Years ago I went with a journalist from Schmoo and covered the Gary McKinnon case at Bow St Magistrates Court, where District Judge Nicholas Evans had just allowed the US to snatch Gary McKinnon, after he had gotten onto non-secured Pentagon websites and left messages telling them they were being foolish to leave them non-secured. Most governments would have appreciated the advice and in similar cases the hackers end up working for security firms, or working for Wired, which is what happened to Kevin Poulsen. McKinnon is frequently blasted by Poulsen for some reason, as if McKinnon had really gone in and set off missile systems.
When we got back to the schmoo newsroom, we found that the BBC had already posted a very good report on its own site, so we archived it and used it as a reference as we wrote our own. Then we tried to bring up the BBC posting again, and it had disappeared, leaving the more anodyne accounts. Had we not archived it nobody would have believed our report.
The extradition business was and still is a very nasty affair. At one point, as written on www.schmoontherun.blogspot.com, a man was wanted for having committed perfectly legal acts on British soil; Ian Norris, of Morgan Crucible. An interview set up with the Independent was mysteriously never published - after I had a strange visit from someone from the Unted States who was very upset that I talked about it at all.
So no surprise to me, though I am sure it must be to most of you, that US cops are trying to drag away US member Farshid Gillardian. They arrived at his mother's house in Hendon to discuss his kidnappnig, I mean, arrest. Actually kidnapping is the better word - especially in light of the attempted kidnapping of a suspect in Canada, which prompted outcry around the world. The US - and this time I mean the large country with the strange president and not United Synagogue - replied to it all by saying it had laws that permitted it to snatch people anywhere in the world.
Now, let us take a look at Gillardian's case. He is under threat of being tried as a terrorist. His firm legally sold electronic components to Iran, that much is true. But to think that a Jewish man is in the business of selling bomb making material to Ahmadinejad is just absurd. However, that is what they are accusing him of, and so he may be about to spend a long time in an orange jump suit. He reasons that this it like sending a shopkeeper to prison if he sells knives, and one of these knives is used in a crime. Further, Gillardian used a cell phone registered to his London address for the transactions, so this was no secret deal. All out in the open - as were Norris' deals with Morgan Crucible. His case wound its way through the courts until five Law Lords unanimously struck it down earlier this year.
Gillardian states that he is a friend of the United States, as are many Jews, and would never do such a thing. That alone, while not conclusive, does make a strong point, strong enough to use common sense and drop the whole affair. But is the United States a friend of Jewish people?
I would say, after spending 30+ years there and serving in the military - some part of which in intel, absolutely not. It is using Israel as a consumer of arms, and that is the realpolitik. Were we to examine the Bush dynasty and its role in helping Hitler, or the number of former Abwehr agents placed in key US positions, we would have to question what is really going on. An unholy alliance, a marriage of convenience; do not think for a second that anti-Semitism does not exist there - perhaps more so than any other country. But as long as Israel is a dumping ground for American products, mostly weapons, there is a relationship.
However, when the money angle changes, the relationship changes. One has but to turn the page of this week's JC once and we see an article by Anshel Pfeffer titled "Financial Crisis? That will be the Jews' fault". Oh indeed, it will be the Jews' fault, when the real culprits need a scapegoat, and a kosher one at that. Hitler used this one to great advantage, and his former pals Bush & Co. can recycle it as well. The financial crisis is due to many factors, from personal folly on the part of millions to absolute theft of tax monies by their leaders. On 10 September, 2001, for instance, it was announced that the Pentagon had lot $2.3 trillion. And today a fraction of that is what was needed to bail out the fat cats. The amount is significant, but look again at the date - 10 September, 2001; a good day to bury bad news - for the very next day, 20 or so Pentagon accountants mysteriously died when something hit the Pentagon.
Conspiracy theories around this, as Pfeffer points out, pointed to Jews. Indeed they did, and they started before any planes went off course on the East Coast. In fact, they started the day before - as the front page of the Washington Times so eerily asserted - Mossad was able to fake large scale terrorist attacks and blame it on Arabs. Just a coincidence? No - but bear with me. Remember the rumour about 4,000 Jews told not to go to work on 9/11 and that only three Jews perished in the attacks? Both rubbish, but where did they come from so conveniently? What added force to them was the fact that Odigo employees received a tip off by cell phone just before the attacks. Somehow, the FBI was unable to trace it - just as they were unable to trace the anthrax - which came from the US Army and NOT from Moslem terrorists. George Monbiot called the FBI to ask them why they were so inept, and suggested to them that the anthrax came from the FBI itself; they hung up on him, and he suddenly stopped asking questions and started bashing those who were. Oddly, Monbiot and the truth bashers conveniently forget to mention William Rodriguez or Mike Zubehr; their strategy is to always attack some off-the-wall theory and ignore the real evidence.
Other Jewish fingerprints on the attacks seemed to be the four idiots who were dancing for joy on the occasion and filming it, having foreknowledge of it. As the Jewish Forward so honestly reported later that week, they were Israelis. And, previous to the attacks, young Israelis had been trespassing on United States government property pretending they were from a non-existent university in Jerusalem. Presumzably, Mossad agents getting ready for 9/11.
So something more than quacks on the Jeff Rense programme were doing their best to create a 'Jews did it' theory...even before it happened.
In each case, it would take people at the highest levels to perform this. The Washington Times is owned by Sun Myung Moon, whose ties to the Bushes are impossible to deny. The calls to Odigo, had they originated from Mossad or any Jewish source, would have been traced. The young 'Mossad agents' did exist, but did Mossad really send in inept agents who could not even properly name a real art school in their own country? And would Mossad really have Dominick Suter and his ersatz moving company behave so bizzarely that they got immediately arrested? Surely, if this was part of some Israeli/Jewish conspiracy, they would have had some connection at the Jewish Forward and would have kept this story out of print. It is not hard for the NSA of CIA to get a hold of some patsies from Israel and put them on the scene to get caught, leaving the real culprits with a second scapegoat, a plan B, in case plan A, the flawed Osama bin Laden story, did not work. Best to develop a Plan B - the Jews did it - which would work in case Plan A failed, and secondly, it would tinge any truth movement with these red herrings. It has worked very well for them.
Ironically though, the first people to question 9/11 and the anthrax were Jews - Daniel Goldberg, Simon Aaronowitz, Jarred Israel and others. I might mention that I spent that day telling people it was a hoax, and that they would not catch bin Laden. Hardly a bold gamble, as I knew what was going on; I kept emotions out of it and used my mind, which led me to the correct conclusions and enabled me to look ahead many squares on the chessboard.
What kept more from coming forward was the fact that every idiot anti-Semite in the world got on the bandwagon, chasing red herrings, such as the Odigo call and the so-called Mossad agent/art students. David Icke and David Shayler for instance spend time on these fish, and I ended up getting into a very vocal broiges with the latter here in London a couple of years ago over this.
Shayler and his buddies on the left, the likes of Annie Machon and Belinda Mackenzie, are out there peddling anti-Semitic material - much less, perhaps, Machon than the other two, but I incluce her in this as she has manned booths where Mackenzie sells a book called 9/11 The Ultimate Truth. And they are joined by the far right, unlikely bedfellows at the orgy. Both are being played for suckers by the thieves as the top who like to keep a distraction running.
Where does all this lead? It leads to an ugly environment, in which a real threat emerges to the Jewish community. And, on a wider lever, it allows real criminals to escape. The Jews did it, so why have real investigations? When hungry people are mad, really mad, not just blogging mad, but out there pounding on the door of their banks to get their money and fighting evictions tooth and nail, anti-Semitism is going to be very convenient for many guilty parties, some of whom are deemed to be friends of Israel. How ironic. Let me strip away the illusion as soon as I can - and point my accusing finger in the right direction. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Operation Northwoods, deregulation, Applied Digital Solutions, IBM, oil companies, these are what we need to look at.
Sadly we don't. And people like Farshid Gillardian may end up the scapegoats - along with 13 million of his tribe. What happened in the 1930s is happening again, and one common denominator is that the public accepted scapegoats rather than the real perpetrators. The Reichstag Fire, well proven to be the work of the Nazis, was accepted as an act of madness committed by Marinus van der Lubbe; but we know better now, or do we?
