Archive for the ‘Joe Giambrone’ Category

Joe Giambrone

 

Published at:

OpedNews, June 14 2013

 

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“I know everything that is said and done.  And thought!”
-Emperor Tiberius, Caligula (1979)

 

“…they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”
-Edward Snowden (2013)

The genius of the American political system is that each administration is significantly worse than the one that preceded it.  The effect is historical revisionism in the public mind.  Nixon looks downright cuddly next to the abuses of Cheney/Rummy/Bush and company.  Now Bush Jr. is starting to look like a civil libertarian when compared to the current Snoopmeister In Chief.  As we plummet toward official Satanism, with a state unrecognizable and patently evil at its core, we can at least cling to the notion that things weren’t as bad as now in some past golden age.  Then we can look around and fight amongst each other, assigning blame to the nearest uninformed yahoo, rather than to the high priests of human sacrifice and global misery and destruction.

We now have an utterly exposed fraud of a system unrecognizable as a democracy, but clearly within parameters of what George Orwell conjured up and Hitler before him.

A series of disclosures comes regularly from defective cogs, little technocratic machine parts, which no longer spin as directed.  Edward Snowden’s classified leaks are the icing on top of a shit pile so towering as to be visible from orbit.  As Snowden warned, “the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

That is the modus operandi.  Secret memos have replaced debate, law and Constitutionality.

“If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”
–Whistleblower Edward Snowden

Snowden, a private contractor, a computer systems “analyst” at Booz, Allen and Hamilton, is recently out of a job.  But that doesn’t seem to have stopped his employer from rolling forward with the mission, no matter what that mission actually entails.  Buzzfeed reports that Snowden’s old job is open for candidates to apply.  So if you’re a hacker with questionable morals and scruples, you are encouraged to take the keys to the kingdom.  There you will be able to “wiretap anyone, from YOU or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president…

Someone, somewhere in a uniform adorned with various gaudy medals, might ask why some off-the-street computer punk could get hired to wiretap his entire life, and with what oversight or legality?  If said punk decides to wiretap high-ranking military officers, what then?  And the President of the United States?  And federal judges?  What sort of Frankenstein’s worst nightmare has the National Security Agency concocted over there, and in what possible ways do such gaping security holes constitute “national security?”  This is quite the opposite, in fact, a national insecurity on a scale unprecedented in all of human history.

Thanks for letting us know, Snowden, but, you’re still enemy number one to be silenced.  Like Manning, and Assange, Kiriakou, Binney and Sibel Edmonds.  You’re not supposed to tell the public.  You see, the US government considers the public a hostile force to be propagandized, controlled, manipulated, kept ignorant, persuaded, sold, taxed, recruited or locked up.  This is the triumph of “western democracy.”

Not a lot is new here, but the naked illegitimacy of the office of the president is a welcome development indeed.  As the buck stops in the Oval Office, perhaps we can begin there with handcuffs and actual warrants for arrest that respect the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights of Mr. Obama and company.

I am not a crook!” said a former crook.  But today, the very notion that the president is a crook has been defined out of existence as a “conspiracy theory” the wild, insane ravings of the lizard cult people awaiting the mother ship.  For it is quite impossible for the president, or anyone else in government, to conspire to break the law.  Such a thing goes against the divine.  A religious aura surrounds the hallowed grounds of the White House, a place so sacred as to be beyond the worldly temptations of normal mortals.

As no US government official is currently capable of breaking the law, the tin foil adorned crowd must simply be shunned and silenced, ridiculed into irrelevance.  Impeachment is another quaint anachronism.  After all, there was no blowjob.  No one lied about semen.  Bodily fluids were not spilled.

This is simply a policy disagreement.  Policy is, in the end, whatever the government decides to have typed up in a memo.  This memo’s relevance to the law and to the rights of the citizens has been engineered completely into irrelevance.  Memo trumps Constitution.  Ask Diane Feinsetin.  They have a “program” and the program is approved by them – so what’s the problem?

The lunatic conspiracist and enemy of the state Edward Snowden claims, “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

Well what does he know, really?

“…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”
-Edward Snowden

Senator Mike Rogers disagrees.  End of story.  End of investigation – of the NSA – not of Snowden of course.

Can some rogue leaker take down the illegitimate surveillance state?  Doubtful.

Have the people awoken?  Remains to be seen.

Can they do anything about it?  Will they?  Will they be asleep again by Sweeps Week?

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
- Edward R. Murrow

Let me ask you, couch potato man, how many more Edward Snowdens will throw away their careers, their life savings and flee for the rest of their lives in order to save your sorry freedom that you don’t even value yourself?  Why should they?  Are you worth it?  Are you even on the right side of history?  Ignorance, in the hyper-information age, is rather pathetic, don’t you think?

The world of knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, often 24/7, and yet they actively choose to know very little.  They wallow in trivialities and banalities choosing ignorance 9 times out of 10.  How long can such a people remain free?

Should they?

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
-Edward Snowden

Beer, Breasts and Cat Videos, that new reality show debuts at 9pm.

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by Joe Giambrone

Published at:

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Brian Glyn Williams (right)
Source: brianglynwilliams.com

I hope I didn’t contribute to it.  That kid and his brother identified with the Chechen struggle.”  

–Brian Glyn Williams, South Coast Today, April 19th  2013

Who is Brian Glyn Williams, and why was he telling his local newspaper such things relating to the alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?  This question may be highly relevant to our understanding of the bombing and of the longstanding Chechen insurgency itself.   It was Williams who contacted South Coast Today reporter Steve Urbon first, and not vice-versa.  This important article indicates a series of contacts between professor Williams and the boy who would later be accused of terrorism and mass murder at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

Brian Glyn Williams bills himself as an associate professor of Islamic History at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.  That’s where his byline tends to stop, abridged as it is.  Recently however, Williams has come clean about his CIA past as a field operative in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and around Central Asia in the early 2000’s.  He studied, of all things, the motivations of “suicide bombers,” establishing himself as an expert on the subject.  Professor Williams also has a longtime association with the Jamestown Foundation, created by the head of the CIA in 1984 and steered by Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Williams’ role as an “analyst” for Jamestown Foundation is usually also omitted from his byline, when his editorials appear in such mainstream journals as the Huffington Post, The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere.   Such failure to disclose his personal connections to US intelligence and to an intelligence-connected front organization mirrors his non-disclosure concerning his personal relationship with the alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in those very same publications.

A website called Major History profiled Professor Williams in March of 2013.  There they wrote, “[Brian Glyn Williams’] work has taken him to … Afghanistan to work for the Central Intelligence Agency.  Williams was tasked with helping law enforcement and intelligence agencies understand the motivations and behaviors of suicide bombers…”  As Williams’ formal education is in history, rather than psychological profiling, this may seem a bit out of the ordinary.  “[Williams’] findings about suicide bombings in Afghanistan were informed by his understanding of tribal identities as much as fervor for the Jihadist movement.  He came to these conclusions after being sent to Afghanistan by the CIA to perform firsthand research on these types of attacks.  This type of fieldwork is unusual for most academics but especially for historians...”

 

Which version of Brian Glyn Williams are we reading?

In 2008 Williams wrote a Field Report on Suicide Bombers of Afghanistan, for the Middle East Policy journal.  No indication was given to readers that his specific trip to Afghanistan was as a CIA operative.  That disclosure does not seem to have been made until March of 2013.  In the piece, Dr. Williams, a lowly associate professor of Islamic History, said, “…it was my research on Afghanistan’s suicide bombers that had drawn me from the safety of my world to the Pashtun tribal regions…”  That may be so, but it is certainly not the entire story.

Williams’ elaborate 2011 defense of the CIA’s drone assassination campaign is an exercise in bolstering the CIA’s policies without fully disclosing his own linkages or self-interests.  Writing in the West Point CTC Sentinel, “Brian Glyn Williams is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.  He formerly taught at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.”  That’s all that Williams discloses in Accuracy of the U.S. Drone Campaign: The Views of a Pakistani General.

FrontPage Magazine managed to locate Brian Glyn Williams after the Boston Marathon bombings and noted, “Professor Brian Glyn Williams teaches the only course in the country about the Chechen wars and said Dzokhar emailed him questions in the spring of 2011.”  No mention of CIA or Jamestown, but was this at all unexpected given Williams’ persistent pattern of non-disclosures?

As Williams is billed as the sole academic in the US worth talking to about the Chechen wars, he should quite know all about the Islamic Jihad that has raged there since the 90’s and which FrontPage describes clearly just further down in the article.  When Osama Bin Laden set up a training camp in Chechnya in 1995, he wanted to ‘establish a worldwide Islamic state…

Who are the Chechen rebel “commanders?”

Canadian Broadcasting (CBC) reported in 2010,

“Last year, a charismatic rebel commander calling himself Said Buryatsky bragged on the rebel website Kavkaz Center he was training new suicide bombers….  Buryatsky… studied for several years in Saudi Arabia… A new leader, Dokka Umarov, emerged declaring the new goal was to separate all six Muslim majority provinces in the Russian Caucasus from the Russian Federation, and create a new Islamic state ruled by Sharia law.  Admired for his Saudi religious education Buryatsky quickly became Umarov’s chief ideologist.  He also became a valued military strategist.”

Doku Umarov is the current leader of the Chechen insurgency, and he is known as “Russia’s Bin Laden.”  His website Kavkaz Center is hosted in Finland.  On June 29th of 2010 the US State Department designated Doku Umarov a “global terrorist.”  In June of 2012 Finnish prosecutors were reported to have linked the US State Department itself to funding for Doku Umarov’s website operations – the Kavkaz Center.

In April of 2013, Brian Glyn Williams suggested to his Huffington Post readers to visit the Kavkaz Center website to see that these Chechens allegedly don’t target Americans.  Williams claimed, “While the small number of Chechen rebels were later radicalized in the 2000s and came to see their war for national independence as a defensive jihad, they had no reason to attack distant America.”  Williams, of course, knows that an Al Qaeda training camp was established in Chechnya in 1995.  He suggests, “For a view into their world see the Chechen rebels’ website Kavkaz Center.”  The owner of that website in Finland, Mikael Storsjo received a “four-month suspended sentence” in 2012 for “assisting Chechen terrorists to enter Finland illegally.” 

Brian Glyn Williams knows full well that Doku Umarov is a terrorist and that the bombings gleefully boasted about on his Jihad website Kavkaz Center are in fact acts of terrorism.  As Umarov is officially designated a “global terrorist” by the US government itself, should Mr. Williams be supporting him, his group and his website rhetorically?

More to the point: Did Williams recommend this website and its activities to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

The distinction that Williams stresses repeatedly is that “they had no reason to attack distant America.”  The clear implication here is that terrorist attacks against Russians are of no concern and should not be of concern to readers.

Doku Umarov’s Al Qaeda-connected group is famous for the massacre of almost 400 civilians at a school in Beslan, Russia in 2004.   FrontPage continues its summation of more recent attacks: “…a November 2009 train bombing that killed 28; suicide bombings in a Moscow subway by female operatives in March 2010 that killed 40; and an airport bombing in January 2011 that killed 36.”

Upon reading Brian Glyn Williams suggestion in the Huffington Post to visit Kavkaz, I clicked the link and found this recent post (5/20/13):

Two blasts in Dagestan killed and injured more than 50 puppets  [21:56] Russian invaders reported that 2 blasts went off within an interval of 15 minutes in Shamilkala, the capital the Caucasus Emirate’s Province of Dagestan.”

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Source: Kavkaz Center Homepage (5/20/13)

One must infer that the above is acceptable in Mr. Brian Glyn Williams’ view, as it does not target Americans.  While Williams vehemently denies any connection between the Chechens and Saudi Wahabbis, the Chechen commanders themselves may see it quite differently.

In the South Coast Today report by Steve Urbon, Brian Glyn Williams described his communications with the younger Tsarnaev brother.  “[Dzhokhar] wanted to learn more about Chechnya, who the fighters were, who the commanders were. I sort of gave him background.”  What Mr. Williams considers “background” is the key question here, and his specific emails and any other correspondence with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be investigated fully.

The “commanders” were, and are, Doku Umarov, Said Buryatsky and a distinguished gentleman named Shamil Basayev.  Basayev arranged for 850 hostages to be taken at a theater in Moscow in 2002, demanding Russia give up the province of Chechnya and pull out.  During the siege 130 civilians died as well as all 40 of Basayev’s armed terrorists.

 

When Williams defends the Chechen “cause” and “struggle”, just which cause is he defending exactly?

Williams next tells his Huffington Post readers, “It seems that the older Tamerlan then converted his brother Dzhokar to the fanatical cause”.  Ah, but here is where we must insist on a full disclosure from Mr. Brian Glyn Williams himself.

To a Fox News audience, “Williams said that after [Dzhokhar] contacted him, he emailed back a syllabus.  He said he didn’t even remember the interaction until he talked to a friend.”

In the South Coast Today, however, “Williams recalled [Dzhokhar] clearly, though the two never met and communicated by email, Williams sending him links to academic papers he’s published and books he recommended.”  Williams then made his case for propagandizing the boy.  “As Williams put it, an ancient civilization was being wiped away… there are stories of mass killings, death camps, mass graves, torture, destruction.”

In the Fox report Williams reiterated his recurring thesis.  “He said the official [Chechen rebel] leadership is more secular and moderate, but there is an extremist element that sees the Russians as ‘infidels.”  That is the story of the Chechen conflict that Williams peddles to whomever will listen, including the eager students at the University of Massachusetts and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  But what is secular or moderate about Mr. Umarov and his Saudi-trained chief ideologist and suicide bomber trainer, Mr. Buryatsky?  It is they who are responsible for the Kavkaz Center, which Brian Glyn Williams linked to in his Huffington Post piece.

In another article that Williams wrote a week after the Boston bombing, Who Are The Chechens?, he told us, “Having taught what is perhaps the only class in America, if not the world, on this obscure land for nine years…” and nothing about his CIA-contracted field work.  If ever a conflict of interest should be disclosed, then this is surely that time.  The man taught about a foreign insurgency in Russia at a public University for nearly a decade despite being a field operative on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency.  He apparently never disclosed this fact at the time, nor even in this post-bombing article.  It remains a mystery why he chose to disclose his CIA past at all in Major History in March of this year.  One motivation may have come from the publisher of his new book “Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al Qaeda,” where it is also mentioned.  Williams’ CIA bona fides may be seen as a useful marketing blurb to sell the book to readers.  In this new era of Zero Dark Thirty the CIA is overwhelmingly sold to the American public as being the good guys, their Church Commission dirty laundry revelations long since forgotten.

Never disclosed in Williams’ one-sided portrayal of his subject matter is the United States’ covert role in sponsoring, funding and encouraging Jihad against first the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979), and then in former republics of the Soviet Union including Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Dagestan.  For all the inspiring talk of desperate “David versus Goliath” Chechen Jihadist warriors, the proxy nature of these insurgencies does not merit any mention by the professor.

What is the Jamestown Foundation?

This NGO was founded in 1984 by William Casey, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Reagan, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski and exiled Soviet-bloc intelligence defectors.  It was a Cold War information collection and propaganda source used to strategically weaken the Soviet Union and to advance US interests in Asia, a mission that continues today undeterred.  SourceWatch states, “Jamestown’s work has contributed directly to the spread of democracy and personal freedom in the former Communist Bloc countries.”  In other words it is an active political player in the region.  It also has an extensive record of influencing the internal politics of “Communist Bloc countries” so that they become “former.”

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Zbigniew Brzezinski is famous for designing and launching the 1979 Jihad in Afghanistan that drew the Soviets into their own “Vietnam,” thereby weakening Soviet Russia and draining its resources on a US-engineered and supported proxy war.  The arms and fighters flowed through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia primarily, in partnership with the CIA.  Radical Islamic fighters were recruited from all over the Arab world to go fight a Jihad in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.

Brzezinski bragged about this success against the Soviets and simultaneously dismissed concerns over Islamic fundamentalism.  “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”  Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard predicted major wars in Central Asia, the oil, gas and mineral rich Caspian region and the Caucasus as necessary for insuring America’s “primacy” in the world.  His goal is based upon world domination by America and its allies, and his entire career has been in service to this goal.  Brzezinski holds the highest position at the Jamestown Foundation.

Currently, says SourceWatch:Global Terrorism Analysis is a subset of The Jamestown Foundation which publishes three journals, Terrorism Monitor… Spotlight on Terror” and  “Terrorism Focus.”  It also publishes, “Chechnya Weekly.”  Jamestown boasts a lengthy roster of paid analysts, and Brian Glyn Williams is a longtime contributor.

Former National Security Agency officer Wayne Madsen says, “The Jamestown Foundation is part of a neo-conservative network that re-branded itself after the Cold War from being anti-Soviet and anti-Communist to one that is anti-Russian and ‘pro-democracy.’”  Madsen notes several further connections.  “The network not only consists of Jamestown and the Caucasus Fund but also other groups funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the [George Soros] Open Society Institute (OSI).

Jamestown and Caucasus Fund were flagged by Georgian state security as holding training seminars in 2012 attended by none other than Tamerlan Tsarnaev during his trip to Russia in the first half of the year.  This second connection between Jamestown Foundation and the Tsarnaev brothers bolsters the idea that the two brothers were being recruited by US intelligence and were not “lone wolves” as is presented uncritically across the US corporate media spectrum.  A further connection to both the CIA and to USAID leads directly to the boys’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni.  That’s three.   And now we have reasonable suspicion to investigate further persons associated with these shady and highly-motivated organizations.

USAID, which uncle Ruslan Tsarni worked with – or more likely for – since the 1990s, was recently expelled from Russia for interfering in the internal politics of that country.   This interference is a consistent pattern, one that has flipped multiple countries from the Russian alliance to the NATO/US alliance, including Georgia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.

Back to Chechnya

Brian Glyn Williams’ so-called expertise on the Chechen conflict stems directly from official US policy since the Cold War, and that is a policy to break up the Soviet Union and Russia in order to weaken it, and to therefore strengthen the US / NATO alliance and expand it into Asia.  The dissolution of Chechnya and Dagestan is seen as a continuation of the break-up of the rest of the Soviet Union, despite Chechnya being a part of Russia for 150 years.  The Chechen insurgency of the 1990s sprung up in similar fashion to other radical Islamic insurgencies promoted by the US and its allies throughout Central Asia.  Numerous foreign fighters flooded in to fight the Russians in similar fashion to the Afghanistan Jihad, also known as Operation Cyclone.

Brian Glyn Williams’ 2004 paper on the subject provides clues to his motivations, and they are far from neutral or academic.  In From “Secessionist Rebels” to “Al-Qaeda Shock Brigades”: Assessing Russia’s Efforts to Extend the Post-September 11th War on Terror to Chechnya, Williams wrote, “…Condoleeza Rice, tellingly proclaimed ‘not every Chechen is a terrorist and the Chechens’ legitimate aspirations for a political solution should be pursued by the Russian government.’”

In other words, the US demanded that secession and the break-up of Russia be permitted by the Russian government.  When the United States itself faced secession and break-up in 1860, this was not exactly welcomed by those in power.

The strategy of defining terrorists working in the interests of US policymakers as “freedom fighters” and dismissing their atrocities by characterizing them as the work of a small “minority,” seems to originate with Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Williams quotes Brzezinski in the piece: “What should be done? To start with the US should not fall for Russia’s entreaty that `we are allies against Osama bin Laden’… Terrorism is neither the geopolitical nor moral challenge here [in Chechnya].”

This is an ideological foundation for ignoring terrorism whenever and wherever it suits US interests.  Such has been the policy for a long, long time and in the Muslim world easily shown back to 1979.   Terrorism in Chechnya is described by Professor Williams as not being from the majority, but from a minority.  Essentially a straw man argument, no one would claim that terrorists are a majority in the first place.   This exact argument is used by US apologists concerning Syria today in regards to the Al Qaeda connected Al Nusra Brigades operating there.

In The Atlantic on April 26th of this year, Brian Glyn Williams told American readers, “There is a minority among the rebels that subscribe to the global view of jihad.  But overall Chechens are very pro-American and pro-Western.”  The first sentence claims a minority “among the rebels,” but the second statement seeks to bolster the first claim by mentioning “overall” about Chechen civilians in general.  The first claim, however is false, and the actual fighters committing bombings, hostage takings and shootings in Russia on behalf of Chechen independence are connected with Doku Umarov and his Jihad to establish Sharia Law.  Therefore Williams is wrong on the facts today and misleading his readers.

One of the most useful sources of information to debunk Brian Glyn Williams is, surprisingly enough, Brian Glyn Williams’ own papers, like the 2004 piece cited above.  “…President Bush went on to declare that ‘Arab terrorists’ linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization were operating on Chechen territory and ought to be ‘brought to justice.’28  U. S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, went a step further and proclaimed “Russia is fighting terrorists in Chechnya, there is no question about that, and we understand that.”  His entire paper reads like a Cold War propaganda piece designed to dispute the assessment of even Bush and Powell and to put forth the myth that the Chechens are not in any way, shape or form linked to Al Qaeda, which is a demonstrably false premise.  Williams mentions that the Taliban recognized the breakaway Chechen Emirate as a legitimate government in 2000, but he dismisses this fact as a “purely symbolic gesture.”

Remember, this is the man who is currently authoring a book to destroy the idea that Chechen terrorism is in any way linked to Al Qaeda.  His April 19th interview with Steve Urbon ended with,  “[Chechens] are not Al Qaeda. Repeat: They are not Al Qaeda.”  Chechen fighters, however, are overwhelmingly radical Islamists, and this is where Williams is debunked as a tale spinner.

In the Huffington Post, April 25th, Williams wrote, “I myself personally traveled to Afghanistan in 2003 and interviewed numerous Taliban prisoners of war held by Northern Alliance Uzbek General Dostum.” Williams does not disclose his CIA assignment on that trip nor who this General Dostum actually is.  Patrick Cockburn described Dostum as follows.  “In northern Afghanistan General Rashid Dostum, a warlord of notorious brutality but an ally of the CIA, had hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners buried alive or packed into containers to suffocate.”

Here with Dostum and friends, the ever-objective Professor Williams found a consistent story: no Chechens.  “None of them had ever seen or heard of Chechens; it was like looking for the Chechen Big Foot.”  That’s a nice story, but is it the truth?

In his 2004 report, Williams tells how this very question was essentially the purpose of his mission, his CIA assignment.  “My goal was to see if any of these prisoners of war had seen or fought alongside one of the ‘thousands’ of ‘Chechen die-hard Al Qaeda fanatics’ reported to have fought against U. S. forces in the Afghan theater.”  His mission was to make the distinction between Chechens and Al Qaeda, apparently at the behest of the CIA.  He has been dutifully repeating this claim ever since.  His new book to be released next year, entitled “Inferno in the Caucus: The Chechen insurgency and the Mirage of Al Qaeda,” will attempt to make this same argument again.

Mark Ames at NSFWCorp was first to challenge Wiliams’ “Chechen Big Foot” claim.  Ames compiled a list of articles to dispute Williams.

“[Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld told reporters, ‘There’s Chinese in there, there’s Chechens in there…’”  Agence France-Presse, on March 22, 2002: “…Chechen fighters in Afghanistan who have thrown their lot in with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.”  Even US Generals were quoted specifically referring to Chechens in Afghanistan and allied with Bin Laden.   ”We know the history of the Chechens. They are good fighters and they are very brutal,” [US Major General Frank] Hagenbeck said.  The general said he has heard of reports out of the Pentagon that a unit of 100-150 Chechens had moved into southern Afghanistan.”  And here is more evidence that Brian Glyn Williams claims does not exist: “General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces, said in Moscow Thursday that Chechen fighters were among the al-Qaeda fighters taken prisoner by US troops but gave no figures.”  The New York Times reported, “Between 100 and 200 Qaeda and ”non-Afghan” fighters, including Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks, have been killed in heavy fighting so far, General Franks said…”  During the battle of Tora Bora the NY Times reported Chechens as the fiercest fighters, “By all accounts, the Arab and Chechen fighters have put up the stiffest resistance.”

Williams also tied his own 2003 mission to Afghanistan with official US policy changes during that time period, “… the White House’s evolving foreign policy had, by 2003, come to have a more balanced view of the Chechen separatists and a three-dimensional view of their supposed links to international terrorism.  The U. S. State Department… limited itself to designating several fringe Chechen terrorists groups led by rogue field commander Shamil Basayev as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations.’”

Williams’ entire career aligns with this policy change.  His field work was directly in service of bolstering this view and gathering evidence in support of maintaining good relations and support for Chechen “freedom fighters” who persist to this day in trying to break away from Russia.   This is Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard in action.

 

Security Holes Are Part of the Game

Mark Ames at NSFW details how this very same policy of treating Chechen terrorists as “freedom fighters” directly impacted the September 11th attacks, in particular the thwarted investigation of “20th hijacker” Zacharias Moussaoui one month before the attacks.

“…Minneapolis agent Harry Samit got the US Embassies in Paris and London to look into Moussaoui’s background,” said Ames. “The FBI’s legal attaché in Paris got back to Minneapolis with some startling news establishing a link between Moussoui and the Saudi warlord in Chechnya, Khattab.  The only problem was that by August 2001, US policy did not recognize the Chechen rebels as terrorists with links to Al Qaeda or Bin Laden.”

An FBI memo already established al Khattab as an Al Qaeda terrorist, but the investigation of Moussaoui’s laptop was denied to the FBI Minneapolis officers and to Coleen Rowley, the legal advisor there. “True, there was an FBI memo on the FBI director Louis Freeh’s desk explicitly warning that terrorists linked to Khattab and Bin Laden were planning a major attack, but the memo was dismissed, and the FBI man in Washington DC, who should have seen that memo but claims he didn’t, rebuffed Minneapolis and shut down their requests for a warrant to look in Moussaoui’s laptop.”

Brian Glyn Williams mentions Khattab in other articles, acknowledging his Saudi roots, funding and role in setting up training camps in Chechnya in 1995.  Williams also admits that the indigenous Chechen rebel leadership made a strategic alliance with Khattab and his Al Qaeda support network in 1999.  Williams himself wrote, “Although the Russian Federation had initially limited its retaliatory bombing strikes to Khattab’s camps in southeastern Chechnya, the Kremlin launched a total invasion of Chechnya in October 1999.  This indiscriminate invasion drove Chechnya’s moderate leadership (the only force in Chechnya that might have assisted in expelling the foreign jihadis) into a strategic alliance with Khattab and his IIB.”  Straight from the horse’s mouth.  Sounding a lot like those attempting to hold Williams to account, he himself told of the foreign Jihadist infusion, Islamists who travelled into Chechnya to engage in warfare and terrorism.  Wrote Williams, “Young Egyptians, Yemenis, Saudis, Pakistanis, Turks, etc. continue to make their way at great risk to Chechnya to assist the Chechens in their uneven struggle.  Many of those who have fought in Chechnya have been radicalized by their experience as front line jihadis.”  Thorough as the good professor is, he even places Al Qaeda’s number 2 at the time, and now top Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri in Dagestan.  “December 1996. Ayman al Zawaheri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and member of Al Qaeda’s ruling troika, travels to Dagestan in search of a new base of operations…”  These Chechen/Al Qaeda links, many of which are admitted to by Williams himself, are striking and irrefutable… but inconvenient for current policy makers.  Excerpts are taken from, “The ‘Chechen Arabs’: An Introduction To The Real Al-Qaeda Terrorists From Chechnya,” Jamestown Foundation, Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 2 Issue: 1, May 5, 2005, by Brian Glyn Williams.

So what the hell was Brian Glyn Williams telling Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
  • And for how long?
  • How many communications?
  • What was motivating these communications?
  • What is the relationship between Jamestown Foundation and ongoing covert operations in the Caucasus?
  • What was the relationship of Jamestown Foundation to Tamerlan Tsarnaev on his trip to Dagestan in 2012?
  • What is the relationship between the brothers and their uncle Ruslan Tsarnai and to his former father in law, CIA mastermind Graham Fuller?
  • How did individuals in US intelligence cancel threat warnings issued on Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
  • Who hid Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s  threat warnings from local Boston police and from members of the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force?

Brian Glyn Williams ended his 2005 article with this statement: “As for the Chechens themselves, the world awaits the arrest of a single Chechen by coalition forces for involvement in Al Qaeda terrorism anywhere in the globe.”  What a bit of irony that the Chechen arrested for terrorism in Boston was communicating directly with Brian Glyn Williams and was mentored in his Chechen roots and heritage by Williams personally.  We can only hope that the FBI thoroughly investigates what Williams told Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and which specific “commanders” and “fighters” he vouched for and personally recommended to the boy.

All emphases were added.

Joe Giambrone publishes Politcal Film Blog (@polfilmblog), and he dares anyone to try this Hell of a Deal.

http://wp.me/pUM5o-5v

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Joe Giambrone

Trek v. Trek:  Who comes out on top?

Having been impressed by the latest Trek through the galaxy, Into Darkness, I came back and re-watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Both films are watchable, but the 1982 effort is really starting to show its age.

Now I know some nerds will be trying to hack the site and cause Khan-like havoc with my life for saying it, but Wrath of Khan, by comparison, isn’t really very good.  It reeks of old Hollywood, over the top lines, swelling orchestra, overly-hyped shots of space models, and some sub-par acting.  I mean, let’s get real here.  The actors may be loved and cherished, but beginning with James T. Kirk himself, the acting can send shivers down your spine.  The one-off supporting cast (son of Kirk?) are similarly second rate.  For performances, the new film stands head and shoulders above the original.  Even Ricardo Montalban (Khan) turns in a heartfelt but poorly scripted and staged effort.  His Shakespeare quotes from the bowels of hell routine inspire more laughter than any other emotion.

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Wrath’s clunky plot is hard to ignore, when Chekov and his captain could easily beam back up the moment Chekov discovers that he’s on Khan’s crashed ship.  Instead, they opt to go outside again and face the Khan contingent.  Still, they have time to beam up, but a quick cut erases that obvious solution.  Also, it’s absurd that anyone could survive on that hostile planet for more than a few months.  There’s no water.

Now if I’m going to nitpick stupid plot choices I may as well point out that in the new film (Into Darkness) we have a similar absurdity (or three) that deserves mention.  As Khan’s little fighter ship spins out of control, outside of Starfleet headquarters on Earth, we are supposed to believe that before hitting the ground Khan was able to beam himself accurately to another galaxy in Klingon controlled space!  Two seconds of contemplation renders that laughable as well.

But the new film makes up for its sins with a lot of bang for the buck.  More story, more humor, more interesting scenarios, more movie.  The new film feels like two movies compared to the old.  It’s also a hell of a lot funnier.  Into Darkness functions as a comedy as much as a drama, with slick references and inside jokes coming almost constantly.  Wrath, in contrast, contains long boring dead spots.  The first film could be seen as a blueprint for the second to expand on.

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The younger, sexier cast is also relevant.  In Wrath, we have an aging Kirk rotting away and waiting to die, longing to fly on a spaceship again.  In the new version, we have a false-flag covert setup.  Much more interesting on its face.  The warmongers position themselves as the enemies of The Federation, even though they essentially run it!  Count me in.

The new film’s plot, with Khan a wildcard, a partnership to defeat the greater evil, leads to better drama and more internal conflict.  The reversal of Kirk and Spock is also interesting, as we’ve already seen Spock’s ultimate sacrifice – which was the best part of the Wrath film – but now Kirk is constantly playing catch-up to his own legend.  He has to prove himself time and again, and the odds are always stacked nowadays against him.

Lastly, Star Trek Into Darkness brings out its theme about the values we hold dear and which form the foundation of civilization.  This powerful guiding principle of the story sews it satisfyingly together, giving it a consistency that Wrath of Khan just doesn’t share.  Into Darkness is a superior film in nearly every conceivable measure.

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Debra Winger and John Malkovich travel to Morocco to get lost.

This was an unexpected, entrancing journey, much like my previous Under the Radar pick Dead Man.  I’d heard the title in a line of dialogue at the opening of The Player, during that amazing 8 minute opening shot. 

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The journey that the couple embark on twists in unexpected directions.  What struck me about The Sheltering Sky is how much like a novel it seemed.  The style, with Bernardo Bertolucci directing, rejects modern Hollywood slick cutting, instead lingering on the ancient desert atmosphere, but not to the point of tedium.  An evolving landscape and an evolving relationship call into question concepts like love, commitment and devotion.  It’s a very meditative, existential film, and worth checking out.

inlaws

Two families, two fathers, one wedding, several stolen currency printing plates, several armed bad guys, a banana republic, the CIA, a man whose life is thrown into a blender…

The original In Laws is my top pick for the best comedy film of all time.  Peter Falk and Alan Arkin come from two entirely different worlds.  Their relationship, based upon a random family connection and a deception, is one of the greatest arcs to develop over the course of a story I can think of.  Dated and frozen in time as it is, that’s of no concern.

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The issues of trust, secrecy, deception, even fraud can confront any family, any time.  As the nature and structure of family is in flux, surrounding an impending wedding, tensions are heightened.  But when they are pushed to near absurd breaking points, the payoff is spectacular.

I guess if I was stuck on an island with just one video, this would have to be it.  Happy Father’s Day.

 

 

 

 

 

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Joe Giambrone

All Aboard the Bullshit Express

Like everything else corporate whoredom shits out, the very nature of the language is undermined and debauched daily.  Concepts that embody morality and sacrifice turn into game shows for self-aggrandizement.

Heroism is now unrecognizable, the mindless commands of a steroid enhanced actor replacing intelligence and moral fortitude.  A bag full of money features in the teaser for this reckless show to risk life and serious injury so that one can perform on TV under the fake banner of “The Hero.”

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Enough of this programming, this Pavlovian conditioning, has warped the social fabric of the nation.  Heroism is itself a marketing slogan for mercenary militarists, Hollywood snake oil salesmen and skeezy “reality” show producers.  And so it is dead in this nation.  The true heroes are labeled state enemies and criminals, sent to prison while the pig ignorant couch slugs gawk on at gibberish like “The Hero.”

Modern American heroes include Edward Snowden, who exposed NSA mass surveillance.  And William Binney, who exposed NSA mass surveillance.  And Adrienne Kinne, who exposed NSA mass surveillance.  And Mark Klein, who exposed NSA mass surveillance.  Is anyone noticing a pattern?

And Bradley Manning who exposed US war crimes, lies and deceptions of the US State Department, and is currently being tried in a military kangaroo court that won’t let him argue the actual reasons why he did what he did.  And Lieutenant Ehren Watada who refused to be deployed to Iraq on the grounds that it was a Crime Against the Peace, an illegal war of aggression, which he similarly was not allowed to say at his kangaroo court martial.

And Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who saw raw intelligence documenting massive US official complicit criminality and support for terrorists in Central Asia, but was fired from the FBI and gagged instead of rewarded and having her evidence used in prosecutions of wrongdoing.  And John Kiriakou who exposed CIA torture and was rewarded with jail time.  And Senator Bob Graham who would not let the 9/11 cover-up stand and has vehemently protested to this day the suppression of evidence of Saudi Arabian and other foreign government involvement in those attacks.

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There are heroes in America today.  But they aren’t the kind that Hollywood sells to children.  They most certainly are not the jackasses playing on the outsides of skyscrapers to make some cash in the service of selling commercial air time – glorified car and beer salesmen.  Such a bastardization and trivialization of the meaning of the word is an insult to every thinking person on this planet.  Dwayne, “The Rock,” should apologize to the world in shame.  That’s not heroism, Dwayne.  Not even close.

Dead-Man

Watching that David Lynch interview reminded me of this dreamlike western.  In black and white, a poetic, disturbing ordeal that maintains a beauty and an elegant wholeness to it.  Such a different kind of film, with such unexpected elements, it’s hard to describe without giving too much away.

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Jim Jarmusch sends Johnny Depp into the old west to try and scrape by as a middle-management accountant type.  By the time Depp arrives however, circumstances have changed.  They then change for the worse, and worse, and worse.

Reviews are overwhelmingly positive.  It’s a meditative journey into the heart of darkness, and resonates still.  But some reviewers disagreed, including, surprise: Roger Ebert.

“’Dead Man’ is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.”

Ebert complains of the slow pace a couple of times.  It takes a certain mood to appreciate a slow burn, and if one isn’t in it…

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Entertainment Weekly also panned the film.  Owen Gleiberman:

“The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we’re in for — two hours of metaphysical drift.”

And sometimes that fits the bill.  Audiences gives it 85% today on Rotten Tomatoes, edging it toward cult status.

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I think I’ll name my production company Metaphysical Drift.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Kz75IWt8YuA

“The members of the Guard are Superman and in a way Superman is a member of the Guard.”

-Zack Snyder

From Mother Jones.

“As part of their “Soldier of Steel” ad campaign, the National Guard went all-out in tying in their name and brand to the popularity and mythology of the Superman franchise. This included some commercials and theater spots that Snyder himself filmed with Guard members, essentially painting them as real-life superheroes.”

Superman Wants You
to Enlist in the National Guard
Stop this Nazi Empire; I want to Get Off.

Propaganda in the Cinema 101

Fake recruitment scenarios.  Real war:

“More than 400,000 National Guard troops have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a congressional report.” (link)

The Iraq War, and arguably the Afghanistan invasion as well, were war crimes under international law, Crimes Against the Peace, the “supreme international crime.”  These are codified in the UN Charter which the United States is a party to (and wrote), and ratified:

“All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

It is an indisputable fact that the Bush Junta lied repeatedly to drum up support to invade Iraq.  Deceptions concerning “weapons of mass destruction” were employed repeatedly to present a false self-defense argument to the Congress and to the public.

National Guard units were an instrumental part in committing this war crime against Iraq.  Their participation in these massive war crimes makes them culpable and responsible for the atrocities that befell that nation at the orders of the US leaders.  That is the glorious heroism that Zack Snyder is selling to children today: Crimes Against Humanity.  We are good because we’re us.  No further justification needed.

Casualties of the Iraq War

“The Lancet study’s figure of 654,965 excess deaths through the end of June 2006 is based on household survey data. The estimate is for all excess violent and nonviolent deaths. That also includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc. 601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval) were estimated to be due to violence. 31% of those were attributed to the Coalition, 24% to others, 46% unknown. The causes of violent deaths were gunshot (56%), car bomb (13%), other explosion/ordnance (14%), airstrike (13%), accident (2%), unknown (2%). A copy of a death certificate was available for a high proportion of the reported deaths (92% of those households asked to produce one).[34][35][36]

Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll[edit]
Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll conducted August 12–19, 2007, estimated 1,033,000 violent deaths due to the Iraq War. The range given was 946,000 to 1,120,000 deaths. A nationally representative sample of approximately 2,000 Iraqi adults answered whether any members of their household (living under their roof) were killed due to the Iraq War. 22% of the respondents had lost one or more household members. ORB reported that “48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance.”[28][29][30][31][32]

Here’s a question for the so-called “Supermen.”  When criminals get away with highly profitable crimes, what does that bode for the future?

P.S.

Not in Snyder’s imperial recruitment propaganda…

Reporting from Greenfield, Calif. — The story of the California Army National Guard’s 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment is mostly in the record books now: 17 soldiers killed, more than 100 wounded…”

For lies.

For empire.

For oil.

For global intimidation.

Sorry if reality doesn’t mesh with the bullshit they bulldoze at you.

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Not for prudish Americans.  This film is rated X for extreme situations, sexuality and brutality.  I’ve heard that some of the sex is actually real, and controversy has surrounded the film ever since Penthouse agreed to co-produce it.  With a script written by Gore Vidal, this is pure mind blowing depravity from start to finish.  Never again would such a film come together, one that reveals the decadence and the psychosis of a society so clearly, while pulling no punches, alleviating no concerns.

Caligula completely ignores the mores and taboos of its audience.  It exists in another realm, another time and place without regard for the conventions of the multiplex set.  Except for its English language tongue, the milieu is eerily authentic in its sadomasochism, torture, mass insanity and raw exercise of power.

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Malcolm McDowell’s finest role in my opinion, and perhaps Peter O’Toole’s as well.  This is top notch over the edge of the precipice stuff, and I really do shiver when thinking of this film.  In an age of banal comic book boy scouts and robot battles written by the mentally retarded, a film like Caligula might as well have been produced on an alien home-world.

The British miniseries I, Claudius tells part of the Caligula story, in a less grotesque fashion, and each telling has its value and place.  But to really tremble in awe of the empire, its power to dehumanize and to disembowel its opponents, Caligula is the cautionary tale for the ages.

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The recent post on Phillip Zimbardo’s psychology of evil is relevant here.  For that is where Vidal plumbed the depths.  Beyond character flaws, beyond triteness and childhood pop-psychology, the ultimate power of the Roman Emperor and the society constructed around him, is what warps and degrades everyone involved.  This lust for power and the terror of being on the wrong end of it form the situation that destroys the humanity of all concerned.  It is Millgram’s experiment and Zimbardo’s prison writ large, a mega-experiment that ruled the earth for centuries.  Versions of this absolute tyrant power linger on today, and to lesser degrees in so many other milieus.

I would place Caligula near the top of the list of the most important films of the 20th century.  It’ll turn your guts inside out, but you won’t forget the experience, not for a long time, if ever.

 

miracle-mile

 

I overlooked an “End of the World” smaller film when I posted the other day. End of the World: UTR Edition

Admittedly, this is not a good trailer.  The style, the background music, and even the hair and some of the clips chosen aren’t doing it much good.  So I haven’t bothered embedding it.  The concept rises above the flaws.

This is actually a decent story, and should be given some consideration.

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As the US empire has driven the world to the brink of a new world war beginning in Russia’s ally, Syria, over bogus “weapons of mass destruction” claims, we should all take pause in a big, big way.  The cold war never ended.  It risks flaring into a hot war, right now, today, as we sit around contemplating movies.

IDL TIFF file

Actual satellite imagery proves that Obama, Feinstein, Rogers, Holder et. al. have been very hard at work this week.

The government denies the massive blob of bullshit has drowned the region.  Officials call such speculation a “conspiracy theory.”

Save America
Impeach Them All

 

NIxonresigns copy