Victoria Nuland’s “Yats” (Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk) was in Berlin meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel Thursday, with an obvious objective of wrecking any chances of a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. Yatsenyuk, sta…
The danger of general war—thermonuclear war—against Russia, coming from the Wall Street-City of London looming bankruptcy blowout, is clearly driving desperate actions from throughout that oligarchical apparatus. This has been reflected in the past 24 hours on both the financial and strategic warfare fronts.
First and foremost was the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. This is a harbinger of further terrorist attacks of this nature, Lyndon LaRouche warned on Thursday.
“This is coming from London, and is part of the British drive for war. Their policy is massive population reduction, and the strategic deployment of terrorist assets must be understood in this context.”
LaRouche warned that the British will play both sides of the Islam/anti-Islam orchestration.
“Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of the specific label,” LaRouche asserted. “This will require some very serious and competent intelligence work to defeat this looming assault.”
LaRouche added that the Paris attacks must be seen as a warning of similar actions that will erupt elsewhere. He continued,
“Do not underestimate the importance of the press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday by Sen. Bob Graham and current Reps. Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch with the 9/11 families. They nailed the Saudi—really Anglo-Saudi top-down hand behind all serious global terrorism. This is a very significant expose of the top-down nature of the real terrorist threat.”
Indeed, evidence is already coming to the surface, indicating a clear British hand behind the terrorist attacks in Paris. On Thursday night, the Daily Telegraph revealed clear links between one of the Paris attackers and Abu Hamza, a longtime jihad recruiter based out of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. Abu Hamza was convicted in a US Federal Court last year of terrorism sponsorship, but in his trial, his defense was that he was working on behalf of MI5, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
The same desperation driving the new wave of 9/11-style terrorism is also driving Congressional Republican leaders to bend to Wall Street’s demands for immediate guarantees of unlimited taxpayer bailout of their totally bankrupt financial bubble. At the same time, they are also, as Lyndon LaRouche warned, pressing for vicious austerity measures targeted at America’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens—through cuts in Food Stamps, Social Security Disability and Veterans benefits. This is one and the same as the British policy of radical population reduction.
LaRouche recently forecasted that, in a very short period of time, the Republican leadership in the Congress will come to be hated as much as Obama.
House Republicans, responding to the continuing terror on Wall Street of a near-term blowout, tried on Wednesday to ram through yet another Wall Street bailout law—and they were defeated by a disciplined Democratic vote. Rather than exploit their majority in the House, Republicans used a rules procedure to bypass the House Financial Services Committee and call an instant vote on HR 37, a collection of financial deregulation measures, including a further two-year extension on the July 2017 deadline for banks to sell off their collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) and the elimination of all collateral requirements on derivatives contracts. All but 35 Democrats voted “no,” and the measure was defeated by six votes (the rule requires a 2/3 majority). Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Reps. Maxine Waters and Keith Ellison, were still furious at the Obama-Jamie Dimon swindle in December, lifting the ban on FDIC bailouts of commodity futures derivatives, and even Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi mobilized Democratic opposition.
While this was a limited, but useful, rear-guard victory, it betrays the continuing Wall Street hysteria, and opens the door for Lyndon LaRouche’s genuine solution: Bankrupt Wall Street by implementing his Four Cardinal Laws, starting with the reinstatement of the original Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
In a similar act of desperation, Ukraine Prime Minister (Victoria Nuland’s “our man Yats”) Yatsenyuk was in Berlin on Thursday, meeting with German Chancellor Merkel and pressing for further confrontation with Russia, and particularly with President Putin. While French President Hollande has been pushing back against the continuing targeting of Russia and pressing for the Normandy Group of heads of state of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany to meet soon in Khazakstan to resolve the Ukraine crisis, Yatsenyuk delivered an in-your-face assault on Putin, accusing Russia of being behind the hacking into German government computers, and accusing Putin personally of deploying hordes of “bandits” into eastern Ukraine. Merkel made no effort to push back against Yatsenyuk’s outrageous provocations.
Back before the New Year, LaRouche was already warning that the very first days and weeks of 2015 would be a showdown moment on a global scale. Events of the last 48 hours illustrate just how accurate his warnings have been.
Democrats succeeded in stopping yet another Wall Street scam Jan. 7, when the new Republican leadership in the House tried to ram through a bill, HR 37, to postpone for another two years a part of the Volcker Rule which requires banks to get rid of their collatoralized loan obligations (CLOs, bundled securitized corporate debt). The Federal Reserve in December unilaterally extended the deadline for banks to dump their CLOs from 2015 until 2017. HR 37 would have extended that deadline until July 2019!
The Republican leadership brought the bill to the floor under special rules allowing it to go through without amendments, even though that process requires a 2/3 vote rather than a simple majority. They assumed they had enough Democrat votes, as they did before Christmas in passing the removal of Dodd-Frank Section 716, which had prohibited banks from dealing in derivatives with FDIC protected money. But Jan Shakowsky, Pelosi, and others mobilized to stop HR 37 by 6 votes, to the shock of the GOP leaders.
Only 35 Democrats supported the legislation. Huffington Post notes that in the past “pro-Wall Street bills often passed with 100 or more Democratic supporters,” showing an anti-Wall Street mood now taking hold. One Republican voted against: Walter Jones, of course.
The Huffington Post notes that “between 94 and 96 percent of the domestic CLO market is held by banks with at least $50 billion in assets, according to federal regulators, who value the market at between $84 billion and $105 billion.”
Obama rose to the occasion, showing his ability to lie outrageously. White House spokeswoman Jennifer Friedmann said Obama opposed the bill: “The President has been clear about his opposition to legislation that would weaken key consumer protections and provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act” — this, after Obama joined hands with Boehner and Jamie Dimon to scrap Dodd Frank’s Section 716 last month!
News media have now identified the three terrorists who killed a dozen people in a well-organized assault on the Paris offices of the neocon satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. They are Cherif and Said Kouachi, brothers both in their mid-30s, and Hamyd Mourad, 18. Mourad turned himself in to police late on Wednesday evening, but the search is still underway for the Kouachi brothers. Mourad claims that he was in school at the time of the Paris attacks and turned himself in to avoid being killed in a police raid.
French authorities have provided some details on Cherif Kouachi, who has been on French intelligence and police radar screens since 2005, when he was detained while attempting to leave France for Syria and Iraq, to join Al Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the American occupation. He was detained in jail for a period of time, then released. He was convicted in 2008 of being part of a terrorist recruiting cell in France on behalf of AQI. Though sentenced to three years in jail, he served no time at all, according to news reports on CNN late Thursday afternoon. A judge reduced his sentence from 3 years to 18 months, and he was allowed to go free, based on time served. This lenient treatment for a member of a terrorist recruiting cell, run by a well-known jihadist preacher named Farid Benyettou, raises questions about whether the younger Kouachi brother made a deal with authorities.
But far more serious “questions” were raised by a report appearing late on Thursday in the Daily Telegraph, identifying Cherif Kouachi as a protege of Abu Hamza, the Algerian-born jihadist recruiter who operated with impunity for years out of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. Last year Abu Hamza was convicted of terrorist activities in a Federal Court in New York. At his trial, his key defense was that he worked for MI5, while recruiting jihadists in London. He is to be sentenced soon.
Late news reports in the New York Times reported that the older brother, Said Kouachi, had been in Yemen in 2011, trained at Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula camps in small arms and unit tactics.
An American intelligence official told the Times that the brothers were on American no-fly lists for a long time.
A Washington source told EIR on Wednesday that international intelligence agencies had been caught by surprise by the Paris attacks, because there was no “chatter” on any jihadist communications links about a pending attack. However, the Times reported that a recent issue of “Inspire” magazine of AQAP had called explicitly for attacks on Western targets and had singled out Charlie Hebdo’s editor Stephane Charbonnier for attack under the headline “A Bullet a Day Keeps the Infidel Away—Defend the Prophet Muhammad.” Josh Rogin reported in Bloomberg Thursday that another jihadist website had called for attacks on the home front in a French language posting under the headline “What Are You Waiting For?”
Jacques Cheminade, former French Presidential candidate and president of Solidarité et Progrès, issued the following statement Thursday under the title “Face à Notre 9/11,” “Our 9/11,” after the bloodbath at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12 people and wounded 11 others. The statement is translated from the original French, available on Cheminade’s website.
“The fight against terrorism is the responsibility of our police force, our national gendarmerie, and our intelligence services. They must take very seriously the immediate threat before us, everywhere and on a daily basis in their deployments. There are no lone wolves, there are small and medium-sized terrorist outfits that are more or less manipulated. From other European countries, we must demand serious border controls, because we are at war. At home, we must put an end to all incitements to violence, including through images in violent video games, which the terrorists are often devotees of and which help make their minds sick.
“Changing the environment is a matter of our public policy. We must hold to account Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where certain institutions and families have funded and continue to fund ‘Salafist’ terrorism. We must hold to account Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s Turkey, which is playing both sides and thus has become an accomplice. We must end any and all ‘special partnerships’ with these countries.
“We must demand an investigation into the role of the banking networks, especially the British ones, which act as transmission belts for the money used by al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists. These are the counterfeiters who keep these misdirected criminals going.
“Moreover, we must not allow the debate to be detoured into being against immigration and Muslims, which would lead us to fall into the trap that has been set for us. In particular, fighting anti-Semitism with all our might means we are supporting the dialogue of civilizations, of cultures, and of religions.
“Let’s be blunt: In the strategy of chaos aimed at Europe and at France, the financial oligarchy is fueling the flames of Islamic terrorism — the giveaway is in the agreements between the Londonistan system and Saudi Arabia — while at the same time calling for war on Islam, as do the PEGIDA movement in Germany and the nationalist networks in France, including within the Front National. But what France is, is “a certain idea,” or a pact with freedom in the world, and not a perverted notion of doctrinal sovereignty, such as with British UKIP (U.K. Independence Party) or the Alternative for Germany, which is de facto associated with PEGIDA.
“Only in a world without the City of London and Wall Street, and enlivened by the spirit of the New Silk Road on a world scale, the spirit of mutual development, can terrorism truly be fought. France can and must be a pillar of that new world.”
Wednesday’s Capitol Hill press conference on the censored 28 pages, featuring former Senator Bob Graham and sitting Congressmen Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch, was a body blow to the British Empire and their global terrorism apparatus. And it was time that it happened, Lyndon LaRouche commented today.
All the more so, since scarcely hours before the Washington press conference began, that same British-run terror apparatus was deployed in Paris, France, where masked and heavily armed gunmen killed 10 journalists and two policemen at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Because of the uncontrollable implosion of their financial system, Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly warned over recent weeks that the British Empire can be counted on to use war — including financial, military, and irregular warfare such as terrorism — in an effort to maintain their death-grip on the planet.
At the 28-pages press conference, Senator Graham and Representatives Jones and Lynch not only denounced the Saudi role in 9/11, but more than once drew the parallel to the “British perfidy” against the United States during the Civil War. Senator Graham called for a “Lincolnesque” response from the country’s institutions, a far cry from what has been seen from the Congress and the Executive to date. They announced a drive to get Senators to introduce a similar resolution to the one presented to the House of Representatives, calling for the release of the 28 pages. In fact, a number of the participants in the event, including members of the LaRouche movement, went directly from the Capitol Hill press conference to lobby Senators and Congressmen to do just that.
Now more must be done, and fast. The continuing plunge of the euro portends the meltdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, even before the critical Jan. 25 Greek elections. The British Empire has launched renewed financial warfare against Russia, which could backfire — and that, most explosively — at any moment. And Jeb Bush, like the true grandson of the Nazi Prescott Bush that he is, launched his presidential campaign drive Wednesday with a fundraiser with relatives in … Greenwich, Connecticut, the hedge fund capital of the U.S.!
But, Lyndon LaRouche noted, now that the Republicans have consolidated power in Congress, and with Wall Street interests being concentrated in the Republican leaders, the Republican party will quickly become the most hated party in the United States.
The alternative to such fascism is the total paradigm shift embodied in LaRouche’s Four Laws and our drive to bring the U.S. and Europe on board with the BRICS. The next advance in organizing that paradigm shift, is centered on the upcoming Schiller Institute conference in Manhattan on January 17, just nine days from now.
That son-of-a-Bush Jeb has launched a new “leadership PAC,” called “Right to Rise,” while his backers have formed an “independent” Super-PAC (that can accept and spend unlimited amounts) with the same name.
Jeb’s “leadership PAC” has already raised ov…
After dropping by 5% yesterday, the euro today fell another half percent in trading against the dollar, bringing it to 1.18 to the dollar — a nine year low. Nervous chatter is filling the pages of the financial media, about how the euro could even drop to parity with the dollar, and that the only hope for survival is for ECB president Mario Draghi to really let loose with quantitative easing at their next meeting on Jan. 22 — three days before the looming Greek elections.
“I’d say there’s a good chance it gets there [euro-dollar parity] before the [U.S.] election next November (2016),”
Marc Chandler, chief foreign exchange strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, told CNBC.
“We know the Fed’s going to be raising rates sooner or later, and the ECB is going to be easing sooner or later. I just see a steady grind lower.”
As the euro was tanking, German Chancellor Angela Merkel travelled to London for six hours of meetings with Prime Minister David Cameron — appropriately enough, in a museum. Purportedly they were discussing the future of the United Kingdom in the EU, but it’s a good bet that the Greek crisis was actually foremost on their agenda.
Iceland, meanwhile, announced that it is planning to formally withdraw its application for EU membership. As Nigel Farage, head of the British UKIP party, stated:
“This move by Icelandic authorities and the increasing Mediterranean opposition to the EU shows that the idea of the inevitability of EU integration has been smashed. More and more people throughout Europe either no longer wish to join the EU or, as in Greece, to leave the euro currency all together.”
Wednesday morning, at 11:26 am, three hooded individuals dressed in black and armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher, forced their way into the building of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in downtown Paris and proceeded to carry out a five-minute shoot-out, killing 12 people, among which were two policemen deployed to intervene. Among the dead, a large part of the editorial board of this very popular weekly in France, gathered for their weekly editorial meeting. These include several of their star journalists and talented caricaturists, well-known to the French public as Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, and Tignous, plus left-wing economist Bernard Maris, a member of the Bank of France board, who is also part of the magazine’s editorial board.
As in other recent terror incidents in France, a policeman and several journalists who survived the attack report that the “terrorists” called themselves al-Qaeda affiliates, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “the Prophet will be avenged.” Reportedly they spoke French as their mother tongue.
While much more intelligence needs to be gathered, a first evaluation is that we are witnessing a full-fledged attempt to plunge Europe into a chaos scenario, pitting sections of the population against one another — pro-immigration against anti-immigration; pro-Muslim vs. anti-Muslim — at a time where they should, on the contrary, unite to face the major strategic problems of the time, the financial crash and the danger of war.
The so-called “Islamic” attack against Charlie Hebdo comes just four days after the attacks against three mosques in a Sweden, where the xenophobic Party of Democracy has doubled its strength since 2010. In the Netherlands, partisans of Geert Wilders of the Party of Liberty, wrote in their blogs their full support for those actions in Sweden, and said they would do the same in the Netherlands. The attack in France comes also at a moment when pro- and anti-immigration demonstrations in Germany are mobilizing thousands of people every Monday, under the leadership of PEGIDA (European Patriots against Islamization of the West), with 18,000 in Dresden alone on Jan. 5th!
Charlie Hebdo itself has been playing with this explosive fire for some time. In 2006, it was they who published the insulting Mohammed caricatures, after Denmark’s Jyllands Posten and the French daily France Soir. At that time, CounterPunch, a U.S.-based left-wing magazine, reported that neo-con Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, was the one who furnished the cartoons to Jyllands Posten. At that time Geert Wilders had declared that the Koran was the same thing as Mein Kampf. When he was taken to court for that, the Middle East Forum announced proudly that they were financing Wilders’ legal defense. Furthermore, Robert Spencer, a friend of Pipes, founded Jihad Watch, and this whole operation at that time was coordinated through the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, a neo-con outfit funded by the Randolph Foundation, and the CFR, where one finds Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Bernard Lewis, Irving Kristol of PNAC, etc.
This time again, Charlie Hebdo was about to proceed to another provocation. The cover story of their new issue was on Michel Houellebecq, a professional “provocateur” who just published a novel Soumission (Submission). The scenario of the book is that in 2025, a French presidential election pits Marine Le Pen against a Muslim candidate who has the backing of the right-wing UMP, the Socialist Party, and other mainstream parties. He actually wins and runs a good policy overall, including peace and economic development, except that all the women have to veil themselves, stop working, etc.!
All the actors of this tragedy have obviously been profiled with a lot of make-up to create a certain appearance of reality. The specific aim of this operation is not yet clear. In various statements, LaRouche associate Jacques Cheminade noted that “this is a terrorist attack against France,” he called for “national solidarity” to deal with the crisis, and said that the real enemy is “financial power”. He also noted that the attack has been carried out by “professionals”. In a weak statement, given in front of the Charlie Hebdo offices, French President François Hollande did call for “national unity” and for France to respond with unity to this attack.
The need for the immediate release of the redacted 28 pages on the funding of 9/11, from the Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September of 2001, was the subject of a high-powered press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday, January 7th. The event was sponsored by Congressmen Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-MA), who on Jan. 6 reintroduced their resolution demanding that President Obama declassify the pages, which were first classified by President George W. Bush. It is now before the Congress as H Res 14.
The featured speaker was former U.S. Senator Bob Graham (D-FL), who co-chaired the Inquiry and has fought for the last 12 years for the pages’ release.
Joining Jones, Lynch, and Graham on the podium were family members of 9/11 victims: Terry Strada, co-chair of the 9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism; Sylvia Carver, sister of a 9/11 victim at the Pentagon; and Abraham Scott, husband of a 9/11 victim at the Pentagon. They all spoke powerfully about the long-overdue need for full disclosure, truth and justice for the survivors and victims and the American people.
The fact that a major terrorist attack, purportedly by Muslim extremists, had occurred in Paris the same day, gave a new urgency to the demands of the participants—as both Rep. Jones and Sen. Graham prominently pointed out.
In his remarks, Sen. Graham outlined three devastating consequences of the failure to release the 28 pages: 1) denial of the truth; 2) denial of justice; and 3) a weakening of the national security of the United States. Sen. Graham demanded that President Obama live up to the “Lincolnesque standard,” whereby President Lincoln made every message sent in to the State Department during the Civil War a matter of public record. After the war, the U.S. government pursued this, holding the British government responsible for aiding and abetting the Confederacy. Ultimately, damages were paid to the U.S. for this perfidy.
Sen. Graham explained:
Graham concluded with the following remarks:
“What would you think the Saudis’ position would be, if they knew what they had done, they knew that the United States knew what they had done, and they also observe that the United States had taken a position of either passivity, or actual hostility to letting those facts be known? What would the Saudi government do in that circumstance, which is precisely where they have been, for more than a decade?
“Well, one, they have continued, maybe accelerated their support for one of the most extreme forms of Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East. And second, they have supported their religious fervor, with financial and other forms of support, of the institutions which were going to carry out those extreme forms of Islam. Those institutions have included mosques, madrassas, and military. Al-Qaeda was a creature of Saudi Arabia; the regional groups such as al-Shabaab have been largely creatures of Saudi Arabia; and now, ISIS is the latest creature!
“Yes, I hope and I trust that the United States will crush ISIS, but if we think that is the definition of victory, we are being very naive! ISIS is a consequence, not a cause—it is a consequence of the spread of extremism, largely by Saudi Arabia, and if it is crushed, there will be another institution established, financed, supported, to carry on the cause.
“So the consequences of our passivity to Saudi Arabia, have been that we have tolerated this succession of institutions, violent, extreme, extremely hurtful to the region of the Middle East, and a threat to the world, as we saw this morning in Paris.
“So I conclude by saying, this is a very important issue. It may seem stale to some, but it is as current as the headlines that we will read today. It is an issue that goes to the core of the United States’ contract with its people, that the people would give the government the credibility and support to govern; the government would give the people the information upon which they can make good judgments, as to the appropriateness of governmental action. It’s as fundamental as justice to our people, who have suffered so, by this evil union of extremism and a very powerful nation-state. And it is the security of the people of the United States of America.
“So, I again thank the Congressmen for their leadership. I hope that they will soon be joined by a rising tide of other members of Congress who recognize the importance of this issue. And then, finally, that the President of the United States will declare that he is going to adopt the Lincolnesque standard of full disclosure, and rely on the intelligence and judgment and patriotism of the American people to decide what the appropriate course of action should be.”
While every speaker demanded the President act now, Rep. Jones took special aim at the U.S. Senate, insisting that the Senators had to move immediately to introduce a companion resolution demanding declassification. His words, and those of Graham and Strada, will be resonating loudly in the Capitol in the days to come. He said:
“I do not know why, after I read these 28 pages, why there’s anyone who is reluctant to release the 28 pages. Steven Lynch and I—and I have a copy of this letter if you want it before you leave today—wrote the President in April, asking him to declassify the information. He’s told the families on two separate occasions, I will declassify the 28 pages. That’s been in the press!
“We wrote him a letter in April, asking him to please declassify the information. [As of t]oday, we have not received a response. We have called the White House numerous times. They’ve been responsive to this point: ‘We’re working on a response. We’ve got to let different agencies look at the response.’
“It is time that the Senate joined the House, and joined the wishes of the American people, and the wishes of the 9/11 families.”
The press conference was well-attended, with reporters and/or camera crews from CNN, Fox News, US News and World Report, Newsweek, Daily Beast, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, National Review, and several 9/11 related websites including 28pages.org and hr428.org.
The full video is available at larouchepac.com.