Monday, March 12, 2012

354 Afghan documents leak to Wikileaks is disinformation. Elvis is more alive than Osama.

Afghan documents leak to Wikileaks is disinformation. Elvis is more alive than Osama.

(1) Media commentators increasingly conclude that Bin Laden is Dead - Maidhc Ó Cathail
(2) Bin Laden is dead - Sue Reid in the London Daily Mail
(3) Arnaud de Borchgrave: Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden .
(4) Afghan documents leak to Wikileaks is disinformation (it blames Pakistan for loss of the war, & claims Bin Laden is alive)

(1) Media commentators increasingly conclude that Bin Laden is Dead - Maidhc Ó Cathail

From: Ken Freeland <diogenesquest@gmail.com> Subject: [shamireaders] Bin Laden is Dead; Long Live "Bin Laden," by Maidhc Ó Cathail

Bin Laden is Dead; Long Live “Bin Laden”

Who’s keeping the terror myth alive?

by Maidhc Ó Cathail

http://www.countercurrents.org/ocathail160810.htm

In the trigger-happy post-9/11 world, the favoured way to instigate a war is to demand that the designated “evildoer” prove a negative.

Iraq was invaded because it couldn’t prove that it didn’t have WMDs. Iran is under constant threat of attack unless it can demonstrate that it’s not seeking nuclear weapons. And now Pakistan is being chastised for allegedly harbouring Osama bin Laden—who in all probability has been dead and buried for eight years.

Questioning Pakistan’s willingness to pursue bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year told a group of Pakistani editors, “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” And in a recent interview with Fox News, Clinton charged that “elements” of the Pakistani government know where bin Laden is hiding.

But what if bin Laden is not hiding in Pakistan? What if he’s been dead since December 2001? How then does Islamabad prove that some of its government officials are not concealing his whereabouts?

While the mainstream media rarely if ever question the belief that bin Laden is still alive, some cracks have been appearing in the consensus. In a September 11, 2009 piece in Britain’s Daily Mail, Sue Reid wondered, “What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake—and that he is being kept ‘alive’ by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?”
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seven-years--U-S-Britain-covering-continue-war-terror.html>

An even more prominent sceptic is UPI Editor at Large Arnaud de Borchgrave whose July 26, 2010 commentary titled “Elvis bin Laden” may herald a new consensus. Sifting much the same evidence as Reid, the “legendary journalist” stated that “some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously.” <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/26/elvis-bin-laden/>

Both articles cited experts who have studied the post-December 2001 audios and videos and concluded they are fakes.

In 2007, Switzerland’s Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which does computer voice recognition for bank security, found that the voices on recordings after mid-December 2001 differed clearly from earlier recordings of bin Laden.

Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University’s religious studies’ department and the foremost bin Laden expert, noted in a 2007 book the inconsistency between the increasingly secular language of the audios and videos and bin Laden’s earlier distinctive religious speech.

Assessing the evidence, Angelo M. Codevilla, a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War and a professor of international relations at Boston University, wryly concluded that “Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama bin Laden.”

So, if bin Laden is as dead as Elvis, who’s been faking all those scary threats in his name?

According to U.S. and British intelligence officials, al-Qaeda’s media wing, As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication, has been run since 2001 by Adam Gadahn, a California-born convert to radical Islam who now goes by the name Azzam al-Amriki.

Gadahn found his way to the Islamic Society of Orange County while living with his grandfather, Carl Pearlman, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League. Ostensibly a civil rights organization set up to fight anti-Semitism, the ADL is “little more than a de facto adjunct of the Israeli government” which has even been caught spying on American critics of Israel.

Adam’s parents changed their surnames to Gadahn in the mid-1970s. The name refers to the Biblical warrior Gideon who, with the aid of trumpets and clay jars, defeated Israel’s enemies.

As Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo put it, Adam Gadahn is “an awfully odd figure, whose sudden evolution from a nice Jewish boy into Osama bin Laden’s Goebbels is just a little hard to take.”

Equally hard to take is the means by which the public learns of bin Laden’s latest pronouncements.

“Almost every statement by Osama bin Laden published on the Internet...is first made public by SITE and IntelCenter,” according to a Spiegel Online profile of Rita Katz, Josh Devon and Ben Venzke, who founded the two companies that supposedly track al-Qaeda online.

SITE co-founder Rita Katz is an Iraqi-born Jew, whose father was publicly hanged in Iraq after the 1967 War as an Israeli spy. Katz, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, tries to downplay the significance of her background but is not always successful. “When you grow up in a place like Iraq,” she told Spiegel, “you understand maybe a little bit about how Arabs think, and also what they are capable of.”

When Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant, analysed a 2006 al-Qaeda video of Ayman al-Zawahiri for alterations and enhancements, he discovered that the As-Sahab and IntelCenter logos had been added at the same time.

Attempting to make light of the understandable suspicions that the “terror trackers” are working for Israeli intelligence, the Spiegel article jokes: “And the conspiracy theories pontificating that SITE and IntelCenter shoot the bin Laden videos themselves will continue to exist in the future. And Katz, Venzke and Devon will continue to see the humor in such theories: Yep, this is Mossad Headquarters. Exactly!”

But with the hunt for the elusive bin Laden having already cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, perhaps Americans should demand conclusive proof that Israel hasn’t conned them into fighting a phoney “war on terror.”

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan. To read more of his writing, go to Maidhc Ó Cathail: Writing and Analysis.

(2) Bin Laden is dead - Sue Reid in the London Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seven-years--U-S-Britain-covering-continue-war-terror.html

Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?

By SUE REID

Last updated at 10:59 PM on 11th September 2009

The last time we heard a squeak from him was on June 3 this year.

The world's most notorious terrorist outsmarted America by releasing a menacing message as Air Force One touched down on Saudi Arabian soil at the start of Barack Obama's first and much vaunted Middle East tour.

Even before the new President alighted at Riyadh airport to shake hands with Prince Abdullah, Bin Laden's words were being aired on TV, radio and the internet across every continent.

It was yet another propaganda coup for the 52-year-old Al Qaeda leader. In the audiotape delivered to the Arab news network Al Jazeera, Bin Laden said that America and her Western allies were sowing seeds of hatred in the Muslim world and deserved dire consequences.

It was the kind of rant we have heard from him before, and the response from British and U.S. intelligence services was equally predictable.

They insisted that the details on the tape, of the President's visit and other contemporary events, proved that the mastermind of 9/11, America's worst ever terrorist atrocity, was still alive - and that the hunt for him must go on.

Bin Laden has always been blamed for orchestrating the horrific attack - in which nearly 3,000 people perished - eight years ago this week. President George W. Bush made his capture a national priority, infamously promising with a Wild West flourish to take him 'dead or alive'.

The U.S. State Department offered a reward of $50million for his whereabouts. The FBI named him one of their ten 'most wanted' fugitives, telling the public to watch out for a left-handed, grey-bearded gentleman who walks with a stick.

Yet this master terrorist remains elusive. He has escaped the most extensive and expensive man-hunt in history, stretching across Waziristan, the 1,500 miles of mountainous badlands on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Undeterred, Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find him. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror.

This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. After all, there are the plethora of 'Bin Laden tapes' to prove it.

Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff?

What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?

Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.

Of course, there have been any number of conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, and it could be this is just another one.

But the weight of opinion now swinging behind the possibility that Bin Laden is dead - and the accumulating evidence that supports it - makes the notion, at the very least, worthy of examination.

The theory first received an airing in the American Spectator magazine earlier this year when former U.S. foreign intelligence officer and senior editor Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, stated bluntly: 'All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.'

Prof Codevilla pointed to inconsistencies in the videos and claimed there have been no reputable sightings of Bin Laden for years (for instance, all interceptions by the West of communications made by the Al Qaeda leader suddenly ceased in late 2001).

Prof Codevilla asserted: 'The video and audio tapes alleged to be Osama's never convince the impartial observer,' he asserted. 'The guy just does not look like Osama. Some videos show him with a Semitic, aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between the colours and styles of his beard are small stuff.'

There are other doubters, too. Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's religious studies' department and the foremost Bin Laden expert, argues that the increasingly secular language in the video and audio tapes of Osama (his earliest ones are littered with references to God and the Prophet Mohammed) are inconsistent with his strict Islamic religion, Wahhabism.

He notes that, on one video, Bin Laden wears golden rings on his fingers, an adornment banned among Wahhabi followers. ...

Bin Laden has been the central plank of the West's 'war on terror'. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?

(3) Arnaud de Borchgrave: Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden .

De Borchgrave is Editor-at-Large of The Washington Times and United Press International

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/26/elvis-bin-laden/

DE BORCHGRAVE: Elvis bin Laden

Man or myth argument is alive and well online

By Arnaud de Borchgrave

The Washington Times

6:36 p.m., Monday, July 26, 2010

The Veterans Today Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that Sept. 11, 2001, was a CIA -Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden was not involved and died in 2001. This easily can be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden's reported demise seriously.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said early this month that the intelligence agency had not been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since "late 2001." And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar -based Al Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, Mr. Duff says. Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept alive to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.

Angelo M. Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos, have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden .

By all accounts from those who knew him before Sept. 11, bin Laden was a deeply religious man, and his early tapes after Sept. 11 were sprinkled with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.

The last credible intercepts of bin Laden's voice were made by overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Pakistan's tribal areas. The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his Pakistani assistant, Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security to rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley. We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50 fighters had emerged on Dec. 9 and had been met by a convoy of utility vehicles that sped off in the direction of Peshawar.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton evidently had more recent intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan on Wednesday. She said she believes "elements" of the Pakistani government know bin Laden's whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the "bowels" of the bureaucracy, not the "top levels of government." She clearly was referring to some members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gul is a personal friend of bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden's No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. Gen. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan's politico-religious extremists and a self-declared enemy of the United States . There are "retired" ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Gen. Gul and his followers also are working to hasten an end to the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan .

For the growing number who believe bin Laden is dead, there is only one valid message from him. It is his open letter to the "Pakistani people" on Al Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after Sept. 11, in which he said:

c "I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States .

c "Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children, and other humans, as an appreciable act. ... Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent ... people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.

c "All that is going on in Palestine ... is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel."

Those who believe Osama bin Laden is alive and guilty of killing almost 3,000 quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982. "God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the Twin Towers," he said then, "but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind."

While Mr. Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all the twists and turns since Sept. 11, there is also the post-Sept. 11 generation that doesn't read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets its news fix online. The conspiracy theory, coupled with disinformation from all sides, makes for more interesting reading. It also gives youngsters a leg up on their "naive" elders.

Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment, and some experts say he died Dec. 13, 2001, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since then, according to neutral experts, show bin Laden writing with his right hand, but he is well known as left-handed. They also detect differences in the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.

Mr. Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over, and his website gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent Top Ten Stories of the Week: "The CIA : Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated"; "Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli Operation?"; "Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups."

Mr. Duff's "corporate profile" says, "We are a full service Network of 63 web sites that service the U.S. military Veterans Community," which claims "over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month" and recently grew 39 percent in one month.

On the worldwide Web, there are no red lines between information, misinformation and disinformation.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC.

(4) Afghan documents leak to Wikileaks is disinformation (it blames Pakistan for loss of the war, & claims Bin Laden is alive)

From: Paul de Burgh-Day <pdeburgh@harboursat.com.au> Date: 15.08.2010 02:15 AM

My friends,

I seem to recall posting my views about Wikileaks, pondering the possibility, as with the Ellsberg 'leak' of the Pentagon Papers

To me, a good tip-off was the amount of attention devoted by the MSM to mytholigise the entire exercise.

The sickening 'leak' by Assange of that Apache crew shooting up and killing (most of) a bunch of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad served the role of attraction attention to what would come next. All this got uncommon MSM attention.

Bill Engdahl has a well hone eye for this form of psyop.

Putting out that Julian Assange is a 'target' who should be taken out is all part of the window dressing.

NOTHING IS AS IT IS MADE TO SEEM!

Paul

Hidden Intelligence Operation Behind the Wikileaks Release of "Secret" Documents?

The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been told.

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, August 11, 2010

Since the dramatic release of a US military film of a US airborne shooting of unarmed journalists in Iraq, Wiki-Leaks has gained global notoreity and credibility as a daring website that releases sensitive material to the public from whistleblowers within various governments. Their latest “coup” involved alleged leak of thousands of pages of supposedly sensitive documents regarding US informers within the Taliban in Afghanistan and their ties to senior people linked to Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence. The evidence suggests however that far from an honest leak, it is a calculated disinformation to the gain of the US and perhaps Israeli and Indian intelligence and a coverup of the US and Western role in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan.

Since the posting of the Afghan documents some days ago the Obama White House has given the leaks credibility by claiming further leaks pose a threat to US national security. Yet details of the papers reveals little that is sensitive. The one figure most prominently mentioned, General (Retired) Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, ISI, is the man who during the 1980’s coordinated the CIA-financed Mujahideen guerilla war in Afghanistan against the Soviet regime there. In the latest Wikileaks documents, Gul is accused of regularly meeting Al Qaeda and Taliban leading people and orchestrating suicide attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The leaked documents also claim that Osama bin Laden, who was reported dead three years ago by the late Pakistan candidate Benazir Bhutto on BBC, was still alive, conveniently keeping the myth alove for the Obama Administration War on Terror at a point when most Americans had forgotten the original reason the Bush Administration allegedly invaded Afghanistan to pursue the Saudi Bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

Demonizing Pakistan?

The naming of Gul today as a key liaison to the Afghan “Taliban” forms part of a larger pattern of US and British recent efforts to demonize the current Pakistan regime as a key part of the problems in Afghanistan. Such a demonization greatly boosts the position of recent US military ally, India. Furthermore, Pakistan is the only muslim country possessing atomic weapons. The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency reportedly would very much like to change that. A phoney campaign against the politically outspoken Gul via Wikileaks could be part of that geopolitical effort.

The London Financial Times says Gul’s name appears in about 10 of roughly 180 classified US files that allege Pakistan’s intelligence service supported Afghan militants fighting Nato forces. Gul told the newspaper the US has lost the war in Afghanistan, and that the leak of the documents would help the Obama administration deflect blame by suggesting that Pakistan was responsible. Gul told the paper, “I am a very favourite whipping boy of America. They can’t imagine the Afghans can win wars on their own. It would be an abiding shame that a 74-year-old general living a retired life manipulating the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan results in the defeat of America.”

Notable, in light of the latest Afghan Wikileaks documents, is the spotlight on the 74-year-old Gul. As I wrote in a previous piece, Warum Afghanistan? Teil VI:Washingtons Kriegsstrategie in Zentralasien, published this June on this website, Gul has been outspoken about the role of the US military in smuggling Afghan heroin out of the country via the top-security Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.

As well, in a UPI interview on September 26, 2001, two weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Gul stated, in reply to the question who did Black Sept. 11?, “Mossad and its accomplices. The US spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That’s $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don’t believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators…” [1] Gul is clearly not well liked in Washington. He claims his request for travel visas to the UK and to the USA have repeatedly been denied. Making Gul into the arch enemy would suit some in Washington nicely.

Who is Julian Assange?

Wikileaks founder and “Editor-in-chief”, Julian Assange, is a mysterious 39-year-old Australian about whom little is known. He has suddenly become a prominent public figure offering to mediate with the White House over the leaks. Following the latest leaks, Assange told Der Spiegel, one of three outlets with which he shared material from the most recent leak, that the documents he had unearthed would “change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars.”

Yet a closer examination of the public position of Assange on one of the most controversial issues of recent decades, the forces behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center shows him to be curiously establishment. When the Belfast Telegraph interviewed him on July 19, he stated,

"Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two...." What about 9/11?: "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." What about the Bilderberg Conference?: "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes." [2]

That statement from a person who has built a reputation of being anti-establishment is more than notable. First, as thousands of physicists, engineers, military professionals and airline pilots have testified, the idea that 19 barely-trained Arabs armed with box-cutters could divert four US commercial jets and execute the near-impossible strikes on the Twin Towers and Pentagon over a time period of 93 minutes with not one Air Force NORAD military interception, is beyond belief. Precisely who executed the professional attack is a matter for genuine unbiased international inquiry.

Notable for Mr Assange’s blunt denial of any sinister 9/11 conspiracy is the statement in a BBC interview by former US Senator, Bob Graham, who chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when it performed its Joint Inquiry into 9/11. Graham told BBC, "I can just state that within 9/11 there are too many secrets, that is information that has not been made available to the public for which there are specific tangible credible answers and that the withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their government as it relates to their own security." BBC narrator: "Senator Graham found that the cover-up led to the heart of the administration." Bob Graham: "I called the White House and talked with Ms. Rice and said, ‘Look, we've been told we're gonna get cooperation in this inquiry, and she said she'd look into it, and nothing happened.’”

Of course, the Bush Administration was able to use the 9/11 attacks to launch its War on Terrorism in Afghanistan and then Iraq, a point Assange conveniently omits.

For his part, General Gul claims that US intelligence orchestrated the Wikileaks on Afghanistan to find a scapegoat, Gul, to blame. Conveniently, as if on cue, British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, on a state visit to India, lashed out at the alleged role of Pakistan in supporting Taliban in Afghanistan, conveniently lending further credibility to the Wikileaks story. The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been told.

Notes

[1] General Hamid Gul, Arnaud de Borchgrave 2001 Interview with Hamid Gul, Former ISI Chief, UPI, reprinted July 2010 on http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/28/arnaud-de-borchgrave-2001-interview-with-hamid-gul-former-isi-chief/

[2] Julian Assange, Interview in Belfast Telegraph, July 19, 2010.

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