By Paul Craig Roberts

February 08, 2015 "ICH" - In the previous posting, The Grand Manipulation, I again wrote about the false reality that government manipulation of information and control over explanations creates for Americans and others who have subordinated themselves to Washington.

Consider the “war on terror.” According to a Nobel economist and a Harvard University budget expert, Washington’s 14 years of war on terror has cost Americans a minimum of $6 trillion. That’s 6,000 billion dollars. This sum, together with the current PayRoll tax revenues is enough to keep Social Security and Medicare in the black for years to come. Without the vast sum wasted on the war on terror, Republicans would not have an excuse to be trying to cut Social Security and Medicare for budget reasons and to privatize the old age pensions and health care of people, thus turning Medicare and Social Security pensions into fee income for Wall Street.

Combatting terrorism is the excuse for squandering a minimum of $6,000 billion dollars.
What were the terrorist events that serve as a basis for this expenditure?

There are five: 9/11, the London transport system bombings, the Spanish train bombing, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the French Charlie Hebdo rifle attack.

In other words, 5 events in 14 years.

The loss of life in all these events combined is minuscule compared to the loss of life in the war on terror. Even the deaths of our own soldiers is greater. Washington’s wars against terror have caused more deaths of Americans than the alleged terrorist events themselves.

But were they terrorist events?

There are many reasons to suspect these “terrorist attacks.” Governments have always resorted to false flag events in order to serve secret agendas. The Czar’s secret police set off bombs in order to create grounds for arresting labor agitators. We know from Operation Gladio that Western intelligence services did the same thing in order to blame European communist parties and block their electoral gains. Washington lived in fear that a communist party would gain executive power in some European country.

The 9/11 Truth movement, consisting of 2,300 architects and engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, military and airline pilots, first responders, and former government officials, have blown the official 9/11 story out of the water. No person with a brain believes the official story. The chairman, co-chairman, and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission have written books stating that information was withheld from the commission, that the military lied to the commission, and that the commission “was set up to fail.”

Now we have claims from an imprisoned Al Qaeda member that Saudi Arabia financed 9/11. There is a secret government document, whose 28 pages allegedly point to Saudi involvement, that some lawmakers think should be released. At this point we have no way of knowing whether this is another layer of cover, another red herring to divert attention from the collapsing 9/11 story to the Saudis, whose country is also on the neoconservative list of Middle Eastern countries to be overthrown. When Washington lies and withholds information, the American people cannot know what the truth is.

There are peculiarities and contradictory evidence with regard to the London transport bombings and the Spanish train bombing. Moreover, these bombings arrived at the right time to serve Washington’s propaganda and purposes, while what terrorists had to gain from them is unclear and ambiguous. The Boston Marathon Bombing and the Paris Charlie Hebdo attack have many characteristics of false flag attacks, but the media have not asked a single question. Instead, the media hypes the official explanations. When questions cannot be asked or answered, it is a reasonable suspicion that something is wrong with the story.

Myself and a large number of observant and astute persons have asked questions about the Boston and Paris events. Our reward, of course, has been ad hominem attacks. For example, a non-entity of whom no one has ever heard used Salon, known as A Voice For The Government, to call me a series of names for asking the obvious questions that every journalist should be asking.

The only reason to read Salon is to continue your brainwashing experience as a good patriotic American should. I mean, how dare you contemplate disbelieving your honest, caring, loving, humane, moral, life-preserving, truth-telling government, which takes special care to spare human life everywhere, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Ukraine.

You can take it as a general rule that anytime you see an ad hominem attack on someone who raises questions that the questions are dangerous and that the government is using its well-paid trolls to discredit the sceptic who raised the questions.

The Charlie Hebdo and Boston bombing have in common that the police decided to kill the alleged perpetuators rather than capture them–just as a person alleged to be Osama bin Laden was gratuitously murdered in the raid on the “mastermind’s compound” in Pakistan. Dead men tell no tales. They can’t contradict the story.

The obvious question is, like the question about Osama bin Laden’s alleged murder by a Seal in Abbottabad, Pakistan, why were such valuable intelligence resources killed rather than captured? But the Western print and TV media have not made a point of this obvious question. One of the alleged suspects in the Charlie Hebdo affair, Hamyd Mourad, when he heard via social media that he was the driver of the getaway car of the Charlie Hebdo killers, had the wits to quickly turn himself into the French police before he could be murdered as a terrorist. The frame-up of this intended victim failed. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/looking-mourad-hamyd

I have seen nothing in the news questioning how the official story can be so wrong about Hamyd Mourad and still be right about the alleged brothers who conducted the attack. The evidence connecting the brothers to the attack is the claim that they left their ID in the get-away car. This reminds me of the passport initially said to have been found in the ruble of the twin towers that was used to establish the identity of the alleged perpetrators of 9/11.

Hamyd Mourad is like the surviving Tsamaev brother. Neither were supposed to survive, because their stories, if we ever hear them, will not fit the official explanation.

We are only two months short of two years since the Marathon bombing and the surviving brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has still not been brought to trial. Nor has he or his attorney been heard from. http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/01/06/boston-marathon-bombing-suspect-silent/

According to the official story, Dzhokhar wrote his confession on the side of a boat in which the severely wounded, unarmed 19-year old was hiding from execution. That such an unlikely story could become part of American reality demonstrates the stupidity of both the authorities and the American public.

It is entirely possible that Dzhokhar’s attorney has learned from the Lynne Steward case that any lawyer who defends his Muslim client will be himself sentenced to federal prison for not cooperating with the government’s agenda.

But these are speculations. What facts do we have? None, of course, from Washington. Washington needs no facts. Washington is the Imperial Power. Washington’s word rules, the facts be damned. The print and TV media do not dare to contradict Washington on any important point or raise any embarrassing questions.

Concerning facts, we have the non-investigated report that a high-ranked French police official, for reasons unknown, killed himself in police headquarters while writing a report on the Charlie Hebdo affair based on his investigation.

Police officials spend their lives hoping for a major, big time case, participation in which makes their career memorable. No police official benefitting from such an opportunity would deny himself of it by committing suicide. Did the investigation not support the official story? Was the police official Helric Fredou not compliant with cover-up orders? The media has not asked these questions, and I have seen no reports about the content of Fredou’s report. What does his report, finished or unfinished, say? Why isn’t this of media interest?

Moreover, the family of Helric Fredou is unable to get the autopsy report of Helric’s “suicide” from the French government. I have seen no news reports of this fact in the US print and TV media. Here is the only report that I can find: from Kevin Barrett on Veterans Today: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/26/fredou/

Let’s turn now to one of the last remaining investigative reporters, Russ Baker. In an interview with Lew Rockwell on January 30, 2015, investigative reporter Russ Baker points out that no evidence has ever been presented that the Tsarnave brothers killed a MIT campus cop or highjacked a motorist. He points out that these stories helped to inflame the situation and to firmly place in the public’s mind that the brothers were dangerous and guilty of the bombing, while launching the police on a revenge killing.

There are many anomalies in the case against the Tsarnave brothers. I won’t go into them. The Internet is full of skeptical information about the official story, and you can look into it to your heart’s content. At the time, the main evidence against the brothers was a video of them walking with packs on their backs. Yet there is an abundance of videos available showing large numbers of people with backpacks, including a number of men dressed identically as if in uniform, and there are reports that a terrorist bombing drill was being held at the site complete with crisis actors. To my knowledge, none of this was ever examined or explained by the TV and print media.

One aspect that suggests pre-planning is the quick appearance of 10,000 heavily armed militarized units from a number of police and federal agencies. How (and why) was this varied force so quickly and easily assembled? The complete lockdown of Boston and its suburbs, and the eviction of people from their homes at gunpoint in order to conduct house by house searches for the one wounded brother still alive, is a response so outside of the normal range of responses as to raise questions that the media avoided asking.

Another suspicious incident is the “spontaneous” street party giving thanks to the militarized forces for saving Boston from the 19-year old kid found bleeding to death under a boat by a local resident. This party took place within a very short time just after the kid was found and seems inconsistent with lead times for organizing street parties, especially coming out of a locked-down situation when so much is disorganized.

Lew Rockwell has given me permission to repost his January 30, 2015, transcription of his June 4, 2013 podcast interview with Russ Baker, “Suppressing the Truth About the Boston Bombings.” I have edited the long interview for length, but here is the link to the full interview: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/no_author/suppressing-the-truth-about-the-boston-bombing/

ROCKWELL:  Well, good morning.  This is the Lew Rockwell Show.  And it’s great to have as our guest this morning, Mr. Russ Baker.  Russ is an award-winning investigative reporter.  I mean, an actual investigative reporter.  I think that’s, unfortunately, a dying breed.  He’s written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Esquire, and many, many others publications.  To me, most importantly, he’s the author of a great book called Family of Secrets:The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces that Put It in the White House and What Their Influence Means for America, and an updated paperback under the title of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.  Russ has his own site, of course, RussBaker.com, also WhoWhatWhy.com, which continues his investigative reporting outside of the mainstream media.

Russ, is anybody, but you questioning the information shutdown that’s taken place in Boston? 

BAKER:  We are looking at the actual facts of the case.   And in the information that has come out, we’re seeing tremendous anomalies, inconsistencies, out-right falsehoods, reversals by these agencies, and we are troubled by them.   And so I and other members of our team have been working this story now for more than a month, and we’re going to stay at it for a few more months. 

 We saw the clamp down on the freedom of movement.  We’ve seen the increasing encroachment of military troops into our American cities.  We see the public getting softened up and being made to become more and more comfortable with living in kind of a military state almost. 

ROCKWELL:  Now, you’ve actually been on the ground in Boston?

BAKER:    I spent the last two weeks there.  I’ll be going back again.  I can’t stay there full time.  I’m based in New York now, not in Boston.  But I did spend two weeks there, and it was very, very instructive and I got a sense of a bunch of things.  I met with and even drove around with journalists from major newspapers and radio shows; some good people, but I could see the limitations.  There really is almost nobody there digging deeply into these problematical issues.  And when I say problematical issues, what I mean is it is the job of the media to just find out what happened.  It is not our job to pass along what somebody else says happened.  That’s not our job.  And the media there, the major newspapers, the TV and the radio, by and large, just said what the authorities told them.  In a few cases, places like “The Boston Globe,” they do more than that, a little bit more than that; they’ve tried to talk to people.  But I can tell you from my own experience that a lot of this stuff is being controlled.

We’ve done four pieces.  We have another one coming up in a few days.  That’s going to be about this carjacking victim, which is a very, very important piece of this story that has not been investigated by the media.  Another one we just did recently is about the shooting of an MIT police officer named Sean Collier.  That story was treated — it was not examined, Lew, in the context of what that story was.  That story was actually a kind of a propagandistic moment.  And those of us who study and read history remember that back in the Nazi era, there was the killing of a police officer, a Horst Wessel, and they even created a song for the Nazi movement, the “Horst Wessel” song.  Killings of police officers that are magnified like this — and if you go to WhoWhatWhy.com and read that article, there’s a photo of all of these baseball players at a stadium standing with their hats off and their heads bent in a giant projection of this one police officer.  And what is that for?  Because, tragically, police officers are killed in the line of duty all the time.  Why all of the focus on this one police officer?  I have never, Lew, seen a news organization ask that question.  Why are we focusing on this police officer?  And more importantly, what actually happened with this police officer that would make us interested in him?

ROCKWELL:  Well, of course, it’s clearly become an unexamined assumption that police are worth more than regular people.  So the killing of a cop is far worse than the killing of an old lady or a young father or whatever else, which happens all the time.  And in fact, there actually are not that many police killed in the line of duty.  You can actually find out that figure.  It’s far more dangerous to be a commercial fisherman or a logger or a farmer or many other occupations than to be a cop.  So it’s not actually true that they’re always being killed.

But absolutely, it’s made into a huge political deal, as Will Grigg puts it, with a Brezhnev-style funeral any time a cop is killed, whereas,  if some poor store owner or whatever is killed in the line of duty, his family cares and that’s about it.

BAKER:  I agree with you, that’s true.  I guess what my point was that even in agreeing with you that there are not that many police officers killed, there still are nationally probably some.

ROCKWELL:  Oh, sure.  Actually, about 40 to 50, which is terrible.

BAKER:  But what interests me here is this particular police officer.
By the way, there were two police officers shot; one died and one almost died.  And they’re both very strange cases.  And so, first of all, I was struck by the fact that they wanted to make it a big deal about this police officer’s death.  Biden flew in and addressed his funeral.  It’s literally said that thousands of law enforcement people came from all over the country to attend the funeral of this man they didn’t know.  Now, it is logical to ask, “Why would people attend a funeral of a person they didn’t know?”  It’s for some reason.  And what it really comes down to is it’s propagandistic.  And what this is, is this is focusing the public and it’s very strongly sending out a message that the system is taking care of you and you have to honor the system.  “This person died for you.”

And what’s very interesting was, if you go into that article and you read all the detail of what I investigated — and we’ll be doing more on this — first of all, when Officer Collier was killed, we were essentially told either explicitly or implicitly that he had been killed by these two brothers.  Now what’s very interesting is, at the time that he was killed, all we knew was that these two brothers, whose names were not even public yet, were pictures from a video, wearing backpacks, walking along with dozens, hundreds of other people wearing backpacks and walking.  And so it was the death of this police officer that set everything into motion.

And as soon as I heard about the death of this police officer, I thought, OK, when an officer is down, when that is announced, I can tell you this — and I know a lot of police officers and many of them are very, very fine people, but they act with a kind of a pack mentality — and it suddenly turbo charges.  You know, there’s a whole tradition, the Blue Wall of Silence and all this, and when anything happens to a police officer in any instance, immediately, all the other police respond in a very, very aggressive way.  And so what you saw was, the second he had been shot, boy, whatever the police officers were doing, they were all going to get whoever did this.  And so this became the justification for that shootout on the street in Watertown; later, going after the younger brother, the Tsarnaev brother, and peppering that boat with gunshots when he wasn’t even armed.  This was essentially a kind of retribution for their fellow officer.  Except for one thing, and that is that about a week later, when they were doing this whole big memorial service with Biden and everything, they rather quietly announced that, oh, you know what, actually, the original story that he had maybe tried to stop these brothers and they had killed him was not right.  It turns out, they don’t know who shot this man.  He didn’t confront anybody.  And he was assassinated.  And do you know where he was assassinated, Lew?  He was sitting in his patrol car.  Just sitting there.  Somebody came up behind him for no apparent reason and killed him in cold blood.  We have no evidence right now that those brothers even did it.  But that was the precipitating event that then unleashed all of this fire power.

The next thing that happened is this carjacking.  And an unknown person, whose name is still not public, has said that he was carjacked by these brothers and that they told him, “We planted the bomb and we killed that cop.”  Now, those are two things that there is no hard evidence that they did either of them, but now you’ve got killed the cop and then you have a carjacking with an unnamed person saying these guys told me they did it.  And then one of them is killed; the other one, I believe, they attempted to murder him.  So what you would have had, Lew, is you would have had a situation where both of these suspects would be dead, an unknown witness would connect them to both of the things, the whole thing would be over; and that military, that huge military police response would have been accepted, and we would be used to the idea that there will be more of these things.

ROCKWELL:  Well, that’s right.  And of course, then we had the younger brother writing out his confession on the side of the boat in the dark.

BAKER:  Well, in the dark, but this guy was basically gravely injured. According to the story, which is a little bit strange, of the man who owned that boat, when he went out to check, he saw blood there.  I mean, this guy was already in a pool of blood before they called the cops.  Because we know he’s gravely injured in the hospital.  So the likelihood that he was in any shape, you know, to sort of heroically prop himself up and go to these incredible lengths to scrawl out a confession virtually with his dying breath is a little bit hard to believe.

At the end, I think the notion was that they thought this guy was going to die.  With those shots that they fired, given the fact that he hadn’t fired a single shot at them, you have to assume that at least one person in that group, whether it was local police or it was the FBI people on the scene, was shooting to kill.  That was the intent, it seems.  And so this confession, if it’s even real — and we haven’t seen that in that confession.  And other thing we’ve been reporting is that that confession was reported to us by John Miller, a senior correspondent at CBS News.  It’s very, very important to remember that John Miller’s last major job was that he was a top official of the FBI.  He was a lead spokesman for the FBI.  He loves the FBI.  He’s very, very close with them.  And this is the man who is now back in journalism telling us this story.  He also has been a key figure throughout.  He got one of those so-called exclusive interviews with the unknown carjacking victim.  So in other words, this entire narrative is being constructed essentially by the FBI or its allies.

ROCKWELL:  I always think of the FBI as the American secret police.  And if you called them that, then when you see this sort of thing going on, it seems to me you ought to take things with maybe not a grain of salt but a cup of salt.

BAKER:  You know, I’ve reported all over the world.  I was one of the first reporters into East Germany before the wall came down; Romania when Ceausescu was overthrown.  I’ve been in so many societies where there was totalitarianism or authoritarianism.  And these kinds of organizations — you do need police, you do need investigative agencies but, unfortunately, the abuses are just rampant.  And anybody who is listening to this who thinks that that is unfair, I invite you to read any of dozens, maybe scores of books about J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for half a century, and to see that he ran it like a personal fiefdom, basically, like a mobster, and everybody in the agency was terrified of him.  There were constant cover-ups in there.  You understood you could lose your job in a second if you asked any questions at all.  Some of these books are by scholars.  Others are by people who worked in the FBI itself.

And so I have to agree with you.  I mean, in some respect, of course, one wants an agency like the FBI to be there, but that doesn’t mean we have to apologize for the grave structural, philosophical and other problems with it.  The FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, local police, all of these institutions are absolutely riddled with problems.  And, you know, my attitude as a journalist is many institutions are riddled with problems, many aspects of the federal government, but also private industry, big corporations, riddled with problems, abuses and so forth.  And it is not our job as journalists, and I don’t think it’s our jobs as citizens, to just accept what anybody tells us and to just blindly trust when they say, whether it’s the FBI or it’s your bank.

ROCKWELL:  tell us what happened in the alleged fire or bomb or whatever the heck it was at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

BAKER:  You know, that’s a strange one, because we were told that that happened almost at the same time of the marathon bombing, within a short time of that, on the same day.  We still haven’t gotten a straight answer on what happened.  I’ve been doing a little bit in the way of inquiries and, I have to say, I have questions about that.  I don’t think that the authorities are being forthcoming.  And even more disturbing than the bombing itself, the potential damage there or attempted damage to priceless research materials that people like I need to continue to investigate what happened to John F. Kennedy, what happened to American 50 years ago, and how it’s impacting us today, which I believe it is.  The past certainly is prologue.  But not only am I concerned about that but, you know, there was no coverag — the media dropped it.    Go and Google this thing, you’ll see zero, almost.  I mean, nothing from the local Boston media or the national media.  I mean, WhoWhatWhy is a little, tiny non-profit and we’re looking into it.  And these giant news organizations have nobody asking these questions.

I find the Boston bombing story absolutely rife with weird messaging.  And it could all be coincidental; it may be coincidental; probably a lot of it is.  I’ll give you an example.  The shooting of Officer Collier was almost a dead ringer for the shooting of Officer Tippet in the Lee Harvey Oswald/John F. Kennedy saga.  Lee Harvey Oswald wouldn’t even have been a real suspect in the Kennedy assassination had not a police officer been shot shortly after Kennedy was killed, because Oswald was just one of many people who worked in that building.  Nobody said that they saw him with a rifle.  He only became really a suspect when this police officer was shot and then the description of the man who shot him matched Oswald.  So here you see a very, very similar thing where it’s a police officer goes down right after this other event and plays a role essentially in tying them, making these non-suspects suspects, and making them very, very guilty.  So that was one thing.

The second thing is this thing at the library on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  There are many, many disturbing parallels.  You’ve got, in both of those stories, the suspects had recently been in Russia.  Remember that?  They both had been in Russia.
[LAUGHTER]

Strange families.  Both the Tsarnaevs and Lee Harvey Oswald had been being monitored by the FBI.  Both of them had relatives, or other people they were associated, with ties to the CIA.  I mean, is this all coincidental?  Does somebody have a particularly sophisticated and sick sense of humor?  I mean, what are we looking at here?  Of course, you’re not even allowed to ask these questions.

Another story going up probably today is how The New York Times, instead of investigating any of these things, they quickly have somebody roll out a story talking about conspiracy theorists and how anybody who has questions about things basically is sort of mentally ill, which is a very, very important contradiction.  If you ask any questions and you don’t accept the conventional narrative that everything is just fine, there is something really, really wrong with you.

But, you know, my continuing efforts to look into these giant traumas, what happened to Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Walter Reuther, you know, union leaders who died in a strange plane crashes and so on, there’s so much of this, and it is disproportionately reformers who get taken out.  Very, very few corporate-cozy conservative politicians, who also, by the way, fly in private planes all the time, never seem to have an accident.  But this stuff we need to look at.

Now, you were talking about the KGB and putting people into mental hospitals but, you know, that happens in the United States all the time.  And just one example is there was an Army sergeant by the name of Dinkin, who was intercepting cables and big top-secret stuff at a military base in 1963, and he divined from his own monitoring of cable traffic that there was an assassination plot against JFK.  And he divined that that assassination plot was going to involve right wingers and members of the military and some foreign assassins, and that it was going to take place in Dallas in November of 1963.  And when he tried to say what he knew, they put him into a mental hospital and they began injections and they began essentially doing mind-control things with him.  And eventually, he was forced to say, oh, no, the reason I said those things — and he gave some other explanation that was totally benign.  And that was the only way that this man could get out of basically the gulag.  So if you think that these things only go on in the Soviet Union, you’re wrong.

ROCKWELL:  Russ, before we go, I want you, to the extent you can, tell us about the book you’re working on now.

BAKER:  Well, you know, I generally don’t talk too much about what I’m working on.  But I will say this.  In terms of subjects and major interests to me, I continue to be very interested in the John F. Kennedy assassination.  Would have loved to have something out on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, but that story is so layered and so complicated, some people believe we could never get to the bottom of it.  I think we can.  I think we can put enough pieces of the things together to figure out what happened.  And I think that solving that is absolutely essential for us to understand what kind of society we really live in, to kind of wake up.  And you know, people say, though, “This is so depressing, I don’t want to hear about it,” but that is not a way to empower yourself.  You empower yourself by educating yourself, by having your eyes open, by understanding how things work.  And that is really the beginning to go about and correct these things, because this country has always — and Franklin Roosevelt said this and Woodrow Wilson said it.  They always warned us that they didn’t really run the country.  Franklin Roosevelt very famously said in a letter to somebody, he said, as you and I both know, the real power in this country resides in the financial circles on Wall Street.  And that’s true.  And I’m continuing to look at Obama and how people like that get to the top and people like Hillary Clinton, and who are behind them, and why it is that, whether we have a Democrat or a Republican, even though there are real substantive differences, primarily on social issues, when it comes to the big global issues and the big financial issues, essentially, we see very, very similar policies and appointments made.  What is really going on in this country?  Why is it that we actually seem to live under a kind of a one-party state?  And that is what my continuing efforts, my books, and, most importantly, my work at WhoWhatWhy.com, which really is the main focus of my efforts in my life today.  It’s to build a meaningful journalistic institution that can train a whole new generation of journalists, funded entirely by the public, with no corporate influence or government influence, asking questions with neither fear, nor favor, and doing what we’re supposed to be doing, really, as journalists.

Dear Readers: If we expect to regain the liberty bestowed upon us by the Bill of Rights, we must turn a deaf ear to Washington’s lies. Washington’s agenda is divorced from the agendas of the American people. Washington’s agenda is war and more debt for taxpayers to service even though a majority cannot pay their bills except with mounting credit card debt, and a police state in place to control the population as jobs offshoring eliminates the middle class buffer that suppresses class war between the poor and the rich.