahoo News! did something astonishing by conducting a poll about who was responsible for the Boston bombing, where the alternatives included the American government:

But after the Boston bombings of April 16th, 2013, even the corporate monopoly media could no longer ignore the possibility of a false-flag attack. Yahoo News asked “Who's behind the Boston Marathon bombings?” and offered 4 theories: (1) Islamic jihadists, (2) Right-wing militia types, (3) the government, and (4) a criminally-insane lone wolf.

Numbers (1), (2), and (4), of course, are the usual suspects. But including (3) “the government” on the suspects list is unprecedented for a mainstream news story reporting on a domestic terror incident.

The false-flag meme's growing prominence was underlined at Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick's press conference after the bombings. The first question for Governor Patrick came from Infowars correspondent Dan Bidondi, who asked whether the bombings were “a false-flag staged event to take away our civil liberties.” Patrick, of course, answered “no.”

Even the Atlantic Monthly, a neocon-lite magazine associated with names like Goldberg and Hitchens, felt compelled to publish a story headlined: “What Is a 'False Flag' Attack, and What Does Boston Have to Do with This?” Amazingly, the Atlantic article stated that yes, there is historical precedent for viewing the Boston bombing as a false-flag event. The author, Philip Bump, even admitted: “If the Boston attack had been a 'false flag' attack, Gov. Patrick would have responded 'no' anyway.”

False Flag attack on Jewish Community Center

 

Barrett attributes this break through to the success of the 9/11 Truth movement in elevating the consciousness of the American public to the fact that governments, especially the Israeli but including our own, resort to attacks on their own people and their own nation to promote the government's political agenda.

A nice example is the attacks on the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Community Center that took place... in apparent retaliation for Argentina's cooperation with Iran in the development of its peaceful atomic energy program, which illustrates the kinds of cases that have occurred, again and again, throughout modern history.

The news that had to be suppressed

The story associates with the patsies in this case has at least a modicum of originality, since they are alleged to be from Chechnya, which has seen its share of bombings and violence, but why they would want to bomb the Boston marathon remained completely unknown.

Meanwhile, evidence that the attack was carried out by DHS continues to mount, where the motives appear to have included suppressing an otherwise sensational report about the commission of torture by the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden admini..., which was to be released the day following the marathon and no doubt would have been front-page headline news on very newspaper and television report in the world but for the occurrence of the bombing.

Here is the real story that should have dominated the headlines on 16 April 2013 as reported by The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.

Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.

While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency records, rather than interviews, remains classified.

“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

Click here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x9KTMasr24

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Bush needed torture for the war on terror

That this information would eventually surface comes as no surprise to those who was paying attention at the time. The Bush/Cheney administration cynically used the 9/11 attacks to constrain civil liberties, increase defense spending, and launch preventative wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush himself eventually admitted that Saddam had “nothing” to do with the attacks; the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that he was not in collusion with al Quada; and the FBI has acknowledged that it has “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of 9/11.

Indeed, a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity (“False Statements Preceded War”, January 23, 2008), revealed that administration officials from Bush to Cheney to Rice on down the line have lied nearly 1,000 times about the reasons for attacking Iraq.

Since Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and Osama had nothing to do with 9/11, it may be worthwhile to consider who benefited. Using the traditional standards of motive, means, and opportunity, the likely suspects for having committed these atrocities are not 19 Islamic fundamentalists acting under orders from a man in a cave in Afghanistan but elements at the highest levels of the US government and their closest ally in the Middle East.

We might want to consider those who have lied to us. Before 9/11, American officials had been in discussions with the Taliban about the construction of an enormous pipeline across northern Afghanistan, assuring them that, if they allowed the pipeline to be constructed, we would bathe them in gold; and if they did not, we would bathe them in bombs. They didn’t, we did (by using 9/11 as our rationale).

Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, was the principal source for a book, The Price of Loyalty (2004) by Ron Suskind, in which it was revealed that the invasion of Iraq was being discussed at the first meeting of the Bush cabinet in 2001. That was many months before the 9/11 attacks, which Bush used to justify invading Afghanistan and attacking Iraq. The underlying motives appear to have been oil, Israel, and ideology.

Anyone familiar with the history of the Middle East and Bush’s thinking would have no problem sorting these things out. The US coveted Iraq’s oil reserves, Israel wanted to reduce the influence of the most advanced and sophisticated nation in the Middle East, and the neo-cons wanted to introduce American military power into the Middle East in the expectation of projecting American influence outward from that geopolitically strategic location.

In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbig Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, outlined precisely such a plan, which was later embraced and developed by the members of Project for the New American Century, whose documents are still available on the internet. Its enthusiastic supporters included William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and many others who would hold high positions in the administration of George W. Bush.

What the administration needed was a rationale it could sell to convince the American people that there were good reasons to invade Afghanistan and to attack Iraq. Heinrich Himmler had explained at the Nuremberg Trials that it is easy to manipulate the citizens of a nation by convincing them that they are under attack by a foreign power and that they will then gladly surrender their liberties for security.

The key role of Philip Zelikow

A key member of the Bush brain trust was a colleague of Condi Rice, one Philip Zelikow, who had written about the political consequences of terrorism. In an article in Foreign Affairs (“Catastrophic Terrorism,” November-December 1998), Zelikow and his co-authors Ashton Carter and John Deutch, former Director of the CIA, had spelled out the consequences that would have ensued had the earlier attempt to blow-up the World Trade Center in 1993 been successful:

“the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949.

Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks.”

What this means is that the inside insiders of the Bush administration had a plan that would enable them to achieve their political objectives. It was one that satisfied Himmler’s conception and could be used to manipulate the American people.

Of course, it would need to be covered-up, where the tried and true tactic of a Presidential Commission could do the job. And who better to run the show and make sure nothing got out of hand than Zelikow himself.”

Indeed, Philip Shenon's The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (2008), revealed that Zelikow was in constant communication with Karl Rove, Bush’s closest advisor, during the commission’s inquiry, which is a convincing indication that it was being conducted with attention to the political objectives that motivated the attacks and their implications for the administration, were they to be uncovered.

An expert on "public myths"

The plot of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)—that 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial airliners, outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, and perpetrated these crimes—can be disproven in every significant respect.

Plane crashes and kerosene-based fires could not have destroyed the Twin Towers; no Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, though one appears to have flown over it; the events in Shanksville are shrouded in mystery. Hani Hajour’s flight instructor was dumbfounded when told that he had allegedly piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon because ‘He couldn’t fly at all!’

Alas, too many Americans have been taken in by the elaborate hoax presented in The 9/11 Commission Report, which was carefully contrived to be convincing by an expert on ‘public myths’ named Philip Zelikow, who was in bed with the administration.

It is common knowledge that torture is ineffectual at producing useful information (or “actionable intelligence”), because the subject will say anything to escape the torment. This fact cannot have escaped the administration, which must have found it irresistible to resort to torture to extract false confessions that could support its phony rationale for the “war on terrorism.”

Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, for example, who is alleged to be the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks, reportedly confessed to no less than 31 attacks (“Al Qaeda Chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Confesses to Planning Sept. 1...,” March 15, 2007).

The fact that some of these occurred when he was a child and others after his capture does not seem to have impressed The New York Times. But the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was an even more grotesque case of the abuse of judicial procedure and violations of due process. He wasn’t convicted of the crime for which he was punished.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth published a press release about the Moussaoui trial (“Scholars Call Moussaoui Trial ‘A Charade’,” April 22, 2006), explaining that he had confessed a year before to participating in a plot to free the blind shiek who had been involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center but had nothing to do with 9/11.

He was equipped with a 50,000 volt ‘stun belt’ at the trial to determine his punishment, which undoubtedly made him very cooperative. But the situation was absurd. One day we had an article, "Bush Wants Limits on Access to Evidence" (February 15, 2008), the next day a front page story, "U.S. Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law" (February 16, 2008).

We were suspended somewhere between "Alice in Wonderland" and "1984". The nation was living a lie, which Americans may now at least dimly be beginning to perceive.

Where do we go from here?

Today the news abounds with stories of a fiery chase, another explosion and a shoot out leaving one dead and the other on the run. That is as much hokum as the stories we have been told about 19 Islamic terrorists on 9/11, about Osama bin Laden having been involved, and about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.

Bush needed torture and kangaroo courts to justify his fake "war on terror", of which the Boston bombing is the latest extension. A administration that lives based upon lies, as Bush/Cheney and now Obama/Biden have done since 9/11, cannot endure public scrutiny without manipulating impressions by concocting fake attacks. The situation looks like this:

(1) DHS was in full command and set up complete perimeter control with snipers and spotters on rooftops and at least two armored watchtowers, which were manned and then raised on scissor-type elevators beneath them;

(2) DHS has 100% live coverage via private HD video cameras of businesses close by which were patched into local fusion center and recorded and face analyzed everything. So DHS know who was carrying backpacks;

(3) DHS deployed contractors to run the false flag and to detonate the bombs. It employed some "blackwater types" (aka "Xe", now "Academy")--in this case, it appears, Craft International--who were caught on photos and film;

(4) Their badge was a skull on their hats which identified them plus they were all dressed the same. They were all talking into earset radios and carrying handheld devices, perhaps satellite radios or remote control detonators;

(5) The date and location of the false flag appear to have been chosen to distract attention from a major story about the commission of torture by the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden administrations that undermines their standing;

(6) This was a sophisticated military type, Gladio style, false flag attack done by DHS, where the FBI--which has not only covered up major cases in the past but is orchestrating domestic "terrorist attacks"--is playing out its role;

(7) It is also a huge psyop designed to counter all the progress the alternative media on the worldwide internet has made cracking the conspiracy to "kill America" and asset-strip it bare. This is a volley in the war against truth.

Ironically, this fiasco may prove to be the most important lesson Americans could possibly learn, even at this late stage in the domination of this nation by DHS and the promotion of a police state. Even our Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has announced that he is ready to abandon Posse Comitatus and allow the US military to perform police functions in the United States.

We know DHS has been gearing up for this, with its acquisition of 1.5 billion rounds of .40 caliber ammunition that is not even permissible in combat under the Hague Convention of 1899, 2,700 light tanks, 7,000 assault weapons, and more. We are in the death throes of a once great nation.

If we can finally see the light and realize the enormity of the threat, we might possibly be able to defeat it. But that requires both courage and strength.

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.  This is the republication of http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/04/19/some-hard-lessons-from-the-...