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"According to the Post, the CIA relies on the Brotherhood for intelligence.
"'Mastermind of Terror' Khalid Sheikh Mohammed joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age sixteen. Mohammed Atta's father is a member...
"...the CIA is reporting favorable things about the group via the willing vessel of the Washington Post. Muslim Brotherhood is also the financial and organizational backbone of not only Al Qaeda, but also Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad...
HENRI PAUL's BLOOD - "Professor Atholl Johnston, a clinical pharmacologist, said one of the blood samples that appeared to show the chauffeur had drunk alcohol was probably not his... 'The most likely explanation is that it isn't Henri Paul's blood.'" - Paul blood samples 'could have been cooked'
"Northern Rock gave half-a-million to Labour's favourite think-tank, the IPPR. It also employed Gordon's personal pollster, Deborah Mattinson, as an adviser. Of all the pollsters to seek advice from, why her? Why give money to that think-tank? Nowadays it is very rare for publicly quoted companies to make politically partisan donations." - Guy Fawkes' blog of parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy ...
Libya has ratified a contract with BP after the London government drafted a prisoner transfer agreement that could include the alleged Lockerbie bomber.
"The $900m (€600m, £450m) exploration contract was part of a package of agreements arranged by Tony Blair, former UK prime minister, on a state visit to Libya last year.
BALI and AIDS. "Unlike other parts of Indonesia, where brothels are legal, prostitution is illegal on the island. Despite this, there are well known red light districts on the island, most of which are in the main tourist spots. A study carried out in Bali last year by the Kerti Praja Foundation found that there are at least 8,800 prostitutes with some 85,000 customers. "Around 14 percent of prostitutes have already contracted the virus..." - Indonesia: Authorities eye clampdown on prostitution in Bali
BBC News has exposed plans of the U.S. military to "provide maximum control" of the Internet, as detailed in a declassified secret Pentagon document signed by the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 2003.
Osama bin Laden's Mujahedin received training from the British SAS in mountains surrounding the Criffel near Dumfries in Scotland.(Sunday Mail, Sept 2001)
Al CIAda destabilising Pakistan? - "Terrorism analyst B Raman said the Pakistani army is fighting a four-front war against jehadis...
"The Pakistan army and Al-Qaida (the loose term encompassing all these groups) are involved in a 'hot war', said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management, 'where the divisions between the two sides are not very clear'." - India worried about Al-Qaida hold on Pak
False Flag Terror news -"Superintendent Brett Lovegrove said Scotland's capital would be an 'extremely attractive' objective for terrorists" - Festival is key terror target
Neil Oliver, who presented the BBC series 'Coast', knows a lot about the coast of Britain.
Oliver wrote in the magazine DGB Life, February 2008, that "there is no more beautiful part of the world than the Galloway Coast."
Dumfries and Galloway is a neglected part of the world, particularly when it comes to transport links.
If it was an independent state, like Lichtenstein, Dumfries and Galloway could be rich. But Dumfries and Galloway is not an independent state and it lacks the power to make the big decisions. The really big decisions are made in London. The talented people tend to leave Dumfries and Galloway and head south.
If you cycle off the beaten track in Dumfries and Galloway, you will come across an Enid Blyton - John Buchan - Peter Pan - Rupert Bear - Gavin Maxwell sort of world. Think of mysterious castles, rounded hills and enchanted bays.
J M Barrie went to school in Dumfries, chief town of Dumfries and Galloway, and there he spent the happiest days of his life (Victoria Terrace).
Robert Burns had a house in Dumfries (Burns Street).
Part of John Buchan's Thirty Nine Steps was filmed in the Dumfries and Galloway hills and valleys.
The gentle hills of Galloway are like the ones in the Rupert Bear or Enid Blyton books: gently rounded, with clumps of trees, rocky outcrops, fluffy little clouds and sometimes deep blue sky.
When it's not raining, the light is incredibly bright and the air so very clear, hence the attraction to artists.
This is not sunny Spain, but the climate tends to be mild; a possibly drier version of Cornwall or the Lake District.
Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, was born in Dumfries and Galloway.
Drumlanrig Castle
Near Thornhill is exotic, multi-turreted 17th century Drumlanrig Castle, which has paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt.
This is one of Britain's sexiest castles. It is home to the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. It was a Queensberry who was the father of Lord Arthur Douglas.
Look out for the decorative cupolas, Renaissance-style colonnade, Baroque horseshoe stairway and gorgeous gardens.
Coastal Kirkcudbright is an attractive and aristocratic "artist's town", associated with the Glasgow Boys.
Hornel
Kirkcudbright's Broughton House is where the artist Edward Hornel used to live. For part of the year, you can tour the beautiful house and see Hornel's Japanese-style pictures of little girls, some naked, and his magical garden, which is probably the very best garden in the world.
Kirkcudbright has a wild life park and a fabulous jazz festival each June.
Weapons testing at Dundrennan has led to certain worries. "Although 27 tonnes of depleted uranium have been fired into the sea at the Kircudbright range none of the shells has been recovered despite extensive searches....the controversial shells ...blamed for causing...Gulf War Syndrome..." according to The Galloway News.
Wigtown, which looks rather French, is Dumfries and Galloway's book town and it has at least 20 book businesses.
Gatehouse of Fleet has a large second hand book shop, run by poet Robin Munro. Gatehouse's Cally Palace Hotel has AA one rosette food and a super golf course; Georgian buildings; bonny views of hills.
New Abbey is associated with John Balliol, the founder of Balliol College, Oxford. This pretty village has an abbey, a museum of costume and a tearoom.
Castle Douglas has the best shopping in the area, a caravan park, a cycle shop, golf, a boating loch, a little art gallery, a theatre, one of the best second hand book shops in Scotland and the tiny Sulwath brewery which produces the world's tastiest real ales (Knockendoch is a dark copper coloured brew tasting of deeply roasted malts) and which provides tours. Castle Douglas is close to Threave Gardens and Threave Castle.
Dalbeattie has some of the friendliest people in Britain. It has the fabulous little Dalbeattie Museum of Victoriana (restricted opening hours). The officer on the deck of the Titanic, when it sank, was a man from Dalbeattie. The Dalbeattie area is famous for off-road cycling.
The National Trust's hilly Threave Gardens, near the town of Castle Douglas, has a magical walled garden, glasshouses, an eastern style pond, rock plants, tall trees, rhododendrons and heavenly views on a clear day.
Logan Botanic Garden, 14 miles South of Stranraer, at Port Logan, open March-October, has water, walled, terrace, woodland and other small gardens, with tree ferns, palm trees, climbers... and there's a nice licensed restaurant.
Crossmichael, near Castle Douglas, used to have a Michelin starred restaurant, but it moved to Leith in Edinburgh, which is where the money and the power lie.
Buddhists, and others, will enjoy the Samye-Ling Tibetan Centre at Eskdalemuir. Here you will find a magnificent golden-roofed temple, and the oldest Tibeten centre in the West.
Port Patrick
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Rockcliffe is an Enid Blyton sort of coastal village with mystery islands, beaches, rock pools and (according to the local papers) smugglers not too far away. Great for walks. Nice tearoom. Yachts and pubs at nearby Kipford. (Wash your hands after building castles on the beach. Watch out for incoming tides).
Dumfries is a small town which straddles the River Nith.
Dumfries has some superbly attractive Victorian and medieval buildings which are now right next to some truly hideous 60's buildings and various carparks.
The streets are often covered in chewing gum, plastic bags and vomit.
Dumfries could be as beautiful as any town in Europe. But it is not.
You will see lots of young people who look unemployed and seriously malnourished (drugs? AIDS? poverty?).
Some of the school kids from JM Barrie's old school look as scruffy as you'll get (although they will politely offer directions). You begin to think you are in the Third World.
"A man has been accused in court at Dumfries of being concerned in the supplying of HEROIN to others in the grounds of DUMFRIES ACADEMY.... (The accused) pleaded not guilty to the charge alleged to have taken place over a NINE MONTHS PERIOD..." Dumfries Courier.
You will seldom see a policeman in Dumfries and Galloway when they are needed.
Dumfries has few restaurants we would want to recommend. We did not enjoy our visit to the Linen Room. The pubs tend to sell that terrible McEwans or Tennants beer rather than the tasty local real ale.
Dumfries has a number of attractions:
1. The Gracefield Arts Centre which too often seems to be closed.
2. The house where J M Barrie once lived. But, amazingly, Dumfries has no museum honouring the author of Peter Pan!
"It was the original Never Land, the inspiration for Peter Pan. But the Dumfries townhouse Moat Brae, auctioned yesterday for £80,000, is not destined to become a shrine to J M Barrie...It was in the Enchanted Garden of this house, chasing, climbing, and prowling through the undergrowth, that the young Barrie met Captain Hook, Tinkerbell and the other characters..." -Glasgow Herald.
Had this house been bought by Dumfries Council it could have brought in millions of tourists from all over the world.
3. Dumfries has the fantastic, world-class, Victorian, Chrichton buildings and gardens at Bankend Rd. http://www.chrichton.org.uk/
Formerly this was one of the biggest mental institutions in the world - world famous and set up by a rich philanthropist; now it is university buildings, a decent hotel, museum, gardens, and a smaller mental institution.
4. Dumfries also has one of Britain's best looking churches - St Michaels. Robert Burns is buried outside.
5. Dumfries has a theatre linked to J M Barrie.
6. There is a Camera Obscura and a museum.There are lots of charity shops.
Loch Ken, near Castle Douglas, is for windsurfers. The Galloway Sailing Centre at Loch Ken can tell you about Dinghy Courses, powerboating courses, canoeing courses, gorge scrambling and quad bikes.
Family fun can be had at the award winning Cream o' Galloway, Rainton, Gatehouse of Fleet, Castle Douglas. Open Easter until October. This place has an adventure playground and nature trail as well as a restaurant selling the best ice cream in the UK.
Cycling was invented in Dumfries and galloway. Cyclists might enjoy the route from Rhonehouse to Kirkcudbright ( 7 miles, deserted road, flowers, sheep, rabbits, little hills like babies' buttocks, country cottages).... or Palnackie to Castle Douglas taking the route over the hills. The Dalbeattie area is famous for having off-road trails and miles and miles of quiet country roads.
This area has traditionally been used by the armed forces for hush hush training of special forces (and 'Moslem terrorists', according to newspapers). Expect to see the occasional Hawk fighter, tank, or men dressed as trees.
Military aircraft have crashed into local farms. "The latest crash was only seconds away from Lockerbie, in one direction, and Dumfries in the other..." according to The Dumfries Courier.
Lockerbie is famous because of Major Charles McKee - Pan Am Flight 103 hit Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.
On that flight "were at least 2 US Intelligence agents and a Mr Khalid Nazir Jafaar." The Dumfries and Galloway police began to investigate. But for two days it was "difficult" for them to collect evidence as "CIA agents combed the countryside for the luggage of the dead American intelligence agents and a suitcase full of heroin.... 59 bodies were left lying around Lockerbie until 24 December...but by then there were only 58 bodies..." according to Lester Coleman.
TRANSPORT
Much of the rail network is gone. The road network is poor. The nearest airport is at Newcastle in England. As transport is the key to the success of an area, Dumfries and galloway has its problems!
National Express coaches will take you from London, Birmingham, Manchester etc to Dumfries and beyond.
A grotty little train will transport you, amid much litter, from Carlisle to Dumfries. The train used to go to Stranraer, but not any more.
Bus services are poor. Many local buses travel too fast. Stagecoach buses have little leg room and usually no toilets even on the longest journeys.
"MacEwans Coaches boss is ready to defend his company after it was branded unreliable this week... Members of the environment and infrastructure committee were told that while Stagecoach Western - which has also attracted a significant number of complaints - had improved, MacEwans had failed to and in some cases had become worse..." Dumfries Courier Oct 13, 2000.
Dumfries by William Miller
WHERE TO STAY?
Brighouse Bay leisure park takes caravans and tents and has lodges and cottages. It "boasts a vast range of on-site facilities that appeal to everyone, from small boats on the pond for the younger generation to Quad Bikes for the thrillseekers. The indoor pool complex offers swimming for all ages with a jacuzzi and steam room for a spot of relaxation after all that work.The 18 hole Golf Course is championship length and has glorious views across the Irish Sea. There is also a 9 hole par 3 for all the family."
Similar to Brighouse Bay is Sandyhills Bay, sitting at the foot of wooded hills and close to a sheltered sandy beach.
There are many other caravan and camp sites.
You could stay in DUMFRIES which has at least one good Bed and Breakfast.
CASTLE DOUGLAS has a number of Bed and Breakfast places.
GATEHOUSE's Cally Palace Hotel has AA one rosette food and a super golf course; Georgian buildings; bonny views of hills. NEWTON STEWART, a quiet contry town in the middle of John Buchan style countryside, has the excellent KIRROUGHTREE HOUSE hotel which has an AA 2 Rosette restaurant! The hotel is AA 3 stars. Lovely, posh country house interior.
PORTPATRICK, on the coast, somewhat remote, has the wonderful KNOCKINAAM LODGE HOTEL, the restaurant of which has AA 3 Rosettes! (same as London's River Cafe, Bibendum....)
The people of Dumfries and Galloway are the people who ran Hong Kong (Jardines and Flemings...) and ran a large part of the Empire! You'll bump into Galloway people in Africa, South America and Australasia.
Strangely, this area has quite a few millionaires. Lots of big houses. They must like the scenery.
"Scotland puts a smile on your face" according to the Glasgow Herald. "The Scots are the happiest people in Britain, according to a new study of the nation's mood....In Scotland the LifeIndex score was 6.6 out of ten. London had the lowest score 5.4 ....."
Dumfries and Galloway has a lower crime rate than Glasgow, London, Rwanda..... It has the best crime clear-up rate in Britain.
TO SUM UP - THIS IS BETTER THAN the Lake District or Cornwall if you have a romantic sort of mind and a car or a bike.
Dumfries and Galloway will appeal to - CYCLISTS, fishermen, WALKERS, foodies, CARAVANERS, booklovers, JOHN BUCHAN/JM BARRIE/GAVIN MAXWELL FANS, Bird watchers, WALKERS, Enid Blyton children..........
Drug resistant TB develops when patients fail to complete a full course of treatment, usually because of a lack of money.
TB patients often have to take an 'expensive' cocktail of drugs for a year.
The big drug companies have spent very little money on developing TB drugs, partly because TB is mainly a disease found among poor people in poor countries.
In some poor countries, the governments have no idea how many poor people have TB.
In Indonesia, for example, many poor people cannot afford either diagnosis or treatment.
A person with drug resistant TB may live for several years before they die.
"An informal group in the Mossad composed of right-wing operatives and working hand-in-hand with the Turkish and Pakistani Intelligence was offering US nuclear technology to some Arab countries and to other countries. They did this for profit and, in some cases also for political motives." - Nuclear proliferationcannot be controlled now
Mr Theroux has that way of describing bits of Britain that make you think : Gosh, that's just how it is .
MARGATE - "Skinheads and chip-shops and rain...."
Theroux walks round Britain's coast (just occasionally taking a train) and describes the places he visits and the people he meets.
The year was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War.
DEAL - "a girl and a boy stopped me...
"The girl said, 'Give me forty-five pence, will you?'"
"... I said no ...
"'He's a poof,'" the girl said, and they both laughed."
HASTINGS - "The town was too poor to be vulgar and it had enough friendly artists to avoid being philistine." Theroux liked Hastings.
BEXHILL - "tea shops; semi-detached houses; pebbledash facades; no fun-fair visible; a largely elderly population of shuffling Tories."
THE EAST SUSSEX COAST - "The English aristocracy had nearly always been recruited from the ranks of flatterers, cut-throats, boyfriends... So it was not so strange that this blue valley on the coast of East Sussex was populated by wine-bibbing lords who had formerly been Marxist union men..."
HOVE - "Hove was low spirits and lawns."
LITTLEHAMPTON - "The sort of place where people did little but water their plants..."
LYME REGIS - "a continuous line of traffic being squeezed between tea shops and coaching inns..."
CORNWALL - "The loathing for tourists and outsiders was undisguised."
WALES - " ... seemed like an earlier version of England - upright and antique and dusty and church-going, with all the colour schemes wrong."
Theroux likes the Welsh. "Welsh politeness was soft-hearted and smiling. Even LLANELLI's Skinheads were well-behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets, and bleached hair and earrings, or green hair and T-shirts saying Anarchy - even they seemed sweet-natured."
BELFAST - "I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face - mouldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences..."
EDINBURGH- "a city of black crags and old solemn tenements... It was the most beautiful city in Britain and one of the most beautiful in Europe."
GLASGOW - Theroux finds Glasgow peaceful, even pretty.
"The city looked dignified."
But, Theroux does notice one less dignified aspect of people and trains in the Glasgow area:
"the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags... the children screaming, 'How much farva!' and 'I can hear funda!'...an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke...."
Theroux likes the Scots!
"I was reluctant to leave Scotland; I had liked nearly everyone I had met."
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Theroux is at his best when describing the people he meets.
"'We do bed and breakfast,' Margaret Skeat said.
Vesta Skeat was thirteen and sneaked lipstick when her mother was not looking...
"'Is that all the clobber you have?" she said, standing in the doorway of my room...
"Her mother screamed her name. Vesta said softly, 'Shut up, you silly cow,' and then winked at me..."
Theroux stayed mainly in Bed and Breakfasts.
"I was often warmed by a small thrill in following the younger landladies up four flights to the tiny room at the top of the house."
Theroux stayed in a B&B in Southport.
"Trish likes getting down on all fours. A lot. To shampoo the carpet, or sweep the carpet, or pick up toys from the floor...
"Trish was frequently on her hands and knees when I was sitting in the room...It was as if, in ape terms, she was 'presenting' to me - the bum-show that matters so much in baboon society..."
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Theroux visits Butlins, in MINEHEAD -
"The more I saw of Butlin's the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies and its pleasures....
"electronic games were easier than sports and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were....
"I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song... Most of the parents were elsewhere- playing one-armed bandits and drinking beer."
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And what does Theroux (an American) really think about the English?
"Person to person, I had found them truthful and efficient and humane..."
"But anonymity made them lazy, dishonest and aggressive.... over the phone they were unhelpful and frequently rude..."
"If I had only one word to describe the expression of England's face I would have said: insulted."
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On occasions, Theroux was forced to stay in large hotels.
"It was hard to distinguish hotels in England from prisons or hospitals. Most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty and were equally uncomfortable."
Actually, Theroux did like some of the small hotels he stayed in. "The English do small things well and big things badly."
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In Bristol he visits the St Pauls district, whererace riots had left streets of gutted buildings.
"In the course of a generation or two the parents' authority had been weakened and the children had stopped submitting. In fact the children had become British," writes Theroux.
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British children?
"one mother (English), looking at the tormented face of her wet baby, grew very cold and sarcastic.
" 'Someone's going to have a warm bottom in a minute!' she said.
"The baby groaned like a starving monkey and tensed its fingers, indicating fear and frustration. "The Welsh people on the train stared at this behaviour and thought: The English!"
~~~
In Southport, Theroux meets Jason.
"Even Jason, who was 12, was lacking in hope. he was a bright boy but he said he was in the 'B' class. 'All the posh woons are in the 'A' class. Teacher's pets and that. He said he was planning to leave school when he was 16.
" 'What would your mother say about that?'
" 'Me moom don't care.'
~~~
Theroux feels sorry for some of the children of Anglesey. "Anglesey...was all council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their hands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers."
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Theroux worries about the poor. He considers that in Britain "directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly."
(How true. Not so long ago, The Sunday Times pointed out that the bosses of Britain's top 100 companies earn on average £1,700,000 per year. And are they doing a good job? In recent times BT shareholders saw their shares drop about 60%)
At one point in the book, Theroux makes a prediction about the future of Britain. He believes Britain would become a "a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes."
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Theroux worries about violence. "I no longer felt that place-names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls....
"The graffiti suggested that England was changing into a ....more violent place."
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'Who the heck does Theroux think he is?' you may ask, as your blood pressure rises. Well, he's American, and he admits that all is not well in America! He lived for five years in Africa, working, I think, for the peace Corps. He taught English in Singapore. He did a lot of travelling: China, South America..... He lived for some years in London. And he admits that when he's critical, the problem may be with him!
He writes: "Morcambe was wrapped around the edge of a dirty sea, scowling, its blackened terraces and hotels reminiscent of certain fierce churches - all spikes and shadows...
"I imagined day-trippers getting off the train and taking one look and bursting into tears. But of course most people at Morcambe were enjoying themselves in the drizzle, and the fault was mine, not theirs."
Well, normal people like drizzle, don't they?
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Theroux LOVED some parts of coastal Britain.
THE NORTH WEST COAST OF SCOTLAND - "This was the most spectacular coastline I had seen so far in Britain - huger than Cornwall, darker than Wales, wilder than Antrim...
"It was a splendid ride to Mallaig - one of the most scenic railway journeys in the world....
"That night I stared out of the window at the freakish mountains of Skye. They were sharp pointed , fantastic and high like peaks in dragon stories...
"Skye...it was a surprise and a pleasure to find a place I wished to return to....I wanted to come here again with someone I loved and say 'Look.'"
ST ANDREWS - "There was not a town its size in Britain to compare with St Andrews...the white stone ruins and the brown stone buildings perched on the rocky cliffs of a wide bay....like a lively cloister with the roof off..."
"Kenya... is the base for US intelligence operations in East Africa and especially the Horn of Africa... The newly discovered oil reserves of Lake Albert in Eastern Congo are to be brought to the coast at Mombasa through a pipeline that will have to run right across the country... China is currently involved in major highway projects in Kenya." - Kenya: post-election violence continues
He was put into power with the help of the CIA and reportedly toppled with the help of the CIA.
Jeffrey Winters, professor of political economy at Chicago's Northwestern University, has said of Suharto:
"Everything turned on the don, all business went through the don, the don was the source of security, and he destroyed everything, Parliament, the rule of law, the intellectual community, and turned the police and military into his personal instruments...
"Suharto squandered Indonesia's best years, when it had ample oil and gas, and had very close ties to the United States and the West, with access to developmental funds at very cheap rates. The growth rate should have been much higher." (Indonesia still struggles after Soeharto)
"The growth was enjoyed by the elite, and the benefits were not distributed among the poor," said Wimar Witoelar, a media commentator. (Indonesia still struggles after Soeharto)
Some people claim that Suharto benefited Indonesia.
However,Indonesia under Suharto made much less progress than its neighbours Singapore and Malaysia.
Indonesia under Suharto spent a very small proportion of its wealth on schools or hospitals or housing for the poor.
Housing for the poor
Visitors to Jakarta during the Suharto years may have seen glitzy skyscrapers being built, but they may not have seen the malnourished children hidden away in the slums or in certain rural areas, and they may not have noticed the killing going on in West Papua or Aceh or East Timor.
Often the Suharto government statistics about progress were as accurate as those from Stalinist Russia.
Malnutrition and TB
The Suharto legacy is a country where many roads are full of potholes, many rural schools look as if they are falling down, many sick children die because their parents cannot afford medicine, many hillsides have been stripped of their trees, and the American trained generals are still pulling the strings. No money for typhoid medicine
It has often been alleged that Suharto's father was a wealthy Chinese-Indonesian merchant and that Suharto was an illegitimate child.
"The absence of official documentation and certain aspects of Suharto's early life that are inconsistent with that of a Javanese peasant (Suharto received, for example, an education fairly early on), has led to several rumors of Suharto being the illegitimate child of a well-off benefactor, which included a being the child of a Yogyakarta aristocrat or well-off Chinese Indonesian merchant. Western biographer R.E. Elson believes that such rumors cannot be entirely ruled out." - Suharto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Suharto learnt much about militarism from the Japanese army.
During World War II, Suharto worked for the Japanese controlled police force and then for the Japanese-controlled militia, the Peta.
In 1945, with the collapse of Japan,SukarnoandMohammad Hattadeclared the independence of Indonesia. This independence was not accepted by the Dutch or the British and led to conflict. In 1946, Suharto became head of an Indonesian regiment stationed in Yogyakarta.
In 1947 Suharto married Siti Hartinah, a Christian from a well connected family.
Siti Hartinah converted to Islam. She became known as 'Madame Ten Percent', a play on her name, Ibu Tien. When contracts were being given out she reportedly insisted on getting at least ten percent of the proceeds. Later, she was called 'Madame Fifty Percent'. (Ibu Tien Buried Today)
Child labour
In 1949, most of Indonesia was given independence by the Dutch.
Between 1954 and 1959, Brigadier General Suharto was the commander responsible for Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces.
At this time he became friends with Chinese-Indonesian businessmenLiem Sioe LiongandBob Hasanand was involved with them in various 'business enterprises'.
Suharto reportedly became involved in a 1959 smuggling scandal and he was transferred to the army Staff College in Bandung. Later, Suharto became commander of the keyKostradregiment(Strategic Reserve). (Suharto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Around 1956, the CIA and Britain's MI6 appear to have decided to topple Indonesia's President Sukarno, partly because he was 'non-aligned' rather than pro-American.
Indonesia did have a communist party, but in the world's biggest Moslem country, it was never likely to do particularly well in elections. The two biggest parties in Indonesia were Sukarno's Partai Nasional Indonesia and the Islamist party Masyumi.
Reportedly, the CIA had right-wing friends within the Indonesian military. (Indonesia 1957-1958 KH)
Suharto was in the right-wing camp.
The CIA and Britain's MI6 began to arm various rebel groups in Indonesia.
In 1958, rebellions began to break out in various parts of Indonesia.
"CIA pilots took to the air to carry out bombing and strafing missions in support of the rebels...
"Sukarno later claimed that on a Sunday morning in April, a plane bombed a ship in the harbor of the island of Ambon-all those aboard losing their lives-as well as hitting a church, which demolished the building and killed everyone inside
"He stated that 700 casualties had resulted from this single run.
"On 15 May, a CIA plane bombed the Ambon marketplace, killing a large number of civilians on their way to church on Ascension Thursday...
"Three days later, during another bombing run over Ambon, a CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, was shot down and captured...
"He was to spend four years as a prisoner in Indonesia before Sukarno acceded to a request from Robert Kennedy for his release.
"Pope was captured carrying a set of incriminating documents, including those which established him as a pilot for the US Air Force and the CIA airline CAT."
The CIA and its friends did their best to undermine the Indonesian economy.
In 1965, some kind of coup took place in Indonesia. By 1966, Suharto had emerged as the country's leader. He became president in 1968.
In the months that followed the coup, army death squads, often recruited from Muslim and Catholic youth groups, murdered up to one million people.
Bali and other parts of Indonesia were awash with blood.
The CIA is reported to have given the Indonesian military lists of people who were to be dealt with.
"The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travellers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies."
Suharto now brought in his New Order government.
The military were to be the people who pulled the strings.
Every institution of any importance was to be dominated by the military. Everyone from cabinet minister to governors to village officials was likely to have a military connection. The military was to be involved in running various profitable businesses.
The USA stopped undermining the economy. Suharto allowed the USA and other western nations to invest and take control of many of the mining and other businesses in Indonesia.
"In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra."
Rural Poverty The people who became rich were:
1. The indonesian generals
2. Members of Suharto's Golkar Party.
3. Suharto's Chinese-Indonesian business friends.
4. The Suharto family
5. Investers in companies like Freeport, linked to Henry Kissinger, which has a gold mine in Indonesia.
The military and Golkar acted as intermediaries between businesses and the Indonesian government. "This led to bribery, racketeering, and embezzlement. Funds from these practices often flowed to foundations (yayasan) controlled by the Suharto family."[21]
In 1998 Suharto was toppled, apparently by the CIA.
At some point in the 1990s Suharto was seen by some Americans as having become too powerful and too independent minded.
Suharto was giving too many business contracts to his family and Chinese-Indonesian cronies, rather than to American companies like Ford.
Some people in the Pentagon considered the possibility of having a general such as Prabowo or Wiranto or Yuhhoyono take over.
In order to topple Suharto there would need to be riots.
In Indonesia, in the years 1997- 1998, there were riots in various parts of Indonesia. Some riots looked spontaneous and some looked as if they had been planned. (http://www.insideindonesia.org/edit50/riots.htm)
In 1998 one of the key generals was Prabowo, son of Dr. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, a former Finance Minister, said to have once worked with the British and the Americans against Sukarno.
In May 1998, Prabowo was commander ofKostrad, the strategic reserve, the regiment Suharto commanded when he took power in 1965.
Prabowo's friend Muchdi ran Kopassus (special forces) and his friend Sjafrie ran the Jakarta Area Command.
General Wiranto, the overall head of the military, was seen as a rival to Prabowo. The American Defence Secretary, William Cohen,was in Jakarta in January 1998 and he visited both Prabowo and Wiranto.
At the start of May 1998, students were holding peaceful demonstrations on university campuses across the country. They were protesting against massive price rises for fuel and energy, and they were demanding that President Suharto should step down.
On May 12th, students at Jakarta's Trisakti University, many of them the children of the elite, planned to march to parliament to present the government with their demands for reform. The police prevented the students from marching.
Some time after 5pm, uniformed men on motorcycles appeared on the flyover which overlooks Trisakti. Shots rang out. Four students were killed.
Riots of May 13-14
On the 13th of May there were reports of rioting in the area around Trisakti. President Suharto was attending a conference in Egypt and the military top brass went off to Malang in East Java to attend a ceremony.
On the 14th of May, serious rioting took place in the Jakarta area. There were no signs of any uniformed soldiers on the streets.
Deaths
Over 1,000 people died during these Jakarta riots, most having been burnt in malls and supermarkets but some having been shot or beaten.
Alleged involvement of the military in planning the riots
Father Sandyawan Sumardi, a 40-year-old Jesuit priest and son of a police chief, led an independent investigation into the events of May 1998.
A security officer alleged that Kopassus (special forces) officers had ordered the burning down of a bank;
a taxi driver reported hearing a man in a military helicopter encouraging people on the ground to carry out looting;
shop-owners at a Plaza claimed that, before the riots, military officers tried to extract protection money;
a teenager claimed he and thousands of others had been trained as protesters;
a street child alleged that Kopassus officers ordered him and and his friends to become rioters;
there was a report of soldiers being dressed up as students and then taking part in rioting;
eyewitnesses spoke of muscular men with short haircuts arriving in military-style trucks and directing attacks on Chinese homes and businesses.
There were reports of children being encouraged to enter malls and then of the malls being set on fire;
there were allegations that muscular men with short haircuts had gang-raped little Chinese girls and then murdered some of them.
Suharto told he had lost the support of the military
Some of Suharto's former allies deserted him. Wiranto allowed students to occupy Parliament. Reportedly Wiranto reported to Suharto on May 20th that Suharto no longer had the support of the army. Suharto was forced to resign on May 21 and was replaced by Habibie, his Vice President.
The continuing importance of the military
Wiranto remained as chief of the armed forces. Wiranto's troops began removing the students from the parliament building.
One result of the May riots was that the military appeared to remain the power behind the throne. In 2004, General Yudhoyono became president.
In Iraq, Britain's army has appeared to act like a bunch of Nazis.
"Evidence now publicly available proves that UK forces had a systematic policy that led to the execution of scores of Iraqis in detention, and the torture of countless more...
"Bodies had been mutilated with eyes gouged out, and multiple stab wounds and body parts severed (including a penis)." - Phil Shiner - A catalogue of abuse Iraq Guardian Unlimited
"My firm alone is acting in cases apparently involving over 30 deaths in detention including executions.
"It was standard operating procedure to hood, stress and deprive detainees of sleep, water and food. Our clients have been subjected to torture, abuse and humiliation.
"There is the clearest evidence from the court martial into the death of Baha Mousa, and other emerging evidence, that systematic abuse by UK soldiers in Iraq was rife." - Phil Shiner - In quotes: Army report reaction
The British army has a long history of using torture.
The writer Mark Curtis says that in 1971 an official British investigation found that the British army's torture techniques "played an important part in counter-insurgency operations in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and the British Cameroons (1960-1), Brunei (1963), British Guiana (1964), Aden (1964-7), Borneo/Malaysia (1965-6), the Persian Gulf (1970-1) and in Northern Ireland (1971)".
KENYA
The British used beatings, sexual humiliation, hooding, sleep deprivation, and bombarding with white noise.
32 Whites were killed by the Mau Mau during the five-year state of emergency. More whites died in traffic accidents in the capital city, Nairobi.
Kenyans were forced into concentration camps and routinely tortured. Some 150,000 Africans died as a direct result of the British policy.
There was a "constant stream of reports of brutalities by police, military and home guards", wrote Canon Bewes, a British missionary. "Some of the people had been using castration instruments and two men had died under castration."
Other brutalities included slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging people to death, pouring paraffin over suspects and setting them alight and burning eardrums with cigarettes.
A British district officer admitted, "There was outright abuse of power and some of the crimes committed were horrific. One day six Mau Mau suspects were brought into a police station in the neighbouring district to mine. The British police inspector in charge lined them up against a wall and shot them."
A mobile gallows travelled the country. Over 1,000 were hanged, their bodies displayed at crossroads and market places.
MALAYSIA
The British used terror in Malaya.
This involved aerial bombing, massacres of villagers, dictatorial police measures and the "resettlement" of hundreds of thousands of people.
CYPRUS
During the state of emergency, from 1952 to 1957, the British army used torture.
Cypriot Nicos Koshies: "They took me to the Special Branch and they started beating me. They took off all my clothes, they tied my hands and feet. They asked somebody to come in. He was taking a stick to put up my bottom, he was putting cloths in water and putting them on my face so I could not breathe, he threw me down and danced on my stomach when he was wearing boots. After 12 days I could not recognise myself."
James Callaghan in the House of Commons: "On 29 June 1957 an inquest was held into the death of Nicos Georghiou. Dr Clearkin said in evidence that bruises in the head were sufficiently severe to have caused the injuries to the brain, perhaps bumping the head against a hard object."
IRAN
In 1953 a coup organised by the British and the USA overthrew Mossadeq and gave power to the Shah.
British SAS forces trained the Shah's Savak secret police. SAS officers helped train the Iranian army in special operations against the Kurds. The Shah's regime used torture until it was overthrown in 1979.
ADEN/SOUTH YEMEN
In Aden, later known as South Yemen, SAS squads used terror against local villages.
An official investigation found that from 1964 to 1967 detainees at a British interrogation centre were routinely tortured. Their eardrums were burst. Others were forced to lean against walls with their fingertips for day and subjected to white noise for hours.
BAHRAIN
Former detainees in Bahrain have described being beaten, electrocuted, whipped, tied in excruciating positions for days on end, kept awake, starved and having their toenails torn out.
NORTHERN IRELAND
The Compton official inquiry acknowledged that the army hooded suspects, fed them on just bread and water and blasted them with noise.
An Amnesty International report said, "It is because we regard the deliberate destruction of a man's ability to control his own mind with revulsion that we reserve a special place in our catalogue of moral crimes for techniques of thought control and brainwashing. Any interrogation procedure which has the purpose or effect of causing a malfunction or breakdown of a man's mental processes constitutes as grave an assault on the inherent dignity of the human person as more traditional techniques of physical torture."
A European human rights report found that British army techniques amounted to "inhuman and degrading treatment" causing "at least intense physical and mental suffering".
William Colby (1920 – 1996) was the boss of the CIA from 1973 until 1976.
He was no friend of Israel.
He knew a lot about CIA dirty tricks and he died in 'mysterious circumstances'.
In 1973, President Nixon, threatened by Watergate, sacked Richard Helms as boss of the CIA and brought in James Schlesinger. Nixon had come to distrust Helms and the CIA. (William Colby - The Education Forum )
Schlesinger felt that elements of the CIA were acting illegally, and he sacked a number of CIA officers.
Elements of the CIA made life difficult for Schlesinger; there were more leaks on Watergate. Nixon moved Schlesinger to the post of Secretary of Defence.
In 1973 William Colby became boss of the CIA. Nixon hoped he would help reveal some of the CIA dirty tricks.
In 1974, The New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh listing illegal CIA operations. The so called CIA "family jewels" included CIA attempts to topple or assassinate foreign leaders and attempts to collect information on the political activities of US citizens.
In 1975, the year that Nixon was forced to resign, the Church Committee was set up to examine the illegal activities of the CIA.
Colby handed over to the Church committee details of the CIA's attempts to sabotage the Chilean economy.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford replaced Colby with George H. W. Bush.
According to Wikipedia, "In later life, and in consonance with his long-held liberal views, Colby became a supporter of the nuclear freeze and of reductions in military spending." (William Colby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
On 28th April 1996 William Colby went on a canoe trip at Rock Point in Maryland. His body was found several days later.
Colby may have known too much about 1. The CIA and heroin 2. Israeli attempts to infiltrate and contro the CIA 3. child sex abuse scandals and the CIA.
1. William Colby was an officer of the Nugan Hand Bank, 'which was a CIA bank in all but name'. Reportedly, the bank financed drug trafficking, money laundering and international arms dealings. (CIA and Drugs WBLUM)
The August 20, 1996 issue of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid, carried an exciting 'newsflash' which announced, "Dead CIA Chief Was Set To Finally Blow Lid on JFK Assassination".
The tabloid announced that former CIA director William Colby had been planning to blow the whistle on the truth about the assassination...
....The fact is, that while serving as CIA director, William Colby was considered hostile to Israel's interests, so much so that it was Colby who fired the Mossad's longtime agent-in-place at the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, who has been documented in 'Final Judgement' as the key CIA player in the JFK assassination conspiracy...
According to Wolf Blitzer, longtime Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post: 'CBS News back in 1975 reported that Angleton had lost his job in December 1974 because of policy disputes over Israel...
Wolf Blitzer has written about how many high ranking CIA officials didn't share Angleton's enthusiasm for Israel, citing Colby as a specific example...'
In the Spring of 1996, Colby contacted a veteran journalist whom he knew to be friendly with top Arab diplomatic, military and intelligence officials and requested that the journalist arrange for Colby to meet with a certain high-level Arab official....
According to a former federal security administrator who attended one of the meetings, Colby and his Arab associate 'had shared concerns. Both men knew that their respective Governments were being infiltrated and manipulated by Israeli agents. Following these meetings, Colby agreed to go to work as a confidential advisor to Arab interests'.
It is interesting to note further that Colby's death came at a critical time when the Israeli lobby in Washington was engaged in a major behind-the-scenes effort to substantially expand the power of the CIA and its then director, John Deutch, a Belgian born Jewish refugee and longtime Washington figure known for his close ties to Israeli intelligence...
Colby would have emerged as a very loud and public critic of such proposals.
3. John DeCamp, who had once worked for Colby, investigated the Franklin child sex abuse case.
Shortly before Colby died, Colby warned DeCamp to give up the case.
Reportedly: Many of the children described satanic rituals that they were forced to attend, some of which involved sacrificing infants and young children. Children attending these sacrifices were warned that if they ever told anyone they would be the next to be sacrificed. In addition, they told of being flown to locations around the country in King’s private plane to parties where they were expected to take part in any sexual acts demanded of them...
Several of the children in Kings prostitution ring recount stories of seeing George Bush at some of King’s Parties. While an outsider would not suspect anything amiss, the children in the ring would know what was taking place. At least one of King’s young prostitutes reported that at one party, she saw George Bush pay King and then depart with a young black man... At least two of (King's) victims have been wrongly imprisoned for refusing to recant their testimony. (George Bush, The CIA, Mind Control & Child Abuse)
Pedophile victim Paul Bonacci, reportedly kidnapped and forced into sex slavery between the ages of 6 and 17, told U.S. District Court Judge Warren Urbom in sworn testimony on February 5, 1999:
"Where were the parties?...down in Washington, DC...and that was for sex...There was sex between adult men and other adult men but most of it had to do with young boys and young girls with the older folks...specifically for sex with minors...Also in Washington, DC, there were parties after a party...there were a lot of parties where there would be senators and congressmen who had nothing to do with the sexual stuff. But there were some senators and congressmen who stayed for the [pedophile sex] parties afterwards...on a lot of the trips he took us on he had us, I mean, I met some people that I don't feel comfortable telling their name because I don't want to ---
...Q: Are you scared?...Yes..."
In his testimony to Judge Urbom, Bonacci reportedly named Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) as having participated in the parties.
Urbom did not ask Bonacci to identify photos of specific senators and congressmen, or reveal their names in court.
Urbom awarded Paul Bonacci $1 million for child abuse on February 19, 1999 regarding his lawsuit involving Republican party operative Larry King.
Bonacci said about Larry King: "I threatened to go to the police in California, thought maybe they would listen whereas in Omaha they were in his pocketbook...he had me hung out of an airplane with a rope by my ankles...If they wanted to get something passed through the legislature, he would put some people that were against it in a compromising position. By using us boys and girls...Judge Urbom: Was this by your being the sexual partner of that person?...Yes...Judge Urbom: ...Any estimates of how often you participated as the sexual partner of one of these persons that he wanted to get some kind of control over?...There were times when it would be four or five in a night...on probably a couple thousand times...sometimes dozens of times with the same person..."
Paul Bonacci claimed the sex ring was based at Offutt U.S. Air Force Base near Omaha. Bonacci said he was abused at the air force base from the age of three onwards. The abuse began in 1970. At Offutt, Paul said he was "trained" by tortures, heavy drugging and sexual degradation.
Offutt AFB was George W. Bush post 9 11 headquarters for a short period.
Larry King was reportedly released from prison on April 11, 2001 after serving about five years. GOP operative Larry King allegedly hired photographers to capture legislators and high officials in compromising sexual positions with children.
Rusty Nelson reportedly confirmed Bonacci’s testimony to Judge Urbom: "Q: Children on the airplane?...yes. Q: How young?...There was one situation went back to Washington, DC...he had probably 10, 12 years old...Q: Boys, girls?...Both...Q: Who attended the parties?...Prominent business people, very prominent high-ranking officials, politicians. The younger people. What would transpire was they would have a party and then a party after the party...after the party was more of a sex-type deal...That’s what Larry [King] would -- -- Q: These old politicians were having sex with each other?...Or people Larry would bring...some younger people...Did you take pictures of the parties?...I took pictures at some of the parties, yes..."
The Secret Service allegedly allowed Paul Bonacci into the White House on July 3, 1988.
A June 29, 1989 Washington Times front page story was headed: "Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush."
Reporters Paul Rodriguez and George Archibald said "Call-boys took midnight tour of White House."
According to a Nebraska state police report, pedophile victims Nelly and Kimberly Webb detailed a massive child sex, homosexual and pornography operation run out of Nebraska by Larry King, but with close ties directly to the White House.
A Nebraska Dept. of Social Services report, by Mrs Julie Walters: "Nelly indicates she attended a party in Chicago with King and the male youths. She indicated George Bush was present...she sat at a table at the party wearing nothing but a negligee. She stated George Bush saw her on the table. She stated she saw George Bush pay King money and Bush left the party with a nineteen year old black boy named Brent."
"My firm alone is acting in cases apparently involving over 30 deaths in detention including executions.
"It was standard operating procedure to hood, stress and deprive detainees of sleep, water and food. Our clients have been subjected to torture, abuse and humiliation.
"There is the clearest evidence from the court martial into the death of Baha Mousa, and other emerging evidence, that systematic abuse by UK soldiers in Iraq was rife." - In quotes: Army report reaction
Cairns has been responsible for political output from the BBC in Norther Ireland.
Cairns was found out.
"A BBC editor has resigned his post within the British military after Sinn Féin raised conflict of interest concerns. RAF wing commander Mike Cairns resigned as OC 7644 VR Squadron after Sinn Féin complained that his work as a public relations officer for the RAF was incompatible with his job as a high-ranking BBC editor.
"Following Sinn Féin's complaint the BBC confirmed Mike Cairns who worked in news-gathering in the BBC had resigned from the RAF reserve." - An Phoblacht: BBC editor resigns from RAF post
In 2001, John Simpson claimed he had found documents strewn on the floor of a Taliban recruitment centre in Kabul. He claimed these documents apparently described how to build a thermonuclear device.
The documents, according to Simpson showed "how dangerous Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network aspired to be".
According to the New Scientist:
The sentences shown in focus by the camera also come from a famous document called "Weekend Scientist: Let's Make a Thermonuclear Device", which was first published in 1979 as a humour piece by The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
The paper was written in response to US court decisions of the time that restricted popular magazines from detailing how to make a bomb. Since all the information is freely available in public libraries anyway, the author said, he decided to provide a humorous "ten easy steps" proving how easy bomb building can be.
While the gist of these instructions may be accurate, for example giving suggested relative proportions of plutonium and TNT, they are written completely in jest.
The first instruction tells readers to obtain weapons grade plutonium at their "local supplier". It continues: "A nuclear power plant is not recommended, as large quantities of missing plutonium tends to make plant engineers unhappy. We suggest you contact your local terrorist organization."
The US Department of Energy generally refuses to comment on the accuracy of such documents. But they do say that about five kilograms of plutonium is theoretically enough to make a nuclear explosive device, while the recipe in The Journal of Irreproducible Results calls for 110 kilograms of plutonium.
The BBC film only allows a few parts of the documents to be read, but these few phrases are exactly as found in the 1979 paper: "Theory of operation ... the device basically works when ... critical mass then produces a nuclear chain reaction ... Plutonium (PU), atomic number ... and is similar in ...".
"From what I've seen, this is certainly a shortened version of the original article," says Marc Abrahams, former editor of The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Some of the more obviously absurd parts of the original are missing from the document in Kabul, such as a paragraph starting "in next month's column, we will learn how to clone your neighbor's wife in six easy steps." The Kabul document also has paragraph returns in odd places, as if someone had cut and pasted the text.
Even so, says Abrahams, "if you spend half a second scanning any of this you should be able to tell it's a joke." He adds that if the instructions were made more believable by removing the ridiculous parts, there would be practically nothing left.
Reportedly, John Simpson was a university friend of a former head of MI6.
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services:
While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as “intelligence”, “security”, “Whitehall” or “Home Office” sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of “one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As “satellites” of the secret state, their list included “agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career”.
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service’s unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of “crypto-communists”. Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it “ran” dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate’s Church Committee and the House of Representatives’ Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: “We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street”
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming “embarrassing publications”.
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, “was a longstanding agent of ours” who “made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction”.
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: “No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot”. King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror’s foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5’s F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: “Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War.”
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. “It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge.”
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from “dodgy security services”. She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: “We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used.” (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair’s ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq’s WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: “Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors.” The source of these “revelations” was said to be “intelligence picked up from within Iraq”. Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the “war” and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had “sexed up” a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists’ links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times’ dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a “calculated set-up” devised to foster the propaganda case for war. “In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam’s regime.” And he concluded: “The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor.”
Let’s not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble’s publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
"Gareth Porter debunks the shoddy case against Iran for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. Typical lousy forensics and a list of unbelievable witnesses leading to an unwilling government forced to blame Iran by the Americans and Israelis." - permanent link
"Rep. Paul, it should be noted, has a terrible record on Israel and has called the Israeli government 'evil.' In October, the Republican Jewish Coalitionbarred him from their policy forum due to his libertarian stance against providing foreign aid to Israel." - • Rep. Ron Paul
"Fifty per cent of the fleet have sinned homosexually at some time in their naval career," declared UK Admiral Sir Frank Roddam Twiss in 1968. (Cached)
Film historian Kevin Brownwing, author of 'The Golden Grope - A History of Hollywood Harassment' writes about John Wayne's use of casting sessions to seduce young males. (The Sleaze Archive - Hollywood Sex Pests!)
"During the 1940s the outwardly conservative and heterosexual Wayne would regularly attend screen tests with director John Ford, in order to size up potential conquests. He'd get Ford to order the young hopefuls to take off their shirts and enact scenes which required them to lift heavy objects or bend over a lot."
Wayne's conquests allegedly included Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea and Montgomery Clift, 'with whom he had a torrid affair during the making of Red River in 1948'.
Eric Patterson (Point of View essay) has explained that: "Memoirs, photographs, and other evidence clearly show that actual cowboys lived on much more intimate terms with each other than many of the fans of the Cowboy today would find acceptable, bunking with each other, grooming each other, dancing together, and posing for photographers in remarkably affectionate ways."
Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain about gay cowboys. Proulx was partly inspired to write Brokeback Mountain by the comment of "one old sheep rancher, dead now, (who) used to say he always sent up two men to tend the sheep 'so's if they get lonesome they can poke each other." (Eric Patterson on Brokeback Mountain)
People who like cowboy films are usually people who like young male bodies in denim jeans.
There are homophobes who make fun of the idea of gay cowboys. Such homophobes are usually gay.
Eric Patterson writes that '"Personalities' like Don Imus and 'Michael Savage' (Michael Weiner) excoriated the movie as 'Fudgepack Mountain' and 'Bareback Mounting.' Though they claim to be horrified or disgusted by anal sex, their insistence on it in their reactions to Brokeback Mountain and indeed to man-loving men in general indicates that they seem to be unable to stop thinking about it, which suggests that it may be considerably more interesting to them than they want to admit."
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In Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger performed as Ennis Del Mar, "a tortured loner who falls in love with fellow cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) despite his belief that homosexuality is wrong." ( 'Mountain' Man Ledger's Steady Climb to the Top)
Brokeback Mountain wasn't the first time Heath Ledger played a gay man. In 1996, he played the part of a gay cyclist in the Australian TV show Sweat.
On January 22, 2008, Heath Ledger was found dead in his fourth-floor apartment at 421 Broome Street in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City.
Israel controls Gaza's airspace, seacoast, main borders, and trade. In this sense, Gaza remains occupied by Israel. The Palestinians do not have an independent state.
1929-32 Fall in the Dow: 89% Losses recovered by: November 1954
1973-74 Fall in the Dow: 45% Losses recovered by: December 1982
"This is a structural crisis that's been spawned by decades of shifting our economy from making things to buying things, from production to consumption. "We need white-collar predators in jail. We need restructuring, not repossessions. We need mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth from the greedy to the needy."
And it is supected that the military help to rig elections.
The USA has borrowed large sums of money in order to fund the military.
The military failed to win the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and is now failing to win in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it is suspected that the military carries out acts of false flag acts terrorism in order to boost its funds.
2. The average American has had money taken away from him in order to help the super-rich get even richer.
The average American is no longer able to spend lots of money in shopping malls.
3.Big American corporations have moved some factories out of the USA and into areas with cheap 'slave' labour.
The USA now has a huge balance of payments deficit.
4.There has been a neglect of basic infrastructure; and education standards are often low.
Hillary Clinton appears to have no plans to curb the power of the military. She appears to have no answer to the debt problem. Her health-care plan would require all Americans to get health insurance.
Barack Obama appears little different from Clinton, although he did oppose the Iraq War and seems to have more sympathy for the poor.
John Edwards is not much different from Obama, although he appears to be critical of big corporations.
Dennis Kucinich favours a program of federal job-creation, like the New Deal. He has been praised by some academics for his understanding of America's problems.
Mike Huckabee favours a 30 % sales tax to replace most other taxes. Sales taxes take a larger proportion of income from the poor and middle class than from the wealthy.
Rudolph Giulianiappears to favour the usual Republican economic policies. He has called for a 20 % reduction in the federal civilian work force in the next decade. He is not planning to reduce the size of the military.
John McCainappears to favour the usual Republican economic policies.
Mitt Romney appears little different from McCain and Giuliani.
Ron Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve because it is an inflation-causing tool of the rich elite.
Ron Paul wants to cut the size and power of government, including the military.
This raises the question of how quickly people can be moved out of government jobs and into private sector jobs.
Ron Paul wants to abolish the federal income tax
This raises the problem of how to pay for Social Security and Medicare.
Ron Paul should note that when the Soviet Empire came to an end, and Libertarianism came to the Eastern Bloc, there was massive and extreme poverty. Many areas such as Belarus and Georgia have still not recovered.
Ron Paul needs to reassure people that his economic policies will work.
The economy will probably be the key issue (unless you count vote rigging as the key issue)
Extract: "Washington continues to support — through CIA covert operations — the development of Islamic fundamentalism, throughout the Middle East, in the former Soviet Union as well in China and India.
"Throughout the developing world, the growth of sectarian, fundamentalist and other such organizations tends to serve U.S. interests. These various organizations and armed insurgents have been developed, particularly in countries where state institutions have collapsed under the brunt of the IMF-sponsored economic reforms.
"These fundamentalist organizations contribute by destroying and displacing secular institutions.
"Islamic fundamentalism creates social and ethnic divisions. It undermines the capacity of people to organize against the American Empire. These organizations or movements, such as the Taliban, often foment "opposition to Uncle Sam" in a way which does not constitute any real threat to America’s broader geopolitical and economic interests."
Osama Saeed of Rolled-up Trousers (Cached) pointed out in 2006 that the Guardian comment pages had, over twelve months, included pieces by:
Charles Krauthammer (leading US neo-conservative), Max Hastings (conservative), Peregrine Worsthorne (conservative), Paddy Ashdown (reportedly of MI6), Tony Blair (friend of Israel) and Sir Malcolm Rifkind (conservative).
Does this mean that The Guardian has become a conservative newspaper?
When you look at the British media, you may find that a sursprisingly large number of journalists could be described as 'friends of Israel'.
"As for the Jewish claim to biblical lands, it makes no more sense to the Arab mind than an Italian claim to establish a Roman state along the length of the A5 would to the British. Indeed, it never made much sense to European minds either, given that they would happily have settled for a Jewish homeland in Uganda or Siberia, if they had thought it practicable."
One New Statesman cover showed the star of David at the heart of the Union Jack, and had the title, 'Kosher Conspiracy.'
The Spectator magazine had an article suggesting that 9 11 was an inside-job.
The Spectator's editor Boris Johnson found his private life exposed. He was sacked as the Conservative party's vice chairman and arts spokesman.
The Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan criticised the war in Iraq. He was sacked.
The BBC sacked journalist Andrew Gilligan after he suggested that a government document on Iraq had been 'sexed up'.
On 29th January 1987, Alasdair Milne, the BBC Director General was removed. He had allowed the BBC to critcise the government. (http://www.bilderberg.org/milne.htm)
A study by Cardiff University media analysts (http://www.bilderberg.org/milne.htm#real) found that the BBC "displayed the most pro-war agenda of any [British] broadcaster."
The BBC's Andrew Marr proclaimed Tony Blair had 'been proved conclusively right' as Baghdad fell to the 'coalition' forces.
'It would be entirely ungracious', said Marr, 'not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result' (BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)."
"Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is ... ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood.
"In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as 'Type I' female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself.
"The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved 'cutting.'
"The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle...
"Any distinction between injuring the clitoris or the clitoral hood is irrelevant, says Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta. 'The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls,' she says. 'It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing.' The circumcision of boys, she adds, has demonstrated health benefits, namely reduced risk of infection and some protection against H.I.V."
Saudi Arabia must have a fear that the USA and its allies are planning to take over Saudi's oil.
"In February of 1975 the London Sunday Times revealed information from a leaked and classified US Department of Defense plan.
"The plan, drawn up by the Pentagon, was code named 'Dhahran Option Four' and provided for an invasion of the world's largest oil reserves, namely Saudi Arabia." - Who Really Wants to Invade Saudi Arabia, and Why?
2. Israel or Iran?
Saudi Arabia must fear both Iran and Israel.
And it must try to keep in with both Iran and Israel.
"Seeking regional allies to make a stand against Iran and the growing Shi'ite Muslim radicalization, Saudi Arabia sees Israel as a likely ally, experts here said...
"Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to the United States and Britain and adviser to King Abdullah, said Israel and the Arabs could cooperate in many areas including water, agriculture, science and education." - Senior Saudi prince offers Israel peace vision
3. Keeping in with Iran
In 2006, Israel suffered a defeat in Lebanon.
Saudi Arabia will no doubt have taken note of the Israeli weakness.
There seems to be growing friendship between Shia Iran and its Sunni-dominated neighbours.
Traditionally, the Gulf states are seen as being on the side of the USA.
Martin Walker reminds us that "There are... long-standing border disputes over islands (and this means over oil and gas rights) in the Gulf. And Iran's revolutionary regime has long scorned the pro-Western sheiks as pampered heirs of outdated feudalism, their regimes ripe for revolution." Iran's new Gulf friends
But, things seem to be changing.
1. The dollar is falling and this worries the Arabs.
2. The USA has created havoc in Iraq and this worries the Arabs.
3. Palestine continues to suffer.
4. There are even those who fear that the eventual aim of the USA and Israel is to break up Saudi Arabia and other Moslem states.
During 2007, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Egypt seem to have decided to become much more friendly with Iran.
1. In early 2007, "the parliament of Bahrain, an island state that hosts America's Fifth Fleet, passed a non-binding motion banning the use of its territory for any attack on Iran." - Friendlier hands across the Gulf
4. "Dubai has become a vital lifeline for its vast neighbour (Iran). As many as 400,000 Iranian expatriates now live in the UAE, with nearly 9,000 part-Iranian-owned firms registered with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Iran is the main destination for exports from Dubai." - Friendlier hands across the Gulf
5. "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told Gulf Arab leaders that Iran wants economic and security pacts with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC). Mr Ahmadinejad was speaking in Qatar, where he is attending a GCC summit - the first Iranian president to do so." - BBC NEWS World Middle East Iran proposes Gulf security pact
7. "Saudi Arabia ... invited Mr. Ahmedinejad to participate in the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, a first for an Iranian leader since the 1979 revolution." - Egypt and Saudi Arabia make new overtures to Iran
Some people believe that elements of the US government approve of closer ties between the Arabs and Iran.
According to Emad Gad, an expert on regional politics at the Al Ahram Center, a government-linked think tank in Cairo: "Qatar could not have invited Ahmedinejad to the GCC without an understanding with the Americans. I don't think Egypt would be sending a diplomat without some sort of green light either. All of this is part of a strategy, and I think it's an American strategy as well, to keep the freeze on the nuclear program while creating a friendlier climate." - Egypt and Saudi Arabia make new overtures to Iran
This is possible.
But, it is also possible that, secretly, many Arab leaders have given up on the Americans.
In February of 2000, Indian intelligence officials detained 11 members of what they thought was an Al Qaeda hijacking conspiracy. It was then discovered that these 11 'Muslim preachers' were all Israeli nationals!
"On January 12 Indian intelligence officials in Calcutta detained 11 foreign nationals for interrogation before they were to board a Dhaka-bound Bangladesh Biman flight... The eleven had Israeli passports... 'They are Israeli nationals,' said a Central Intelligence official. He claimed that Tel Aviv 'exerted considerable pressure' on Delhi to secure their release...
It was Indian Intelligence that helped the U.S. to so quickly identify the '19 hijackers'! On April 3, 2002, Express India, quoting the Press Trust of India, revealed:
"Washington, April 3: Indian intelligence agencies helped the U.S. to identify the hijackers who carried out the deadly September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, a media report said here on Wednesday."
... Indian intelligence has an extremely close working relationship with Israel's Mossad because both governments hate the Muslim nation of Pakistan. (RAW & Mossad: The Secret Link)
How might Mossad have managed to increase racial tensions in India?
Narendra Modi is the chief minister of Gujarat (Bombay area). Reportedly he has used acts of terror against Moslems in order to increase his power.
According to Zee News, 7 June 2006, "Gujarat and Israel can cooperate with each other in solving their water scarcity... says Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Both Gujarat and Israel are 'divided by land but united by water', says Modi who was recently in the Jewish nation as part of the Indian delegation attending Agritech-2006." (Sunday, January 6 2008 GujaratFiles.net)
"Yet, no action has followed one of the most explosive news investigations in India.
"None of those caught on tape boasting about raping, burning and hacking Muslims have been arrested or even interrogated.
"Modi’s authority has not been questioned.
"Instead, there is an eerie silence. Far more eerie than the cold-blooded murders of more than 1,000 innocent people during the communal massacres of March 2002.
"The role of the Modi government in the State-sponsored terrorism of 2002 is well documented. Even the Supreme Court had censured Modi for being 'a modern day Nero who watched while Gujarat burned'.
"Now, the Tehelka tapes offer irrefutable proof of how the Sangh (Hindu nationalists) organised a 'Hindu jihad' across Gujarat and protected the murderers."
"The only Democrat the Jewish Billionaires really trust is, of course, Hillary Clinton. The only Republican they don’t trust is Ron Paul." - permanent link
And it is supected that the military help to rig elections.
The USA has borrowed large sums of money in order to fund the military.
The military failed to win the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and is now failing to win in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it is suspected that the military carries out acts of false flag acts terrorism in order to boost its funds.
2. The average American has had money taken away from him in order to help the super-rich get even richer.
The average American is no longer able to spend lots of money in shopping malls.
3.Big American corporations have moved some factories out of the USA and into areas with cheap 'slave' labour.
The USA now has a huge balance of payments deficit.
4.There has been a neglect of basic infrastructure; and education standards are often low.
Hillary Clinton appears to have no plans to curb the power of the military. She appears to have no answer to the debt problem. Her health-care plan would require all Americans to get health insurance.
Barack Obama appears little different from Clinton, although he did oppose the Iraq War and seems to have more sympathy for the poor.
John Edwards is not much different from Obama, although he appears to be critical of big corporations.
Dennis Kucinich favours a program of federal job-creation, like the New Deal. He has been praised by some academics for his understanding of America's problems.
Mike Huckabee favours a 30 % sales tax to replace most other taxes. Sales taxes take a larger proportion of income from the poor and middle class than from the wealthy.
Rudolph Giulianiappears to favour the usual Republican economic policies. He has called for a 20 % reduction in the federal civilian work force in the next decade. He is not planning to reduce the size of the military.
John McCainappears to favour the usual Republican economic policies.
Mitt Romney appears little different from McCain and Giuliani.
Ron Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve because it is an inflation-causing tool of the rich elite.
Ron Paul wants to cut the size and power of government, including the military.
This raises the question of how quickly people can be moved out of government jobs and into private sector jobs.
Ron Paul wants to abolish the federal income tax
This raises the problem of how to pay for Social Security and Medicare.
Ron Paul should note that when the Soviet Empire came to an end, and Libertarianism came to the Eastern Bloc, there was massive and extreme poverty. Many areas such as Belarus and Georgia have still not recovered.
Ron Paul needs to reassure people that his economic policies will work.
The economy will probably be the key issue (unless you count vote rigging as the key issue)
Oliver James, in his book 'The Selfish Capitalist: The Origins of Affluenza' claims that selfish capitalism is a major cause of the decline in our mental health. (The big question By genre Guardian Unlimited Books)
Oliver James states that the people of the selfish capitalist, English-speaking nations (US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) are twice as likely to suffer mental illness as those from mainland western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain., Holland, Belgium).
With selfish capitalism, the rich get richer as they force the poor to stay poor.
Politicians like Bush and Blair like to reduce the taxes on the rich. So, the poor have to pay more.
The top 1% of British earners doubled their share of the national income between 1982 and the present day.
Poverty does not necessarily cause mental illness. There have been low levels of mental illness in many poor countries down through the ages.
What causes mental illness, according to Oliver James, is the combination of lack of money with a selfish culture of consumerism that places a high value on possessions, money, appearances and fame.
According to James, selfish capitalism encourages people to be greedy consumers and workaholics.
And when people fail to become as rich as Bush or Blair, they may become mentally ill.
James suggests that we need leaders who will help the poor and reduce consumerism. This will reduce mental illness and help save the planet from ecological disaster.
It sounds like we need an improved version of Castro or Chavez.
The World Health Organisation predicts that depression may well become the second most widespread disease, after heart disease, in the developed world by 2020.
If we don't get better political leaders, the prediction could come true.
James refers to an "invisible hand" which attempts to control our minds. Is he thinking of the CIA or Mossad working on behalf of the rich elite?
Is he suggesting that we are being brainwashed and that elections are rigged?
"Two major demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur last November, and a series of smaller protests in the last couple of months, have clearly unnerved the ruling establishment... The main Chinese party in the ruling coalition, the Malaysian Chinese Association, is still reeling from a video sex scandal" - Abdullah's finger on election trigger
The Mormons have links to the CIA and various other odd institutions.
Joseph Smith, considered by some to be a fraudster, started the Mormon religion.
The Book of Mormon is based on a 'translation' of tablets Smith claimed he found in upstate New York in the 1800s after a visit from an angel called Moroni.
Mormons believe that the ancient Israelites migrated to Central America and that the Red Indians (Native Americans) are descendants of those ancient Israelites.
It has been proven that Native Americans first migrated from Siberia, not Israel, over 10,000 years ago.
1. The Carlyle Group, which has links to the Bush (and bin Laden) families, was reportedly founded by people linked to the Mormons.
2. Mormons have had 'a disproportionate representation in the CIA and FBI through the years, and that J. Edgar Hoover started the FBI with Mormon agents'.
3. Karl Rove, although not a Mormon, 'was nurtured in the Salt Lake City Mormon culture and educated at the University of Utah.'
4. Mormon Timothy E. Flanigan helped organise the Bush case in the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court legal argument. Flanigan also helped organise the Homeland Security department.
5. Mormon Orrin Hatch has chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the Department of Justice and the FBI.
6. Dawin A. John who was managing director of information and communication systems for the Mormon Church, was given the job of reorganising the FBI's computer files.
SEX
Salt Lake City is one of the top 51 'gay-friendly places to live' in the U.S. [45]
"In a highly controversial trial, which took place in 1987, a man by the name of Alan B. Hadfield was convicted on seven counts of "sodomizing and sexually molesting his son and daughter." (Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 13, 1988)
"In the same newspaper, under the date of Dec. 16, 1987, we find the following: 'PROVO—As many as 40 people in the same Lehi neighborhood were implicated as child sex abusers by their own offspring and other children in the area, a therapist testified Tuesday.
"Dr. Barbara Snow, the principal therapist who broke an alleged widespread pattern of child sexual abuse centered in one ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spent nearly six hours on the stand during the second day of the trial of Alan B. Hadfield."
"It is possible to see 1968 as the movement used and utilized for advancement of the Jewish cause.
"Indeed, in France it came after de Gaulle declared embargo on weapons to Israel; in the US it was the break point for the hold of the old elites and the beginning of the Rise of Jews.
"To a great extent, we can say the same about Russia in 1917."
1. Cohn-Bendit is Jewish, and 'an agent of Mossad'.
2. Cohn-Bendit is trying to sabotage E.U relations with Egypt.
3. De Gaulle was hated by Israel, and by French Jews.
4. This was because De Gaulle had told the world that it was Israel which had attacked the Arab states in June 1967 and not the Arabs who had attacked Israel .
(De Gaulle had also declared an embargo on weapons to Israel)
5. While De Gaulle was on a state visit to Romania, Mossad, with the help of Cohn-Bendit, orchestrated the Paris riots against the French government.
Cohn-Bendit "tells of his meetings with the ‘boys’ – his new friends, the War party in Washington. Perle and Wolfowitz shared with him their plans for the Middle East, he says.
"They want to give Iraq to a Hashemite ruler and to push Palestinians into Jordan to create a Palestinian state there.
"Then, the Jews will get the whole of Palestine.
"They are Bolsheviks, he says. ‘Bolshevik’ is a swear word for this new Danny.
"He has a better, much better plan: give a state to Palestinians, and bring Israel into NATO and the European Union. Make Russia, China, everybody declare their support for the Jewish state, the best and the only democracy in the Middle East.
"If the Americans go along, he can deliver European support for the American occupation of Iraq, he says...
"He (Cohn-Bendit) promoted the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. He supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia into submission. But the Jewish cause occupies much of his time and effort. He is proud that Germany supplied Israel with the nuclear-capable submarines at the expense of the German taxpayer...
"A Syrian immigrant and member of a German state assembly from Cohn-Bendit’s party, Jamal Karsli, called on Germany to stop providing Israel with weapons of mass destruction and referred to the ‘strong Jewish influence in German media’.
"Cohn-Bendit and his Parteigenossen practically lynched Karsli for ‘anti-Semitism’...
"Expelled by Cohn-Bendit from the Green Party, Karsli joined the FDP of Juergen Moellemann, a brave German politician who objected to the rearmament of Israel and to Jewish control of the German media. In a short while, Juergen Moellemann had a fatal accident: both his parachutes did not open. (Practically in the same time, Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign minister and steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause was assassinated in Stockholm.)"
Brad renfro was aged 11 when he appeared in The Client, a film based on the bestselling John Grisham novel, and one of the top-grossing films of 1994.
Child stars have a difficult life.
An article entitled ‘Hollywood Corruption, Child Abuse, & Gay Genocide’ 10 June 2005, refers to the large number of a suicides involving child stars and former child stars. (http://www.universalway.org/Trevor/paulpetersen.html)
The article suggests that some of the dead stars were gay or bisexual and that sexuality may have played a part in some of the deaths.
The writer praises Rupert Everett, Chad Allen, and Ellen DeGeneres for allowing the public to know that they are homosexual.
Reportedly, the large number of child stars that are gay or bisexual have to go to great lengths to pretend otherwise.
A "Beard" is the female companion that a gay male star uses to disguise his sexuality.
Allegedly, examples of beards have been:
1. Leo DiCaprio's Giselle Bundchen
2. Ben Affleck's J.Lo.
Hollywood agents and publicists often hand stories to reporters about invented relationships between gay celebrities and females.
Gay or bisexual stars have been known to pick up prostitutes so as to spread the rumour that they are 'normal'.
Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and joined the Human Rights Campaign (HRC ). Reportedly, the rate of gay teen suicide declined, at least temporarily, as a result.
1. In 1964 former child star Alan Ladd, star of Shane, died of an overdoes of sedatives and alcohol. Months earlier he nearly killed himself with an 'accidental' self-inflicted gunshot wound.
2. In 1968 child actor Scotty Beckett's death was listed as a probable suicide from sleeping pills .
3. In 1965, the body of former child star Bobby Driscoll was found in the rubble of an abandoned tenement. He had been a drug addict. He was buried in a pauper's grave.
4. In 1969, former child star Judy Garland took her own life in a locked London bathroom.
5. In 1982, child actor Trent Lehman committed suicide.
6. In 1993, former child actor River Phoenix died in mysterious circumstances.
The recount in Manchester's Ward 5 in New Hampshire
Clinton Diebold Result 683 Hand Count 619
Huge disparities between votes cast on Diebold electronic voting machines and actual hand counted tallies are emerging during the New Hampshire recount - PrisonPlanet
"It has been and still is a world wide pandemic with no permanent vaccine in sight. It has existed and still does in nearly every land, on every continent, among most all the world and there is no end in view." - The Jews of Poland: Joseph Polak's July 28, 2007 e...
Much of the following information comes from an article by David Kimche, who reportedly worked for British intelligence and reportedly was once a deputy head of Mossad.
Kimche has revealed much 'information' about Israel's involvement in Africa (David Kimche.)
According to Kimche and others:
1. KENYA:
The leaders of Kenya's Mau Mau, who fought the British, were given military training in Israel.
Kenya has many Israeli businessmen and a Mossad presence.
"ABC News and the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'aretz, reported Wednesday that a US informant in Kenya had warned the American government two weeks before the blast that the Nairobi embassy had been targeted for a bomb attack... When American officials checked with Mossad about the reliability of the source, they were advised to treat the report with skepticism. No special security measures were taken at the embassy...
"The Israeli government's dismissal of this advance warning may account for its extraordinary effort to supply bomb experts and rescue teams in the wake of the bombing, for reasons which have not otherwise been explained.
2.Sudan and Darfur:Mossad is active in Southern Sudan.
3. Ethiopia: The Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia in particular, are of strategic importance to Israel. Israel befriended Ethiopia's Mengistu and helped Ethiopia against the Somalis.
4. ZIMBABWE: Israel helped finance the Accra office of Robert Mugabe's National Front group.
Israel had links to Sally, the Ghanaian who became President Mugabe's wife.
5. TANZANIA: Israel's Mossad set up a spy school in Dar es Salaam.
6. GHANA: Around 1959, Israel enjoyed close relations with some of Ghana's leaders.
Israel’s Ambassador to Ghana, Ehud Avriel, became a close confidant of President Kwame Nkrumah.
"Ghana’s National Security and the Political Action and Liaison Department of Mossad have been cooperating successfully, with Mossad’s special branches of Metsada and Lohamah Psichologit...
"Ghana’s head of Military Intelligence Brig Gen R O Sackey had also gone to Israel to train with Aman, the country’s Military Intelligence."
7. GUINEA: Shiomo Hillel, Israel’s first Ambassador to Guinea, became a firm friend of President Sekou Touré
8. MALI: Rafi Ben Shalom advised President Modeiba Keita
9. CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Ephraim Ben Haim forged close ties with the President.
10. SOUTH AFRICA: Israel had close relations with white South Africa. South Africa has a large Jewish community.
"In 2006, 90 % of troops in Iraq thought the war was retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11...
"The most lethal conspiracy theory of recent years was concocted and promoted by the US state...
"The promotion of extreme forms of Islam by the US, the UK and their allies... is only the most conspicuous examples of recent attempts to harness the 'forces of unreason' to state interests."
"I believe that the elites overplayed their hand. I believe that by carrying out the brutal act of cynical murder on 9/11 and by using overt forms of power to try to stifle dissent and truth, the elites have not only sewn the seeds of their own downfall from power, but have also paved the way for an awakening of humankind to the realities of how people have been manipulated by the elites for millennia." - George Washington's Blog: Why We'll Win
Indonesia has made agreements with Russia, which include arms, energy and trade deals.
Indonesia and Russia have an agreement to develop stronger military cooperation.
In recent decades, Indonesia got most of its armaments from the US and Europe.
In 1991, public reaction to Indonesian massacres in East Timor forced the US to impose restrictions on arms sales.
In 1997 Indonesia was hit by a financial crisis and Russia began to negotiate with Indonesia about selling armaments that were cheaper than those supplied by the US.
In 1998 Suharto was toppled, reportedly by the CIA and its friends in the indonesian military.
In 1999, the US again reduced military cooperation with Indonesia, after Indonesia-backed militias and security forces killed thousands of people in East Timor, after the 1999 vote for independence from Indonesia.
In 2002, bombs went off in Bali and many Indonesians blamed the CIA and its friends in the Indonesian military and police. However, Indonesia's President Megawati, thought to be tool of certain generals, was happy to receive aid from the US to help in the fight against 'terrorism'.
In 2003, the US invaded Iraq. Indonesia, the world's biggest Moslem nation, was not happy.
In 2003, Moscow arranged for Indonesia to receive fighter jet, armoured personnel carriers and assault helicopters.
In 2006, Indonesian Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said that the Russian deal would wean Indonesia from its historical dependence on US military products.
"In Sri Lanka, Mossad trains, arms, and equips both sides -- through its Cambodian Zim Shipping empire, and through its holdings in South Africa -- and perpetrates false flags whenever there is talk of peace. Mossad’s goal is to maintain the lucrative arms market, plus the local drug trade that helps pay for those arms...
"ISI drug lords in Pakistan and Israeli gangsters in Turkey (plus Mossad in Southeast Asia) sell heroin to the Tamils, who use the drug proceeds to buy arms from Mossad...
"Most (not all) of the weapons come from Mossad-owned factories in Vietnam and Cambodia, and from Jewish-owned factories in South Africa.
"The British also arm and train both sides. Just as the CIA uses its 'National Endowment for Democracy' to arm dictators and death squads, MI6 uses use Oxfam (Oxford Famine Relief), which is one of England’s most powerful and secretive intelligence organizations." - Mossad in Sri Lanka
I had walked out of my job and was looking for work. I had flown to Brazil.
An almost empty bus sped me from Rio airport to the centre of the city. The sky was full of black tropical clouds, but the air was warm and getting warmer. There were shanty towns, or favelas, built out over the waters of the bay, and beside the docks there were very seedy bars. The smiling Negro bus driver, speaking in Brazilian Portuguese, said something about Pele. I tried to explain that I was looking for a hotel. He dropped me off near the end of Avenida Rio Branco in the dictrict called Centro.
It being early on a Sunday morning, there were few people about. As I walked, I was very much aware that Rio is a city of steep little mountains and hills. I climbed a hill covered in crumbling villas. A yellow tram clanked by.
Coming to a hill topped by a favela I wandered up to a ridge near the top. I sat down in front of a row of blue, yellow and white home-made shacks, took out my writing pad, and began to sketch the scene before me. The sun broke through and below me I could see Sugar Loaf Mountain and a sea of brilliant blue.
Some ragged children materialised. They introduced themselves as Edison, Flavio, Ricardo and Fatima; and one had the surname of Anderson. Edison sat beside me and taught me how to count in Portuguese. Ricardo grabbed my pen, pretended to run off with it, and then returned it with a grin. I held out a plastic cup to indicate that I was thirsty. Edison took it to his shack and returned with it full of water. A Black youth, dressed in Sunday-best shirt, explained in a mixture of sign language and Portuguese, that this was an area of machine gun battles and murder. The black youth led me down the hill, pointed to a hotel, the Hotel Globo, and then climbed back up his hill.
My room in the Globo had no windows, but it was cheap.
I walked along Copacabana Beach, where sky-scraping wave s break on white sands, where bronzed bodies play under the palm trees, and where sparkling yachts sail beneath steep jungly mountains. My shoulders began to ache as I walked across railway tracks, over and under hills, and across motorways with killer traffic. I was getting near to the cemetary. On the grass verge, at the side of the motorway which runs along the shore, I came across four plates. On two of these there was some food. On the other two were dead black crows. The sun disappeared rather suddenly and I retreated to my windowless room in the Hotel Globo.
Monday 9th October
A bus took me past green and gold luxury flats with uniformed doormen, and past lively black slums, to Copacabana Beach. My map told me the beach was near the English Church, where I hoped to find information about jobs.
At the far end of the beach I found a bar. That was where I met Hilton, a retired Brazilian airforce warrant officer. Over beer and sandwiches, Hilton explained that he had worked for two years in Manchester, in connection with the purchase of aircraft for the Brazilian airforce. Hilton was rich. He took me to his luxury flat, one street from the beach, to introduce me to his wife, and to show off his English furniture, English wallpaper, and English beer mats. Hilton's wife wanted to live in England as it was her ideal country. Her daughter, now married to a Hollywood film producer, had had her photo in the Daily Mirror and the Sun, and was Brazil's 'most famous' model. She looked fantastic! We ate roast beef, drank some beers, and I postponed my visit to the church.
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Tuesday 10th October
On Tuesday morning, at the British Consulate on Praia Flamengo, the lady at the desk told me she could not help me to find work. She said that even if I found a job, I might not get an identity card from the Brazilian government.
I walked to the English Church. It was very English. Soon I was chatting to Walter Girdwood who runs the office at the church. Walter had come to Brazil just after World war I, at a time when influenza was killing millions of people. Walter suggested I get a job on a Brazilian oil rig. Alternatively, there was a school in the mountains that wanted a teacher. But, they would probably want someone fluent in Portuguese. The chaplain was not at home, so it was suggested I return the next day. Where was the school-orphanage that might want a teacher? Walter pointed vaguely in the direction of the nearest hill. He said the place was called 'Cidade de Meninos'.
I set off uphill. It was a steep climb up steep steps cut into the rock, on either side of which were piles of rubbish and the shacks of the slum dwellers. The favela houses looked surprisingly solid, considering that they were made out of old scraps of wood. There were healthy-looking children, mainly brown and black in colour, and some of them had school satchels. The people seemed friendly in an amused sort of way. Dogs barked and birds flew about and there were some enormously large beetles scurrying about among the refuse. As I climbed higher up the mountain the view of the sea and all the sugar-loaf-shaped mountains became more annd more amazing. A black lady seemed to take pity on me. Perhaps she thought this was no place for tourists. I asked her where the 'Cidade de Meninos' was, and she in turn asked three small schoolboys to guide me. Had the lady understood what I was saying? The boys led me down through steeply wooded slopes to the more civilised part of town, and left me at a bus stop!
I took the first bus that came along and ended up at the Pedro II station in Centro. This bright, clean station contained shops, live music, and cafes selling sorbets, sundaes and hamburgers. I bought a hamburger and watched the silvery cooking surfaces being polished. A fair-haired, bare-footed child was swooshing water around the floor with a mop.
Back at the Hotel Globo, I examined the bites from the bed bugs and mosquitoes.
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Wednesday 11th October.
During the night there had been a lot of shouting in the hotel. When I went down to breakfast I noted that at the hotel's front door there was a smartly dressed marine on guard. Breakfast was bread and jam and coffee at a large shared table. My fellow guests included pulchritudinous young girls with overly tight blouses and pleasantly short skirts.
Out at Christ Church, the Rev. Roger Blankley was holding a communion service. When that had finished, Roger gave me a list of people I should try to see at the British Council.
Near the beach, and under Sugar Loaf Mountain, I found the British Council's pleasant villa. As I waited in the reception room, I studied a BBC World service pamphlet and noted two programmes: 'Rescued in Time - four people tell of their rejection of a former way of life...', and, 'Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon: George Kettle decides one day that he has had enough...'
Mr Hughes of the British Council explained that the Council only recruited from London. He claimed that the Brazilian authorities were tightening up on teachers from England who had no visas.
At the 'English Culture Centre', I was told that there was a whole industry involved in arranging visas for foreigners. You could pay around £100 to a 'fixer.' But first, you had to find a job. The Brazilian lady who was telling me all this said, "I'd love to live in England. I feel I've been there in a previous life."
Thursday 12th October
I walked along Rio Branco avenue with its skyscrapers, its joggers, its doll-like school girls, and its street musicians. I passed several airline offices, but decided it was not yet time to give up and buy a return ticket. Copacabana beach was bathed in sunlight and the beach umbrellas were dazzlingly bright. But more interesting than the surf and sand were the steep green mountains with their multi-coloured shacks. I walked towards the shanty towns just behind the beach. Municipal lorries were collecting some of the refuse from the concrete chute running down the mountain between the slum houses.
I entered the favela on the Morro de Cantagalo. The houses were of brick and the feeling that this was one of the more civilised favelas was increased by the presence of kids in school uniforms.
Sitting down at the side of a path I began to sketch the view before me. Far to the right was a sugar loaf shaped mountain and in the far distance were islands rising steeply from the sea. Immediately below me were telephone wires, a red tiled roof, a black woman in white plimsoles hanging up washing in her yard, and a duck and a sleepy cat.
Three boys, one carrying a happily chirping bird in a cage, came wandering along the sunny path and then sat down to watch me drawing. An older youth appeared. He had an unsmiling gorilla face and gorilla shoulders and he was smoking hashish. He wanted to know if I smoked. No. He seemed to be telling me to go and gave me a shove to help me on my way.
I followed one of the small boys, aged about eight, back down the hill in the direction of the beach. We came to a fork in the path and the small boy seemed to want me to take the right fork. Seconds later there were muscular arms around my neck and I was being held down on the ground by the youths. There was strong pressure on my Adam's apple. I didn't make any resistance. Hands stretched out to take my wallet, my money belt, my wrist watch, my pen, my glasses, my small change and my passport. There was about one thousand dollars in cash in the money belt. Then they were off round the corner.
I remained on the ground, somewhat bemused. An old man with a stick, who had earlier watched me drawing, walked slowly past. A middle aged lady with sunglasses and an unsmiling face came round the corner carrying my empty wallet and my passport. She handed them to me. A little schoolgirl picked up my sketches and handed them too me gravely. The lady with the sunglasses wanted me to leave the favela immediately. Taking my arm, she almost dragged me along the path. We were now being watched by several funereal faces. At the bottom of the hill, the lady with the sunglasses departed.
As I sat at the edge of the road thinking what to do next, a woman from the nearest block of flats came across and spoke a few words. It appeared that in her block there was a young Englishman from Winchester called Roger. Roger duly arrived and took me into his comfortable flat for a drink. All I wanted was water.
Roger explained that having come to Rio on holiday, he had decided to stay, and had found himself a teaching job.
He considered I was crazy to go into the favela. "The last person who went in there, an American, got killed," he said. "You know the police only go in with helicopters and machine guns."
I was not sure whether or not I wanted to meet the Rio police, but Roger, having no love of the criminals in the favelas, insisted on driving me in his Volkswagen to the local police station.
"How many people attacked you," asked one of the officers behind the high desk at the entrance to the police station.
I could not be sure.
"What was the oldest one dressed like?" I could not remember. Perhaps he was wearing a red shirt.
What make of watch? I couldn't remember.
"Did you go into t he favela to buy drugs?"
"I went to draw some sketches."
The police officers grinned. They wondered why I too was grinning.
"Let your Queen Elizabeth get your money back," joked one officer.
Then I was sent to to another building, in another street, to see the military police, giants with helmets and boots. I briefly repeated my story.
Eventually, at a third police station, I was taken down stairs to view the inmates of the cells, large cages below street level. One cell was filled with tiny street urchins. The other was crowded with tough, desperate looking, black youths. I did not recognise any faces. At this point the police seemed to lose interest and I was shown the door.
Without my glasses it took me a little while to find the British Consulate, but, when I arrived there I found the lady behind the desk was sympathetic.
"It happens all the time," she said. And she went on to explain that she could not wait to leave Rio in order to start a new life in Australia.
A young New Zealander and his Brazilian girlfriend were also visiting the consulate. They hoped to get married. But the lady behind the desk was suspicious and whispered something to me about the girl probably being a whore.
The consul was a wonderfully friendly young man in a suit. He advised me about how to have money sent out from Britain.
"Where are you staying?" he asked.
"Hotel Globo."
The consul looked surprised that I should be staying in such a low-life hotel. He gave me a few, very few, cruzeiros. And took away my passport, which he assured me would be returned when I repaid him. Then the consul and his tall young side-kick took me down the street to the local bar. The consul seemed to stagger a bit both before and after our entrance to the bar.
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Friday 13th October
On the beach on Praia de Flamengo, I sat watching the Cariocas: mafia types with showy clothes, police in Volkswagens, black women in green trousers sweeping the pavements, men in straw hats selling drinks from drums under their arms, and fair haired kids doing Kung Fu.
In the Consulate there was still no word of my money arriving from England. The New Zealander had obtained his documents by paying money to a 'fixer'.
In the evening I walked to the Anglican Church where I knew they were having a Curry Supper. From the courtyard of the church I stared up at the lights of the shanty town on the mountainside. Women and children were climbing up and down carrying water containers and food. The chaplain was thin, probably in his forties, and had the sort of warm, kindly face and voice you associate with people who have lived among the poor. The chaplain had worked with Indians in the jungle. In his comfortable sitting room I was introduced to the chaplain's smiling wife and to two new Zealanders, Ian and his sister Marylyn, both in their twenties, both on holiday. Ian ran a Christian bookshop in Chile and believed that Pinochet was popular, at least among the rich.
There was a large attendance at the curry supper, mainly business people. And among the throng was Mike, from Guardbridge in Scotland, and his wife Katie. The saintly Mike and Katie offered me a bed in their luxury flat off Copacabana beach. Wonderful people the Scots!
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Saturday 14th
After breakfast with Mike and Katie I strolled along Copacabana beach. And that was where I met a Lieutenant Colonel in the Brazilian airforce who had once been military attache in Tokyo. He told me all about Geisha girls while we enjoyed beers in a bar.
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Sunday 15th
Lunch at Mike and Kate's flat was shared with a Brazilian businessman and his fiance and their small daughter. The Brazilian, who looked like Mussolini, had views on race similar to those of Hitler. He did not like Blacks.
After lunch Mussolini drove us in his Volkswagen up into the forested hills at the back of Rio in the direction of Corcovado, the famous statue of Christ. Through the fog we could make out the dark favelas and beside them the luxurious houses of the rich. The fog thickened and Mussolini's search for Christ became increasingly difficult. The jungle seemed to close in around us and the petrol tank was almost empty. Mussolini gave up and headed back to the centre of town. Here, Mussolini showed us, from the safety of the car, the attractions of the red light district.
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Monday 16th
My money arrived at the Bank of London and South America. Having collected it I guarded it carefully as I set off for the office of Air France. And so, back to London, and, after a few weeks, a new job! That was 1979.
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My memories of Rio: the most supernatural, sensuous, and spellbinding place in this or any parallel universe. Think of the tall dark Tijuca mountains, tall dark tropical trees, tall skyscrapers, the peak of Corcovado surmounted by the statue of Christ, Sugar Loaf mountain, sparkling Guanabara Bay, Copacabana, yellow trams, long-legged girls with dental floss bikini bottoms, seductive carnival music, sambas, street children hoping not to be murdered by the police ..... oil drums, bright blue walls, spiritist statues, corrugated iron, banana trees, washing lines, kids flying kites... You will be haunted by Rio's strange sounding church bells, its mists rolling in from the sea and its beautiful people.
"Being the commander who cut crime in Brixton (2000-2002) and had officers wanting to work there, instead of wanting transfers - his pitch at today's launch in Brixton town hall - is central to his bid to surprise Londoners by beating both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson." - The political life of Brian
In the early 1920s, Cary Grant was in the Bob Pender stage troupe and they took him to the USA.
In the USA, Cary Grant acted at one time as a male escort, for socialites. (Gay For Today: Cary Grant)
In 1931 Cary Grant arrived in Hollywood.
In 1932 Cary Grant met Randolph Scott, and the two shared a rented beach house in Santa Monica for twelve years. Rumours had it that Grant and Scott were gay lovers.
Cary Grant also lived for a time with gay Australian artist Jack Kelly, a set designer professionally known as Orry-Kelly.
Authors Marc Elliot, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley believe that Grant was bisexual.
Higham and Moseley claim that Grant and Scott were seen kissing in a public car park in the 1960s. (Gay For Today: Cary Grant )
In the book Hollywood Gays, Boze Hadleigh quotes homosexual director George Cukor, as saying about the alleged gay relationship between Randolph Scott and cary Grant: 'Randolph will admit it – to a friend.'
There was no big gap between rich and poor. There was no feudal system or fascist elite.
Today, in the remoter parts of the world, we can still find hunter-gatherers; there are, for example, the people of the North Sentinel Island in the Andamans.
There is a dispute in the world of anthropology about whether or not the hunter-gatherers were less violent or more violent than present day humans.
If we look at the world of chimpanzees we may get some clues.
1. Bonobo chimps are peaceful bisexual creatures.
2. Jane Goodall demonstrated that some of the common chimps can get rather violent on occasions. However, it has been argued that it was Jane Goodall's interference with the lives of the chimps that created the violence that she witnessed. (The Anthropik Network » Noble or Savage? Both. (Part 1))
"Chimpanzees in the wild roam widely, rarely confronting each other in direct competition over food. Goodall’s artificial feeding, practiced from 1964 to 1968, introduced direct competition among the apes for the first time. Bunched around the feeding boxes and often frustrated by not obtaining the bananas (which were doled out according to specific schedules), the animals began to engage in more intense forms of competitive, aggressive, and threatening behavior than was known to occur in the wild." (The Anthropik Network » Noble or Savage? Both. (Part 1))
Apparently some of the hunter-gatherers went in for tribal warfare. Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates a warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year as typical of hunter-gatherer societies.
Some people believe Keeley greatly exaggerates the level of violence.
Researchers examined thousands of Native American skeletons and found that those from after Christopher Columbus landed in the New World showed a rate of traumatic injuries more than 50 percent higher than those from before the Europeans arrived.
“Traumatic injuries do increase really significantly,” said Philip L. Walker, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who conducted the study with Richard H. Steckel of Ohio State University.
The findings suggest “Native Americans were involved in more violence after the Europeans arrived than before,” Walker said.
Think of an area where the streets are covered in discarded chewing gum, plastic bags and vomit; an area where young people commit acts of drunken vandalism. You can be pretty sure that there will be no police around. You can be pretty sure that in police HQ there will be too many middle managers and top managers sitting around drinking tea.
Now think of an area where there is a visible police presence; an area where you see your local friendly policemen on patrol.
Some of Scotland's most crime-ridden areas have seen crime rates fall by a fifth since old-fashioned police street patrols were introduced. (bobbies on the beat do cut crime)
In Glasgow, in 2007, serious assaults fell by 38 % in city-centre zones that were given extra police foot patrols at nights and weekends.
Edinburgh has seen a similar success.
Jackie Muller, secretary of the federation's Lothian and Borders branch, is quoted as saying: "My membership are telling me they would be able to give a better service to the public if they were out in the communities in which they serve."
According to The Scotsman newspaper, "much of the cost of upping front-line officer numbers in Glasgow will come from a reduction of middle-management officers, such as superintendents, at Strathclyde Police's headquarters in the city."
The Scottish Government, now run by the Scottish National Party, has said it will fund 500 additional officers, with another 500 being funded by cutting red tape and dissuading other staff from retiring.
Simple huts, like haystacks, little kids with innocent faces and swollen stomachs, a few chickens, some maize, lots of uncultivated land and distant mountains: Zimbabwe, somewhere between Mutare and Harare.
I tried speaking to the bare-foot little kids. They were super polite and super serious looking. Conversation was difficult. Had it been Brazil or Malaysia I could have talked about Princess Diana or Manchester United and they would have smiled. But these Zimbabwean kids, lucky souls, had no TV.
The way of life of these people has no doubt been carefully worked out over thousands of years. They know what to grow and how to grow it. They do not necessarily want the IMF or the World Bank or some multinational company telling them they should be growing tobacco on huge estates. They do not necessarily want the political boundaries and political systems that the Europeans wanted or want.
I felt there was a huge gap between my culture and their culture. And my culture, with its drugs and sleaze and office work from 9 till 5, is not necessarily superior.
Their culture appears simple on the surface, but is not.
Of course the White Man may have brought some good things to Zimbabwe: clinics, schools, fine roads... But some of the White Men treated the Black Zimbabweans with cruelty and contempt.
"They are like little children," said one former White resident (on holiday in Mutare). "The politicians only want to enrich themselves and their families. They'll never be any different." It turned out that I had misunderstood. He was talking about our Westminster politicians, back in London.
With a friend I went to see a witch doctor. They say that witch doctors have much greater success than western doctors, partly because a lot of illness is mental or spiritual. But when I looked at the strange furry/scaly/feathery things tied to the witch doctor I felt out of my depth and retreated.
Beyond Mutare the highland scenery was Scottish: burns, pine trees, steep slopes, and freezing cold nights. Was Africa once joined to Scotland? Does President Mugabe own a castle in Scotland?
Back in Harare I discovered that the capital is not a place to explore on foot. Violent crime has become a serious problem.
There is not the same 'depth of culture' as in Cairo or Marrakech or Cape Town.
The flame trees were gorgeous; and we had a scenic picnic, shared with monkeys, on a smooth round red granite hill.
On the sreets of Harare you will find hungry orphans (AIDS orphans) and even hungry, elderly Whites whose pensions have become worthless. (AIDS? "In many African countries men do not expect to be faithful and often take several wives...sex at truckstops costs less than breakfast.... In Southern Africa...half of all 15-year-olds can expect to die of AIDS... Four out of ten young men in Zimbabwe are HIV positive..." according to Christina Lamb, writing in the Sunday Telegraph.)
The wild life in Zimbabwe was interesting: strange to think that these wildebeest and lions are in a savage battle for survival... Victoria Falls was interesting, although I've seen too many waterfalls on tours. I tried to imagine I was a famous explorer.
SAFETY:
Early in 2001, a group of ex-combatants "descended on the resort town of Victoria Falls...and harassed tourists."
I was harassed once, by an angry young man. I was minding my own business outside a cheap roadside cafe painted white and blue. I don't know what he was shouting at me, but he looked more than angry.
There have been riots around Harare, partly as a result of steep price rises and job losses. Locals find it nearly impossible to get paraffin for heating and lighting. Unemployment stands at 50%. Real incomes have gone down 75% in 10 years. Inflation is 60%. At least 30 opposition supporters and 8 white farmers have been murdered
COMFORT:
Fuel and foreign currency shortages have hurt tourism. There is little foreign exchange left to pay for fuel imports. Zimbabwe allegedly spent $30 million per month on its 'war' in the Congo (DRC). On the other hand, Zimbabwe still has some first class infrastructure and most of the people are very loveable indeed.
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A drink in a Harare hotel with a middle-aged Black called Emmanuel:
"You know," said Emmanuel, "Our country is standing up to the West. Standing up to the New World Order."
"How is that?" I asked.
"You know, 7 million poor Zimbabweans struggle to survive in our rural areas. But 20,000 whites control most of the best land. The people of the New World Order want Africa's land and wealth."
"You mean," I said, "that the Americans want the 20,000 white farmers to keep their land?"
"No, the New World Order people want the White Zimbabwean farmers out."
"To help the rural Black poor?" I asked naively.
"No," said Emmanuel, "so the really big guys can eventually move in and take over African land. The multi-nationals. The really big guys in America."
"Some people have told me the real problem here is the involvement of Zimbabwe in Zaire, the Congo ."
"You know," said Emmanuel, "The Americans want the mineral wealth of Africa and Asia. That's why they topple leaders. If a Third World president won't deal with an American mining company, then he's going to be undermined and toppled."
"But isn't the West trying to help Zimbabwe. What about the IMF?"
"You know," said Emmanuel, "the IMF has made us poor. You take Kenya. The IMF has ruined some of Kenya's industry by insisting on free trade. Mozambique: the IMF ruined the cashew processing by insisting on free trade."
"You think the problem is the New World Order rather than problems within Zimbabwe?"
"Listen," said Emmanuel, "You get corruption everywhere. So why is the new World Order trying to topple our leaders? Not because of corruption here. But because these people want to control us."
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A final drink in a bar; and chat with Nicholas, a wide-bodied middle aged gentleman wearing shorts and a large hat.
"Nice airport," I said.
"Leo Mugabe's company helped build it," said Nicholas, puffing a cigar.
"Leo Mugabe?"
"Part of the President's family. Nephew. Part of the Gushongo clan."
"Did Leo put in the best bid?"
"What do you think? Leo Mugabe runs Joy TV and Zimbabwe's first privately owned mobile phone system. He's chairman of the Zimbabwe football Association. He got the tender for the Harare sewage works and lots of other government projects. Some people say he's a front for his uncle."
"Any other Mugabes?"
"Innocent Mugabe used to run the Central Intelligence Organisation. He died. Oh, there's lots of the family running things. Uncles and cousins. Some become ministers. Some go into business. Some run newspapers."
"What about the government ministers. I saw some headlines in New African."
"There was a scandal when ministers were accused of robbing funds meant to help civil servants. The biggest scandal was when top ministers were accused of looting the war victims compensation fund."
"Did the war victims get any money back?"
"Mugabe put up prices to help pay for that. But the price rises led to riots. ten people got shot dead."
"What about Mugabe's new house?"
"Which one? He has two houses in Borrowdale and properties all over the place. The big one with the Italian marble has been given to Libya's Ghadaffi. Ghadaffi has lots of farms here."
"What about the diamonds in the Congo?"
"Rumour has it that certain top generals have been looting diamonds."
In October 2000 he set up a war avoidance team to carry messages back and forth between himself and the then Minister of Foreign Affairs in Iraq, Tariq Aziz. (Peter Hain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
In May 2005 Hain was appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Although previously a supporter of Irish unity, he has since retreated from this position.
In January 2007, Hain gave an interview to the New Statesman in which he referred to the Bush administration as "the most right-wing American administration, if not ever, then in living memory" and argued that "the neo-con agenda for America has been rejected by the people and I hope that will be the case for the future".[6]
"Hain would have become an MI5 stooge around 1975. Which would entail that the Anti-Nazi League was co-founded and co-led ('77-'82) by an MI5 informant, which, if one thinks about it, makes some sense...
"In 1972 someone sent Peter Hain a letter-bomb, which was opened by his sister and which failed to detonate. Hain believed that it was sent by BOSS (South African intelligence). It may have been BOSS, and it may not, and it may have been intended to scare but not explode, but it may not.
"Whatever, when someone like Peter Hain receives a letter-bomb, some plods from Special Branch come calling with advice on security. It's possible, I think, that thereafter all of Hain's family's mail was first checked for devices by SB, who'd then deliver them to him. SB officers are the footsoldiers of MI5. From being PENO in '69, Hain (and his family) may thus have started receiving SB/MI5 protection from '72 onwards.
"Then, in 1974/5(?), Peter Hain was falsely accused and charged with bank robbery from a Barclays in Putney. The case went to the Old Bailey, and he was acquitted in 1976.
"As with the bomb, Hain believed that BOSS was behind it.
"Again, it may have been BOSS, and it may not - if the effect was to push Hain even further towards SB/MI5, then the latter agency may have been involved.
"It could even have been an MI5-BOSS co-production.
"Whatever - if Hain really believed that BOSS was trying to maim and/or destroy him, his dependence upon the British secrurity services would have grown.
If he was also concerned, say, by the influence of the Trotskyists and Stalinists on the British Left, such as in the anti-apartheid movement in which he was active, it would have been an easy step for him to make, from receiving SB/MI5's on-going protection to passing on information about extremists, quid pro quo.
"Hain was also, and still is, a CND member, another group of then interest to MI5. Considering the likely effect on Hain of receiving the letter-bomb, and then being framed for robbery, and given that the Security Service had had him under surveillance for some time before that, is it entirely too outlandish to raise the possibility that MI5, and not BOSS, was behind both the dud letter-bomb and the Barclays frame-up?
"Anyway, I think the bank-robbery experience may have completed his transition from national security threat to potentially valuable asset.
"If that's right, then Hain would have been in MI5's pocket when the Anti-Nazi League was formed in 1977.
"To me this is quite plausible.
"I think it's even possible that the whole ANL (Anti Nazi league) project was started by MI5, for two purposes - it could use surveillance and informants to keep watch of leftist extremists drawn to the ANL, and it could use the ANL and its supporters to quell the growing popularity of the right-wing National Front.
"For MI5, the Anti-Nazi League operation could have been counted a great success.
"Also in 1977, Hain switched from the Liberals to Labour, and in 1991 he was elected an MP.
"By the end of that decade, he was a Foreign Office minister.
"Among other posts, he's been Leader of the Commons and Northern Ireland Secretary.
"At the FCO, he would have been briefed by MI6 and have read secret reports.
"As Commons Leader, he liased closely with the SS on trying to protect parliament from terrorist attacks. In the occupied six counties, he has political responsibility for the workings of PSNI Special Branch, MI5 and MI6....
"Jung called such turnarounds enantiodromias, the going from one extreme to another. I think Hain's extraordinary transformation from public enemy number one to intelligence insider is best explained by the terrorist campaign conducted against him and his family, by unknown intelligence agencies, between 1972 and '75."
Some people claim that Suharto benefited Indonesia.
However,Indonesia under Suharto made much less progress than its neighbours Singapore and Malaysia.
Indonesia under Suharto spent a very small proportion of its wealth on schools or hospitals or housing for the poor.
Housing for the poor
Visitors to Jakarta during the Suharto years may have seen glitzy skyscrapers being built, but they may not have seen the malnourished children hidden away in the slums or in certain rural areas, and they may not have noticed the killing going on in West Papua or Aceh or East Timor.
Often the Suharto government statistics about progress were as accurate as those from Stalinist Russia.
Malnutrition and TB
The Suharto legacy is a country where many roads are full of potholes, many rural schools look as if they are falling down, many sick children die because their parents cannot afford medicine, many hillsides have been stripped of their trees, and the American trained generals are still pulling the strings.
No money for typhoid medicine
It has often been alleged that Suharto's father was a wealthy Chinese-Indonesian merchant and that Suharto was an illegitimate child.
"The absence of official documentation and certain aspects of Suharto's early life that are inconsistent with that of a Javanese peasant (Suharto received, for example, an education fairly early on), has led to several rumors of Suharto being the illegitimate child of a well-off benefactor, which included a being the child of a Yogyakarta aristocrat or well-off Chinese Indonesian merchant. Western biographer R.E. Elson believes that such rumors cannot be entirely ruled out." - Suharto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Suharto learnt much about militarism from the Japanese army.
During World War II, Suharto worked for the Japanese controlled police force and then for the Japanese-controlled militia, the Peta.
In 1945, with the collapse of Japan, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared the independence of Indonesia. This independence was not accepted by the Dutch or the British and led to conflict. In 1946, Suharto became head of an Indonesian regiment stationed in Yogyakarta.
In 1947 Suharto married Siti Hartinah, a Christian from a well connected family.
Siti Hartinah converted to Islam. She became known as 'Madame Ten Percent', a play on her name, Ibu Tien. When contracts were being given out she reportedly insisted on getting at least ten percent of the proceeds. Later, she was called 'Madame Fifty Percent'. (Ibu Tien Buried Today)
Child labour
In 1949, most of Indonesia was given independence by the Dutch.
Between 1954 and 1959, Brigadier General Suharto was the commander responsible for Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces.
At this time he became friends with Chinese-Indonesian businessmen Liem Sioe Liong and Bob Hasan and was involved with them in various 'business enterprises'.
Suharto reportedly became involved in a 1959 smuggling scandal and he was transferred to the army Staff College in Bandung. Later, Suharto became commander of the key Kostrad regiment(Strategic Reserve). (Suharto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Around 1956, the CIA and Britain's MI6 appear to have decided to topple Indonesia's President Sukarno, partly because he was 'non-aligned' rather than pro-American.
Indonesia did have a communist party, but in the world's biggest Moslem country, it was never likely to do particularly well in elections. The two biggest parties in Indonesia were Sukarno's Partai Nasional Indonesia and the Islamist party Masyumi.
Reportedly, the CIA had right-wing friends within the Indonesian military. (Indonesia 1957-1958 KH)
Suharto was in the right-wing camp.
The CIA and Britain's MI6 began to arm various rebel groups in Indonesia.
In 1958, rebellions began to break out in various parts of Indonesia.
"CIA pilots took to the air to carry out bombing and strafing missions in support of the rebels...
"Sukarno later claimed that on a Sunday morning in April, a plane bombed a ship in the harbor of the island of Ambon-all those aboard losing their lives-as well as hitting a church, which demolished the building and killed everyone inside
"He stated that 700 casualties had resulted from this single run.
"On 15 May, a CIA plane bombed the Ambon marketplace, killing a large number of civilians on their way to church on Ascension Thursday...
"Three days later, during another bombing run over Ambon, a CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, was shot down and captured...
"He was to spend four years as a prisoner in Indonesia before Sukarno acceded to a request from Robert Kennedy for his release.
"Pope was captured carrying a set of incriminating documents, including those which established him as a pilot for the US Air Force and the CIA airline CAT."
The CIA and its friends did their best to undermine the Indonesian economy.
In 1965, some kind of coup took place in Indonesia. By 1966, Suharto had emerged as the country's leader. He became president in 1968.
In the months that followed the coup, army death squads, often recruited from Muslim and Catholic youth groups, murdered up to one million people.
Bali and other parts of Indonesia were awash with blood.
The CIA is reported to have given the Indonesian military lists of people who were to be dealt with.
"The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travellers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies."
Suharto now brought in his New Order government.
The military were to be the people who pulled the strings.
Every institution of any importance was to be dominated by the military. Everyone from cabinet minister to governors to village officials was likely to have a military connection. The military was to be involved in running various profitable businesses.
The USA stopped undermining the economy. Suharto allowed the USA and other western nations to invest and take control of many of the mining and other businesses in Indonesia.
Rural Poverty
The people who became rich were:
1. The indonesian generals
2. Members of Suharto's Golkar Party.
3. Suharto's Chinese-Indonesian business friends.
4. The Suharto family
5. Investers in companies like Freeport, linked to Henry Kissinger, which has a gold mine in Indonesia.
The military and Golkar acted as intermediaries between businesses and the Indonesian government. "This led to bribery, racketeering, and embezzlement. Funds from these practices often flowed to foundations (yayasan) controlled by the Suharto family." [21]
In 1998 Suharto was toppled, apparently by the CIA.
At some point in the 1990s Suharto was seen by some Americans as having become too powerful and too independent minded.
Suharto was giving too many business contracts to his family and Chinese-Indonesian cronies, rather than to American companies like Ford.
Some people in the Pentagon considered the possibility of having a general such as Prabowo or Wiranto or Yuhhoyono take over.
In order to topple Suharto there would need to be riots.
In Indonesia, in the years 1997- 1998, there were riots in various parts of Indonesia. Some riots looked spontaneous and some looked as if they had been planned. (http://www.insideindonesia.org/edit50/riots.htm)
In 1998 one of the key generals was Prabowo, son of Dr. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, a former Finance Minister, said to have once worked with the British and the Americans against Sukarno.
In May 1998, Prabowo was commander of Kostrad, the strategic reserve, the regiment Suharto commanded when he took power in 1965.
Prabowo's friend Muchdi ran Kopassus (special forces) and his friend Sjafrie ran the Jakarta Area Command.
General Wiranto, the overall head of the military, was seen as a rival to Prabowo. The American Defence Secretary, William Cohen, was in Jakarta in January 1998 and he visited both Prabowo and Wiranto.
At the start of May 1998, students were holding peaceful demonstrations on university campuses across the country. They were protesting against massive price rises for fuel and energy, and they were demanding that President Suharto should step down.
On May 12th, students at Jakarta's Trisakti University, many of them the children of the elite, planned to march to parliament to present the government with their demands for reform. The police prevented the students from marching.
Some time after 5pm, uniformed men on motorcycles appeared on the flyover which overlooks Trisakti. Shots rang out. Four students were killed.
Riots of May 13-14
On the 13th of May there were reports of rioting in the area around Trisakti. President Suharto was attending a conference in Egypt and the military top brass went off to Malang in East Java to attend a ceremony.
On the 14th of May, serious rioting took place in the Jakarta area. There were no signs of any uniformed soldiers on the streets.
Deaths
Over 1,000 people died during these Jakarta riots, most having been burnt in malls and supermarkets but some having been shot or beaten.
Alleged involvement of the military in planning the riots
Father Sandyawan Sumardi, a 40-year-old Jesuit priest and son of a police chief, led an independent investigation into the events of May 1998.
A security officer alleged that Kopassus (special forces) officers had ordered the burning down of a bank;
a taxi driver reported hearing a man in a military helicopter encouraging people on the ground to carry out looting;
shop-owners at a Plaza claimed that, before the riots, military officers tried to extract protection money;
a teenager claimed he and thousands of others had been trained as protesters;
a street child alleged that Kopassus officers ordered him and and his friends to become rioters;
there was a report of soldiers being dressed up as students and then taking part in rioting;
eyewitnesses spoke of muscular men with short haircuts arriving in military-style trucks and directing attacks on Chinese homes and businesses.
There were reports of children being encouraged to enter malls and then of the malls being set on fire;
there were allegations that muscular men with short haircuts had gang-raped little Chinese girls and then murdered some of them.
Suharto told he had lost the support of the military
Some of Suharto's former allies deserted him. Wiranto allowed students to occupy Parliament. Reportedly Wiranto reported to Suharto on May 20th that Suharto no longer had the support of the army. Suharto was forced to resign on May 21 and was replaced by Habibie, his Vice President.
The continuing importance of the military
Wiranto remained as chief of the armed forces. Wiranto's troops began removing the students from the parliament building.
One result of the May riots was that the military appeared to remain the power behind the throne. In 2004, General Yudhoyono became president.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born in Chicago, Illinois and was raised in a United Methodist family. Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a son of Welsh and English immigrants
Hugh Ellsworth Rodham was an American textile wholesaler.
He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Hugh S. Rodham and Hannah Jones, English immigrants.
"It seems that the family name of 'Rodham' was once 'Rodomski' and her father’s family came from the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland and settled in England before emigrating to the Chicago area.
"... Hillary was, according to a California State Police report, found naked in bed with a black woman! Wonderful but not a surprise to those who know her. This was written up, and published, by San Francisco ‘Chronicle’ columnist, Herb Caen. When Bill became President, he sent the FBI to seize the report but copies had been made and circulated."
It was a cold end of December night; I was hungry, and the sun had set by the time the train brought me to Venice.
As usual I had no accomodation reserved and all the hotels between the station and the Rialto seemed to be 'completo' full up. The streets were crowded with noisy tourists dressed in gold and fur and all no doubt safely booked into warm hotels. I struggled on from hotel to hotel and began to wonder if the churches would stay open at night.
Then, just past the Rialto, I found a room still vacant. Having unpacked my toothbrush, I hurried off to guzzle down a pizza thick with steaming mozarrela, tomatoes and anchovies.
There was a lady in Rio who thought that in a previous life she had lived in England. That evening I felt some special friendship with Venice. The moon was full as I sauntered across the piazza; lovers were warming themselves under dusky arcades; in a tiny piazzetta, grinning choirboys were juggling with balls; Riva degli Sciavoni had the flashing lights and the music of the carnival. Campo Ruga was silent. I had fond memories of Campo Ruga, but that night no one seemed to be about.
In the light of a sunny winter morning, Campo Ruga revealed itself as a place of quiet activity. Sparrows, pigeons and muzzled dogs moved about among the swirling paper. A rubbish cart was pushed by hand through the throng. Green doors opened to reveal bambini in warm coats and hats. And from a balcony a pretty woman hung out her families pretty washing. Over three years before I had been here, standing on the bridge.
As I approached the tobacconist's shop a cute looking fair-haired girl smiled at me in recognition. My heart took a little leap.This girl was one of Andrina's friends.
She led me down a narrow lane to the house of Andrina. It was a simple working class house with discarded toys and a broken window in the dark narrow hall.
Andrina greeted me warmly. She had Slav good looks; mouth wateringly lovely.
I was given a tour of Venice, and this included St Mark's Square where I was introduced to Andrina's uncle Franco who sells books and postcards at a stall. I was introduced to Andrino's uncle Renato who works as a furniture restorer. Then there was the friend who worked at the carnival and a whole host of others, in various ways inter-related.
Of all the meals I had at Andrina's, the best was on the 31st December. Andrina's father, Carlo, was perhaps a little embarrased about the small size of the house, but he was proud of the family. Andrina acted as my translator, and her translations often began with the words, 'Excuse me sir, I am asking you....' In the kitchen we feasted on chicken soup, pasta with mushrooms, tender roast beef, the best Ruffino wine from Florence, cheese, coffee with brandy, and finally, more brandy. Carlo and Marisa his wife began to sing in accompaniment to a record of gondolier music, and Marisa confided that she came from a gondolier family. We looked at family photographs taken during holidays in Rome and in the Dolomites, and we chatted about Venice and Iran. The family all believed that Venice was the most beautiful of all cities. Marisa, a devout Roman Catholic, liked Iran and Khomeini. Older son, Massimo, pointed out that the Iranian regime executed people for having 'lax' sexual morals. Marisa thought this was good. At midnight we opened a bottle of Spumante wine and ate some cake. Marisa threw her arms around Carlo, and Massimo, and Andrina, and all the others. The evening finished with dancing to the music of Glen Miller.
Andrina? Her mother was not a typical Venetian. Or was she?
~~~
I revisited the islands of Burano, Murano, Torcello, the ever colourful Pellestrina, and Chioggia, but it was to the area around Castello and Campo Ruga that I most liked to return.
Right next to Venice you will find Torcello, an island of nostalgia, green fields , muddy canals, a decayed piazza, small farmhouses, skinny dogs, and a cathedral half Byzantine half Gothic. You can lunch at the expensive, but good,trattoria. Burano - WOW! Don't miss this fabulous island. Gorgeous blazing blue and white and pink and yellow and red and orange fishermen's houses. Orange as blue as the sky. Flaking paint. Subtle effects; with light blues wearing away to show darker blues; in turn wearing away to reveal bottle greens... have some more wine and tell me if you think the campanile is about to fall over. Talk about a leaning tower! It's like a well-lit operetta. Gardens of bougainvillea, women sewing lace, children in boats... Kids used to bathe in the canals here. But now the water is almost solid with muck.
Murano - great, if you like factories.
Pellestrina - a narrow strip of land, fishermen's houses faded by the sun, bathing shacks, and a haunting atmosphere. Stop for some fish and wine.
Chioggia - rougher, uglier, and simpler than Venice, but worth a visit. This is the biggest fishing port in Italy and is full of raucous activity and fish. Here children still swim in the canals, even though the waters are black.
Beautiful boys and girls, la dolce vita and some of the world's top tourist sites, such as Capri's Villa San Michele, haunting Pompeii, ravishing Ravello, William Walton's tropical garden and the dramatic Aragonese castle: that's your trip to Ischia and the Bay of Naples.
Think of erect volcanoes, grand old hotels, topless beaches, swaying palms, mysterious villas, palatial yachts, and the Mafia.
WHO COMES TO THIS AREA?
Ulysses, Aphrodite, Tiberius, Michelangelo, Elizabeth Taylor, Henrik Ibsen, Garibaldi, Graham Greene, Krupp, Visconti, Gore Vidal....
Tourists these days tend to be well-heeled, retired Germans who like to do a lot of walking. Young folks who love the night life of Ibiza or Benidorm might find this place not to their taste.
LA DOLCE VITA?
In the good old days, Italians may not have had much money, but they knew how to smile and flirt and make friends.
According to a recent survey Italians are now the grumpiest people in Europe.
( The international social survey programme collated results from 37 countries. The happiest are the Swiss, of whom only 3.6% are disgruntled. Britain's dissatisfaction figure was 8.5%. Some 27% of Italians are not happy with life and it shows!)
The Mafia?
Today, 60% of businesses in the Naples area are alleged to pay protection money to the local mafia, the Camorra.
The good old days?
Norman Lewis's book "Naples '44" tells what happened towards the end of World War II. Cholera and malaria were widespread; up to one third of the female population was forced into prostitution to survive.
On my third day in Ischia, the morning newspapers had a story about an explosion in Piazza Garibaldi in Naples, and about alleged corruption by Berlusconi, Andreotti and other politicians. Witnesses against Andreotti say that within the Mafia he is known as Uncle Guilio and that he is linked to certain murders. European Commission president Romano Prodi is alleged to have had links to the KGB, Milosevic and the murder of Aldo Moro.
FLIGHT
I flew with a well known package holiday company in a crowded and rather scruffy plane with little leg room.
Naples airport had a Third World feel about it. It took a little while to find the holiday reps at the airport.
HOTEL
A ferry journey of about 45 minutes brought us from Naples to the Island of Ischia where I was staying at the four star Hotel X, located in Ischia's main town.
The hotel is one of the most beautiful in the world.
Guest rooms are set in a collection of villas within the exotic gardens.
The public rooms feature polished marble, terra-cotta floors and the sort of furniture you'd expect to find in an expensive Italian town house.
The basic holiday price for 2 weeks half board was just over £700.
Why so cheap?
1. This was May rather than July. 2. I booked over the internet. 3. The hotel is well inland from the beach and it's a long walk along a busy road to get to the centre of things. Buses can be crowded. 4. My room was relatively small. 5. There was sometimes a package-holiday feel about the hotel - some rude staff at reception, a wine bill that contained many items I had not ordered, breakfast orange juice that seemed to be out of a packet, unhelpful and unfriendly staff at the hotel's health spa. 6. Some local people seem hostile to tourists, especially the British (thanks to the up to 250,000 civilians killed in Iraq since the invasion). 7. Traditionally most tourists to Ischia are Germans and the German economy has reportedly been in some trouble. 8. Italy can be expensive for the British tourist. 9. The Bush/Blair war on Tourism.
Opposite my hotel was a school with a fair amount of graffiti on its walls. The children seemed better behaved than many in Sheffield or London or Manchester, but they did push off and on the buses.
Don't take travel cheques to Italy. My hotel said that they no longer deal with travel cheques. It cost me 11 Euros to change 200 Euros at a bank. Take a plastic card instead.
WHAT TO SEE AND DO
Ischia is a small hilly island with about half a dozen small towns/villages.
It reminds me of some Caribbean islands because of the lush vegetation and steep pointy volcanic hills; but it lacks the joie de vivre of the Caribbean.
Ischia can be seen within a week, but, during a second week, ferry boats can take you to Capri, Procida, Sorrento and Naples.
From Naples you can visit places like Pompeii.
Ischia Town is the best transport centre and is the most suitable place to stay unless you want a very quiet holiday.
ISCHIA TOWN
Ischia Town has an old-fashioned beach area with fishermen's cottages, washing hanging out, and views of the Aragonese castle.
If you're lucky you may hear the excellent town band.
The visually stunning castle is on a small, steep island reached by a causeway. The castle and its surrounding buildings and gardens provide fabulous views of mountains, bays and boats.
Ischia Town has sections of beach which are free and sections which you pay to enter.
Ischia Town's small, colourful port is usually crammed full of ferry boats and expensive yachts. You could imagine you were on St Lucia.
The main shopping streets of Ischia Town have smart boutiques and smart cafes, including a useful internet cafe (123 Corso Colonna).
The hinterland of Ischia Town has some narrow roads and quiet tracks, villas and wild flowers, a small Roman viaduct, some relatively poor houses and the usual graffiti on houses and schools.
MARONTI BEACH
A number 5 bus will whisk you swiftly from Ischia Town through the middle of the island to its destination which is called Maronti. Maronti is possibly the best BEACH on the island, and is within walking distance of the little town called St Angelo.
The number 5 bus leaves from the small bus station at Ischia port and bus tickets can be bought there or at any tobacconist. A ticket which covers 7 days use of local buses costs 15 Euros. Maronti beach is long and backed by low crumbling cliffs. Pallone is a pleasant beach restaurant, built mainly of wood, which overlooks the action on the beach. For 13 Euros I had sardines, fried potatoes, water and wine. A gentleman in a funny hat, a young woman in a short skirt and a young boy wheeling a baby in a pram, provided my entertainment within the restaurant.
WALTON'S GARDEN
What is Victoria Amazonica? She opens near nightfall. Next day she has changed sex and become male.
Victoria Amazonica is a water lily and can be viewed at LA MORTELLA, the huge gardens built on the site of a hillside quarry by composer Sir William Walton and his wife, who both came to live on Ischia in 1949.
The world famous gardens contain many hundreds of rare plants and trees and have views of mountains and of the coastal resort of Forio. There is a tearoom where not-very-happy staff serve weak tea. I recommend the wine.
In the Walton-museum section there are regular concerts.
The gardens are open from April to November on Tuesdays, Thursdays and at weekends, from 9am until 7 pm.
To reach La Mortella, I took an expensive 'rip-off' tour arranged by Thomson holidays, using a local tour company. Their bus arrived late and was driven too fast. The much cheaper alternative is to take a local bus - buses number 1 or 2 or CS which depart from Ischia port. Get off the bus just before it reaches the town of Forio.
FORIO
I took a CD bus to the Ischian town of Forio. Why not walk to Forio? The steep narrow S-shaped roads are not always suited to walking.
Forio had deep litter on the beach and some graffiti on walls. The harbour is undistinguished.
I walked inland from Forio on little country roads but soon came up against signs saying 'private'. The best feature of Forio is the view of the pink-orange mountain with the white-walled villas and the flowers at its base.
Lunch was excellent lentil soup and pasta with tomato sauce in an empty and rather dull restaurant.
CASAMICCIOLA & LACCO AMENO
I walked from Ischia town to the next-door seaside town of Casamicciola which struck me as being a place of road repairs, building works and boring buildings.
I walked on to nearby Lacco Ameno and found this had more character: a pleasant church, boutiques, flowers and a friendly street cafe serving bruschetta with tomatoes, wine and Italian ice-cream.
ST ANGELO
Bus 1 or CD or CS take you to St Angelo, which has become a bit un-natural and boutique-ish. It's superficially pretty, with its little harbour and painted houses. But it has a Disney-feel about it.
MOUNT EPOMEO (789 meters)
Take a CD bus to the village of Serraro Fontana. From the main square, follow the signs for the track leading up the mountain.
PROCIDA
At Ischia Port I bought a ticket for the Caremar ferry to the nearby island of Procida. The carabinieri police at Ischia port look menacing in the extreme - mafia dark glasses, tall leather boots. On the ferry I had a drink in the bar and then looked through the pollution haze towards Vesuvius and various islands.
If Capri seems very wealthy, and Ischia seems well-off, then PROCIDA could be said to be relatively poor and scruffy. It is not the interesting scruffiness of some Italian settlements. The main port has bleak tenements and the usual graffiti and road works.
The main interest is Marina Corricella, a small harbour within walking distance of Procida's port. A seat in a cafe in Marina Corricella can give you a view of the prison and colourful tenements, while you sup vinegary wine.
NAPLES TO POMPEII
The fast aliscafi hydrofoil from Ischia to Naples (Molo Beverello) costs 22 Euros return and is not recommended because of the fixed return time. Much better to get a single on an ordinary Caremar ferry and then your time of return is more flexible.
Once in Naples I walked towards the railway station. Take care and avoid disreputable types hanging around quiet stretches of street near the docks.
Piazza Garibaldi, next the railway station, was deep in stinking garbage and the populace seemed made up of beggar women and evil-looking pimps.
Naples has some of the loveliest and some of the most venal-looking faces in the world.
From the station I took the Circumvesuviana train that heads to Pompeii and Sorrento.
Naples and its surrounds have deteriorated dramatically.
The Circumvesuviana trains and most of the stations are completely covered in graffiti.
My train contained at least one madman and a horde of intimidating young men.
Pompeii was full of sometimes impolite parties of Italian school kids. But Pompeii is still fabulous: acres and acres of Roman streets and buildings.
I did not travel on to Sorrento. I had heard that, like Naples, it also has deteriorated.
CAPRI
Capri was the highlight of my trip. It is a spectacular little island, almost traffic free.
I took the Caremar aliscafi hydrofoil to Capri, a boat journey of 40 minutes, costing about £15 return.
I walked from the port, Marina Grande, up the very steep twisting road to Capri town: wonderful views of villas and flowers and yachts, but a long walk.
I would recommend taking the funicular, instead of walking! Tickets for the funicular are bought at a hut next to the pier (turn right as you exit the pier). You can buy a ticket that will include buses and last all day. The entrance to the funicular is opposite the pier.
This was May, but, unlike in Ischia, Capri Town was crowded with tourists, mainly large tour groups of the portly and elderly, but also a few people with film-star good looks.
From Capri Town I took a bus up to the town of Anacapri. This narrow, steep, z-bend road has been known to suffer from rock falls.
I got off at the first stop in Anacapri, crossed the road, and followed the sign for Villa San Michele.
It's a short walk along a path to one of the world's great sights.
At the age of 18, Swedish doctor and author Axel Munthe visited Capri and decided that some day he would build a house on the island. Its loggias would be full of light, and there would be a small chapel, a vineyard, and old statues in the garden. After practising in Paris and Italy, Munthe became in 1903 physician to the Swedish Royal family.
THE STORY OF SAN MICHELE (1929) is an account of Munthe's experience as a doctor in Paris and Rome, and in semi-retirement at the villa of San Michele on the island of Capri. Both realistic and mystical, the book became a world-wide best seller, one of the most famous books ever written.
Munthe built his villa on the site of a villa of the emperor Tiberius, high up on the rocky ledges just northeast of Anacapri, at the foot of Mount Barbarossa.
Villa san Michele: a villa and garden decorated with beautiful pillars and statues; a curving terrace with views down to Marina Grande.
At the other end of Capri is Villa Jovis to which Roman emperor Tiberius retired in 27 AD, allegedly to live a life of vice and debauchery.
To get there, start at the main square in Capri Town. The route is free of motor traffic. Follow Via Botteghe out of the square. There are signposts.
It's about a half hour walk up gentle slopes.
You pass wonderful villas with beautiful gardens and have views of distant islands.
Villa Jovis is a bit of a ruin but it only costs 2 Euros to get in.
The gardens next to the vill have some of the world's most amazing views - of cliffs and stacks and distant domes and distant mountains.
Close to Villa Jovis is a gorgeous little open-air restaurant where you can enjoy wine and mozarrelo with tomatoes.
The mainstream media would like us to believe that the Shah was overthrown by People Power and that the CIA and MI6 were taken by surprise.
However, there is evidence that the CIA and MI6 toppled the Shah because he had become too much of a nationalist, like Nasser, and was not following instructions on oil or even opium.
The CIA did not want left-wing democrats taking over from the Shah as they might not be easy to control. So, reportedly, the CIA allowed the Ayatollahs to take over.
Radio Free Iran claimed that while at Qom, the Ayatollah Khomeini received a "monthly stipend from the British, and he is in constant contact with his masters, the British." The British, Muslim Terrorism and September 11
On 19 January 1980, the International Herald Tribune reported that the Shah had said, two years before he was overthrown, that he had heard from two different sources connected with oil companies that the regime in Iran would change.
‘We believe that there was a plan to ensure less oil was offered to the world markets in order to bring about a price,’ said the Shah. ‘One country was to be chosen for the sacrifice... It seems that the country chosen to drop its oil production was mine.’ webgardian: Shah:Oil Companies Helped to Oust Him
The Shah's nationalist policies were making him more popular in Iran and making his country more independent and more powerful. This worried the CIA and MI6.
1. The Shah bought land from the upper classes and, along with the crown's own land, sold it back cheaply to tenant farmers. Over one a half million people to became land owners, thus ending the old feudal system.
2.The Shah allowed women the right to vote. He brought an end to the wearing of the veil.
3. He developed plans for a $90 billion nuclear power program.
4. The Shah signed petroleum agreements with ENI, the Italian oil company.
5. He began to close down the opium industry. This had been created during the days of British influence.
Coleman believes that the US government toppled the Shah of Iran.
He writes:
Why was the Shah deposed...? In a word, because of DRUGS. The Shah had clamped down and virtually put an end to the immensely lucrative opium trade being conducted out of Iran by the British. At the time that the Shah took over in Iran, there were already one million opium/heroin addicts.
This the British would not tolerate, so they sent the United States to do their dirty work for them in terms of the “special relationship” between the two countries.
When Khomeini took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, arms sales by the United States, which had begun with the Shah, were not discontinued...
After 1984, Khomeini’s liberal attitude toward opium had increased the number of addicts to 2 million, according to United Nations and World Health Organization statistics.
Both President Carter and his successor, Ronald Reagan, willingly and with full knowledge of what was at stake, went on supplying arms to Iran even while American hostages languished in captivity...
The arms trade with Iran was sealed at a meeting between Cyrus Vance... and Dr. Hashemi, which resulted in the U.S. Air Force beginning an immediate airlift of arms to Iran, carried on even at the height of the hostage crisis the arms came from U.S. Army stockpiles in Germany and some were even flown directly from the United States with refueling stops at the Azores.
With the advent of Khomeini... opium production skyrocketed. By 1984 Iran’s opium production exceeded 650 metric tons of opium per annum.... Iran presently rivals the Golden Triangle in the volume of opium produced.
The role of the Moslem Brotherhood and the Ayatollahs
(Sources used in the article: The Biography of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, jebhemelli.org Killing Hope - U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, William Blum, 1995 MI6 - Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Stephen Dorril, 2000)
Prior to World War II, British Intelligence cultivated ties with the Brotherhood through agent Freya Stark, the British adventurer and writer... The Muslim Brotherhood spread throughout the Muslim world and has evolved into something like a Muslim equivalent of the West's Masonic brotherhood... "According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955... 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 signalled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces." (Blum)
The most noteworthy success of the Islamic movement during this time was of course the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the installation of the Ayatollah Khomeini as the Islamic dictator. British Intelligence had used their contacts with Iran's mullahs and ayatollahs to help overthrow Mossadegh and install the Shah back in 1953, and these contacts were maintained and used again to overthrow the Shah when his regime fell out of favor.
The Establishment history of Iran's Islamic Revolution is that Khomeini's revolt was spontaneous and populist, and that it overthrew a repressive dictatorship that was hated by the people but supported wholeheartedly by the United States. It is true that the Shah's government was not a democracy and that his secret service, trained by the CIA, was one of the most effective intelligence organizations in the world.
But what is not reported is that prior to the British-sponsored massive public relations campaign on behalf of the Ayatollah the government of the Shah was loved by the vast majority of the population.
After taking over from Mossadegh the Shah began to push forward a number of nationalist policies that increased his popularity at home but, in some cases, worried the Anglo-American Establishment.
First, he signed petroleum agreements with ENI, the Italian oil company.
Then in 1963 he pushed forward on a series of popular reforms that became known as the White Revolution.
The Shah evolved into a nationalist whose path paralleled that of Nasser far too much for the Establishment's liking:
- He bought land from the upper classes and, along with the crown's own land, sold it back cheaply to tenant farmers, allowing over one a half million people to become land owners and ending the old feudal system.
- He allowed women the right to vote, and brought an end to the wearing of the veil, which were "Westernizing" moves unwelcomed by the religious sector.
- He pushed forward on a $90 billion nuclear power program.
- He moved to shut down the lucrative opium industry that had been created during the days of British Empire control that had been running for a hundred years....
The attack on the Shah's government came through the Muslim Brotherhood and through the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, supported and manipulated by British Intelligence...
Dr. John Coleman, a former British Intelligence agent... states in his report on Iran's Islamic Revolution (11) that the Muslim Brotherhood was created by "the great names of British Middle East intelligence" ...and that their mission was to "keep the Middle East backward so that its natural resource, oil, could continue to be looted..."
Dr. Coleman writes that in 1980 the broadcasts of Radio Free Iran divided the enemies of the Shah into four categories: 1. Iranian politicians bought by the Israeli Shin Bet, 2. The CIA's network of agents, 3. The feudal landowners, 4. The Freemasons and the Muslim Brotherhood (viewed as the same enemy).
In his report Dr. Coleman writes that in Iran, "At one time there was even a joke about the mullahs being stamped 'made in Britain.'" When the Shah introduced his plan for modernization in 1963 the Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the leader of the religious opposition. Up until his exile from Iran in 1964, Khomeini was based at the religious city of Qom. Dr. Coleman relates that Radio Free Iran claimed that while at Qom Khomeini received a "monthly stipend from the British, and he is in constant contact with his masters, the British."
On February 1st, 1979, two weeks after the Shah's departure, Khomeini made a triumphant return to Iran. The BBC's John Simpson was on the plane that carried him back from Paris. aangirfan: BBC links to MI6?
"Votes cast in New Hampshire's Democratic and Republican presidential primaries will undergo a hand recount, after two candidates who garnered little support here questioned the results. The Democratic recount was requested by Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who won about 1 percent of the vote in Tuesday's primary." - Concord Monitor
Monzer al-Kassar, born in Syria in 1945, is known as the "Prince of Marbella."
Kassar is married to a sister of Ali Issa Dubah, a former chief of Syrian intelligence, and a close associate of Rifat Assad, the brother of Syria's former President Hafez Assad.
Kassar is said to have been a CIA asset, involved with Colonel Oliver North and General Richard Secord. ('Confession of an Iranian Terror Czar')
Reportedly, Rifat Assad, 'the Syrian boss of the Lebanese heroin industry', and Monzer al-Kassar took over Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in 1975 with the help of the Syrian Army.
On board Pan Am 103, on 21 December 1988, were Major Charles McKee, of the the US Defence Intelligence Agency in Beirut, and Matthew Gannon, CIA Deputy Station Chief in Beirut.
Reportedly Al-Kassar 'was part of the secret network run by US Lt. Colonel Oliver North.'
Outraged that COREA was doing business with a Syrian 'who made money from drugs, arms and terrorism', the McKee team reportedly 'decided to fly to CIA HQ in Virginia to expose COREA'.
They flew on Pan Am flight 103 which came down over Lockerbie.
It has been alleged that Kassar has received regular CIA money deposited to his credit at the Katherein Bank, Vienna (A/c No. 50307495) and at the Swiss Bank Corporation in Geneva (A/c No. 510230C-86). ('Confession of an Iranian Terror Czar')
Kassar is said to be a very major arms and drugs smuggler.
In 1992, al-Kassar made arms sales in the millions of dollars to Croatia, Bosnia and Somalia, violating United Nations arms embargoes to all three countries.
According to the US Drugs Enforcement Agency, Al-Kassar imports 20 % of the heroin that comes to the United States. (FTR-109 Monzer Al-Kassar & Co)
In 1992, the Spanish government arrested Kassar for his alleged involvement in the Achille Lauro hijacking. In 1995, and he was found not guilty on all charges.
In July 2006, the government of Iraq placed Kassar at number 26 on their "most wanted" list, calling him one of the main suppliers for the Iraqi insurgents.
On 8 June 2007, the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Administration) announced the arrest in Spain of Monzer al Kassar. This was said to be linked to arms sales to rebels in Colombia.
Kassar was arrested just days before the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was granted a second extraordinary appeal and 'just days after Blair went to Tripoli to negotiate a deal that would save him the embarrassment of a fresh appeal.' ('Confession of an Iranian Terror Czar')
The Lockerbie Bombing (PanAm 103) appears to be about the attempt to silence Major Charles McKee (US Defence Intelligence Agency) and his team who reportedly had gathered evidence of CIA drug smuggling.
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According to Juval Aviv, the Lockerbie investigator for Pan Am, McKee's team discovered the illegal CIA drug operation and refused to participate. According to Aviv, McKee contacted the CIA headquarters but got no reply. McKee and Gannon, ‘against orders... decided to fly home to blow the whistle.’
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According to the BBC: BBC News WORLD Lockerbie: Conspiracy theories "An internal investigation by Pan Am ... is believed to have concluded that the bomb was not aimed at the killing of Americans in general, but was targeted specifically to kill a small band of DIA operatives that had uncovered a drugs ring run by a 'rogue' CIA unit in Lebanon... The drugs-ring and the connection to Hezbollah is said to have been set up by Israeli Mossad agents."
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Minutes before flight 103 took off from London's Heathrow airport, FBI Assistant Director Oliver 'Buck' Revell took his son and daughter-in-law off the plane. [1001]
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In the past, the CIA wanted to blame Libya for the Lockerbie bombing and reportedly faked the evidence against Libya. Now it might be happy to blame Iran; and might be happy to fake the evidence?
The Lockerbie story involves alleged Syrian drug smuggler Monzer Al Kassar, who has allegedly been a CIA asset. Kassar was arrested in June 2007.
The Lockerbie story may involve an Iranian defector.
And there may be links to Argentina.
In 'Confession of an Iranian Terror Czar', 11 January 2008, Dr. De Braeckeleer writes about Iranian 'Brigadier General' Ahmad Behbahani and Lockerbie.
The following makes use of what Dr. De Braeckeleer' (The GaiaPost) a professor of physics & international humanitarian law, has written.
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On 24 May 2000, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCR) claimed that a Brigadier General Ahmad Behbahani had defected from Iran to Turkey.
(In 2002 it was the NCR that claimed to have exposed two Iranian secret nuclear facilities located at Natanz and Istaphan.)
The NCR alleged that Behbahani had first hand information about Iran sponsored terrorism, including the 1988 Lockerbie bombing (PanAm 103).
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Now, you may ask:
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1. Why would the Iranians want to kill Major Charles McKee and his team who were apparently going to blow the whistle on drug smuggling?
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2. And, why did the CIA appear to know in advance that PanAm 103 was going to be brought down?
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After the crash, a member of a mountain rescue team said: "We arrived within two hours [of the crash]. We found Americans already there." [1023] According to George Stobbs, a Lockerbie police inspector, "[I] started to set up a control room, and [between] eleven o'clock and midnight, there was a member of the FBI in the office..." [1024]
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3. And why did the CIA apparently help the bomb maker? Reportedly bomb maker Marwan Abdel Razzack Khreeshat had been arrested and one of his bombs seized. Then Khreesat was mysteriously released. [1009]
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Former CIA agent Oswald Le Winter stated, "…pressure had come from Bonn… from the U.S. Embassy in Bonn… to release Khreesat." [1010]
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Reportedly, Khreesat worked for U.S. intelligence. [1011]
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In June 2000, America television news program "60 Minutes" investigated the story of the Behbahani defection. CBS made use of Robert Baer, a former CIA officer (suspected by some of being a disinformation agent for Mossad or the CIA).
(In 2000, the USA was wanting to blame Libya for Lockerbie. Israel had a different point of view!)
"If his story can be confirmed... it would not only disrupt the trial of the two Libyans charged with that bombing, it could interfere with the Clinton administration's efforts at relaxing and improving relations with Iran," warned CBS on June 4, 2000.
Turkish officials refused to allow the CBS team to meet the man claiming to be Behbahani. However, Hakakian, a member of the CBS team, reportedly managed to smuggle herself into the place where Behbahani was staying. She says she is convinced that Behbahani was a genuine defector. "He had fallen out of favor with the Iranian officials, with the government of Iran, and he just wanted to get back at them, at any cost."
Robert baer (who may be a disinformation agent) said about Behbahani:
"He's the only person that has tied Libya and Iran into Pan Am 103, into the Lockerbie bombing. This is the first authoritative source that I've ever heard that connected the two countries together."
In July 1997, German prosecutors interviewed Abolghasem Mesbahi, 'an alias used by a former high ranking Iranian intelligence agent'.
Reportedly, Mesbahi claimed that Iran was behind the 1988 Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am 103). Tehran dismissed this testimony as part of an anti-Iran campaign by the German media.
Mesbahi told investigators that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal, 'a Palestinian guerrilla leader', to carry out the Lockerbie bombing.
According to Mesbahi, Iran planned the attack as revenge after the U.S. cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iran Air Airbus over the Strait of Hormuz in 1988.
Mesbahi alleged that the bomb came from Frankfurt but was loaded onto Pan Am 103 in London.
Mesbahi said that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini personally ordered the revenge attack and that Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati had carried out the planning with Libya and guerrilla leader Abu Nidal.
The CIA stated that it had never heard of Behbahani. The CBS program said the CIA denied knowledge of Behbahani.
The Iranian government said:
1. The defector was not General Ahmad Behbahani.
2. It had never employed a man named Ahmad Behbahani.
3. The defector was Shahram Beladi Behbahani, an escaped convict, who had been imprisoned for armed robbery in 1991, and who had worked with the Iranian opposition Mujahedeen Khalq until 1998.
4. Behbahani might have fabricated his accusations to gain asylum.
The NCR then claimed that Shahram ( also known as Mehdi) Beladi-Behbahani was the younger brother of General Behbahani.
Reportedly, in 1992, Shahram had been arrested in Iraq and provided much information about his older brother. Shahram was then returned to Iran in 1998.
Speaking on behalf of the PFLP-GC, Ahmed Jibril stated that Behbahani's claims were fabricated: "This charge against the PFLP-GC is not new. Whenever they need to pressure the Palestinian opposition, they revive this claim," declared Jibril.
Major Khalil Tunayb, a former chief of intelligence for the PFLP-GC, is said to have confirmed the involvement of the PFLP-GC in the lockerbie Bombing.
In 1992, Tunayb reportedly stated that Khalid Nazir Jafaar had been used by the PFLP-GC as an unwitting accomplice to get the bomb bag aboard Flight 103.
Jafaar was reportedly working in drug operations for the DEA and CIA.
Jibril and Jafaar were reportedly in rival drug organizations.
What age was Behbahani at the time of Lockerbie?
U.S. intelligence reports seem to suggest that he would have been about 20 years old at the time of the Lockerbie bombing and thus too young to have been in charge of such an operation.
CIA debriefers were finally allowed to interview 'the refugee'.
They dismissed him as an imposter.
According to a 1996 report from the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, during the Rafsanjani presidency (1989-1997), General Behbahani served as head of the Intelligence Section in the President's Office.
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was elected the first president of Iran's Islamic Republic. On July 1981, he fled to France. In 2000, Bani-Sadr reportedly confirmed that General Behbahani had left Iran in 2000 and that he had sought refuge in Turkey.
Allegations Over Lockerbie (1988)
Reportedly, General Behbahani alleged that:
1. The Lockerbie bombing was carried out in retaliation for the 1988, downing of an Iran Air passenger jet by the U.S.S. Vincennes in the Persian Gulf
2. The radical Palestinian terrorist group PFLP-GC (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine?General Command), headed by Ahmed Jibril, was contracted to make the bomb.
3. Libyan intelligence operatives were recruited to carry out the attack.
4. The explosives used in the Lockerbie bombing were transferred through the Frankfurt international airport by an Iranian intelligence agent, Hossein Marvastizadeh, who was then in charge of security for the Iran Air Office.
Reportedly, the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (in German: Bundeskriminalamt or BKA), working with German intelligence, established that the bomb had been carried to Frankfurt from Damascus via Cyprus.
It has also been alleged that, two days after the downing of Pan Am 103, Israeli intelligence intercepted a phone call from the Interior Ministry in Teheran to the Iranian embassy in Beirut. During the conversation, the ambassador was congratulated for the "successful operation" and was told to hand over to the PFLP-GC the remaining funds.
Neither Israel nor the PLO has ever accepted the conclusion of the Lockerbie trial.
Allegations Over Buenos Aires Bombings (1992 - 1994)
On March 17 1992, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killed 32 people. On July 18 1994, the bombing of a Jewish centre (AMIA) killed 85 people.
Reportedly, General Behbahani claimed that Iran masterminded both bombings, with the assistance of Jibril and Libyan agents.
Mesbahi had said that the operation was led by, the cultural attache of the Iranian Embassy.
"One cell focused on cooperating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack while another devoted itself to obtaining the explosives in Brazil" reported the New York Times.
Mesbahi also accused then President Carlos Menem of accepting a U.S.$10 million bribe to obstruct the investigation.
According to a report of the Argentina State Intelligence Agency, there could be a "Syrian connection" to the bombing of the Israeli embassy and the AMIA building, through the Syrian, Monzer al-Kassar.
Khobar Bombing (1996)
Reportedly, Behbahani claimed that Iran masterminded the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers in saudi Arabia in 1996.
The Kassar - Menem Connection
Reportedly, Monzer al-Kassar is a Syrian arms and drugs smuggler.
Reportedly, Rifat Assad, 'the Syrian boss of the Lebanese heroin industry', and Monzer al-Kassar 'took over the Bekaa Valley in 1975 with the help of the Syrian Army'.
Kassar has reportedly been involved with Colonel Oliver North and General Richard Secord (Iran-Contra); the International Bank for Credit and Commerce (BCCI); the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and its leader, Ahmad Jibril, and others.
It has been alleged that Monzer al-Kassar is a CIA asset. It has been alleged that Kassar has received regular CIA money deposited to his credit at the Katherein Bank, Vienna (A/c No. 50307495) and at the Swiss Bank Corporation in Geneva (A/c No. 510230C-86).
Kassar and Argentine President Carlos Menem have the same Syrian connections. Their parents were from the same city in Syria, Yabroud.
Al Kassar is a cousin to Menem's former wife, Zulema Yoma, also of Syrian origin.
Kassar was officially appointed arms dealer for the Menem Government.
The Kassar - Lockerbie Connection
In the late 80s, Kassar was reportedly running a heroin smuggling operation. Drugs from Lebanon were flown, via germany, to the USA, reportedly with the approval of the intelligence agencies of the USA and Germany.
It has been reported that the al-Kassar drug-smuggling agents were employed to put the bomb onto Pan Am 103.
Charles McKee and four other members of his investigative team died on Pan Am 103.
Alleged CIA asset Kassar 'had the means and motive'.
The Mysterious Arrest of Monzer al-Kazaar (June 2007)
On 8 June 2007, the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Administration) announced the arrest in Spain of Monzer al Kassar.
This was said to be linked to arms sales to rebels in Colombia.
Kassar was arrested just days before the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was granted a second extraordinary appeal and 'just days after Blair went to Tripoli to negotiate a deal that would save him the embarrassment of a fresh appeal.'
The Muslim Brotherhood, the CIA and 9 11
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