Guilt By Association

Crisis in North Korea – What a Surprise….

Readers of Guilt By Association know the role played by the power of association when well-timed crises are used to advance a global agenda—specifically to ensure that Israel retains military dominance in the Middle East, its monopoly on nuclear weapons and its refusal—along with Axis of Evil member North Korea—to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel long ago mastered this craft as evidenced by its ongoing ability to avoid compliance with agreed-to terms of the Roadmap. Thus it came as no surprise to see a crisis in North Korea just as the pro-Israelis who induced the U.S. to invade Iraq intensified efforts to expand the war to Iran.
After years without a serious incident, both Iran and North Korea detained U.S. journalists over a six-week period in 2009. In early February, National Public Radio’s Roxanna Saberi was detained by Tehran. In mid-March two female employees of Current TV, founded by Al Gore, were detained by Pyongyang and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

In early April, North Korea launched a rocket capable of reaching Hawaii, suggesting a threat to the U.S. Meanwhile Tel Aviv upped the pressure on Washington to shut down Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting a threat to Israel. Six weeks later, Pyongyang announced a nuclear test, its first since 2006. Meanwhile Israel insisted that Iran not be appeased or—like North Korea—it would pose a nuclear threat.

When President Obama advanced his proposed engagement with Iran, a Twitter-catalyzed crisis around Iranian elections made such diplomacy unlikely or, at the very least, ineffective. Meanwhile attempts failed to rekindle six-party talks with North Korea, making engagement unlikely and diplomacy ineffective.

Discrediting the U.N.

Simultaneously, the peace-brokering role of the U.N. was sidelined as its credibility continued a steady decline since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Though U.S. war-planners chose not to protect Baghdad’s famous antiquities museum, ensuring widespread looting, the Oil Ministry was captured intact, securing the evidence required to prove U.N. mismanagement of Iraq’s food-for-oil program—with Iran oil-trader Marc Rich again a major player.

This program offered relief from a U.N. embargo for the sale of Iraqi oil to buy food and medicine. In September 2005, an 18-month probe of the $64 billion program found that Saddam Hussein benefitted from kickbacks and oil-smuggling profits, with lucrative commissions paid to the people in between. Findings of lax U.N. oversight were worsened by charges that Koji Annan, son of Secretary General Kofi Annan, profited from insider information and access.

The discrediting of both the U.S. and the U.N. began in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched by war-planners to the U.N. Security Council to vouch for the veracity of intelligence—since proven false—about Iraqi biological weapons. Then high-profile U.S. Senate hearings, chaired by Senators Carl Levin and Norm Coleman, put the food-for-oil scandal in the public eye, further damaging the U.N.’s credibility and effectiveness.

With the U.N. and its leadership at their weakest in recent memory, Israel pressed Annan for a Holocaust memorial at the U.N. and for a day to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor in the Congress, lobbied reluctant nations. On January 24, 2006, the U.N. saw the first ever prayer service on its premises—the Jewish hymn for martyrs—followed by the Israeli national anthem.

Fast-forward to June 2009 and a cargo ship departed North Korea enroute to Myanmar trailed by a U.S. warship that, under a U.N. resolution, could not use force for interdiction. Pyongyang portrayed any interference as an act of war and assembled 100,000 marchers to denounce the U.S. while its leaders promised, if provoked, to “wipe out” the U.S.

A month earlier, Myanmar elections were thrown into crisis with the arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her May 27th detention enables avoidance by the ruling junta of the open elections promised in 2010 as part of the “roadmap to democracy.” In a well-timed incident, the Nobel peace laureate was taken into custody for violating the terms of her house arrest when she allowed an intruder to stay at her home for two days after he swam to her compound.

The intruder, American John Yettaw, claimed he was on “a mission” to warn her that she would be assassinated. He swam over a mile to her heavily guarded compound using cardboard flippers and plastic containers for flotation. Described by a member of Suu Kyi’s staff as “a nutty fellow,” Yattaw covered the distance carrying the book of Mormon, the ‘revealed’ text of a Zionist sect whose devotees are called “Latter Day Saints” and “The Lost Tribe of Israel.”

With another totalitarian regime (Myanmar) potentially gaining access to nuclear technology, Tel Aviv gained another “associative” case it can cite to oppose Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile an election crisis catalyzed another rallying cry for regime change in the Middle East—in Iran.

U.S. credibility in the Middle East was undercut months ago when Dennis Ross was appointed State Department special envoy to Iran. A senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, a think tank founded by the Israel lobby, he has since been promoted to senior director of the National Security Council. Americans can only hope that—in that position—he will be closely monitored by those committed to restoring the national security of this nation.

Guilt By Association

Iran’s Rafsanjani – The Grey Eminence

In Iranian politics, few loom larger that Hashemi Rafsanjani. Yet for whom does he work—really?
As chairman of the Assembly of Experts, he oversees the selection, monitoring and dismissal of Iran’s Supreme Leader. As Chair of the Expediency Council, he mediates legislative conflicts. As President of Iran from 1989-1997, he created a power base dating back to his study of theology with Ayatollah Khomeini. But that was then; what about now?

To grasp his role in this “election” requires a reflection on whose interests are best served by crises in the region. Serial crises are essential to sustain the plausibility of the much-touted Clash of Civilizations as a means to justify a “global war on terrorism.” When Mahmoud Ahmadenijad won out over Rafsanjani in a 2005 bid for the presidency, the result was a spokesperson with little political power but a high-profile platform.

In today’s media-saturated politics, candidates are akin to brands. Soon after their release in the market, each is identified with a message. Ahmadenijad was quickly branded the world’s most famous anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. As the academics say: Cui bono—who benefits? Which nation gained most from that branding? Iran? Or Israel?

For an enclave dependent for support on branding itself the unwitting victim of a hostile, anti-Semitic world, who better to freshen up that brand? If so, what role does Rafsanjani play in a nation whose leaders have long collaborated with Israel in duplicitous operations?

Those operations, too numerous to describe, include the Israeli-enabled, presidency-discrediting Iran-Contra affair that Ronald Reagan denied and then was forced to admit. That clumsy arms-for-hostages exchange aided Iran in its war with Iraq, then a U.S. ally, and resulted in 11 federal convictions for Reagan-era officials. All were pardoned.

What role does Rafsanjani play in the casting for a real life drama that, if events continue on course, is poised to discredit another U.S. president? What we know is this. Ahmadinejad charged the Grey Eminence and his family with massive corruption, including racketeering, embezzlement and money laundering. That appears accurate. The Rafsanjani clan emerged wealthy beyond measure, including one son who is allegedly a billionaire in a nation long plagued with the ravages of poverty and false piety.

We also know that Rafsanjani, a billionaire also known as “the shark,” financed the campaign of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. As Prime Minister, Mousavi was Tehran’s go-between for Iran-Contra. He also reportedly served as Iran’s middleman for the October 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Marines.

The question remains: for whom was he a middleman—really? For the bombing, was he the go-between with Hezbollah terrorists blamed for the attack? That may well be true. Yet former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky insists that Israeli intelligence had a complete description of the truck used in that attack—and chose not to alert their ally.

That mass murder prompted the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, leaving the Middle East vulnerable to political manipulation by whatever nation proved most adept at the craft. Cui bono? Did Iran benefit from that bombing? Lebanon? Or Israel?

Any conclusions must remain conjectural until more is known about the role played by Israel and pro-Israelis in fixing the intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq. And may yet induce an attack on Iran aided by a well-timed crisis that may deter the direct negotiations that Washington proposed—and Tel Aviv opposed.

Readers of Guilt By Association know that analysis pivots off a person identified as “John Doe.” He encountered the Grey Eminence two decades ago while profiling the transnational criminal syndicate chronicled there. Rafsanjani was then selling an office building in Manhattan built by the Shah of Iran.

The top floors were occupied by arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken’s co-conspirator in securities frauds for which both were convicted. Boesky spent two years in Iran for purposes that remain obscure. Doe negotiated the sale with Pincus Green, the partner of Marc Rich who was then illegally trading oil with Iran—when Rafsanjani was president.

Rich’s defense team was led by Nixon White House counsel Leonard Garment and Lewis Libby who then worked in the Pentagon for Paul Wolfowitz in the G.H.W. Bush era. All four men are Ashkenazim. For G.W. Bush, Libby emerged as Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney when Wolfowitz, as Deputy Secretary of Defense, became a lead advocate for invading Iraq in response to the mass murder of 911.

In May 2007, Libby was found guilty on four federal charges for his attempts to obscure the fixing of intelligence that induced the invasion in pursuit of the expansionist goals for Greater Israel. The neoconservatives who advanced that agenda have since confirmed that their primary target was—and remains—Iran.

History is best understood in hindsight. Yet where, as here, behavior patterns repeat over multiple decades, Americans who continue to put their faith in false friends may find themselves repeating past tragedies. To avoid future calamities, Iranians had best grasp that neither this election—nor the Grey Eminence—may be what they seem.

Guilt By Association

The Need for Alternative Media

The Need for Alternative Media

Why does democracy need alternative media? An earlier blog on the Criminal State website (“The New Heretics”) chronicles the role that mainstream media routinely plays in waging war by way of deception.

Ambassador Charles Freeman withdrew his nomination last week as the newly appointed chair of the National Intelligence Council. The withering attack unleashed on him by the Israel lobby may awaken a long-deceived public to the perils posed by six decades of accommodating America’s entangled alliance with the Zionist state.

Guilt by Association, the first release in the Criminal State series, condenses the how of Zionism to its duplicitous essence by making the analysis generic and not dependent on any particular time, place or circumstance. At the core of its duplicity lies an oft-deployed modus operandi: the displacement of facts with what people can be deceived to believe.

That “m.o.” operates the same regardless whether it’s an induced belief in Iraqi WMD, a consensus faith in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets, or a shared opinion that Israel is an ally. When waging war in the shared mindset (where else could a “consensus” reside?), the power of association is deployed as a weapon to deceive “the mark”—us.

Thus the stature of Colin Powell was used to lend credence (believability) to the phony intelligence used to deceive the UN Security Council that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories. Powell’s testimony made America look just like the Zionist state—a duplicitous government willing to deceive other governments to wage war on Israel’s behalf. Yet despite the consistency of this duplicity, we continue on with this entanglement, assured that this alliance is in America’s interest.

The Ancient Art of Deception

When deploying the power of association—whether to accredit or discredit—facts are irrelevant. In this case, the credibility of an honorable man was deployed to make a dishonorable case to invade Iraq for Greater Israel policy. For those who consider themselves above the law, the means justify the end. General Powell concedes he was used and has since rarely appeared in public. The result cost America untold amounts in blood, treasure and hard-earned credibility—the most essential capital of any legitimate nation state.

Those profiled in the Criminal State series wage war at the level of the mental state. All else flows downstream from what academics call the paradigm—the shared mindset. To target the public’s mental state is to wage war on informed consent, the foundation on which democracies depend. In today’s media-dependent politics, that’s where modern-day treason operates.

To address this systemic criminality requires tools of perception that enable the public to see this duplicity for themselves. The Israel lobby has so thoroughly intimidated the Congress and the Executive Branch that the battle to restore informed consent must now be fought from the bottom-up. In the media-dominated decision-making of the Information Age, this is what modern warfare looks like. Why would anyone expect otherwise?

This fact-displacing modus operandi depends on mainstream media to shape the shared mental state of the mark (us). Likewise when deceivers deploy the power of association. Both rely on a complicit media to manipulate opinions, impressions and emotions so that, in combination, fiction replaces facts as the basis for policy-making.

How long has U.S. policy been shaped by the criminal syndicate chronicled in Guilt By Association? Barack Obama is the tenth president covered by veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas. When, in his first press conference, she asked which nations in the Middle East have nuclear weapons, our commander-in-chief avoided an answer. That’s understandable.

According to his April 2007 filing with the Federal Elections Commission, Obama’s political career is traceable to the Chicago Outfit. Hotelier Penny Pritzker, Chicago’s Crown clan (defense contractors), and hedge fund billionaire George Soros were his top three contributors. The organized crime lineage of the Pritzker family dates from the Jewish syndicate of the 1920s. Soros represents a more modern vintage. Abner Mikva, former Clinton White House counsel, calls Obama “our first Jewish president” based on his roots in West Side Chicago politics.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and campaign manager David Axelrod were political activists in Chicago when the Israel lobby targeted Illinois Senator Chuck Percy for removal in 1984, two years after successfully targeting Illinois Congressman Paul Findley. Findley’s AIPAC-recruited replacement was Dick Durbin, now second in the Senate leadership. He shares a house in Washington with New York Senator Chuck Schumer who is third. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, from mobbed-up Nevada, is Mormon (aka the Lost Tribe of Israel).

Though comprising just 1.7% of the U.S. population, 15% of the Senate membership is Jewish. Add Mormons and Christian-Zionists (Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, et.al.) and where does the national security of America rank when compared to Israel—whose security Obama described as “sacrosanct”? As Freeman pointed out, the danger we now face is not only to the U.S. but also to the continued existence of Israel—particularly when the mark awakens to the common source of this deceit.

March 16, 2009