London 9/11 Truth double billing 9th & 13th July:

1) Monday 9th July, 7.30 Another chance to hear the sensational
personal testimony of WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ, survivor & hero of 9/11, who
cannot be dismissed as a 'conspiracy theorist' because HE WAS THERE!
Bring your friends who still believe the official story and help give
William a rousing send-off from London as he departs on the European leg
of his tour;

2) Friday 13th July, 7.00 'Creating Terror': a lateral look at 9/11,
7/7 and the War on Terror, with NAFEEZ AHMED, author of 'The War on
Truth' & 'The London Bombings'. An opportunity to take a rain-check on
the WOT on the 2nd anniversary of 7/7, in the light of the latest
extraordinary goings-on in the UK.

Both events are at the Indian YMCA, Mahatma Gandhi Hall, 41 Fitzroy
Square, London W1 (Warren St or Great Portland St tube). Admission FREE.

EDIT: Article updated 8:25 pm Central Time. (In this new piece, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed analyzes the latest foiled "terrorist" events in the UK, and uncovers a familiar series of anomalies. -r.)

Whose Bombs?

© Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

How to understand the attempted but largely failed terrorist plots uncovered since last Friday? Police officers on June 29 dismantled two car bombs made from gas canisters, gasoline and nails, parked in central London’s major theatre and shopping districts. A day later, two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee, filled with flammable material, into a terminal entrance at Glasgow airport. The series of attempted attacks follows hot on the heels of an attempted al-Qaeda attack in the United States earlier in June.

The chronology requires further probing, and indeed, preliminary analysis raises some unresolved questions.

"The American empire is imploding and going down, it is already visible before our eyes. The ideological and the political currency and cachet of this government... it's disgraced around the world. The American government is hated more than at any time in my lifetime, so we really have an empire that's in a slow-motion decline and it will decline. My two worries are... they are going to do a lot of bloodshed, a lot of wreckage before it goes down, and that what stands to replace them is the Chinese empire, and the Chinese empire is a lot more experienced than the American empire, which would be rather parvenue by Chinese standards. "
- Prof. John McMurtry.

I've blogged a couple of times now about a forthcoming documentary from the Australian production company, Upstream Media, called Shadowplay. I'm happy to report that Shadowplay is finally coming to fruition due to the dedicated work of Upstream's Gillian Norman. Her long-distance co-producer is Ian Woods of Global Outlook.

Thanks in part to donations from visitors of 911blogger, Shadowplay is emerging as a strong piece with a serious focus on 9/11 and the decline of the American empire.

The Strategy of Tension

We are at War

against International Terrorism,

defending our Values

and our Civilization.

Western anti-terror legislation does not allow the state to be considered in any way culpable for terrorist activities. As far as our elected representatives are concerned, terrorism is a problem of loosely associated groups of reactionary fanatics “attacking our freedoms”. The assumption, never explicitly stated for then it would be revealed, and easily and permanently ridiculed, is that the state is innocent, immune to indulging in such barbaric practices. Written into the rule of law itself, this assumption posits the state as a paternal Fuhrer, a God figure whom we must all entrust our lives and liberties to.

Yet whichever way you look at it, international terrorism has its origins in the state itself. There are many ways of understanding this, but perhaps the most pertinent for our purposes is contemporary history. We don’t need to go very far back either. Only twenty odd years, to the era of the Cold War, when we were also getting Trigger-Happy trying to defend the “Free World” from the “Evil Empire” of International Communism, as Ronald Reagan put it so aptly.

The “strategy of tension” denotes a highly secretive series of interconnected covert operations conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy of tension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’t learn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

"By late 1918, stalemate on the Western Front and the entry of America into the war forced Germany and the Central Powers to accept Wilson's terms for peace. The subsequent Paris Peace Conference of 1919 resulted in the harsh Treaty of Versailles...

Attending the Paris peace conference were President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisers, Colonel House, bankers Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch, and almost two dozen members of "the Inquiry." The conference attendees embraced Wilson's plan for peace, including the formation of a League of Nations. However, under American law, the covenant had to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which failed to do so, apparently distrusting any supernational organization.

Undaunted, Colonel House, along with both British and American peace conference delegates, met in Paris's Majestic Hotel on May 30, 1919, and resolved to form an "Institute of International Affairs," with one branch in the United States and one in England. The English branch became the Royal Institute of International Affairs. This institute was to guide public opinion toward acceptance of one-world government or globalism." (1)

Nafeez Ahmed gave an excellent talk last month in London that takes a "big picture" look at international terrorism and 9/11's place in that spectrum.

Reposting from Nafeez's blog:

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Well, it's good to be back online again. And lots has happened since my last post. A few weeks ago I did a talk in Maida Vale, which has been received with some interest in certain circles. Here's a brief description of the talk as advertised by the venue, Islamic Centre England:

"Nafeez will give an introduction into the covert intelligence operations, economic intrigues and rampant political corruption that have dominated Western 'national security' policies since the end of the Second World War. Using newly declassified secret government files and other reliable documentation, Nafeez will reveal the official deceit that justified Anglo-American imperial expansion during the Cold War, post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods. He will lay bare the dynamics behind historical and current US and British militarism, its overarching goals, and the escalating political, economic and ecological crises generated by the current global imperial system."

The talk was recorded in full, including the Q & A session, by the London Sound Posse, and is available online here.

(Streaming here.)

(Edit: looks like Nafeez wasn't on the show today, but Abrahamson was on.)

Alex welcomes Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) in London to discuss possible recent false-flag terror attacks as well as new developments in the 9/11 Truth Movement

infowars

Live streams:
http://www.infowars.com/listen.html#gcn

Later Alex speaks with independent journalist, researcher, and the editor of False Flag News, Daniel Abrahamson, to discuss upcoming war games going on worldwide and how they have been used in the past to conceal government sponsored terror attacks.

Whose War on Whose Terror?

In the name of security -- that is in the name of defending our security, the security of you and me, the British public -- the government has systematically erected a vast legal apparatus of social control, which in both principle and practice violates our most cherished and hard-won human rights and civil liberties.

State Totalization

Ironically, the government has quite cynically used the law, to violate the very rule of law itself. The overarching direction of the anti terror and civil contingency laws is simple:

1) broadening the scope of activity of the police and intelligence agencies and their ability to not only monitor individuals in both their public and private lives; but also proliferating the array of instruments and pretexts available to them to take punitive action, be it through indefinite detention; obtaining convictions using so-called ‘secret’ evidence whose validity cannot be impartially assessed; deportation; the appropriation of private property, at will, in conditions deemed by the government to constitute civil emergencies, etc.

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM: THE SECRET HISTORY -- 9/11, 7/7, AND BEYOND.

Lecture by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006)

Sunday 12th November 2006

Starts at 18:00hr.

Venue: Islamic Centre of England, 140 Maida Vale, London W1 9QB Tel 020 76045500 [Nearest Tube Station, Kilburn on Bakerloo line]

Nafeez will give an introduction into the covert intelligence operations, economic intrigues and rampant political corruption that have dominated Western "national security" policies since the end of the Second World War. Using newly declassified secret government files and other reliable documentation, Nafeez will reveal the official deceit that justified Anglo-American imperial expansion during the Cold War, post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods. He will lay bare the dynamics behind historical and current US and British militarism, its overarching goals, and the escalating political, economic and ecological crises generated by the current global imperial system.

(This may seem off topic, but stigmatizing Muslims generally, and perpetuating that stigmatization is indeed a cultural phenomenon that ebbs and flows in the wake of 9/11. -r.)

The Muslim Problem

by Nafeez Ahmed

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Muslims, it seems, are a problem. No, I should rephrase that. Muslims, it seems, are perhaps the problem of our times. Or at least one might be forgiven for believing that after the last few weeks and months. We've just had Jack Straw, the Leader of the House of Commons, and former Foreign and Home Secretary, tell us that Muslim women who cover the face with a veil or niqab make community relations "more difficult." And this is because, he says, concealing the face is "a visible statement of separation and difference."

So what is Straw saying? He's not just saying that he finds it "uncomfortable" to talk to a Muslim woman whose face he can't see. He's saying that the fact that some Muslim women choose to cover their face is a direct cause of communal tension, and a confirmation from Muslim women themselves that they indeed are different, and do not wish to engage in society.

Straw later went on to elaborate that he'd rather those Muslim women who wear the veil simply don't do so at all.

Straw's little outburst comes hot on the heels of a series of remarks, observations and political maneuverings consistently pointing at the various problems that Muslim pose to British, and western, society. In August, we had the 'liquid bomb' plot which both former and active military and intelligence experts have found to be either impossible or barely existing.

Pakistan and the Terror Nexus

Poor old General Musharraf. His PR trip trying to rehabilitate the image of Pakistan around the world appears to have been slightly scuppered by the leak of the now widely-reported UK Defence Academy paper. Notwithstanding the predictable chorus of denial from the corridors of power, namely, from those who for all intents and purposes stand accused (at the current time Musharraf, Blair, Bush, etc.), the leaked report is entirely consistent with a wealth of evidence in the public record.

The leaked report, authored by a British intelligence official with a military background, is based on interviews with Pakistani Army officers and academics. BBC News has flagged-up one of the most important sections of the document, which says:

The Army's dual role in combating terrorism and at the same time promoting the MMA and so indirectly supporting the Taliban (through the ISI) is coming under closer and closer international scrutiny. Pakistan is not currently stable but on the edge of chaos.

[The West has] turned a blind eye towards existing instability and the indirect protection of Al Qaeda and promotion of terrorism.

Indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism - whether in London on 7/7 or in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The US/UK cannot begin to turn the tide until they identify the real enemies from attacking ideas tactically - and seek to put in place a more just vision. This will require Pakistan to move away from Army rule and for the ISI to be dismantled and more significantly something to be put in its place.

Musharraf knows that time is running out for him...

Continued...

Biting Mangos... and Bullets: from Bradford to Bangladesh -- a Tribute to my Uncle

"...We got back from Bradford on Sunday evening. I had forgotten my mobile at home, and had a backlog of messages, one from my Dad, so I called him back. He had very bad news.

My uncle in Bangladesh had been shot on Saturday morning while I was speaking on my panel in Bradford. A nationally-respected professor of political science at Dhaka University, Dr. Aftab Ahmed, had been attacked in his own home on the university premises by unidentified gun-men, who had pushed their way into the apartment and shot him four times at close range in the upper body, in the presence of his wife (my aunt) and 9-year old disabled daughter (my cousin).

This evening, at around 8 pm, my Dad called to let me know that my uncle passed away earlier this morning. He had been recently demoted from a government-appointed post as Vice-Chancellor at Bangladesh's National University. In that position, he had tackled entrenched issues of political corruption and bribery, the legacy of the previous Allawi League government, when hundreds of university staff had been systematically recruited solely for their political support of the govt, as opposed to their merits as teachers. In a politically explosive and unpopular move, he had fired all staff recruited on the basis of corruption and moved to revitalize academic standards in university recruitment.

This wasn't the first time my uncle had made enemies. He was well-known as a Marxist dissident, and had often been imprisoned by previous governments for his loud opposition and participation in demonstrations and strikes. In 1995, he co-authored a powerful critique of the lack of accountability Bangladesh's purportedly democratic institutions, warning of "the intransigent attitude of the bureaucracy" and highlighting "the lack of willingness and ability ofMPs to seriously enquire into government policies and operations."

In another notorious episode, my uncle had made a few off-hand televised remarks suggesting the Bangladeshi national anthem be amended for a new time, and to give new impetus to the people. He was harshly criticized by hardline nationalists in a concerted campaign that almost lost him his job. But such things never bothered him.

My uncle was a courageous academic who stuck by his principles, and spoke what he believed. For unswervingly doing what he was convinced was just, he was murdered in a brutal assassination, unprecedented in the history of Bangladesh. As the world turns and the newsbites chatter, I pray for uncle's soul, and hope that his legacy of political activism on behalf of freedom and, always, against oppression and corruption, will be carried forward in Bangladesh, this beleaguered icon of Third World devastation from which I am descended. To those out there who believe, please pray with me..."

Ahmed's post continued...

------------------------------------------------------------------

911blogger regulars,

Instead of clogging Ahmed's inbox and blogger account with messages, please feel free to post your condolences in the comments thread below, and I'll make sure Ahmed sees this.

Looks like that dissident bone runs in the family.

My deepest sympathy to you and your family, Nafeez. I hope that justice is served on the assassins.

------------------------------------------------------------------

In case you want to send something more tactile, here is an address to send cards, etc.;

Institute for Policy Research & Development
Suite 301, 20 Harewood Avenue
London, England
NW1 6JX

(This essay was originally submitted as part of the record for Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s congressional briefing; “The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later, A Citizens' Response: Did the Commission Get it Right?”, re-published with permission of the author. Download the complete transcript and submitted written material from McKinney’s briefing here; 2.5 MB PDF)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

An accurate understanding of the history of US relations with the Afghan mujahideen who went on to join al-Qaeda’s international terrorist network is crucial to understanding the anatomy of international terrorism today.

"What the 9/11 Families are Saying"

Friday, September 15, 2006

One of the things that really bothers me is the marginalization of the 9/11 families, the people who lost their loved ones in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Not only have the families, and their call for an investigation even now, been marginalized by the Bush administration; they have also been marginalized by the 9/11 "truth" movement which has largely shown little interest in what the families have been saying.

More than anyone, it's been the 9/11 families who have been at the forefront of the ongoing campaign for an independent public inquiry into the attacks that might truly hold the authorities to account, and result in full disclosure of what happened, how and why. Indeed, one of the most powerful resources demonstrating how little we really know about 9/11 comes in the form of the huge list of 9/11 Unanswered Questions on the website of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission. In all, there are, I believe, several hundred questions pertaining to virtually every single dimension of the terrorist attacks. (NOTE: by the way, when I cited 9/11 widow Lauri van Auken in my article below "Interrogating 9/11", although she spoke on behalf of many 9/11 families, she did not speak on behalf of the 9/11 Families Steering Committee as the latter had been disbanded in January 2005 already)

Interrogating 9/11

by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed

Five Years On, Being a Sceptic Doesn’t Automatically Mean You’re A Lunatic… Although It Might Do

Five years after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that shook the world, scepticism about the Bush administration account of what happened, as well as of the “War on Terror” in general, has increased exponentially. This has accompanied the emergence of all kinds of pet theories about what happened, some of them truly bizarre, others intriguing but vacuous, and perhaps a few based on compelling facts.

For someone not familiar with these theories, it’s difficult to know where, and why, to start. And particular variants of 9/11 “truth”, such as the “no planes” theory that the whole event was merely an audiovisual technicolor chimera concocted on our TV screens, don’t help.

But is it all just a pile of lunacy? If only it was, I could sleep much better at night. Unfortunately, beneath the mountain of theories and speculations, there remain disturbing and persistent anomalies that have yet to be resolved. In this respect, the mainstream media’s approach to criticism of the 9/11 official narrative has been wanting in the extreme, focusing largely on bizarre pet theories and fringe speculations, suggesting that anybody who has doubts about the official story must be delusional, dumb, or both.