EDITORIAL
Obama and the Anglo-Saudi Empire on the Chopping Block
April 12 (EIRNS)—CBS News’ ”60 Minutes” Sunday night, nationwide, prime time exposé of the Saudi role in the original 9/11 attacks, and the Bush and Obama Administration cover-ups of the 28 pages, has caused a total panic at the White House, in Riyadh, and in London. With both former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) demanding that Obama immediately declassify the 28 pages, the pressure on Obama and the Anglo-Saudi apparatus that he and Bush have protected for the past 15 years, has crossed a threshold.
Obama’s complicity in covering up the crimes of the Saudi Monarchy more than rises to the standard for immediate impeachment. The “60 Minutes” broadcast had been ready for airing for months, and the fact that the show was broadcasted ten days before Obama’s scheduled visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with Gulf Cooperation Council leaders, is an indication that growing forces have come to recognize what Lyndon LaRouche declared as early as April 2009: Obama is a tool of the British Monarchy and their Saudi butchers, and the very survival of the United States is in jeopardy every day that he remains in office.
The “60 Minutes” documentary brought in a number of well-established national security veterans, from former Navy Secretary John Lehman, to former CIA Director Porter Goss, to former Sen. Bob Graham, who all demanded the immediate release of the 28 pages. Joint Congressional Inquiry member Tim Roemer fingered former FBI Director Robert Mueller as one of the key figures engineering the cover-up of the Saudi role.
The airing of the “60 Minutes” exposé came just a week after the release of the “Panama Papers,” which revealed the really dirty underbelly of the British Empire: the offshore dirty money centers that launder drug money, other criminal money, run tax evasion, and other crimes. As Lyndon LaRouche has made clear for decades, the British Empire is a criminal oligarchy, bent on mass genocide. Now, there are 11 million pages of evidence against the London-centered empire of crime and murder.
This one-two punch to the heart of the oligarchy also comes at a moment when the British are desperate to start a world war against Russia and China, in response to the fact that their system is hopelessly and irreversibly bankrupt. Obama is their pathetic tool in this war drive, and his removal from office is the only true war avoidance option at this time.
The 28 pages fight has now reached a point where it can bring down Obama and the whole rotten Anglo-Saudi system. It’s about time!
Note: The campaign to release the 28 pages is getting prominent coverage in Europe as well, such as in the well-known French security and defense website, Dedefensa.org, which is based in Belgium. Its lengthy coverage begins by reporting on the “60 Minutes” exposé: “Sunday, the political and popular pressure for the declassification of the famous 28 pages of the initial U.S. government report on Sept. 11, sharply increased with, for the first time, a TV program with a major national audience—“60 Minutes,” with CBS’s Steven Kroft—which was entirely on this issue. It’s an important victory of a movement launched on the public level, outside political networks….”
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
New York Senator Gillibrand Ups the Ante on Obama, Demands Release of 28 Pages Now!
April 12 (EIRNS)—New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, already a co-sponsor of the Senate bill to declassify the 28-page chapter of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which deals with Saudi Arabia’s role in that attack on the United States, told CBS News yesterday that President Barack Obama should release those still-classified 28 pages before he goes to visit Saudi Arabia ten days from now.
Gillibrand has read those pages, CBS News reported, and “she said that the 9/11 families she represents deserve to read them, too—before the President travels to the Middle East next week.
“If the President is going to meet with the Saudi Arabian leadership and the royal family, they think it would be appropriate that this document be released before the President makes that trip, so that they can talk about whatever issues are in that document,” Senator Gillibrand told CBS.
Obama stalled. The White House told CBS News on Monday that “the declassification review is underway and that the administration hopes to complete it by the end of Mr. Obama’s Presidency,” reported Florida’s Broward Bulldog early this morning.
With the heat on, Brett Holmgren, a senior policy advisor to the assistant to the President for Homeland Security, called former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) on today to tell him that the declassification review of the 28 pages will soon be completed, Graham told theTampa Bay Times. Graham reported that he asked Holmgren how soon he could expect a decision, and he was told “one or two months.” He added, the Tampa paper reported, that given the recent publicity about the classified 28 pages, including the “60 Minutes” April 10 story, “[T]he decision-makers at the White House have realized the public cares about it and there is an urgency to come to a decision.”
CBS ‘60 Minutes’ Story Again Places a Spotlight on the FBI’s Cover-Up of the Saudi Role in 9/11
April 12 (EIRNS)—Former Sen. Bob Graham and his collaborators at the Broward Bulldog celebrated Sunday’s explosive CBS “60 Minutes” case for the release of the still-classified 28-page chapter from the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, on foreign support for that attack on the United States—but they immediately pointed out that there is much, much more which must come out on the government of Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11. The Bulldog’s Dan Christiansen reported today that Graham, in particular, believes much more should be reported on the case of the Saudi family living near Sarasota which was found to have ties to the 9/11 terrorists. “You could do another ‘60 Minutes’ just on Sarasota,” Graham told the Bulldog.
The FBI is at the center of the Sarasota story; that is, covering it up. As Christiansen reported again today, the FBI never disclosed to either the Congressional Joint Inquiry or the later 9/11 Commission that it had established that a well-to-do Saudi family living in Sarasota, who abruptly fled their home two weeks before 9/11, had been visited by several of the Saudi hijacker pilots before the attack. The FBI first lied that they had found no evidence connecting the al-Hijji family to the terrorists, and then went to great lengths to try to discredit their own investigation, when FBI documents were made public in response to Freedom of Information filings by the Broward Bulldog which documented that the Sarasota Saudis had many connections to the 9/11 attack.
The wave of national press coverage set off by CBS’s “60 Minutes” story on the scandal that “for 13 years, the 28 pages have been locked away in a secret vault,” has not ended, and many of those stories report on H.Res.14 and S.1471, the legislation introduced in both houses of Congress demanding declassification. Exemplary of the stories coming out, are Slate’s “Your Guide to the 28 Classified Pages About Saudi Arabia and 9/11 that Obama Might Release,” and “Think Progress” ’s “28 Pages that Could Implicate Saudi Arabia in 9/11.”
The “Daily Beast” ’s article by Eleanor Clift, “Obama Under Pressure To Declassify the 9/11 Report’s 28 Pages,” usefully emphasizes former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s (D-NE) statement to “60 Minutes,” that it is not true that the 9/11 Commission Report exonerated the Saudi government, as the Saudis repeat ad nauseam.
“It’s long past time that someone blew the whistle on what the Saudis are doing in perpetrating extremism. There are no secrets here. It’s what everyone knows is going on, but few dare to disrupt. Shining a light on this long-standing protection racket could make some people squirm. It could also interrupt a very vicious cycle of behavior,” the Clift wrote.
New York City Public Radio Promotes FDR’s Glass-Steagall
April 12 (EIRNS)—Topic No. 1 of WNYC radio Brian Lehrer’s “30 Issues in 30 Weeks” pre-election series, which started on April 11, just a week before the New York primary, was one “at the heart” of the Democratic Party campaign, host Lehrer announced: Breaking up the “Too Big To Fail” (TBTF) Banks. Enter the voice of Franklin Roosevelt, telling Americans that his bank holiday proclamation “was the first step in the government’s reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric.” http://www.wnyc.org/story/30-issues-breaking-banks/#commentlist
So, this issue is not new to 2016, Lehrer interjects; that was FDR speaking to the nation on March 12, 1933. He asks: does this not sound familiar? And FDR continues: “We have had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers have shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the peoples’ funds. They have used the money entrusted to them in speculation and unwise loans.”
That opening frames a half-hour program dedicated to making a solid case for FDR’s Glass-Steagall as the needed remedy for today’s “Too Big to Fail” banks, which Dodd-Frank does not do.
Audio clips of Bill Clinton and Obama defending the revocation of Glass-Steagall on the grounds that it was needed for the industrialized, centralized, and more nationalist economy which no longer exists; Sen. Byron Dorgan’s outraged warning in 1999 that eliminating Glass-Steagall would create TBTF banks whose collapse we would rue within 10 years; and short clips from Bernie and Hillary, completed the setting for the interview with New York Times Business section writer Gretchen Morgenson which followed.
Morgenson spelled out how Wall Street was responsible for the Great Depression; argued that if Glass-Steagall had been in effect the whole economy would not have been brought down by the mortgage crisis of 2007-2008; insisted that the FDIC is not enough to protect deposits, Glass-Steagall is still needed, and dismissed Dodd-Frank as a too-long bill which didn’t end TBTF and mandated regulations which still haven’t been written, six years later.
Financial Crash Gives Central Bankers NIRPous Fits
April 12 (EIRNS)—A sign of the rapidity of economic collapse that is occurring behind the “stock market headlines” of the Trilateral countries, is the epidemic of love for negative interest rates coming from those countries’ central bankers. This gushing belies the fact that central bank NIRP, or negative-interest-rate policy, is very clearly making the underlying economic crisis worse.
Bank of Japan President Haruhiko Kuroda has gotten the worst possible results from NIRP since Feb. 1—a sharp rise in Japan’s currency; falling bank lending; more economic contraction in the first quarter than in the last quarter of 2015—but says, quixotically, that the policy is working, and he is ready to lower rates further into the negative and add more “quantitative easing” money-printing.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is doing the same thing, despite blistering attacks from German, Swiss, and Austrian banking associations which charge Draghi with ruining their ability to make loans, to businesses in particular.
In a lengthy interview with the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg April 11, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde launched into a crazy defense of negative interest rates: “If we hadn’t had negative interest rates, we’d be in a much worse place.” If this sounds like a gunman telling his victim that it would have been much worse if he had shot the unfortunate in the head, Lagarde then doubled down: “It may take a bit more fragility, drama and economic misery for things to actually change.” Affirming that countries often need terrible shocks, Lagarde added, “I would rather be the architect” of the changes. Reuters reports a new IMF research paper promoting negative rates, although admitting “they might also encourage excessive risk-taking and build financial market bubbles.”
The City of London’s Financial Times chimed in April 11, reporting that “negative interest rates are a reality for nearly a quarter of the global economy,” and that the ECB bankers “are adamant they can cut [already negative] rates again if the region’s economy deteriorates.”
In the United States, as Fed Chair Janet Yellen met behind closed doors with her Board of Governors and with President Obama April 11, her predecessor Ben Bernanke went one dangerous step further than NIRP, proposing in a Brookings blog post that “Under certain extreme circumstances—sharply deficient aggregate demand, exhausted monetary policy, and unwillingness of the legislature to use debt-financed fiscal policies—‘helicopter money’ programs may be the best available alternative.”
“Helicopter money” means central bank printing of money to place it directly into both government and private business and consumer accounts. Trying to create inflation, this is sure to create hyperinflation instead, and would likely be coupled with still further restrictions on bank lending, cutting further into real production and productivity.
British Empire Tries To Get Their Vultures in a Row
April 12 (EIRNS)—Outflanked by China and Russia on numerous fronts, and by the reality of their collapsing trans-Atlantic financial system, the British Empire appears to be scrambling around with some urgency to try to get their vultures in a row for what’s coming next.
With the annual IMF-World Bank meeting scheduled for April 15-17 in Washington, D.C., both U.S Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde were trotted out to make major preparatory policy statements, which centered on promoting the hyperinflationary bailout policies of negative interest rates and so-called “helicopter money” (see item above for Lagarde’s comments).
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations and an accompanying article in the CFR’s Foreign Affairs, Treasury Secretary Lew threatened China that it had to bolster the existing (bankrupt) system, and not try to create a new one. He said that the U.S. would embrace “new players on the global economic stage and make sure they meet the standards of the system we created.” In his article, he took direct aim at China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB):
“I conveyed the same message both to China directly and to countries considering joining the institution [the AIIB]; namely, that it was paramount to incorporate in the AIIB’s policies and procedures the high-quality standards and lessons learned from the decades of experience of the World Bank and regional development banks, so that the AIIB can reinforce the existing global financial architecture…. A successful AIIB that meets high standards and collaborates effectively with the other international financial institutions would be a positive thing for the global economy,” Lew warned.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Al-Nusra Threatens Aleppo: Russia and Syria Responding
April 12 (EIRNS)—Terrorist groups, emphatically including the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, have escalated the fighting in Syria in recent days, in Aleppo province in particular, but also in Latakia and Damascus provinces. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al Moallem charged, after meeting with UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, that the terrorist groups continue to breach the cessation-of-hostilities agreement under directives from their sponsors in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others, in a bid to sabotage intra-Syrian dialogue in Geneva, according to the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).
At the Russian Defense Ministry, Lt. Gen. Sergei Rudskoy, the chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian General Staff, reported yesterday that al-Nusra has gathered nearly 10,000 fighters in Aleppo, 8,000 of them in the southern part of the province, and the rest in northern Aleppo.
“Jabhat al-Nusra is performing active warfare using these forces. Illegal armed groups have captured al-Ais and Zerba. It is known that Jabhat al-Nusra is to launch a large-scale offensive in order to cut off the road linking Aleppo and Damascus,” he went on.
According to Al Masdar News, the Syrian army has deployed double the 6,000 troops that were used for the liberation of Palmyra for the offensive in southern Aleppo. According to a military source in Damascus, the government offensive is expected to include a large part of the Aleppo countryside that is currently under the control of the extremist rebels.
That the Syrian government, with Russian backing, was getting ready to move on this threat, was telegraphed by Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader al-Halki on Sunday, when he told a visiting delegation of Syrian parliamentarians, “We, together with our Russian partners, are preparing an operation to liberate Aleppo and block all illegal armed groups that have not joined the ceasefire agreement or [have] violated it.”
Rudskoy confirmed this yesterday. “It is necessary to stop such actions of terrorists in order to prevent the siege of northern regions of Syria,” he said. “That is why all actions performed by Syrian troops and Russian aviation are aimed at disrupting the plans of Jabhat al-Nusra.”
Ash Carter’s Visit to India, Hits Snags on Military Cooperation
April 12 (EIRNS)—U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s three-day, April 10-12, visit to India, a record-breaking third such visit in one year, produced “progress in some logistics- and technology-sharing programs, but it fell short on other key issues, including co-development of a future Indian aircraft carrier,” Stars and Stripesreported today.
Washington has been urging New Delhi to sign the Logistics Support Agreement that allows the two militaries to use each others’ land, air, and naval bases for resupply, repair, and rest. But after years of dithering, the two sides said an agreement was in hand, although not yet ready for signing.
“We have agreed in principle that all the issues are resolved. We now need to finalize the draft,” Carter said after talks with Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar. New Delhi has had concerns that the Logistics Agreement will draw it into a military alliance with the United States and undermine its traditional autonomy, the Indian news agency TNN reported.
New Delhi’s interest in strengthening defense relations with Washington has been spelled out by the Modi administration in recent months. It centers around expanding collaboration under the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative; “Make in India” efforts of the government of India; new opportunities to deepen cooperation in maritime security and Maritime Domain Awareness; military-to-military relations; knowledge partnership in the field of defense; and regional and international security matters of mutual interest. In support of “Make in India,” the United States shared two proposals to bolster India’s suite of fighter aircraft for consideration of the government. Recently, two U.S. defense majors, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have offered to manufacture their F-16 and F/A-18 fighter jets in India, India’s Financial Express reported today.
Washington, however, has not made clear that its interest is entirely confined to what New Delhi seeks. Last month, the chief of the U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Harry Harris was in New Delhi, where he proclaimed loudly that he looks forward to the day when “American and Indian Navy vessels steaming together will become a common and welcome sight throughout Indo-Asia-Pacific waters.” A couple of days later, Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar subjected Harris’s proposal to a dose of reality, observing testily that the question of joint patrolling did not arise. The Indian Navy has never carried out joint patrols with a foreign navy, Ajai Shukla of Business Standard noted.
SCIENCE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Cosmonautics Day: Chinese Accomplishments, Russian Plans, and the Lack of a U.S. Space Program
April 12 (EIRNS)—Comments made during the global celebration today of Cosmonautics Day, the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s Earth-orbital flight, presented a stark contrast between the optimistic space plans of Russia and China, and the lack of any vision from the U.S.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke via video link with the Russian and American ISS crew members, stressing the importance of cooperation: “We attach great importance, that despite whatever difficulties we face on Earth, people in space work shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, help each other, and fulfill tasks that are essential, not just for our countries, but for all of humanity.”
- China Central TV is running a series of stories today, focused on China’s space plans for this year, and beyond. They include interviews with space officials; a review of past accomplishments, and the upcoming missions of the Tiangong-2 module, Shenzhou-11 manned spacecraft, and cargo carrier missions for this year.
- An opinion piece appeared today in the Washington Timesby Director Lev Zelenyi and his colleague, Olga Zakutnyia, at the Space Science Institute, titled, “Why Space Missions Are Feasible.” It includes interesting history on cooperation, going back to French President Charles de Gaulle’s 1966 visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which led to France’s “long and fruitful partnership with Russia,” including “many joint experiments.” The authors stress that cooperation is not just a matter of increasing funds, “but new opportunities.” This is seen in the Russia-European ExoMars missions, the first of which launched on March 14; neither Russia nor Europe could have executed the two missions alone.
- But NASA spokesmen would not see further than the current Space Station cooperation. Stephanie Schierholz, spokesman for Administrator Bolden, made a stupid statement yesterday in an interview with Russia’s TASS, on how international cooperation depends upon “U.S. leadership.” This, as virtually the entire world plans missions to the Moon, while the U.S. “leads” no one but itself to some make-believe asteroid. On the sidelines of the Colorado Space Symposium, NASA official John Falker said it’s good to have the partnership with Russia, since we needed Russia when the Shuttle stopped flying.
- Correction: Yesterday’s Alert mistakenly identified 9/11 Commission member Tim Roemer as the former Colorado governor. Tim Roemer was at the time a former Democratic Congressman from Indiana.
