U.S. Army 'Psyops' Specialists worked for CNN
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/devries/psyops.htm
The Emperor's Clothes
http://www.tenc.net
WASHINGTON, ATLANTA - For a short time last year, CNN
employed military specialists in 'psychological operations' (psyops).
This was confirmed to by a spokesman of the U.S. Army. The
military has influenced CNN's news reports about the crisis in
Kosovo.
"Psyops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in
CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program 'Training With
Industry,'" said Major Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information
Service in a telephone interview last Friday. "They worked as
regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on
stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of
news.''
These military, a "handful" according to Collins, stayed with CNN
for at least a couple of weeks "to get to know the company and to
broaden their horizons''. Collins maintains that "they didn't work
under the control of the army." The temporary outplacement of U.S.
Army psyops personnel in various sectors of society began a couple
of years ago. Contract periods vary from a couple of weeks to one
year.
CNN is the biggest and most widely viewed news station in the world.
The intimate liaisons with army psyops specialists raise serious
doubts about CNN's journalistic integrity and independence. The
military CNN-personnel belonged to the airmobile Fourth
Psychological Operations Group, stationed at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina. One of the main tasks of this group of almost 1200 soldiers
and officers is to spread 'selected information'.
American psyops troops try with a variety of techniques to influence
media and public opinion in armed conflicts in which American state
interests are said to be at stake. The propaganda group was involved
in the Gulf war, the Bosnian war and the crisis in Kosovo.
So far CNN has not commented on the allegations. "I don't believe
that we would employ military personnel; it doesn't seem like
something we would normally do," said CNN-spokeswoman Megan
Mahoney on Friday evening. But when the U.S. Army Information
Service confirmed the news, Mahoney said she would have to
contact CNN's senior officials. However, on Sunday evening CNN
still could not provide an official statement to Trouw.
CNN's coverage of the war in Kosovo, and that of other media, has
attracted criticism from several sides as having been one-sided,
overly emotional, over-simplified and relying too heavily on NATO
officials. On the other hand, journalists have complained about the
lack of reliable information from NATO; for almost all of them it was
impossible to be on the battlefield and file first-hand reports.
For more on the connection between CNN
and U.S. Army opinion-control operations,
see 'The American army loves CNN'
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/devries/love.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale
Terror Attacks
(Filed: 16/09/2001)
ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their
counterparts in the United States last month that
large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on
the American mainland were imminent.
The attacks on the World Trade Centre's twin towers
and the Pentagon were humiliating blows to the
intelligence services, which failed to foresee them, and
to the defence forces of the most powerful nation in the
world, which failed to deflect them.
The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with
Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were
sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI
to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists
said to be preparing a big operation.
"They had no specific information about what was
being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden
and told the Americans that there were strong grounds
for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli
security official.
The CIA has said that it had no hard information that
would have led to the prevention of the hijacking, but
the FBI said it believed that cells operating within
America and totalling at least 50 terrorists were behind
last week's devastating hijacks; the names of new
suspects are being added to the list daily.
America's intelligence agencies are being widely blamed
for their failure to predict the attacks, or anything like
them, and for not discovering any of the terrorist cells
before the hijackings on Tuesday. Some of those who
took part had lived in the US for months, or even
years.
Evidence that a clear Israeli warning was delivered to
American authorities, but ignored, would be a further
blow to the reputation of the CIA, which is under fire
for its failure last week.
An administration official in Washington said: "If this is
true then the refusal to take it seriously will mean heads
will roll. It is quite credible that the CIA might not heed
a Mossad warning: it has a history of being
overcautious about Israeli information."
For years, staff at the Pentagon joked that they worked
at "Ground Zero", the spot at which an incoming
nuclear missile aimed at America's defences would
explode. There is even a snack bar of that name in the
central courtyard of the five-sided building, America's
most obvious military bullseye.
This weekend, five days after that target was struck
with devastating effect by a hijacked plane, the joking
has stopped.
It is far from certain that any military commander would
have had the courage to recommend shooting down a
passenger airliner, even in the unprecedented
circumstances of last Tuesday.
For three of the four airliners hijacked last week,
however, the question did not even arise. Two pairs of
combat fighters were scrambled into action but did not
get near enough to shoot any of them down.
Norad, the command headquarters in Colorado
responsible for defending all of North America from air
attack, was notified of the first hijack at 8.38am and six
minutes later two F-15 fighter jets were ordered into
the air from Otis airforce base on Cape Cod.
Before they could take off, however, the first hijacked
airliner crashed into the World Trade Centre's north
tower at 8.46am. Six minutes later the two military jets
were airborne, but when the second hijacked airliner hit
the south tower shortly after 9am they were still 70
miles from Manhattan.
The only successful action against the hijackers was
taken by passengers of the fourth airliner, whose heroic
decision to fight back led to its crashing into the fields
of Pennsylvania.
The reason lies in the strict distinction America draws
between civil and military power, combined with the
fact that until last week nobody had confronted the
possibility that a terrorist hijacker might turn kamikaze
pilot.
Although Norad has its own radar system to track
aircraft over the US, its prime task is to watch for
hostile aircraft approaching America from outside. "We
assume anything originating in US airspace is friendly,"
said a spokesman.
For the same reason, the 20 or so American fighter
planes on permanent full alert in case of a suspect
intruder, were deployed at half a dozen bases in the
likeliest flightpaths of an attack from the former Soviet
Union, several hundred miles from New York or
Washington DC.
All aircraft flying over American airspace are monitored
and controlled by a network of 20 regional Federal
Aviation Authority air traffic control centres, backed up
by individual airport control towers. Military aircraft
under Norad control can intervene with domestic traffic
only if called on for help by their civilian colleagues.
That is what happened on Tuesday, but in no case was
there apparently enough time after the FAA's warning
for fighter planes to reach the hijacked airliners.
More puzzling, there were 45 minutes between air
traffic controllers losing contact with the third airliner,
which took off from Dulles airport just outside
Washington, and its crash on to the Pentagon.
At that point, however, the aircraft was still flying on its
intended course westwards. It may not have been until
later, possibly after a passenger's mobile phone call to
the Justice Department, that the civil authorities finally
twigged what was happening.
It was not the military but civilian air traffic controllers
at Washington's Reagan National Airport - tipped off
by their colleagues at Dulles - who alerted the White
House to the fact that an unauthorised jet was flying at
full throttle towards it.
As shaken White House staff began a frantic
evacuation, the aircraft banked, performed a 270
degree turn and sailed past lines of aghast drivers on
expressways to crash explosively into the west side of
the Pentagon.
If the airliner had approached much nearer to the White
House it might have been shot down by the Secret
Service, who are believed to have a battery of
ground-to-air Stinger missiles ready to defend the
president's home.
The Pentagon is not similarly defended. "We are an
open society," said a military official. "We don't have
soldiers positioned on the White House lawn and we
don't have the Pentagon ringed with bunkers and
tanks."
It emerged last night that two F-16 fighters took off
from Langley airforce base in Virginia just two minutes
before the American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into
the Pentagon, again too late to have a chance of
intercepting.
Only the fourth hijacked airliner, which was less than
30 minutes from Washington when it crashed, might
have been successfully intercepted: air traffic controllers
at a regional centre in Nashua, New Hampshire, told a
Boston newspaper that at least one F-16 fighter was in
hot pursuit, and defence officials confirmed that the
fighters already launched from Langley were on their
way to intercept the flight when passengers apparently
took matters into their own hands.
Deep inside the Pentagon, in the hardened bunkers of
the National Military Joint Intelligence Centre, senior
officials were said to be "stunned" by the terrorists'
achievement.
Within minutes of the attack American forces around
the world were put on one of their highest states of alert
- Defcon 3, just two notches short of all-out war - and
F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base were in the air
over Washington DC.
A flotilla of warships was deployed along the east coast
from bases in Virginia and Florida, with two
aircraft-carriers to help protect the airspace around
New York and Washington DC. Off the west coast, a
further 10 ships put to sea to take up station close to
the shore.
Extra Awacs aerial reconnaissance aircraft were sent
aloft to ensure that nothing other than military aircraft
flew in American airspace - a home-grown version of
the "no-fly zones" enforced for many years over Iraq.
For much of the rest of the week, the unsettling roar of
F-15 and F-16 fighters patrolling the skies high above
America's biggest cities replaced the usual rumble of
commercial airliners.
On Friday, in a tacit admission that America must in
future be better prepared, Donald Rumsfeld, the
Defence Secretary, announced that fighters were being
put on a 15-minute "strip" alert at 26 bases nationwide.
There was anger among politicians at what many saw
as the failure of the intelligence services, and some
officials on Capitol Hill began canvassing support for a
move to force George Tenet, the director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, originally appointed by Clinton, to
step aside.
James Traficant, a Democratic congressman from
Pennsylvania, said that for years Congress had poured
billions of dollars of largely unscrutinised funding into
America's intelligence services, "yet we learnt of every
one of these tragedies from Fox News and CNN"- two
television channels. Senator Richard Shelby, a
Republican member of the Senate intelligence
committee, said it was "a failure of great dimension".
There are moves to address one severe shortcoming
noted by many critics: the CIA's reliance on
technological rather than "human" means to gather
information, and its weakness as a means of finding out
what Osama bin Laden is up to.
During the Clinton administration, Congress banned the
CIA from recruiting as a paid informer anyone with a
criminal record or who was guilty of human rights
violations. James Woolsey, another former CIA
director, said: "Inside bin Laden's organisation there are
only people who want to be human rights violators. If
you don't recruit them then you don't recruit anyone."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mossad Link Ignored by Media
-------------------------------------
NEWS EMBARGO AFTER ISRAELI LINK LEAK
Stern-Intel (Canada). A US military intelligence source revealed details
of an internal intelligence memo that points to the Israeli Mossad
intelligence service having links to the World Trade Center and Pentagon
attacks.
The intelligence source, who requested his name be withheld, confirmed
the internal US intelligence memo circulated four weeks ago described
information that pointed to the threat of a covert Israeli operation on
US soil to turn mass public opinion against Palestinian Arabs via an
apparent terrorist attack on US interests that would give Israel the
green light to implement a large scale military onslaught against the
Palestinian Arab population.
The 11 September attack has been described by experts as being too
sophisticated for a lone terrorist group to execute. This attack required
a high level of military precision and the resources of an advanced
intelligence agency. In addition, the attackers would have needed to be
extremely familiar with both Air Force One flight operations, civil
airline flight paths and aerial assault tactics on sensitive US cities
like Washington, Stated David Stern an expert on Israeli intelligence
operations. The attacks targeted the Pentagon, World Trade Center towers,
with the White House and Air Force One also being targets according to
the FBI.
The attacks have certainly turned US public opinion firmly back in
Israel's favor after 11 months of Palestinian uprising, heavy criticism
of Israel over war crimes allegations and racism by a UN conference in
Durban.
The attacks serve no Arab group or nation's interests but their timing
came in the midst of international condemnation of Israel for its policy
of death squad assassination of Palestinian political and police figures
added Stern.
If verified, the news of Israel's involvement in the US attack will come
as no surprise to intelligence experts. The state of Israel has a long
history of covert operations against Western targets with attacks on the
King David Hotel, USS Liberty, murder of a Scandinavian UN envoy as well
as espionage against the US during the Jonathan Pollard case. [As well as
selling US secrets and technology to communist China.]
On Wednesday the US defense department issued a warning to its officials
to halt the leak of information on the investigation which it says is
happening on a daily basis since the attacks occurred.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
California bill redefines marriage
Opponents say Democrats used cover of tragedy to advance measure
THEY SNUCK ONE THROUGH IN CALIFORNIA
Under cover of a series of terrorist attacks in New York City and at the
Pentagon, California lawmakers have passed a bill that will redefine
traditional marriage in the state and convey new marriage rights on
homosexual couples, says a conservative women's group.
"You'd think they would have had the decency to wait a few days before
launching this reckless assault on society's premiere institution," said
Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family
Institute. "On one coast, terrorists are committing acts of war against
American citizens. On the other coast, California politicians are overturning
5,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition and openly sponsoring sinful
behavior."
Knight said that the California Assembly, on a vote of 42-29 last Wednesday,
passed AB 25 – a measure that conveys 13 new rights and benefits on
homosexual "domestic partners." The bill now goes to Gov. Gray Davis, who has
indicated in the past that he would like to sign such a measure, though he
has yet to commit to this one, the group said.
Last year, Californians approved Proposition 22, the "Defense of Marriage"
initiative, which was aimed at preserving the institution of marriage as one
between a man and a woman.
"AB 25 is a direct attempt to overturn a decisive vote by Californians to
protect marriage," Knight said. "If Gov. Davis has any respect for the people
he represents, for our system of government, and for marriage, he must veto
AB 25."
The last major revisions of the bill occurred Sept. 7, according to the
California Assembly's website. The bill was introduced by Assemblymembers
Carole Migden and Robert M. Hertzberg, both Democrats, in the Assembly, and
Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Los Angeles, in the state Senate.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rumsfeld Warns Against US 'Police State'
September 16, 2001
(CNSNews.com) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday the United
States has no choice but to use every thing at its command to pursue
terrorists and their networks around the world and the countries that are
harboring them in the wake of last week's attacks against New York City and
Washington, D.C.
But at the same time, Rumsfeld said America should not become a police state
in the war against terrorism.
"The way to deal with this problem is not to suddenly become a police state
and say we are not going to be free and we are not going to go about our
lives. We are going to go after the people who are posing this very serious
danger and that's what we need to do," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld also doesn't think it is necessary at this time to re-institute the
military draft because the armed forces have enough personnel along with its
reservists to satisfy needs at this time in the war against terrorism.
Some 35,000 military reservists have been called into action so far.
"Either the United States acquiesces to the terrorists and becomes
isolationist, turns inward, or gives up our freedom," said Rumsfeld. "If we
decide we can't do anything about this problem, then we have no choice but to
give up that freedom. And we can't do that."
Rumsfeld made his remarks during an interview on the Fox News Sunday program.
The defense secretary reiterated the remarks of President Bush, who told the
nation in his weekly radio address Saturday that Americans should expect a
war that will not be short.
"We need to wage a long, broad sustained effort. This is something that
involves not week or days but years," said Rumsfeld. "We've just seen a
battle. A terrorist can attack at any time at anyplace using any technique."
Rumsfeld also noted that some of the countries believed to be harboring or
assisting in terrorist attacks "do, in fact, have chemical and biological
weapons," and some in congress have already raised the specter of additional
attacks on the U.S. that may incorporate such weapons.
In the days leading up to terrorist attacks on America, unknown investors
made unusually large bets in the financial markets against the stocks of
two companies that would come to be prominently associated with the
disaster: United Airlines and American Airlines.
That trading in United and other securities is the focus of investigations
in several countries, including the United States and Germany, sources
say. Investigators are looking into theories that someone with advance
knowledge of the attacks, possibly even financiers of the terrorists
themselves, sought to profit from the financial fallout.
Using what is known in the options trading industry as a "put," investors
bet heavily against United's parent, UAL Corp., on Sept. 6 and 7, and
against American's parent, AMR Corp., on Sept. 10, in the three trading
days before the attack. Put options are essentially market methods for
profiting when an investor believes the price of a security will drop.
No similar bets were made against the stocks of any of the companies' major
competitors, including Delta, Continental, Northwest and Southwest. That
would suggest that the investors had specific reason to believe UAL and AMR
shares would drop.
In addition, the trading ratio in UAL put options on the Thursday before
the attack was 25 times its normal level, according to data from the
Options Clearinghouse Corp.
On Sept. 11, hijackers seized one American flight and one United flight
and used them to demolish the World Trade Center's twin towers. A second
American plane crashed into the Pentagon, while another United flight
crashed in rural Pennsylvania after an apparent struggle between the
hijackers and passengers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'HEARD THOSE REPORTS' "
We've heard those reports about terrorist involvement in our markets," said Harvey Pitt,
chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as quoted in the Wall Street
Journal. "Our enforcement division has been looking into a variety of
market actions that could be linked to these terrible acts, including the
subjects of the rumors."
SEC officials acknowledged the existence of the inquiry into put options
but declined to elaborate about Pitt's comment or to discuss specific areas
of inquiry. But a source familiar with the inquiry, who spoke only on
condition of anonymity, confirmed that trading of UAL issues and those of
other companies was under investigation by both market monitors and
government regulators.
The identities of the investors being investigated are not known to the
public, but their trades can be traced easily by investigators.
The evidence at this point is purely circumstantial. There are a number of
reasons that the bets against UAL and AMR could have been legitimate or
perhaps the product of insider trading with no connection to the terrorist
plot.
However, officials have launched a multinational investigation into the
unusual trading of a number of securities in the days leading up to the
attacks. What also has drawn attention was the short-selling of the stock
of Munich Re, a German insurance company whose shares took a sharp and
unexplainable tumble in the week before the attack. A short sale is when
an investor borrows stock from a broker and sells it in the hope of
repurchasing it at a lower price and profiting on the difference.
There also was an increase in the number of put options on the Standard &
Poor's 500 index, a broad measure of the market.
A put contract is the purchase of an option at a price lower than the level
at which the security is currently trading; if the security drops to that
level, the investor profits on the fall.
UNUSUALLY HIGH VOLUME Financial industry workers said they had noticed an
unusual volume of put contracts in the days before the attack but thought
they were seeing the natural result of a months-long deterioration in the
market. Now, in light of the attacks, darker scenarios are being discussed.
"I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following
the markets, particularly the options markets," said John Kinnucan, a
principal of Broadband Research, an independent telecommunications research
firm. "When one sees this type of activity, the first thing one does is
ask oneself, 'What is the explanation? What are people worried about?' "
One explanation might be that the nation was already in the midst of an
economic slowdown that was hurting the airline industry as travel demand
slackened. In addition, AMR and UAL posted huge losses after the second
quarter this summer and warned that their losses could continue through the
end of the year; UAL's stock price hit a 52-week low of $30.39 Sept. 10,
the day before the attack.
But anyone betting against either airline would have profited handsomely in
the days since. The attacks have hit the airline industry hard, and
fleeing investors wiped out $12.2 billion in shareholder value in airlines
yesterday alone. Meanwhile, a number of airlines have announced massive
layoffs in an attempt to stay afloat.
Among the hardest-hit stocks were UAL, which fell $13.32, or 43 percent, to
close at $17.50, and AMR, which fell $11.70, or 39 percent, to close at $18.
A spokeswoman for United Airlines said she did not have enough information
to comment about the inquiry, and a spokeswoman at American said she had
been told not to take calls seeking information on the matter.
The purchase of UAL put contracts on the Thursday before the attack was
about 25 times normal levels so far this year, and on Friday it was about
eight times normal.
Investors this year have on average bought fewer than 200 put contracts per
day on UAL stock.
By contrast, on Sept. 6 investors bought 3,150 contracts, followed by
2,194 purchases the next day.
On the Thursday that 3,150 put contracts were purchased, the Pacific
Exchange in San Francisco saw volume three times its normal levels, to
1,500 contracts. The following day saw an increase in trading volume at
the Chicago Board of Options Exchange in UAL options.
The purchase of AMR puts on the day before the attacks was about 10 times
the normal level so far this year, with 4,556 put contracts
purchased. That was nearly double the normal volume going through the
Philadelphia exchange. A spokeswoman for the Philadelphia exchange said
the market monitors there detected nothing unusual about the trading.
Using the U.S. financial system to underwrite attacks on it would be in
keeping with at least one previous boast during an altercation between the
United States and a Middle Eastern country.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein said Iraq would kill American
soldiers "with their own bullets" after the United States supplied Iraq
with weapons and training in the belief that Iraq would be a Middle East ally.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
