The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It

The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch. com
Posted on September 8, 2008, Printed on December 26, 2008
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 97913/
AlterNet is resurfacing some of the best and most popular articles published in 2008 as the year comes to a close. First, Tom Engelhardt's essay on the spread of American military bases and global empire, published this September.

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military basesscattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.

Where the Sun Never Sets

Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender and it's been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world were our oyster; and we're still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But let's start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed -- or perhaps more accurately, Washington hailed itself -- not just as the planet's "sole superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower, " but as its "global policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping police stations -- aka military bases -- in or near the oil heartlands of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.

As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new, post-Soviet version of "containment. " With the USSR gone, however, what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.
Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant mega-war against Japan and Germany, and then the stalemated "police action" in South Korea (1950-1953) -- vast structures which added up to something like an all-military American version of the old British Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in Japan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea. (Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our major bases in the Philippines in 1992.)

But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations Well, they were often something to behold -- and they still are.

Let's start with the basics: Almost 70 years after World War II, the sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases" -- in Chalmers Johnson's phrase -- which at this moment stretches from Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Rumania to Okinawa. And new bases of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more to come). For instance, an American missile system is slated to go into Poland and a radar system into Israel.

That will mean Americans stationed in both countries and, undoubtedly, modest bases of one sort or another to go with them. (The Israeli one -- "the first American base on Israeli territory" -- reports Aluf Benn of Haaretz, will be in the Negev desert.)
There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially 39 of them have American "facilities, " large and/or small. But those are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply aren't counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases; because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, somehow don't count. In other words, that 39 figure doesn't even include Iraq or Afghanistan. By 2005, according to theWashington Post, there were 106 American bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named Camp Victory that house tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, Defense Department civilians, have bus routes, traffic lights, PXes, big name fast-food restaurants, and so on.

Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil. In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Air Base, located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which even has a full-scale hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian contingent of troops).

You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news stories, that books by the score would pour out on America's version of imperial control. But here's the strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that really are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, you basically wouldn't know it; or, thought about another way, you wouldn't have to know it.

In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no debate at all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys. There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.

Missing Bases

Americans have, of course, always prided themselves on exporting "democracy," not empire. So empire-talk hasn't generally been an American staple and, perhaps for that reason, all those bases prove an awkward subject to bring up or focus too closely on. When it came to empire-talk in general, there was a brief period after 9/11 when the neoconservatives, in full-throated triumph, began to compare us to Rome and Britain at their imperial height (though we were believed to be incomparably, uniquely more powerful). It was, in the phrase of the time, a "unipolar moment." Even liberal war hawks started talking about taking up "the burden" of empire or, in the phrase of Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but, in that period, still at Harvard and considered a significant American intellectual, "empire lite."

On the whole, however, those in Washington and in the media haven't considered it germane to remind Americans of just exactly how we have attempted to "police" and control the world these last years. I've had two modest encounters with base denial myself:
In the spring of 2004, a journalism student I was working with emailed me a clip, dated October 20, 2003 -- less than seven months after American troops entered Baghdad -- from a prestigious engineering magazine. It quoted Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, speaking proudly of the several billion dollars("the numbers are staggering") that had already been sunk into base construction in that country. Well, I was staggered anyway. American journalists, however, hardly noticed, even though significant sums were already pouring into a series of mega-bases that were clearly meant to be permanent fixtures on the Iraqi landscape. (The Bush administration carefully avoided using the word "permanent" in any context whatsoever, and these bases were first dubbed "enduring camps.")
Within two years, according to the Washington Post (in a piece that, typically, appeared on page A27 of the paper), the U.S. had those 106 bases in Iraq at a cost that, while unknown, must have been staggering indeed. Just stop for a moment and consider that number: 106. It boggles the mind, but not, it seems, American newspaper or TV journalism.

TomDispatch. com has covered this subject regularly ever since, in part because these massive "facts on the ground," these modern Ziggurats, were clearly evidence of the Bush administration' s long-term plans and intentions in that country. Not surprisingly, this year, U.S. negotiators finally offered the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki its terms for a so-called status of forces agreement, evidently initially demanding the right tooccupy into the distant future 58 of the bases it has built.
It has always been obvious -- to me, at least -- that any discussion of Iraq policy in this country, of timelines or "time horizons," drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on the ground weren't taken into account. And yet you have to search the U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over Iraq policy.

I could go further: I can think of two intrepid American journalists, Thomas Ricks of theWashington Post and Guy Raz of NPR, who actually visited a single U.S. mega-base, Balad Air Base, which reputedly has a level of air traffic similar to Chicago's O'Hare International or London's Heathrow, and offered substantial reports on it. But, as far as I know, they, like the cheese of children's song, stand alone. I doubt that in the last five years Americans tuning in to their television news have ever been able to see a single report from Iraq that gave a view of what the bases we have built there look like or cost. Although reporters visit them often enough and, for instance, have regularly offered reports from Camp Victory in Baghdad on what's going on in the rest of Iraq, the cameras never pan away from the reporters to show us the gigantic base itself.

More than five years after ground was broken for the first major American base in Iraq, this is, it seems to me, a remarkable record of media denial. American bases in Afghanistan have generally experienced a similar fate.

My second encounter with base denial came in my other life. When not running TomDispatch. com, I'm a book editor; to be more specific, I'm Chalmers Johnson's editor. I worked on the prophetic Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published back in 2000 to a singular lack of attention -- until, of course, the attacks of 9/11, after which it became a bestseller, adding both "blowback" and the phrase "unintended consequences" to the American lexicon.

By the time The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, the second volume in his Blowback Trilogy, came out in 2004, reviewers, critics, and commentators were all paying attention. The heart of that book focused on how the U.S. garrisons the planet, laying out Pentagon basing policies and discussing specific bases in remarkable detail. This represented serious research and breakthrough work, and the book indeed received much attention here, including major, generally positive reviews. Startlingly, however, not a single mainstream review, no matter how positive, paid any attention, or even really acknowledged, his chapters on the bases, or bothered to discuss the U.S. as a global garrison state. Only three years later did a major reviewer pay the subject serious attention. When Jonathan

Freedland reviewed Nemesis, the final book in the Trilogy, in the New York Review of Books, he noticed the obvious and, in a discussion of U.S. basing policy, wrote, for instance:

"Johnson is in deadly earnest when he draws a parallel with Rome. He swats aside the conventional objection that, in contrast with both Romans and Britons, Americans have never constructed colonies abroad. Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an 'empire of bases,' he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost."


Not surprisingly, Freedland is not an American journalist, but a British one who works for the Guardian.

In the U.S., military bases really only matter, and so make headlines, when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.
Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well kept secrets on the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit strange.

The Foreshortened American Century

In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply isn't news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S. taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul (largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points out the following: "An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially budgeted one-fifth that amount."

And that's only the most obvious way Americans pay. It's hard for us even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W. Bush's two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the military's Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)
In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad.

In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two "superpowers, " the lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years. Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits, the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just heading for the exit far more slowly.
As of now, "the American Century," birthed by Time/Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century -- whether it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China, the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos -- will not be an American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax Americana.

[Note on Sources: It's rare indeed that the U.S. empire of bases gets anything like the attention it deserves, so, when it does, praise is in order. Mother Jones online launched a major project to map out and analyze U.S. bases worldwide. It includes a superb new piece on bases by Chalmers Johnson, "America's Unwelcome Advances" and a number of other top-notch pieces, including one on "How to Stay in Iraq for 1,000 Years" by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (the second part of whose Pentagon expansion series will be posted at this site soon). Check out the package of pieces at MJ by clicking here. Perhaps most significant, the magazine has produced an impressive online interactive map of U.S. bases worldwide. Check it out by clicking here. But when you zoom in on an individual country, do note that the first base figures you'll see are the Pentagon's and so possibly not complete. You need to read the MJ texts below each map to get a fuller picture. As will be obvious, if you click on the links in this post, I made good use of MJ'sefforts, for which I offer many thanks.]

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch. com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2008 Tomdispatch. com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet .org/story/ 97913/

Slaughter in Gaza: Another Chapter in the Global Elite Master Plan

Slaughter in Gaza: Another Chapter in the Global Elite Master Plan

December 29, 2008

Israel is using U.S. munitions against the Palestinians. From the Jerusalem Post:

The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday.

The missile, called GBU-39, was developed in recent years by the US as a small-diameter bomb for low-cost, high-precision and low collateral damage strikes.

The claim that Israel is employing the bomb because it minimizes “collateral damage” is sadistically absurd, to say the least — the Gaza Strip is incontestably the most populated tract of land on earth and any munition, even a “smart” one, will undoubtedly cause “collateral damage.” The 1.3 million Palestinians living on the Gaza Strip are little more than fish in a barrel due to the fact Israel controls Gaza’s airspace, coast and most of its borders.

Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month and was used successfully in penetrating underground Kassam launchers in the Gaza Strip during the heavy aerial bombardment of Hamas infrastructure on Saturday. It was also used in Sunday’s bombing of tunnels in Rafah.







A Bush administration press conference blaming Hamas for Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza.


Yaakov Katz, writing for the Jerusalem Post, fails to mention that the tunnels are also used to smuggle food and medicine, items the Israelis have blocked from entering Gaza. “Merchants invented the system,” writes Amira Hass. “The tunnels are not only for weapons and drugs, but for medicine, basic food commodities and cigarettes, at prices much more suitable for poverty-stricken Rafah. They are a way to break an economic siege. The weapons in the hands of the armed men of Rafah prove that the tunnels are not being used to smuggle sophisticated weapons. Nonetheless, the tunnels have turned into a scarecrow that justifies every strike at civilian lives and civilian property.”

On Sunday, head of the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration Col. Moshe Levy was interviewed by several Arab news outlets during which he stressed that Israel was not against the Palestinian public in Gaza but was operating against Hamas.

It should be noted that Hamas claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats in 2006, as the Washington Post reported at the time. Fatah won only 43 seats, mostly because many Palestinians realized the organization was heavily comprised, corrupt, and in league with Israeli intelligence and the CIA. Fatah’s relationship with the CIA became apparent last year when Fatah security compounds in Gaza were raided by Hamas — “they found huge supplies of American-made weaponry including 7,400 M-16 assault rifles, dozens of mounted machine guns, rocket launchers, seven armored military jeeps, 800,000 rounds of bullets and 18 US-made armored personnel carriers,” writes Mike Whitney, who cites Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily.

They also discovered something far more valuable — CIA files which purportedly contain “information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza.

“Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point,” mused Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA operations officer. “Baer is right. The uncovering of the documents is ‘big trouble’ for Abbas who is already facing a loss of public confidence from his closeness to Israel and for his appointment of Salam Fayyad, the ex-World bank official who the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz calls ‘everyone’s favorite Palestinian,’” adds Whitney.

A “favorite Palestinian” for the globalists and banksters, not the Palestinian people.

The corporate media in the U.S. has bent over backwards to portray Hamas as the villain in the latest round of mass murder and carnage. In fact, Hamas has attempted to implement a ceasefire with Israel on numerous occasions. “Israel rejected a cease-fire offer from the Palestinian group Hamas as a humanitarian aid crisis erupting in the Gaza Strip threatened wider instability,” the Christian Science Monitor reported in April. “[The] Palestinian group offered to cease cross-border rocket attacks if Israel opens crossing points into Gaza and ends military incursions into the Palestinian territory,” Al Jazeera reported.

In fact, Israel is notorious for violating ceasefires. For instance, on June 19, 2008, Hamas and the Palestine Information Center accused the Israelis of violating an agreed upon ceasefire three times on the first day of its implementation. “The Center reported that Israeli navy boats fired four shells at fishermen in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, while soldiers opened fire at farmers east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip,” the media center reported on its website. “Also, eyewitnesses reported that soldiers fired at farmers in Khuza’a town, near Khan Younis, and fired at a number of houses in AL Qarara town, east of the city.”

Israel fully exploited a Hamas declaration on December 19 to not renew the above ceasefire “because the Zionist enemy has failed to respect the conditions,” according to Joshua Lapide, reporting for Asia News. “The Israeli government blames Hamas for not stopping attacks often carried out by smaller Palestinian factions, while the Islamists claim Israel also broke the truce by failing to lift its blockade of the impoverished territory. Israel responded to a surge of violence in early November by tightening sanctions and closing crossing points with Gaza, halting deliveries of humanitarian aid and other supplies, basically transforming the Strip into one huge gulag.”

Jonathan Cook, writing for ZNet, details Israel’s brutal recruitment of Palestinian collaborators. “Recent reports in the Israeli media, for example, suggest that the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, far from reducing the opportunities for collaboration, may actually have increased them. The current siege of the Strip — in which Israel effectively governs all movement in and out of Gaza — has provided an ideal point of leverage for encouraging collusion… In the past 17 years alone, 150,000 Palestinians have been prosecuted by the military regime. According to the Israeli group Yesh Din, 95 per cent of these trials end in plea bargains, offering yet another chance to persuade a detainee to turn informant in return for a reduced sentence.”

Is it possible the above mentioned “smaller Palestinian factions” engaging in attacks are false flag groups unleashed to ensure an Israeli pretext – in fact, A New World Order pretext – for continued violence against the Palestinian people and make sure there is never an agreeable peace deal between the two?

In 2002, “Palestinian security forces … arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon.” An anonymous Palestinian official told the newspaper the alleged collaborators sought to “discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip.”

As noted on December 22, the “less influential Islamic Jihad was behind most of the rocket attacks” on Israel, although Hamas has approved of such attacks.

Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a documented CIA and British intelligence asset. “According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955,” writes Said Aburish in his book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite. “When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East… This signaled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces.”

It is also a documented fact that Israeli intelligence created Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO and Arab nationalism. Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO ,” Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told UPI correspondent Richard Sale. “According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928,” writes Sale (see Yossi Schwartz, Palestine: The origins of Hamas and its role today).

As Peter D. Goodgame details in The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order, the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and related manifestations are part of a larger plan on the part of the ruling elite to destabilize Muslim and Arab societies and thus curtail the “threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries,” as a leading Australian scientist suggested in a secret report to the Australian Defense Department in 1947.

Goodgame writes:

This explosion of violence throughout the Middle East in the late ’70s and early ’80s was referred to by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the “Arc of Crisis.” It was not something that occurred by chance, but was in fact the result of the deliberate plan developed by the Globalist strategists such as Dr. Alexander King, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and British operative Dr. Bernard Lewis. The Middle Eastern “Arc of Crisis” was not a spontaneous internal conflagration, it was something that came about as a result of Western policy in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Without help from the West radical Islam would have remained the illegitimate, repressive minority movement that it has always been, and the Middle East would have remained stable and prosperous.

Israel undoubtedly has it own imperialistic and chauvinistic reasons for long brutalizing the Palestinians — as documented by Ralph Schoenman in his book The Hidden History of Zionism — but at the end of the day Israel is essentially a client state not so much under the control of the United States as the New World Order and the eugenicists of the global elite.

(On a side note: the ultimate creation of the state of Israel was a pet project of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Baron Edmond James (Avrahim Binyamin) de Rothschild (1845-1934) is the known as the “Father of the Settlement” (Avi ha-Yishuv). In 1982, Israel released a commemorative Independence Day coin bearing Rothschild’s likeness.)

Bush and Obama have deferred to this ongoing plan to victimize the Palestinians. Earlier today, the Bush administration placed the blame for Israelis bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip — apparently including the use of GBU-39 missiles provided by the United States — squarely on Hamas.

“Mr. Obama’s election has raised expectations, among allies and enemies alike, that new American policies are forthcoming, putting more pressure on him to signal more quickly what he intends to do. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Mr. Obama has not suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush had to resolve the existential conflict between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza,” reports the New York Times.

Indeed, Obama has not “suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush” because both take orders from the global elite and do not actually formulate policies of their own. As for the “existential conflict” in the Occupied Territories, it is part of a larger Malthusian plan on the part of our eugenicist rulers, a plan spelled out well in advance by the United Nations, the Club of Rome, the Tavistock and Aspen Institutes.




_________

British/Saudi role in Israeli assault on Gaza

The following brief reports from LaRouchePAC indicate the intention behind the Israeli assault on Gaza, and the Anglo/Saudi role in the instigation and use of the atrocity at this moment of maximum global crisis. This includes a message from LaRouche; a report on Turkey's President Gul and China's People's Daily, which both identify the timing as aimed at undermining Obama's ability to act; and a report on the Saudi effort to provoke global chaos. Mike Billington LaRouche: "This is the Time to NOT Start Hostilities in Southwest Asia"

December 29, 2008 (LPAC)--Lyndon LaRouche today issued a renewed, sharp warning at the danger of escalating violence in Southwest Asia, as a result of Israel's deadly air raids against Gaza.

"The enemy, the British Empire, through their assets in Israel and elsewhere, is testing the incoming Obama administration, even before he is inaugurated," LaRouche stated. "This stunt, these hostilities, put a color on those who are provoking them. Anyone with any brains knows that this is the time to NOT, absolutely not start hostilities in the region. Anyone pushing for such hostilities, in Israel and elsewhere, should be singled out and identified."

"This insanity," LaRouche noted, "is occurring in a period centering on the collapse of the entire international financial system. The period between now and Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, is the crucial period. The British are reacting as expected, when expected, when they believe they have command of the agenda. And the assassination danger against Obama is at a high level at this time, for just that reason."
Turkish President: Israeli Attack Timed to Create a Mess for Obama

December 29, 2008 (LPAC)--Turkish President Abdullah Gul yesterday condemned Israel's attack on Gaza, taking special note of the fact that it puts a mess on the doorstep of the incoming Obama administration: "I consider the latest incident irresponsible... The issue is not only between Israel and Palestine; it is an event which will lead to instability in the entire region. In addition, further irresponsibility is leaving such a Middle East to the new American administration. To be honest, I find this very meaningful," Gul said.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also condemned the massive Israeli air strikes on Gaza, as directly undermining Turkey's efforts to mediate Israeli-Syrian peace talks. He was especially angry because the attacks took place only days after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in Ankara to discuss continued Turkish mediation with Syria.

During a meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party yesterday, Erdogan said: "This operation, launched despite all of these facts, is also disrespectful to Turkey...I consider Israel resorting to such a thing at a time when we have been exerting these many efforts first and foremost a blow to peace efforts," Erdogan told reporters on Dec. 27, urging Israel to immediately halt its operations. "I was planning to call Israeli Prime Minister Olmert today regarding the Israel-Syria talks, but decided against doing so. I will not call, because it is also disrespectful to us. We are a country that has been working for peace. While we have been exerting these efforts, in Palestine, this act against the populace in Gaza, who have already been in a type of open-air prison, is a blow to peace," Erdogan added. He called the Israeli attack a "crime against humanity," and called for immediate UN intervention to stop the Israeli attacks.


China Denounces "Misuse of Force" In Gaza

Dec. 29 (LPAC)--In a major editorial, China's {People's Daily}
describes the Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip on Dec. 27
and 28, and asks: "Why has Israel taken such brutal actions
against Hamas?" The editorial identifies three causes, mentioning
first the Hamas rockets. But, significantly, it then points to the
fact that Israeli elections are coming up, and "Likud Chairman
Benjamin Netanyahu has always accused the government of Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert of being weak.... Only with a tough stance,
would [Olmert] be able to defeat Likud and other political
parties and win the general elections."
Third, {People's Daily} notes that Israel has capitalized on
a vacancy of power in U.S. politics, as Bush is about to end his
Presidency and President-elect Barack Obama is yet to take
office. "Israel took the advantage of this special ideal,
opportune moment to launch surprise assaults on Hamas."
Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang said in Kuwait City Dec. 28,
that China was shocked by the Israeli attack and "supports the
efforts made by all parties, especially the Arab countries, to
realize a comprehensive, just peace in the region."
The Southeast Asian countries of Malaysia, Indonesia and
Thailand also denounced the Israeli assault.



Saudi Wahhabi Cleric Calls for Global Jihad Against Israel, Threatens the U.S.

December 29, 2008 (LPAC) -- A leading Saudi Wahhabi cleric, Awadh Al-Qarni (also spelled Al-Garni) issued a Fatwa "to spill the blood" of Israelis everywhere in the world, as a revenge for the Israeli attacks against Palestinians in Gaza. His fatwa, a religious decree, was published today in Islamonline.org website, which in turn is run by Sheikh Yosuf Al-Qaradhawi, a leading Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood member and anti-American agent provocateur.

"All Israeli interests, and anything else related to Israel, are a permitted target for Muslims everywhere... They should become targets. Their blood should be shed as the blood of our brothers in Palestine has been shed. They should feel pain more than our brothers," Al-Qarni stated. He added: "This is a fatwa that I am responsible for in front of Allah," Qarni said. Implicating other moderate Arab nations, such as Egypt, he accused them of being "part of the conspiracy". "The recent visit by Israeli Foreign Miniter Tzipi Livni to Egypt, and her embrace by Egyptian officials in front of cameras, followed by her confirmation that the situation in Gaza is going to change, and the lack of any response from Egyptian officials, are part of the conspiracy," he said.

Al-Qarni also attacked the United States for its silent condoning of the Israeli massacres. "Washington, by its silence and support for the Israeli massacres, will destroy the future of humankind, not only relations between Muslims and the West."

Another Saudi cleric, Salman Fahad Al-Oudeh, (chairman of the Saudi institution Islamtoday.net) also issued a statement calling on Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to respond to the Israeli attacks "with actions, not merely words."

These statements should be viewed as signals for Saudi-British sponsored Salafi terrorist networks to wreck havoc internationally and target not only Israeli interests but even American or the interests of U.S.-allied nations. This comes amid warnings that "a third force", not the Palestinian Hamas, Islamic Jihad, nor Lebanese Hezbollah, could expand this conflict into a global threat by targeting other nations with terrorism. This would put the whole world and the incoming Obama Administration in an impossible situation regarding peace in the Middle East and U.S.-Muslim relations.

The two above mentioned Saudi clerics, Al-Qarni and Odeh are part of a 20-person powerful Wahhabi faction in Saudi Arabia who have a key role in sending marching orders and recruits for terrorist operations internationally. In 1994 this grouping was sent to jail by former King Fahad for supporting a call by then London-based Osama Bin Laden for "reform" of the kingdom. These clerics were later released after cutting a deal with the Saudi royal family, according to which the Saudi government support some of their demands for supporting Jihad operations in the Caucasus, Kashmir and other targets of British operations, in return for directing their rhetoric away from the royal family and against the "west", Russia, China, India or other powers allegedly oppressing Muslim minorities.

In November 2004, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the two joined a group of 20 Wahhabi clerics who issued another Fatwa calling for armed resistance against the Americans in Iraq and anybody who collaborated with the Americans. The "collaborators" category included not only Iraqi government officials, police or armed forces, but almost every Iraqi who went to his job and did not participate in armed resistance against the U.S. troops. Saudi youth and others from Arab countries poured into Iraq after this fatwa to launch suicide attacks against Iraqi civilians. Al-Qaeda and extreme Sunni militant groups inside Iraq used this and similar fatwas to justify to the most heinous crimes against Iraqi and foreign civilians.

This is what these clerics are hoping to arouse now, but on global scale.

Barack Obama: The Naked Emperor

Barack Obama: The Naked Emperor

David Icke
December 26, 2008

I am writing this in the last days of 2008 as I watch with dismay as vast numbers of people across the world, including many who should know better, have been duped by the mind-game called Operation Obama.

Even people with some understanding of the conspiracy have said things like: ‘Well, at least he’s not Bush’ and ‘Well, at least it’s great to see such a new spirit of hope’. No, he’s not Bush - he’s potentially far more dangerous; and what is the use of a spirit of ‘hope’ if it’s based on a lie? In fact, what use is ‘hope’ at all?

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Obama’s wife, Michelle, who I wouldn’t trust to tell me the date in a calendar factory, said that ‘everything begins and ends with hope’. Utter nonsense. Hope is meaningless emotion because its fruits are always in the future and, by definition, never in the NOW.

Hope is like riding a carousel horse; no matter how fast you go you never get closer to the one in front. The idea, however, is to persuade you to stay on the horse, despite the evitable disappointment, in the ‘hope’ that things will change. But they don’t because the very system is designed to prevent it.

That’s the way ‘hope’ is employed by the dastardly and devious - take the crap we are giving you now in the ‘hope’ that things will get better (but we know they won’t). Barack Obama is a purveyor of ‘hope’ because his masters want the people to accept what they are given now in the hope that good times will come.

Just do what we demand, oops, sorry, Barack demands, and in return he’ll inspire you to hope that it is all leading to the Promised Land. It isn’t, but, by the time you realise that, it’s too late.

What terrifies the manipulators is that people will abandon hope, as a future, sometime-never projection, and start to demand fairness, justice and freedom now. To avoid this nightmare they need to keep those desires as something to aspire to, not to actually have.

Thus, their man, Obama, sells ‘hope’ as a diversion technique, a holding position, to keep the masses from truly rebelling. We have no job, no food on the table and our home has been foreclosed, but at least we have ‘hope’. Phew, thank goodness for that.

‘I’m hungry, mum, can I have some hope, please?’

’I'm so sorry, darling, you can’t have hope today, only tomorrow - hope is always tomorrow.’

‘So will I eat tomorrow, mum?’

‘We can hope so now, dear, but when we get to tomorrow, we can only hope it’s the next day.’

On and on it goes. That’s how ‘hope’ works. Or rather doesn’t.

Obama’s predominant mantra has been ‘change’. Indeed, his massively-funded, record-breaking campaign was based on that one word - change. This is a technique used by Bill Clinton and many others and it is highly effective because, at any point, the system ensures that most people are not happy with the way life is. So, when you don’t like the status quo, ‘change’ can be a potent message, even if, like Obama, you don’t say what it means.

It has been vital to his success, and that of his controllers, that he has never specified what his ‘hope’, ‘change’, and that other mind-control trigger-word, ‘believe’, were referring to in terms of policy and the way society in general will be affected. Hope for what? Change what? Believe in what? To answer those questions with specifics would have been fatal to Obama’s appeal.

I studied the military/government mind-control programmes and techniques in great detail for many years during the late-1990s and across 2000, and the Obama ‘phenomenon’ is the most blatant mass-mind control operation you could wish to see.

At its core the plan has been to make Obama the focus of everything you hope for, believe in and want to change. This is why it has been crucial for him not to specify and detail what is meant by his ‘hope, ‘change’ and ‘believe’.

However, I can tell you what those words mean in the context of the Obama mind-game. They mean whatever you decide they mean or want them to mean. The idea is for you to project all that you stand for onto him and so he becomes the symbol of you and how you see the world. Specifics would destroy that ‘I am whatever you want me to be’ scenario and so you don’t get any detail, just ‘hope’, ‘change’, and ‘believe’.

They don’t want him to be seen only as ‘the Messiah’; they also want him to be Abraham Lincoln, JFK, or Buddha - anyone you choose to project on him, for he is a blank page, blank screen and empty suit. Obama is a make-your-own, do-it-yourself leader, a projection of your own mind. (If you are still asleep, that is. If you are in any way awake, he’s an open book.)

See the video How Obama Got Elected to see how easy it is to manipulate the masses. It’s child’s play. Click here …

There is no more powerful way of manipulating people than to tell them what they want to hear and to keep shtum about anything they wouldn’t like. Double-glazing salesmen are trained to pick up in general conversation what their target likes and dislikes and to respond accordingly in the way the product is sold. The technique is simply to tell the potential buyer what you have gleaned they want to be told.

Obama comes from the same stable, but on a massively bigger scale and with a whole network of advisors and controllers steeped in the art of manipulating minds, opinions and actions.

Obama’s written-for-him speeches are not from the heart, but from the autocue. The ‘heart’ bit comes from extensive training and his Bill Clintonesque ability to ‘mean it when he says it’, a state of delivery that goes beyond mere acting. Tony Blair was trained in the same way.

But if you take a step back and look at these people dispassionately you can clearly see the techniques they consciously employ. Blair is the most blatant fraud in the way he delivers a line, stops in mid-sentence for emphasis and looks down for fake emotional effect. Obama is a little more slick, but, from where I have been looking this past year, not much. And how have people not seen those cold eyes just above the painted smile?

You can watch his mind working, turning between autocue screens to his left and right, then straight down the camera for his key messages. From-the-heart orators don’t do that; they are too immersed in what they are feeling and saying to give even a passing thought to where they are looking or how the line is delivered.

I worked in television for more than a decade, often reading autocue while a director spoke in my ear telling me what cameras to look at. I have, since the early 1990s, spoken my truth on public stages across the world. I know, therefore, the difference between artificial autocue delivery and body language and talking from the heart without a script. Obama, I repeat, is coming from the autocue, not the heart.

Obama’s speeches are a mass of mind-control techniques and Neuro-Linguistic-Programming, or NLP, and they are carefully constructed to implant beliefs and perceptions into the mind of the viewer. Click here for a description of his psycho-babble, headed An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches.

As I keep emphasising, the whole Obama circus is an exercise in mass mind control and it has been so successful because so many people live their lives in a permanent state of trance. All of which brings me to the parallels with Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and similar regimes throughout history.

Obama may not look like Hitler, nor sound like Hitler, but the themes are just the same. Germany was in a terrible state economically and militarily in the 1930s in the aftermath of the First World War and the reparations inflicted on the country by the Rothschild/Illuminati-controlled Versailles ‘Peace’ Conference in 1919.

From amid the chaos came the man that Germans saw then in much the same way that so many see Obama today. His name was Adolf Hitler and his oratory and rhetoric, again supported by a ritualistic presentation founded on mind-control techniques, made him appear to be the German ‘messiah’, the German Obama.

Hitler promised ‘change’, ‘hope’ and something to ‘believe in’ amidst the consequences of war and financial collapse. He spoke to vast rallies of adoring followers and a mass movement emerged in support of Hitler’s vision of a new tomorrow.

As the writer Webster Tarpley points out, fascism in its true sense is not just a Police State imposed by a tiny hierarchy. It might end up like that, but first it is brought to power by a mass movement from within the people who have no understanding of what the ‘change’, hope’ and ‘believe’ they are being offered really means. They just know that they want some because, as with Obama, they make it mean what they want it to mean. Only later do they see, to their horror, what they have signed up for.

Obama is far more dangerous than Bush because he can sell a line to those who are in the trance while Boy Bush could not do that on anything like the same scale. Bush was a transparent idiot with no communication skills who needed massive fraud at the polls to get him officially ‘elected’. He could never be the figurehead to inspire a mass movement of the people to support some vacuous ‘hope’, ‘change’ and ‘believe’ when they don’t even know what those words are supposed to mean.

But Obama clearly can, because he has.

One of ‘his’ (his controllers’) prime targets are the young, just as they were with the Nazis and the Hitler Youth Movement. If you think this parallel is far-fetched then have a look at this video to see how extreme Obama worship has already become for some young people. Hitler Youth was just the same. Click here to watch …

In line with this theme, the WorldNetDaily website reported:

‘The official website of President-Elect Barack Obama, Change.gov, originally announced that Obama would "require" all middle school through college students to participate in community service programs; but after a flurry of blogs protested children being drafted into Obama’s proposed youth corps, the website’s wording was softened.

Originally, under the tab "America Serves", Change.gov read, "President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in under served schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps.

"Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year," the site announced.’

For the full story, click here …

Obama said in a speech in July 2008 in Colorado Springs that he wanted to see a ‘civilian national security force’ that would be as powerful and well-funded as the Marines, Navy and Air Force. As Joseph Farah, founder of WorldNetDaily, wrote:

‘If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal? I thought Democrats generally believed the U.S. spent too much on the military.’

How is it possible their candidate is seeking to create some kind of massive but secret national police force that will be even bigger than the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force put together? Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?’

Obama meant, amid the flowery words, that he’s not in favour of either peace or freedom. He is a front-man demagogue for the same force that controlled Boy Bush, Clinton, Father Bush, Reagan, Carter, ad infinitum; but the difference is that he has been hyped to such hysterical proportions that he will be allowed to get away with far more than they were, at least until reality dawns on the mass ranks of his hypnotised supporters. And, clearly, that could take some time.

The cabal will be anxious to squeeze every minute from Obama’s honeymoon period and we can expect to see events move quickly after his inauguration in January.

When I was a journalist 30 years ago, I came across a technique that some tabloid newspaper reporters would use to get someone to speak with them. They would work in pairs with the first one knocking on the door of some distressed family who didn’t want to talk with the media. He would tell them he was from a newspaper he didn’t really work for and treat them with aggression and contempt to make them even more upset.

He would then leave and his colleague would knock on the door, tell them the real newspaper he was from, and act like Mr. Nice Guy. He would say that he understood completely how upsetting the other man must have been, but ‘if you will only speak to me exclusively I will make sure that the other man, nor anyone like him, won’t bother you again’. They usually agreed and the scam was complete.

Much the same thing is happening with regard to Bush and Obama. The Neoconservative ‘Republican’ wing of the Illuminati controlled Bush for eight years and led the country into foreign wars and financial chaos (bad guy/problem); now the ‘Democratic’ wing, led by the infamous Zbigniew Brzezinski, has brought forth the ’saviour’, Barack Obama, to lead us into the sunshine with ‘hope’ and ‘change’ (good guy/solution).

Hence even some more aware people say: ‘At least he’s not Bush’.

Apart from the unspecified ‘hope, ‘change’ and ‘believe’, few have any idea what Obama’s policies will be. Public perception comes from having an ‘image’ of him, or a self-projection, not the fine print because Obama doesn’t do fine print until the votes are cast and even then he will hide it in his windbag words.

There is an ‘image’ that Obama is against war, but no he’s not. He says he’s against the invasion of Iraq, though we’ll see what he does about that in office. How can a man calling for more troops, including European troops, to be sent to Afghanistan be against war? He has also said he is prepared to bomb Pakistan and use military force to stop Iran building nuclear weapons and he has appointed Hillary ‘Let’s bomb ‘em’ Clinton (Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations) as Secretary of State and re-appointed Bush’s ‘Let’s bomb ‘em’ Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates (Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations). So that’s the ‘change we can believe in’, then.

Obama isn’t against war at all and, if his controllers have their way, he will engage the US in even more foreign conflicts with the troops sent to their deaths, and the deaths of their targets, on a wave of oratory from the dark suit with the black face who would never go where he’s sending them.

He claims to be a ‘uniter’, which is exactly what Bush said about himself before he came to office, but unity in and of itself is not the issue. Nazi Germany had unity in the early years of the war, but was that a good thing? What matters is what the unity is designed to achieve and Obama’s much-vaunted ‘unity’ is to ‘inspire’ a mass movement to support the Orwellian plans of the Illuminati.

His constant rhetoric about ‘bringing people together’ can be used to justify the ‘coming together’ of the United States, Canada and Mexico in the North American Union; it can be used to concede America’s sovereignty to the ‘coming together’ of the ‘world community’ (world dictatorship); it can be used to unite the believers in their opposition and condemnation of non-believers, which is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany with the book-burning and violent suppression of those who challenged the Hitler regime.

The potential of Obama Mania is endless when it comes to selling fascism as ‘hope, change’, ‘freedom’ and a ‘New America’, or ‘New World’ [Order].

Bush and Cheney were transparent warmongers and would always have struggled to bring in the draft, the compulsory enlistment of people into the military against their will. But it would not be as difficult for Obama in the current climate. For goodness sake, he’s already talking about compulsory community service for middle school, high school and college students and creating a peoples’ army in America.

That’s why I say Obama is far more dangerous to freedom than Bush. In the last eight years Bush could only get part of the way to fascism - Obama has the potential to finish the job, for all the reasons I have mentioned and more.

You only have to look at the cabal behind Obama, and those he has already appointed to his administration team, to see what his ‘change’ is truly planned to be. His mentor, svengali and main controller is Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, and the co-founder, with David Rockefeller, of the Illuminati’s Trilateral Commission.

Brzezinski has admitted publicly that he began to fund and train what he would call today ‘terrorists’ in Afghanistan to oppose the Soviet-controlled government in the capital, Kabul, in the late 1970s. The idea, he said, was to entice the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan to protect the Kabul regime and thus give the rival superpower ‘their Vietnam’. The plan worked at the cost of a million Afghan lives during the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, a consequence that troubles Brzezinski not at all.

Brzezinski’s ‘freedom fighters’ would become known as the ‘Mujahideen’ and later the Taliban and what is claimed to be ‘Al-Qaeda’. This is the man behind ‘anti-war’, Barack Obama. It was common knowledge that President Carter would do nothing involving foreign policy without the okay from Brzezinski, the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission which chose Carter for president.

It is one of many great ironies of the Obama presidency that he is demanding massive troop reinforcements to be sent to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban terrorists who were initially armed, trained and organised by Brzezinski, the man behind Obama. As Morpheus says in The Matrix: ‘Fate, it seems, is not without its sense of irony’.

But then, in Brzezinski’s case, it is not ‘fate’, but cold calculation that has brought it all about. The Poland-born Brzezinski has a fierce hatred of Russia and that is still one of his key targets, together with China.

And if they are Brzezinski’s targets, they are Obama’s targets.

The Trilateral Commission and the wider Brzezinski network, including Illuminati fronts like the Ford Foundation, have now chosen Obama and the situation will be the same. Brzezinski will call the shots; Obama’s job is simply to sell them to the people. This is rather alarming when you think that Brzezinski wants to trigger a war involving Russia and China. ‘Obama’s’ policies come straight from Brzezinski’s books. Here is one Brzezinski quote you might recognise and it was made before Obama ran for president:

‘Needed social reassessment … can be encouraged by deliberate civic education that stresses the notion of service to a higher cause than oneself. As some have occasionally urged, a major step in that direction would be the adoption of an obligatory period of national service for every young adult, perhaps involving a variety of congressionally approved domestic or foreign good works.’

Now where have I heard that before? As an Illuminati operative, Brzezinski’s aim is to create a world government, central bank, currency and army - a global dictatorship - underpinned by a microchipped population connected to a global computer/satellite system. He wrote a book in 1970, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, in which he described the global society that he and the Illuminati seek to impose:

‘The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.’

He also said in the same book nearly 40 years ago:

‘Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites … [Whose] ties cut across national boundaries … It is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook … The nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty … Further progress will require greater American sacrifices. More intensive efforts to shape a new world monetary structure will have to be undertaken, with some consequent risk to the present relatively favorable American position.’

And what does his puppet, Obama, now say that Americans have to do to bring about ‘change’? ‘Make sacrifices‘. As Mrs. Demagogue, Michelle, said:

‘We need a different leadership because our souls are broken. We need to be inspired … to make the sacrifices that are needed to push us to a different place.’

You can bet that this will include sacrificing more sovereignty and freedom on the road to the global dictatorship described by Brzezinski for decades.

Brzezinski’s son, Mark, was an ‘advisor’ to the Obama campaign (doing what his father told him) and, in line with the American one-party-state, his other son, Ian, was foreign policy advisor to the McCain campaign (doing what his father told him). His daughter, the Obama-supporting Mika Brzezinski, reported the campaign for MSNBC television.

Obama has been the chosen one for a long time, a fact known only to a few in the deep inner circle, and his relationship with Brzezinski almost certainly goes back to the start of the 1980s when he attended the Ivy League, and big-time Illuminati, Columbia University where Brzezinski was head of the Institute for Communist Affairs. Obama simply will not talk in any detail about this period. He has been covertly funded and supported ever since by the Trilateral Commission and its network of foundations connecting into the Ford Foundation, for whom Obama’s mother worked.

And a question: Does anyone really believe that someone, a ‘man of the people’, would simply appear from apparently nowhere to run the slickest and best-funded presidential campaign in American history? He was chosen long ago by those who wish to enslave the very people that Obama says he wants to ’set free’.

The sources of Obama funding read like a Wall Street Who’s Who - Goldman Sachs, UBS, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and so on. No wonder he went back on his pledge to accept the limitations of public funding for his campaign and instead took the no-limit option of ‘private’ funding.

And those people are going to support a candidate who does not represent their best interests?? Oh please.

Obama and his seasoned network of professional manipulators, sorry his ‘campaign team’, sold the lie that he had refused to take funding from ‘lobbyists’, those who are paid to ensure that politicians frame legislation, or block it, in the interests of their clients.

But like everything that surrounds Obama, past and present, it’s a sleight of hand and mouth. They funnelled vast sums of money into the Obama accounts through law firms that represent lobbyists and lobby groups. It provided ‘plausible denial’ about funding from lobbyists while the money poured in from lobby interests via third parties.

Then there is the Jewish financier, George Soros, the multi-billionaire associate of Brzezinski and closely involved with the funding and marketing of Obama. Soros is a former board member of the Illuminati’s Council on Foreign Relations and funds the European Council on Foreign Relations. In short, he is a major insider.

You can certainly see the Soros/Brzezinski techniques in the Obama ‘revolution’ in the United States. It was the complex and secretive network of Soros foundations and organisations, connected to the intelligence agencies of the US and Israel, that trained and funded students in the Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere in the art of mass protest and overthrowing governments.

These manufactured protests were sold to the world as ‘peoples’ revolutions’, but it just so happened that when they were over and the old regime was removed the new leaders were those waiting in the wings all along - the puppets of Soros, Brzezinski and their associated networks.

Obama is just more of the same, a big smile with strings attached, and controlled completely by the Illuminati networks that chose him, trained him, sold him and provided his record funding. It was they who kept his many skeletons under wraps, like the gay sex and crack cocaine allegations of Larry Sinclair, and they will continue to do so as long as he jumps to their bidding.

Obama is just another Banksters’ moll prostituting himself for fame and power, and that’s why he supported the grotesque bail-out of the banking system and why he will always put their interests before the people. His financial advisors are straight from the Wall Street ‘A’ list, including Paul Adolph Volker (Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group), the head of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987 and Illuminati to his fingertips.

Obama has made him head of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which is dominated by insiders, including its staff director and chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, a close Obama associate from the University of Chicago. Goolsbee is an initiate of the infamous Illuminati Skull and Bones Society at Yale University, which also includes Boy and Father Bush. It was Goolsbee who told the Canadian government not to worry about Obama’s attacks on the economic effects of ‘free trade’ agreements because his words were just to win votes in the election campaign.

Another Wall Street insider, the Zionist Timothy Geithner (Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations), was appointed by Obama to be his Treasury Secretary. Geithner was the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the most powerful in the private ‘Federal’ Reserve cartel that masquerades as America’s ‘central bank’, and he is a former employee of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the appalling Kissinger Associates.

Obama’s Treasury team locks into the inner circle around the Zionist Robert Rubin, the Director and Senior Counselor of Citigroup, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, and economic advisor to Obama. Rubin, a member of the Illuminati Bilderberg Group, was the man behind Citigroup’s strategy of expanding its risk in debt markets which forced it to be rescued by taxpayers’ money.

The very people who caused the financial crisis are being appointed by Obama to decide how to respond to it (more taxpayers’ money for them and their friends).

Rubin was Treasury Secretary to Bill Clinton and was followed in that post by Larry Summers (Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations) - another insider appointed to Obama’s team of ‘change’. Summers is a fanatical supporter of ‘free trade’ (freedom to exploit) and ‘globalisation’ (global dictatorship) and he wrote a memo in 1991, while chief economist to the World Bank, saying that the bank should dump toxic waste in poor countries because the costs of the ensuing ill-health and death would be lower. When the memo was made public, Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger, told Summers:

‘Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane … Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in … If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said …the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.’

Lutzenburger was dismissed shortly after writing this letter while the horrific Summers was made US Treasury Secretary by Bill Clinton and now he has been appointed to head the National Economic Council by Mr. ‘change’, hope’ and ‘believe’ Obama. It’s all a fairy story.

Bloomberg.com reported that the Center for American Progress (CAP), housed just three blocks from the White House, has become a major source for policy initiatives for the Obama Democratic Party. Who funds the Center for American Progress? George Soros.

It is simply the Neocon Project for the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute under another name. Those two organisations developed and dictated the Bush policy of war and suppression of freedom and the ‘CAP’ and others like it will do the same for Obama. The CAP will fit and Obama will wear it.

In fact, except in name and rhetoric, there is no difference in theme between the regimes of Bush and Obama. Bush policy was dictated through Illuminati ‘think tanks’ and so is Obama’s.

Bush was surrounded by slavish pursuers of Israeli interests and so is Obama. Mr. ‘Change’ has pledged his unquestioning support for Israel to the point of ‘pass the sick bag’ and his vice-president, Joe Biden (Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations), is a vehement Zionist who makes a virtue of saying he will support Israel in all circumstances.

Obama has appointed the arch Zionist Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff and another super Zionist Jew, Dennis Ross, to be his Middle East Policy advisor. God help the Palestinians. Ross also served in the Bill Clinton and Father George Bush administrations. Oh, plenty of ‘change’ there, then.

Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago-born Congressman, is the son of Benjamin M. Emanuel, who was a member of the murderous Jewish terrorist organisation, Irgun, which helped to bomb and terrorise Israel into existence. The Open Secrets website reports that Emanuel was the top House recipient in 2008 for election contributions from ‘hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry’.

Emanuel was also appointed by Bill Clinton to the board of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac in 2000 and his tenure coincided with a stream of scandals and financial irregularities. It famously had to be bailed out by the taxpayer amid the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Emanuel, like Obama himself, is an asset of the ‘Illinois Combine’, a cross-party network of politicians and business interests that conspires to manipulate Chicago politics for their own benefit. Even before taking over at the White House Emanuel faced calls for his resignation for alleged connections with the Rod Blagojevich scandal.

In December 2008 Blagojevich, the Illinois governor and associate of Obama, was arrested over a conspiracy involving massive corruption and moves to sell Obama’s Senate seat in Chicago made vacant by his election to the presidency. It is yet another example of the staggering web on ongoing and infamous corruption in Chicago by the very networks that spawned Obama.

A close friend of Rahm Emanuel is another clone of the Illinois Combine, the Zionist, David Axelrod, who ran Obama’s election campaign and will no doubt be highly influential in the Obama administration. Axelrod is a veteran of Chicago politics, one of the most corrupt political systems in the world and he worked for many Chicago mayors in the 1990s and on Obama’s senate campaign in 2004.

Bill Clinton took his Arkansas cabal to Washington when he became president in 1993 and Obama is uploading his Chicago mob and handing them key positions of national power and influence. And these guys don’t take prisoners.

All of this may be many things, none of them pleasant, but ‘change’ it isn’t.

Obama is a monumental fraud who talks a good story, but lives a very different one. He won his first political office as a state senator in Chicago in 1996, not through the power of his policies, but by coldly abusing the electoral process.

Instead of running against his opponents and letting the people decide, he had his cronies challenge hundreds of names on the nomination papers of his Democratic primary rivals until they were all forced off the ballot by technicalities. He then ran unopposed. One of them, Gha-is Askia, says that Obama’s behaviour belied his image as a champion of the little guy and crusader for voter rights:

‘Why say you’re for a new tomorrow, then do old-style Chicago politics to remove legitimate candidates? He talks about honour and democracy, but what honour is there in getting rid of every other candidate so you can run scot-free? Why not let the people decide?’

Why? Because he would probably have lost and Obama isn’t interested in losing by playing fair. He wants to win by any means necessary. The only voter-right he’s interested in is the right to vote for him. He has also used his hatchet-men like Axelrod to employ scandal to discredit opponents to ensure his election when the real scandal is the truth about Obama himself.

He is a classically corrupt main-chancer spawned from the Chicago political cesspit. His close connections, therefore, to seriously dodgy ‘businessmen’ and fraudsters like the now-jailed slum landlord Tony Rezko are exactly what you would expect.

Rezko, yet another snout in the trough of the Illinois Combine, has heavily funded Obama’s political career and that of the now-arrested Rod Blagojevich, and in return they have supported massive sums being paid to Rezko by Chicago taxpayers to run ‘public housing’.

These properties were then allowed to fall into such a state of danger and disrepair, including sewage running into kitchen sinks, that they were deemed unfit for habitation by the often black poor that Obama was supposed to be representing as a Senator. Some buildings were so bad they had to be demolished.

Rezko also secured appointments for his business associates to state boards and was eventually indicted for using these connections to demand kickbacks from businesses that wanted to do business with the state.

Rezko and Obama toured the $1.6 million mansion in Hyde Park, Chicago, which the Obamas bought at $300,000 below the asking price in 2005 while the Rezkos purchased the adjoining land at the full asking price. Some of this land was later bought by the Obamas. Rezko contributed a quarter of a million dollars to Obama’s political career and served on Obama’s Senate campaign finance committee, which raised more than $14 million.

Then there is Obama’s close association with the terrorists, William Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn. In the late sixties Ayers co-founded the terror organisation called the Weather Underground (also known as the Weathermen and similar derivatives) and launched a campaign of bombing public places like the Pentagon and the Capitol Building. Three members were killed making bombs in Greenwich Village.

In 1970 Ayers was said to have described their philosophy as: ‘Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at …’ Mr. Ayers himself comes from the home of ‘rich people’.

Bernardine Dohrn said this about the Charles Manson murders: ‘Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”

The case against Ayers and Dohrn was thrown out because of then illegal wire-taps andAyers is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.

Ayers recruited Obama to serve as chairman on the $100 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge and they worked together for seven years handing out grants to the ‘educational’ projects of people like … William Ayers. They also worked together on another tax-exempt foundation, the Woods Fund in Chicago, which awarded grants to Obama’s own Trinity United Church, home to his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Obama’s political career was effectively launched in 1995, just after he was made chairman of the Annenberg Challenge, at a meeting at the Chicago home of … William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They have been connected to his circle ever since if the truth be told.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, run by Obama and Ayers, didn’t fund schools directly, but instead insisted that they affiliate with ‘external partners’ who were granted the money. These turned out to be far-left ‘community organisers’ so beloved of Bill Ayers and these groups included the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Obama also conducted ‘leadership training’ seminars with Acorn and its members began to become heavily involved in his political campaigns. It has also been behind efforts to ‘register voters’ (voters most likely to vote for Obama) and Nevada state officials raided Acorn’s Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names.

Among the major funders of Acorn … George Soros.

Obama even refuses to prove that he was born in the United States and thus qualifies to be President. He claims to have been born in Hawaii, but his grandmother, half-brother and half-sister in Kenya all insist he was born there.

‘Mr. Clean’ Obama has a deeply dirty background, but for now no scale of evidence will stop the swooning Obama zombies from believing the hype or burst their reality bubble. That is going to take hard experience and it could take some time and a lot of disappointment before they are released from the clutches of cognitive dissonance and have to admit to themselves they have been had.

It is the same for all the black people who voted for what they thought was the first black president when, in truth, he is a man in a black mask representing the interests of the white-faced Illuminati cabal, the very families and networks that ran the slave trade.

I don’t want to be the bringer of bad news or the thwarter of dreams, but honesty demands it. The man is a trickster controlled by supertricksters. A sock puppet controlled by bigger sock puppets who serve an even greater and darker evil. To his masters, Obama is just a means to an end and if it suits them to assassinate him to trigger civil war and upheaval in the United States then that is what they will do.

Oh dear Oprah, how will you cope when reality dawns? But, then, will it ever??

I can understand the appeal of Obama because people want him to be what he claims to be, but isn’t. They are sick of the conflict, the corruption, the struggle we call ‘life’ and they want it all to change. But Obama’s change is illusory and represents only the continued transformation of society in the image envisaged by Orwell.

We will see some apparently good things announced, like the closing of Guantanamo, to give the impression that Obama means what he says. But keep your eye on the ball and you’ll see how the agenda of the global tyranny is introduced under the guise of Obama’s ‘hope’, ‘change’, ‘believe’, ’sacrifice’ and ‘coming together’.

It could take two years, maybe much more, before cognitive dissonance (lying to yourself) loses it current grip on the minds of the Obama faithful. Until then they will make endless excuses for him (lie to themselves) to keep the ‘dream’ alive.

But one day they will have to admit, by the power of the evidence before them, that they bought a dream and got a nightmare. What a pity they can’t see the obvious now and save them themselves such painful disappointment.

Shoe Bush?

Shoe Bush?

JANUARY 19th

Why Shoe Bush?

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/files/images/shoebush.jpgBy David Swanson,

Our president stood in a nation he had illegally invaded and occupied, where his actions had caused over 1.2 million deaths, 5 million people forced out of their homes, millions more deprived of electricity or clean water and afraid to walk the streets. He stood smiling in a nation he had transformed into a living hell, a place where everyone had seen loved ones and neighbors killed. And when Muntadar Al-Zeidi threw two shoes at him, our president remarked “I don’t know what his beef is.”

But billions of people around the world believed that the pretended obliviousness of George W. Bush to the pain and suffering he was inflicting had gone on as long as they could stand if not much longer, and Al-Zeidi became a hero overnight. His two shoes punctured the Bush veil of separation, the distance Bush pretends to imagine exists between his decisions and the human limbs scattered in the sand of his colony. And while the U.S. media pretended to wonder whether the water torture was “really” torture, the United States and its puppet government in Iraq inflicted on Al-Zeidi one of the more commonly employed torture techniques of the Bush regime: they beat him and broke his bones.

In an ideal world, it would be enough to present the evidence of crimes for Bush, Cheney, and their criminal subordinates to be prosecuted and convicted. In this world, we’ve presented that evidence for years, and we are still in a climate in which Bush and Cheney blissfully admit their crimes, apparently believing that they render prosecution less likely by declaring their own crimes acceptable. While lies may take hold more easily the bigger they are, big lies also collapse quickly, as when a child points to a naked emperor, or a journalist throws his shoes.

We have a president-elect who can save himself from engaging in criminal wars and occupations, in torture and other war crimes, in warrantless spying and other violations of our Constitution, only by prosecuting the actions of his predecessor. Not to prosecute is itself a crime. If we are going to persuade the president elect, we must first persuade the U.S. media, and the U.S. media is not attracted by facts and information. The U.S. media is attracted by throwing shoes.

Bush’s last act is expected to be the unprecedented pardoning of crimes he authorized. This has never before been done, and to do so is to drop all claim to being a nation of laws. Thanks to the example set by Al-Zeidi, since emulated by people all over the world, we will know exactly how to make our response visible when those pardons come.
Join us at the White House at 11 a.m. on January 19th
Full calendar of events in DC in January

ABOUT THE SHOES FOR BUSH ACTION

On Monday, January 19th on President Bush’s last day in office, people will gather at 11:00am at a site near the White House (TBA) for what will be a cathartic action of hurling shoes at the White House. We will be acting in the spirit of Mutadhar Al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference on behalf of the widows, orphans and all those killed in Iraq, and in solidarity with the Iraqi people as well as all of those who have suffered under the Bush regime.

To watch Bush leave office and not be held accountable for war crimes and impeachable offenses is like rubbing salt into the wound.

This action may not take away all of the pain suffered during the Bush regime but we will get satisfaction from the statement the act makes. The shoe hurling will be a historic marker. The visual of thousands of people hurling shoes at the White House as Bush leaves office will go around the globe and the people all over the world will let out a collective cheer. Please join us in being part of history!

If you will be in DC for the Inaugural, please bring an extra pair of shoes with you and join us! If possible collect shoes from your friends and meet us at 11:00 at a location to be announced. Please check back on this site.

Organizers are setting up SHOE COLLECTION HUBS and we need your assistance. Please volunteer to have your residence be a place for people to bring their shoes. Then people who are driving to DC can bring the shoes with them.
Please visit our SHOE COLLECTION HUB page on this web site.

OR you may mail your shoes to SHOES FOR BUSH
PO BOX (forthcoming) Kennebunk, ME 04043
There are no bomb sniffing dogs at our post office! Only a very annoyed post master.

We will be transporting your shoes in a U-Haul to DC.

Please consider writing a note to put in your shoes as we will be reading them at the assembly site. Artists—be creative make art with your shoes.

After the action all shoes will be donated to the needy in the Washington DC area.

SHOES FOR BUSH ACTION


Join the Calls to release Iraqi Journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaydi
Senate Report Links Bush to Detainee Homicides; Media Yawns
Cheney admits authorizing detainee’s torture
Why We Must Prosecute Bush And His Administration For War Crimes




__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 3717 (20081225) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

http://www.eset.com

Mumbai, Corporate Security and Indo-Pakistani Conflict

from STRATFOR

Mumbai, Corporate Security and Indo-Pakistani Conflict
December 24, 2008


Global Security and Intelligence Report

By Fred Burton
Related Special Topic Page

* Militant Attacks In Mumbai and Their Consequences
* Travel Security
* Security and Counterterrorism in India

The Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels in Mumbai reopened Dec. 21, less than one month after the Nov. 26 Mumbai attack that left more than 170 people dead. During that crisis, hotel guests and visitors became trapped after coming under attack from militants using guns, grenades and other weapons to kill indiscriminately. As the investigation into the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack continues, New Delhi has demanded that Islamabad take action to control its militant proxies and militants operating from Pakistan. Because Islamabad has not yet met New Delhi’s demands, Pakistan and India stand on the brink of military confrontation.

Prior to the attacks, India’s increasingly precarious security situation and the inability of Indian security forces to effectively address the deteriorating situation had already made the country less attractive to businesses. A series of bombing attacks throughout the country in 2008, attacks against executives and above all, the Mumbai attack, all have showcased the danger of doing business in the South Asian country at present. And if military confrontation between India and Pakistan erupts in the wake of the Mumbai attacks , multinational corporations quite possibly could face a number of new threats from militant groups in addition to more traditional security problems. Because the exact nature and locations of potential Indian military action against Pakistan are not known, the specific problems multinational corporations might face cannot fully be predicted. Regardless, corporations should be prepared to respond to a number of problems with the potential to disrupt their operations and the security of their personnel.
Facilities and Personnel Security

If conflict breaks out between India and Pakistan, corporate operations will be affected regardless of whether a particular business finds itself in the line of fire. Pakistani retaliation to an Indian strike could take the form of traditional military action, but it also could well involve asymmetric warfare. In this scenario, Pakistan would act through its militant proxies — who could well target Westerners associated with multinational corporations in a bid to damage the Indian economy.

Previous attacks throughout India have shown that numerous militant organizations can cause serious damage and high body counts. But these attacks largely focused on Indian targets — including crowded marketplaces, theaters and mosques — that would cause high casualty numbers among the local population or would damage landmarks. The attacks in Mumbai widened this target set to include foreigners and Jewish interests. While the Taj and Oberoi hotels probably were attacked in part because of their status as Mumbai landmarks, the direct targeting of foreigners indicates the hotels also were chosen in a bid to strike Westerners. (It goes without saying that the attack on Nariman House was intended to target Jews and Israeli interests.)

The Mumbai attacks showed that attacking locations where Westerners are known to congregate, rather than attacks against marketplaces or cinemas that will primary kill Indian nationals, could well be a more efficient and effective way for militants to use their limited resources. And as hotels and other traditional soft targets harden their facilities and implement new security countermeasures to prevent further Mumbai-style attacks, militants will seek less-secure venues that will achieve the same result.

Such targets could include apartment complexes or neighborhoods that primarily house Westerners — similar to the 2004 attacks on the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. residential facilities in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia — or other soft targets such as Western-style marketplaces or restaurants. Though most multinational corporations operate in hardened facilities away from city centers, affording better access control and countersurveillance, their employees cannot remain behind walls at all times. And even within multinational corporate compounds, security cannot be fully guaranteed.

The Mumbai attack has renewed fears that insiders could be used to carry out future attacks on multinational corporate facilities. Ajmal Amir Kamil, the only Mumbai attacker taken alive, reportedly has told police that at least five people in the Mumbai area aided the attackers in their preparations for the attack. Kamil reportedly told investigators these persons provided information about various locations in the city and police stations, though they were not involved in the actual attacks. Indian media reports also note that an intern chef at the Taj may have assisted the attackers’ preparations by providing access to various parts of the hotel, though the Taj has denied the man’s involvement. Unconfirmed reports also hold that some of the attackers wore hotel uniforms, indicating possible staff collusion.

Given the high level of technical sophistication displayed in the way responsibility was claimed for the attack, and given that workers in the information technology industry were involved in previous attacks, the IT sector should be especially vigilant about the potential for militant attacks with inside assistance. While the investigation into how the attackers planned their mission is still ongoing, militants seeking to use the lessons from Mumbai might make renewed attempts to infiltrate multinational corporations to gain information that could be used to launch an attack.

Corporations should also take into account the possibility of Hindu-nationalist-led protests against the Mumbai attack long after the attack itself, which could disrupt business operations. Such a delay between a triggering event and the protests themselves has precedent in the February 2002 protests that occurred months after the December 2001 Kashmiri militant attacks on the Indian parliament. These protests continued sporadically through the summer of 2002, involving extensive violence and many casualties. Similarly, the militant group Indian Mujahideen (IM) said many of its recent attacks were in retaliation for the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat in which more that 1,000 (mostly Muslim) people were killed. Indian military action against Pakistan could be the trigger needed to incite widespread public protests against the Mumbai attacks.
Travel Security

Multinational corporations have long noted the problems of keeping track of employees traveling for either business or personal reasons. Travel during a military conflict poses special problems in this regard. The Mumbai attack showcased those problems, while also adding another layer of concern for corporate security managers. Though hotels have long been a favored target of militant attacks, the prolonged nature of the Mumbai conflict and the reports of Western hostages being held in the hotels made the situation even more problematic for those seeking to identify the people inside.

Efforts at locating employees were further complicated when Indian security forces cut off communication lines inside the hotels to isolate the attackers and prevent them from communicating with one another. Once employees were located inside, security managers also faced difficult decisions about what form of transportation to use when moving employees away from the scene of the crisis.

In the event of a military confrontation between India and Pakistan, corporations would be likely to face similar challenges in locating employees traveling in the country and in removing them from dangerous situations. In the event India chooses to carry out targeted airstrikes against Pakistan, all civilian aircraft could be grounded and Indian airspace frozen. In this scenario, executives and other travelers in India would be unable to leave the country until the ban is lifted.

In the long run, corporate travelers in India (and elsewhere) will continue to face the threat of militant targeting of hotels, especially as other militant groups observe the success of the Mumbai attackers. While the Taj and Oberoi were known as high-quality luxury hotels suitable for Western executives, a number of other similarly situated luxury hotels in the city also house high-profile guests that could make an attractive target for militants.

It is possible the Mumbai attackers chose the Taj and Oberoi because security at the two facilities was not as prominent or visible as in other hotels. In any case, that the Mumbai attackers pre-positioned explosives and other weapons for their use inside the hotel indicates they conducted extensive preoperational surveillance of the targets and likely understood the security countermeasures present in each location. Given the Mumbai attackers’ successful penetration of these hotel facilities and similar attacks in the region, corporations and travelers should be prepared for similar attacks in the future.

These problems reinforce the importance of implementing a consistent travel security plan for employees that allows personnel managers to know the full itinerary of traveling employees, allowing a more effective response to emergency situations. Ultimately, it is impossible to predict the exact location or timing of emergencies. Even so, employees should be fully briefed on contingency plans for avoiding — and escaping from — emergencies, as well as points of contact to report their status to increase the odds of surviving future Mumbais.

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World Shipping Comes To Halt As Global Navies Prepare For 'Unprecedented' Confrontation

December 21, 2008

World Shipping Comes To Halt As Global Navies Prepare For
'Unprecedented' Confrontation

By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

Of the numerous reports we have been able to access from some of the
World's most secret intelligence archives the strangest have always been
those from Russia's Interior Ministry, which though not controlled by
the Soviets anymore is still believed to be at the forefront into the
research of extra and strange science subjects such as UFO's, psychic
powers, remote viewing, etc.

The first time these deepest secrets of the Soviet Interior Ministry
were revealed to the World was in the 1970's with the publication of
"Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain" by Canadian and American
researchers Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, and which according to
the Russian environmental and civil liberties group Ecology and Living
Environment the research of these projects is still continuing today.

But what has caught our attention today, to put it mildly, is a combined
Russian Interior Ministry-FSB report circulating in the Kremlin today
that states that our World's Navies are about engage in 'unprecedented'
hostilities with the 'giant founders' of the ancient Biblical Garden of
Eden to prevent our Planet from being re-colonized by an alien race most
popularly known as the Annunaki (or "Nephilim") who ancient Babylonian
texts state are the 'Watchers' over our Earth.

What makes this report even more disturbing is that as these very words
are being written, Naval Forces from all around the Globe are now
converging upon The Gulf of Aden, the area historically described as is
"the freshwater river that left Eden and split into four heads of
branches, based upon archaic notions of a great river encircling the
world" and which is the exact location given by these ancient Babylonian
texts for the location of the 'main undersea base' of these Watchers.

Global Naval Forces currently steaming towards, or already in, The Gulf
of Aden include 'friends and foes' alike The United States, Iran, China,
Russia, Germany, European Union and India under what these reports state
is the 'cover story' of protecting the shipping lanes of that region
from the US backed pirates operating out of Somalia.

Current news from this region are, also, appearing to show that
hostilities have already begun between our Earth's 'Defense Forces' and
the Watchers as like the United States last attempt to attack these
'aliens' by themselves this past January has, once again, resulted in
massive cuts by the Watchers to the many undersea communication cables
laying upon the seafloors of this region which have now isolated large
parts of the Middle East and the sub-continent.

To the worst fears confronting our Earth's Defense Forces, these reports
continue, is a repeat of the catastrophic events that occurred on
December 26, 2004, when the American nuclear attack submarine USS San
Francisco attempted to launch an attack against an undersea Watcher base
in the Indian Ocean causing these 'aliens' to retaliate by raising the
sea floor over 100 meters which the USS San Francisco than slammed into
but which also launched the cataclysmic tsunami which killed over
250,000 and whose earthquake, latterly, changed the orbit of our entire
Planet.

The Earth Defense Forces in an apparent bid to mitigate any further such
retaliations against them have ordered a near halt to shipping on all of
our World's oceans, and which has been confirmed by the reports issued
on the Baltic Exchange Dry Index [see top photo left] which shows that
Global shipping is now grinding to a near halt as over 93% of all cargo
ships have been recalled to their ports.

It should be noted that as hard as these reports may be to believe by
the average propaganda filled person, the threat to our Planet by these
Watchers has been known by all of the World's powers for many years, and
with one of the first mass warnings being given to our human race by the
American President Ronald Regan who on September 21, 1987 stated before
the United Nations:

"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how
much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside,
universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally
think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were
facing an alien threat from outside this world".

Today is indeed showing us that an 'outside, universal threat' is
'quickly' making 'differences vanish' as both the American and Iranian
Navies are confronting a common Global threat even as they stand on the
brink of war as separate Nation states having no common bonds between
them.

And, to these events occurring at the exact same time as our World's
economic structure continues imploding leaving billions of human beings
in its tragic wake broke, homeless and starving, one can indeed see that
the final 'end game' for the control of our Planet has now begun in
earnest, leaving only the question to be asked.who really are the 'good
guys' in all of this?

For the answer to this question it is wise to remember the Sorcha Faal's
words in her book "Battle Begins For Throne of This World: The Return of
the Einherjar Warriors" wherein she wrote of our need to understand our
Earth's most ancient myths in order to understand these times we live in
today.

"The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet
consists entirely of souls", say the Inuit people of the great Arctic
regions of the World.

According to these ancient people's beliefs, all living things have
souls, just like our human ones, and once we kill a life its spirit is
then free to exact revenge upon us, that is unless we humans perform the
rituals necessary to free them.

The beliefs of the Inuit's come from a world-view that is devoid of
religious belief, in fact, they believe that the universe is ruled by
nothing.

There are no gods or creators, there are no punishments in either this
present world or the hereafter; there is only the belief that is best
summed up by the Inuit's themselves, and who say: "We don't believe. We
fear."

December 21, 2008 EU and US all rights reserved.
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1180.htm
--
Sorcha Faal
sorchafaal@fastmail.fm