Holder scandal may be US attempt to destabilize Mexico

PressTV

An analyst says the trafficking of guns by the US to violent cartels in Mexico in a secret operation has resulted in some of those guns entering into Arizona.

Press TV has interviewed Wayne Madsen, investigative journalist from Washington, about the ramifications of the US running guns across the Mexican border and being caught doing it; and also about the possibility that US Attorney General Eric Holder, voted by Congress as being in contempt of Congress, will be pursued through independent prosecution.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: It’s been said that the Holder case is meant to distract Americans from bigger issues at hand such as the economy and never ending wars etc. Do you agree or is this a lot more significant?

Madsen: Well, I think one of the interests in this case may be misplaced somewhat. Of course, the Obama White House says this was a political move, but… and we have to understand it is the Justice Department, which would have to bring charges for this contempt of Congress vote against the attorney general.

Well, the attorney general is the head of the Justice Department so it’s rather doubtful that he is going to appoint a prosecutor to have himself prosecuted.

So, this is actually more of a symbolic vote by the House. They knew this wasn’t going to go anywhere, but there’s another issue.

The issue is that anytime the National Rifle Association thinks that guns are an issue and it could be restricted, they have their people in Congress vote for their legislation. So we saw some 17 Democrats vote with Republicans to cite Holder for contempt of Congress - I think only two Republicans joined the Democrats in opposition.

But we also know that there are a lot of strange things going on in Mexico with the two major drug cartels, Las Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel and the fact is that guns from the US wound up in the hands of these cartels.

There’s a conspiracy theory amongst the NRA that this is a means by the Obama administration to try to restrict guns, but there’s also another thought that this is an attempt to destabilize Mexico.

There’s a big presidential election in Mexico on Sunday and the mere fact that we could see a return of the PRI Party candidates, which ruled Mexico for decades, there could be much more to what’s going on with the running of guns from the US into Mexico.


And I’m told from sources in Arizona that guns are coming back across the border from Mexico into states like Arizona that share a border with Mexico… So I’m wondering whether there’s an intelligence operation going on and that is why Mr. Holder decided to stonewall because his record shows that he will protect the interests of all US intelligence operations and this may be an attempt by the US to destabilize Mexico.

Press TV: I want to pick up on your point about the Justice Department. Doesn’t the fact that Holder’s case will be referred to prosecutors under him unearth a vital flaw, maybe, in the judicial system? It seems the US attorney general is in a sense above the law as no prosecutor would want to jeopardize his or her own position.

Madsen: Absolutely. And this is why many times we saw independent special councils or independent prosecutors named, to get that individual out from any kind of coercion from the attorney general.

We saw during Watergate with the independent Watergate prosecutor; we saw it again in the move against President Clinton that ended up in his impeachment - of course, he was found not guilty by the Senate. But we have seen these special prosecutors appointed because of this very issue.

It’s always stated that the attorney general is not a political position. It’s somehow different from the other members of the Cabinet, but we’ve seen from past history with the Attorney General John Mitchell under Richard Nixon and Edwin Meese under Reagan that these attorneys general have been highly political and in fact Attorney General Mitchell went to prison because of his activity during the Watergate scandal.


So, yes it does point out a flaw in the Independent Counsel Statute, which is now not in force. It was always used as a means to prevent the politicization of the Justice Department in these types of matters.

America’s Death Pornography Culture: Celebrating brutal deaths of Qaddafi and Saddam

Global Research
Wayne Madsen

New images reveal Qaddafi sodomized by rebels

The United States government and military revels in death and pornographic intimidation. The videos and photographs of howling Iraqis celebrating the hanging of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after his U.S.-administered kangaroo court trial in Iraq and the physical abuse, alleged sodomizing, and execution of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi by NATO-armed and directed rebels after his convoy in Sirte was reportedly struck by a U.S. drone-launched missile, exemplify America’s fixation with pornographic death scenes...

The George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama administrations share a fascination for displaying the dead bodies of their vanquished enemies. For Bush, it was the gruesome stone-slabbed corpses of Qusay and Uday Hussein, Saddam’s sons, after they were killed in a firefight with U.S. troops in. That was followed by the body of Sadaam after his hanging in.

Of course, it did not suit President Obama to broadcast a photograph of Osama Bin Laden, allegedly killed while resisting arrest in Abbotabad, Pakistan. In the case of Bin Laden, there is a strong reason to believe that Osama’s body could not be shown because there was no body of Osama. Whether an Osama Bin Laden look-a-like was killed or not may never be known, but what is certain is that the Obama administration’s explanation for ”Osama’s” burial at sea from a U.S. aircraft carrier appears dubious.

There was also the curious designation of the operation to kill Bin Laden as “Geronimo.” President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were in the White House Situation Room when they heard the news from the strike team: “We’ve ID’d Geronimo,” followed by “Geronimo EKIA” or “Geronimo enemy killed in action.”

There was outrage among Native Americans over the designation of Bin Laden as Geronimo. But the code name has its own ghastly history. In 1918, in another macabre display of ghoulishness by America’s political elite, Prescott Bush, the future U.S. senator and father and grandfather of two future presidents, allegedly dug up the grave of the famed Apache leader Geronimo and stole his skull and some bones. The remains are said to be among the prized possession of Yale’s elite and secretive Skull and Bones society, along with the skull of former President Martin van Buren, the only president of the United States who was not in the blood line, close or distant, of the British royal family.

How the world changed after 9/11 (Democracy Now! Scooped in their own back yard by The Guardian)

The Guardian

On the day of September 11, Charlie Skelton attends a symposium of critical thinkers in New York

The heavy syllables of the victims' names boomed out along the streets around Ground Zero. The public were patted down, then allowed up a cramped side road to peer at a distant video screen of the memorial. They filmed the video screen on their mobile phones, filmed each other filming, and film crews filmed them filming.

It was hardly fertile ground for grief, you'd think. And yet, the weird detachment of the moment was severed by the chanting of the names and the brief tributes of the readers. It was the daughter who said her father's friends tell her that she reminds them of him that did it for me. That, and the list of victims called Jones. Jones after Jones after Jones. Too many Joneses. I took my sniffles back up the street to Starbucks.

And from Starbucks, I went down the rabbit hole. I found myself at a conference on Walker Street called 'How The World Changed After 9/11'. It was packed, but I managed to slide in at the back, to hear a guy called Webster Tarpley chant his own list of names. The names of the 46 military exercises and hijack drills (called things like 'Vigilant Guardian') that were actually taking place on the morning of September 11. "The greatest density of drills in US military history," Tarpley said.

Fake radar blips, dummy hijacks, dummy attacks, fighter jets sent off to Turkey, the skies left unprotected, with the FBI's top anti-terror experts stuck on a training exercise in California. The drills, said Tarpley, were important, because not only did they weaken and confuse US air defence, but there was also a military drill for each major component of the 9/11 attacks. The drills were cover, and the dummy threats were made real.

September 11, he argues, was a coup carried out by a rogue network within the US military and government. A cabal of fascists, working with (and for) a banking oligarchy, "the old boys of Wall Street".

Webster Tarpley

"You want to blame Saudi Arabia, or Israel, or Pakistan? You can't. There isn't the evidence." The evidence, Tarpley says, points towards 9/11 as a false flag attack, carried out by a high level clique, that forced a shocked and awestruck US public into a vast and still ongoing war. It was America's very own Reichstag fire. And the official version of the event? "A racist, militaristic, and fascist myth that we must reject."

What I heard, from speaker after speaker, was a heartfelt desire to turn away from the path of destruction, militarism and lies that America has been set upon after 9/11. Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, mourned for Iraq: "One million dead, 4m displaced, and that's a victory?" He sees the failure of Americans to comprehend the scale of the destruction wrought under their flag as nothing less than racist. "In America, we are very good at segregating our tears. Racism is our original sin."

Ray McGovern

McGovern quoted from Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail: "Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." And 9/11, for McGovern, is a "big boil" that needs lancing.

He drew attention to an extraordinary story, barely touched by the mainstream press, that Richard Clarke, who was the White House counter-terrorism czar at the time of the attacks, has recently accused the CIA of deliberately suppressing information before 9/11, information that might have prevented the attacks. Clarke claimed: "There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information." And who made this decision? "I would think it would have been made by the director".

So that would be George Tenet. Director of the CIA from 1997-2004, now a managing director of an investment bank. The former CIA man, McGovern, ends his speech by saying: "Of all the people who should be put in prison, he'd be top of my list."

Another speaker, Mike Rivero, addressed the outrage, which he often felt when the "false flag" analysis of 9/11 is presented. The idea that "we would never do such a thing" or "it's not the sort of thing governments do." He gave a whistlestop tour of state-sponsored attacks and hoodwinkings: the Lusitania, the Maine, the Dodgy Dossier, Saddam's nuclear weapons, the staged burning of the Reichstag, and the notorious Gleiwitz incident in which the Nazis faked an attack on a German radio station to justify the invasion of Poland. His point being that 9/11 was "not unique". There's a historical context.

History, documentation, facts. A respect for life, and a respect for truth. This is what I heard, over and over again, at this remarkable conference. Wayne Madsen – a former naval officer and NSA operative – spoke of the atmosphere of "hype and fear" that still grips America, 10 years after 9/11. A fear that's pumped into us, relentlessly, through our flatscreen HD Orwellian "telescreens"

Wayne Madsen

Madsen called for the release of the commission findings that Ludkowski told me about last night: "Let's get those documents out of the National Archives!" But he noted that the man whose job it is to decide what gets released, the administrator of the White House office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is one Cass Sunstein. The same Cass Sunstein that in 2008 urged the government to "cognitively infiltrate" alternative groups like the 9/11 Truth Movement. So releasing those documents probably isn't top of his to-do list.

He's also the same Cass Sunstein that wrote the first op-ed about Julian Assange – the CIA asset and "child of MK Ultra", as Tarpley dubs him. But that's a whole other can of worms …

I found myself blinking back tears for the second time when McGovern read out a poem – in his polished CIA Russian – about a mother mourning the loss of her child. This thread of grieving ran throughout the conference. Wayne Madsen grieved for the loss of "shoeleather journalism", McGovern mourned the death of the fourth estate, while Tarpley spoke of the hollow memorial at Ground Zero – the two "abysses": the reflecting pools, or "voids", as they're often called. He sees these memorials as an appropriately empty vision of "nothingness. Nihil. No ideals, nothing." A nothingness at the heart of America. "But we have to do something."

We have to do something. Even if that something is simply to Google 'Cass Sunstein' and start from there. Begin your own cognitive infiltration. Google 'Vigilant Guardian' or 'Able Danger'. Crosscheck 'Abdel Hakim Belhadj' and 'Al-Qaida'. Begin digging. Begin thinking. And stop believing.

Human rights fact-finders show Libyan deaths, injuries not 'propaganda'

Examiner
Deborah Dupre

In the CIA kick-started war on Libya, The New York Times report Monday by John F. Burns, calling Libyan civilian casualties "propaganda," does not square with a series of WBAIX in-hospital interviews by  Joshalyn Lawrence that show civilian victim survivors of US/NATO intensifying bomb raids, both witnessed by a human rights fact-finding mission including Cynthia McKinney and former MPs who report it is NATO spin that mainstream media is reporting.

"Sightings of civilian casualties have been rare," reported Burns yesterday.

"Visits to bombing sites, hospitals and funerals have produced a succession of blunders, including patients identified as bombing victims who turned out not to be, empty coffins at funerals and burials where some of those interred turned out not to be airstrike victims at all."

The Lawrence videos, on WBAIX channel, of hospitalized civilians is evidence that, rather than injuries and killings by bombs being "rare" or reporting "blunders," they are realities.

Graphic images of the wounded are documented in the WBAIX videos created by  Joshalyn Lawrence.

In the videos, one after another wounded innocent civilian described atrocities to Cynthia McKinney, in a fact-finding mission with a team including a delegation of former MP's and professors from France all now in Tripoli.

The live-stream Lawrence videos on DeBar's channel document the NATO attacks and the injured, showing their wounds, and describing friends and co-workers killed.

McKinney's fact-finder team is seen entering one hospital room after another, each with the injured and the doctor explaining how the injury occurred and showing the injuries.

Houses are "completely destroyed" and meanwhile, according to McKinney, NATO has its own psychological operation in progress.

In a statement today by McKinney, she refutes NATO claims about making "significant progress" in "protecting Libyan civilians" and "targeting military intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli." 

Today's fact finder team, of which McKinney is a delegate, planned a program to visit camps of internally displaced persons in the area but this cannot occur because of US/NATO attacks.

"[W]e are not able to complete our program while Tripoli is under attack.  I will do my best to visit some of the areas bombed today when/if this attack lets up."

Like The New York Times, The Washington Post headlined "Libya government fails to prove claims of NATO casualties" and the Los Angeles Times headline was, "Libya officials put a spin on a conflict."

"These bombs and missiles are not falling in empty spaces:  people are all over Tripoli going about their lives just as in any other major metropolitan city of about two million people," stated McKinney.

Why?

"I don't understand why they want to kill us," said one young woman seen standing with others outside the Tripoli hospital room, explaining that the old are also being injured and killed.

"Why?" is the question repeatedly asked by the injured who are able to speak.

Political analyst Webster Tarpley answered that question Monday on Press TV, stating that the "goal of all this all along has been to smash Libya into various parts to drive Gaddafi out of power and to seize control of the oil to re-impose the yoke of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in still more severe form than we ever had it."

"And I think right now desperation is growing, especially in London and Paris, that old Suez 1956 combination unreconstructed Imperialist," said Tarpley.

"They are desperate now because what they met with so far are not working. They tried high level bombing, combined with this rebel rabble underground with a lot of al-Qaeda fighters included in it and that's not working."

Wayne Madsen, who was among those in the hospital with McKinney and others, seeing the patients and witnessing the injuries, has reported (www.waynemadsenreport.com) that early mainstream media reports included photos of Libyan rebels waving weapons and discharging them into the air, while "NATO member nations were supposedly locked in debate as to whether or when to provide weapons to the rebels."

"Someone in the media finally pointed out that the weapons being waved about in the photos were NATO standard issue," reported Madsen.

Foreign Secretary William Hauge has said that NATOS's almost three month-long mission is intensifying and it could last more than months according to Press TV.

Tarpley speculates that the US aggression on Libya could bring President Obama down.  Republicans who have been long-time warmongers "are now ceasing on the Libyan war as a means of attacking Obama."

The war power act, that "would have required Obama to get congressional approval for what he is doing within 60 days meaning by about May 20th," stated Tarpley. He furthered:

"At May 20th the second clock starts which gives him 30 days to pull out. If Obama does not pull out of the attack on Libya by about the 20th of June, he could be brought down by the Republicans in the House, who might use that as a vehicle to express their resentment so they build up some other issues." 

Yesterday, African Americans in Harlem urged public support on Wednesday as they protest the US/NATO attacks on Libyan Africans and the targeted killing of Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gidaffi, the man praised by Nelson Mandela for supporting the Anti-Apartheid struggle and the man who has said 'No' to the establishment of a US military command (Africom) on the African continent to take the nation's oil. ("African Americans Emergency gathering to stop Qadaffi assassination," Dupré, D., National Human Rights | Examiner.com)

McKinney asked today, "What were you doing today between 1:00 pm and now?"

"The people of Tripoli endure the trauma of repeated bombings in their immediate environment."

Tomorrow Referring to "Imperialist" Nuremberg crimes against humanity in Libya, Tarpley said that "undoubtedly," depleted uranium and cluster bombs are being used, "and all the rest."

Investigations have revealed that the U.S. Navy used cluster bombs on Libyans that injured the innocent, including children.

"[A]nd that's what they call democracy these days."

Sources

WBAIX

Wayne Madsen

New York Times

Press TV

Cynthia McKinney

CIA on Facebook & Twitter: Wayne Madsen on info warfare

“Attack against South Korean ship looks like false flag operation”

Published 29 May, 2010, 10:16

Edited 30 May, 2010, 04:49

While international investigators have accused North Korea of sinking a South Korean patrol corvette in March, China has taken a more cautious position.

Investigative journalist and RT contributor Wayne Madsen says it is because Beijing suspects there was greater deception at work.

“The Cheonan [navy corvette] was sunk by this torpedo that was later to be discovered to have been of German manufacture. Germany said it sells no military weapons to North Korea. This thing is starting to look like a classic false flag operation,” Wayne Madsen says.

“Kim Jong-Il who very rarely travels – and when he does, he only travels by train – went to Beijing. My sources in Beijing say that he went to Beijing, that Chinese authorities said that North Korea did this, he denied it. They were satisfied with his response,” Madsen adds. “Now the Chinese are very suspicious of the US’ intentions in richening things up in the Korean peninsula.”