The World We Live In !!

WASHINGTON: Alleged mastermind of 9/11 attacks Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he had lied to the CIA after being abused, according to documents made public Monday.

Mohammed made the assertion during hearings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was transferred in 2006 after being held at secret CIA sites since his capture in 2003.

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ ”

Mohammed also appeared to say that he had fingered people he did not know as being Al Qaeda members in order to avoid abusive treatment. Although there is no way to corroborate his statements, Mohammed is one of the militants whom the CIA repeatedly subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Khalid Shaikh says ‘I lied about link with al-Qaeda after abuse’ – GEO.tv.

Afghanistan’s parliament call for the prosecution of “Criminal Foreign Troops”.

Two years before the 9/11 attacks on America, George W. Bush told a Houston journalist if elected president, “I’m going to invade Iraq.”

Bush made the comments about starting an aggressive war to veteran Houston Chronicle reporter Mickey Herskowitz, then working with Bush on his book “A Charge To Keep,” later brought out by publisher William Morrow.

This disclosure was uncovered by Russ Baker, an award-winning investigative reporter when he interviewed Herskowitz for his own book, “Family of Secrets” (Bloomsbury Press) about the Bush dynasty. However, Baker says, when he approached The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times with the potentially devastating story to President Bush prior to the 2004 presidential election, they declined to publish it.

In a new book, “Media In Crisis”(Doukathsan), Baker quotes Herskowitz as telling him: “He (Bush) said he wanted to do it(invade Iraq), and the reason he wanted to do it is he had been led to understand that you could not really have a successful presidency unless you were seen as commander-in-chief, unless you were seen as waging a war.”

Bush told Houston Journalist: If Elected, “I’m Going to Invade Iraq”.

A casual glance at this picture above taken a few weeks back one would generally not have seen the anomaly but a careful look reveals the problem, a high level meeting in Washington between the respective Presidents of The United States of American, Afghanistan and Pakistan, seems ordinary enough. Generally such a meeting is attended by the official representatives of each country, Afghanistan being represented by President Hamid Karzai, the American delegation by President Obama and you can even see Vice-President Joe Biden, but the problem lies when you take a look at the Pakistani side of the delegation President Zardari, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Hussain Haqqani and Rehman Malik, but what-the-heck is Bilawal Bhutto Zardari doing sitting right next to Mr. Asif Zardari.

There is no rational reason why Bilawal Bhutto Zardari should be sitting in on an extremely important meeting with extremely important leaders. Could this be the “Divine Right Of The Kings” doctrine being implemented? You don’t see Hamid Karzai bringing his kids to such meetings, you don’t see Obama bringing his two girls for a round of official meetings, but ironically you DO SEE our President tagging along his 20-year old son for an adrenaline rushing tour of the White House. Lets also not forget the fact that during this official visit to Washington with a begging bowl for the IDP’s in Pakistan our President Zardari stayed in a $4200 Presidential Suite at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington while Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was given a $2200 suite all covered and sponsored by the Government of Pakistan. All this lavish spending continued while a national disaster brewed up in the Frontier Province due to the displacement of 2.5 Million people

Bilawal Zardari bumps a seat in the Pakistani Delegation to the White House | Teeth Maestro.

Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil.

By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet.

Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they’ll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.

This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S..  The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state.  The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory — the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit.  The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.

Israel’s spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence.   When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage,” Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.”  A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion.  In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret U.S. policies or decisions relating to Israel.”  In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the U.S. government.  Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report.  In 1954, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the U.S. military attaché.  In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of U.S. missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”

Read more…

So far the principle result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the events of 9-11 has been the destabilization of Pakistan. That breakdown is peaking with the events in what AP calls the “Swat town” of Mingora—actually a city of 375,000 from which all but 20,000 have fled as government forces moved in, strafing it with gunships. We’re talking urban guerrilla warfare, house-to-house fighting, not on the Afghan border but 50 miles away in the Swat Valley. We’re talking about Pakistani troops fighting to reclaim the nearby Malam Jabba ski resort from the Tehreek-e-Taliban, who since last year have been using it as a training center and logistics base. We’re talking about two million people fleeing the fighting in the valley and 160,000 in government refugee camps.

And of course, “collateral damage”: As was reported in The News in Pakistan May 19:

Several persons, including women and children, were killed and a number of others sustained injuries when families fleeing the military operation in Swat’s Matta town were shelled while crossing a mountainous path to reach Karo Darra in Dir Upper on Monday, eyewitnesses and official sources said. Eyewitnesses, who escaped the attack or were able to reach Wari town of Dir Upper in injured condition, said they were targeted by gunship helicopters. However, police officials said they might have been hit by a stray shell. Local people said they saw some 12 to 14 bodies on a mountain on the Swat side but could not go near to retrieve them or help the injured for fear of another aerial attack.

What a nightmare scenario for Pakistan.

We’re talking about the Pakistani Army sometimes fighting over the last year to retake towns from Taliban forces in the Buner region of the North-West Frontier Province that are closer to the capital of Islamabad than the Afghan border. And while the Talibs apparently lack popular support, even among the Pashtuns (who are 15 % of the Pakistani population—26 million and 42% of the Afghan population—14 million) they have been able to inflict embarrassing defeats on the army.

Tehreek-i-Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud, head of the militant forces in South Waziristan, established his credentials when his forces captured 300 Pakistani soldiers and traded them for about 30 imprisoned militants in the fall of 2007. Time and again the several (sometimes rival) “Taliban” forces, which did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan created them, have forced the government to negotiate terms. Most recently in February Islamabad agreed to the implementation of the Sharia in the Swat Valley in exchange for peace.  The Taliban broke the agreement in April, or so the story goes, and the army claims it’s killed 1,100 militants since.

The Destabilization of Pakistan.

General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani shakes hands with a soldier in Swat (Inter Services Public Relations)

ISLAMABAD – The state of  Swat, economically  self-sustained with rice paddy fields at the town of Thana and wheat and corn  producing  fields en route to Matta, Kabal, Mingora, Madian, Bahrain, and ending at Walnut Heights of Kalam where trout is the most available all-season food, is home to the peaceful and docile Pashtuns.

The majority of these Pashtuns came into Swat from Dir and Bajour, others from Kailash and Chitral. Their ancestry, some historians claim, is Greek. To an extent Kailash-Chitral, neighboring Swat, gives credence to this claim.

Kailash is a rock-locked valley where one of the generals of Alexander the Great once lost his garrison. One can trace the semblance of Greek within the Kalasha language. Some scholars reject the claim of Greek ancestry, but when the present head of Kailash, Luxun Bibi, took up an invitation by the government of Greece, the meeting state officials discovered that there are many common words between Greek and Kalasha. Read more…