Able Danger

10:06 PM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT
Able Danger was a classified military planning effort led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It was created as a result of a directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in early October 1999 by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, to develop an information operations campaign plan against[citation needed] transnational terrorism.
According to statements by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and those of four others, Able Danger had identified 2 of 3 Al Qaeda cells active in the 9/11 attacks; the 'Brooklyn cell' linked to "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman, including September 11 attacks leader Mohamed Atta, and three of the 9/11 plot's other 19 hijackers.
In December 2006, a sixteen-month investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded "Able Danger did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to September 11, 2001," and dismissed other assertions that have fueled 9/11 conspiracy theories. The Senate Judiciary Committee first attempted to investigate the matter for the Senate in September, 2005. The Pentagon "ordered five key witnesses not to testify", according to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter. "That looks to me as if it may be obstruction of the committee's activities," Specter, R-Pennsylvania, said at the start of his committee's hearing into the unit.[1]
Attorney Mark Zaid, representing Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer and the other four Able Danger employees at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in September 2005, pointed out to the Committee that his clients had been forbidden by the Pentagon to testify to the Committee. He also discussed the Defense Intelligence Agency's decision to suspend Lt. Colonel Shaffer's security clearance shortly after it became known that he had provided information to the 9/11 Commission on Able Danger. "Based on years of experience I can say categorically that the basis for the revocation was questionable at best."[2] [3]
An investigation by the Defense Department Inspector General's office (IG) in September 2006 concluded that "the evidence did not support assertions that Able Danger identified the September 11, 2001, terrorists nearly a year before the attack, that Able Danger team members were prohibited from sharing information with law enforcement authorities, or that DoD officials acted against LTC Shaffer for his disclosures regarding Able Danger." However, some of the people questioned by the IG claimed their statements to the IG were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report, and the report omitted essential information that they had provided. Lt. Col Tony Shaffer has claimed that the DOD retaliated against him for speaking out publicly about the IG report's distortions.[4]
The Senate panel of investigators said there was no evidence DoD lawyers stopped analysts from sharing findings with the FBI before the attacks. Analysts had created charts that included pictures of then-known Al Qaeda operatives, but none including Atta. A follow-up chart made after the attacks did show Atta. The Senate Committee said its findings were consistent with those of the DoD inspector general, released in September 2006. [5] [6]

Overview[edit]

The program used data mining techniques to associate open source information with classified information in an attempt to make connections among individual members of terrorist groups as part of its original "intelligence preparation of the battlespace". The objective of this particular project was to ascertain whether the data mining techniques and open source material were effective tools in determining terrorist activities, and if the resultant data could be used to create operational plans that could be executed in a timely fashion to interrupt, capture and/or destroy terrorists or their cells.[7][8]
According to statements by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and those of four others, Able Danger had identified 2 of 3 Al Qaeda cells active in the 9/11 attacks; the 'Brooklyn cell' linked to Blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, including September 11 attacks leader Mohamed Atta, and three of the 9/11 plot's other 19 hijackers, as possible members of an al Qaeda cell linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.[9]
This theory was heavily investigated and researched by Republican Representative Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and HouseHomeland Security committees. However, Defense Intelligence Agency leadership had already ordered the hurried destruction of mined data, source databases, charts & resultant documents on entirely spurious legal grounds. DIA also prevented key personnel from testifying to both the Senate Judiciary & Senate Intelligence Committees, though after numerous denials did admit the program's existence.[10]
In December 2006, an investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that assertions could not be confirmed. It stated that they were unable to find supporting evidence regarding "one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes."[5] This report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee copied, nearly verbatim, the United States Department of Defense Inspector General's September 2006 report on Able Danger.

Assertion that Able Danger identified 9/11 hijackers[edit]

The existence of Able Danger, and its purported early identification of the 9/11 terrorists, was first disclosed publicly on June 19, 2005, in an article[11] byKeith Phucas, a reporter for The Times Herald, a Norristown, Pennsylvania, daily newspaper. Eight days later, on June 27, 2005, Representative Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and House Homeland Security committees, and the principal source for the Phucas article gave a special orders speech on the House floor detailing Able Danger:
Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my attention over the past several months that is very disturbing. I have learned that, in fact, one of our Federal agencies had, in fact, identified the major New York cell of Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11; and I have learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September 2000, that Federal agency actually was prepared to bring the FBI in and prepared to work with the FBI to take down the cell that Mohamed Atta was involved in in New York City, along with two of the other terrorists. I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that when that recommendation was discussed within that Federal agency, the lawyers in the administration at that time said, you cannot pursue contact with the FBI against that cell. Mohamed Atta is in the U.S. on a green card, and we are fearful of the fallout from the Waco incident. So we did not allow that Federal agency to proceed.[12]
Rep. Weldon later reiterated these concerns during news conferences on February 14, 2006. He believed that Able Danger identified Mohamed Atta 13 separate times prior to 9/11 and that the unit also identified a potential situation in Yemen two weeks prior to the October 12, 2000 attack on the USSCole.[13] The Pentagon released a statement in response, stating that they wished to address these issues during a congressional hearing before a House Armed Services subcommittee scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, 2006.

Able Danger and the 9/11 Commission[edit]

Curt Weldon's assertion that Able Danger identified the 9/11 hijackers was picked up by the national media in August 2005, after it was reported in the bimonthly Government Security News.[14] In addition to asserting that Able Danger identified the 9/11 hijackers and was prevented from passing that information onto the FBI, Weldon also alleged the intelligence concerning Able Danger was provided to the 9/11 Commission and ignored.[15] Two 9/11 Commission members, Timothy J. Roemer and John F. Lehman, both claimed not to have received any information on Able Danger.[14]
Following the GSN report, members of the 9/11 Commission began commenting on the information they had on Able Danger and Atta. Lee H. Hamilton, former Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, and Al Felzenberg, a former spokesman for the 9/11 Commission,[16] both denied that the 9/11 Commission had any information on the identification of Mohamed Atta prior to the attacks.[17] Hamilton told the media, "The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohamed Atta or of his cell.... Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."[18]

Jewish Bolshevism

10:06 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT

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Jewish Bolshevism also known as Judeo-Bolshevism is a conspiracy theory that theJews were at the origin of the Russian Revolution and held dominant power amongBolsheviks. Similarly the Jewish Communism theory implies that Jews have been dominating the Communist movements in the world. They are part of the Jewish World Conspiracy theory that Jews control world politics.[1] The expressions have been used as a catchword for the assertion that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy, and it has often coincided with overtly aggressive nationalistic tendencies in the 20th century and 21st century. In Poland, "Judeo-Bolshevism" was known as Żydokomuna and was used as anantisemitic stereotype.[2] Scholars dismiss this theory.[3] [4]
The expression was the title of a pamphlet, The Jewish Bolshevism, and became current after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, featuring prominently in the propaganda of the anti-communist "White" forces during the Russian Civil War.
The label "Judeo-Bolshevism" was used in Nazi Germany to equate Jews withcommunists, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists.[5][page needed] According to Hannah Arendt it was "the most efficient fiction of Nazi Propaganda".[6] In Poland before World War II, the labelŻydokomuna was used in the same way to allege that the Jews were conspiring with the USSR to capture Poland.

Origins[edit]

The conflation of Jews and revolution emerged in the atmosphere of destruction of WW1 Russia. Many Russian Jews had actually volunteered to serve the Tsar in the war and there were at least 400,000 Jews serving in the Russian army in 1914. By the end of 1915, some 5 million Polish Jews of the Russian Empire had become subjects of Imperial Germany, the consequence of the Russian defeats.[7] When the revolutions of 1917 crippled Russia's war effort conspiracy theories grew up - even far from Berlin and Petrograd, many Britons for example, ascribed the Russian Revolution to an 'apparent conjunction of Bolsheviks, Germans and Jews.' [8] And in fact the Wilhelmstrasse had looked at the possibilities of a public embrace of Zionism.[9] A recent history of the intended use of world religions in World War I, concluded that 'neither Max Bodenheimer s committee of German Zionists, nor the Zionist Executive, nor any kind of organized international Jewish network had much of anything to do with either the February or October Revolution.' [10]
The worldwide spread of the concept in the 1920s is associated with the publication and circulation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The expression made an issue out of the Jewishness of some leading Bolsheviks (most notably Leon Trotsky) during and after the October Revolution. Daniel Pipes says that "primarily through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Whites spread these charges to an international audience."[11] James Webb wrote that it is rare to find an antisemitic source after 1917 that ..."does not stand in debt to theWhite Russian analysis of the Revolution."[12]

Jewish involvement in Russian Communism[edit]

Persecution of Jews in the late Russian Empire[edit]

Main article: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
Jews had been a persecuted minority in the Russian Empire.[13] They had endured a form of racial segregation in the Pale of Settlement, as well as sporadic pogroms. In the period from 1881 to 1920, more than two million Jews left Russia.[14]
According to Berel Wein:
Expulsions, deportations, arrests, and beatings became the daily lot of the Jews, not only of their lower class, but even of the middle class and the Jewish intelligentsia. The government of Alexander III waged a campaign of war against its Jewish [citizens]... The Jews were driven and hounded, and emigration appeared to be the only escape from the terrible tyranny of the Romanovs."[15][page needed]
Jews in relatively large numbers joined various ideological currents favoring gradual or revolutionary changes within the Russian Empire. Those movements ranged from the far left (anarchists,[16] Bundists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks[17]) to moderate left (Trudoviks[18]) and constitutionalist (Constitutional Democrats[19]) parties. Monarchist parties, such as Union of the Russian People, expressed clearly antisemitic attitudes, and included antisemitic paragraphs in their political program.

Jews in the Bolshevik party[edit]

On the eve of the February Revolution, in 1917, the Bolshevik party had about 23,000 members, of whom 364 were known to be ethnic Jews.[14][20] Between 1917 and 1919, Jewish Bolshevik party leaders included Grigory Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, Lev Kamenev, Yakov Sverdlov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Leon Trotsky. Lev Kamenev was of mixed ethnic Russian and Jewish parentage.[21][22] Trotsky was also a member (or "Narkom") of the ruling Council of People's Commissars.[23] Among the 23 Narkoms between 1923 and 1930, five were Jewish.[21]
Conditions in Russia(1924) A Census - Bolsheviks by Ethnicity
According to the 1922 party census, there were 19,564 Jewish Bolsheviks, comprising 5.21% of the total.[21] Jews made up 7.1% of members who had joined before October 1917.[23]
Among members of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets in 1929, there were 402 ethnic Russians, 95 Ukrainians, 55 Jews, 26 Latvians, 13 Poles, and 12 Germans – Jewish representation had declined from 60 members in 1927.[24] With regards to Jewish representation in the ruling Politburo, it waned very rapidly starting in 1918. It began with the assassination of Moisei Uritsky, the most radical member of the Politburo, in August 1918. Then Yakov Sverdlov died of disease in March 1919 and Sokolnikov was shunted aside. Three years later in 1922, Jewish members in the Central Committee, the Politburo's new name, had shrunk to a minority of three: Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Eventually they were all physically eliminated by Joseph Stalin: Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936 and Trotsky in 1940.
In the 1920s, of the 417 members of the Central Executive Committee, the party Central Committee, the Presidium of the Executive of the Soviets of the USSR and the Russian Republic, the People's Commissars, 6% were ethnic Jews.[21]
Between 1936 and 1940, during the Great Purge, Yezhovshchina and after the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, Stalin had largely eliminated Jews from senior party, government, diplomatic, security and military positions.[25] A prominent victim of the Purge was the Head of the State Security or NKVD ( the enforcement arm of government previously known as the Cheka and GPU ) who also happened to have come from a Jewish background: Genrikh Yagoda. In 1939, Stalin directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews".[26] Although some scholars believe that this decision was taken for primarily domestic reasons,[26] others argue it may have been a signal to Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.[27][28]
Jewish Bolsheviks, like other Bolsheviks were hostile to Judaism. They banned the teaching of Hebrew and religious instruction in Judaism, and they imprisoned Jewish leaders.[29] According to historian Iakov Etinger, many Soviet state purges of the 1930s were antisemitic in nature, and a more intense antisemitic policy developed toward the end of World War II.[30] Stalin in 1952 allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy for the United States".[31]
An example of the exaggeration of Jewish influence in the Soviet Communist Party is the estimate by Alfred Jensen that in the 1920s "75 per cent of the leading Bolsheviks" were "of Jewish origin" quoted by journalist David Aaronovitch. Aaronovitch (a son of a Communist intellectual) notes that "a cursory examination of membership of the top committees shows this figure to be an absurd exaggeration".[32]

Nazi Germany[edit]

In the wake of the First World War, Hitler was just one of many on the right in Germany who accused Weimar politicians of having 'stabbed Germany in the back' (Dolchstosslegende)- Jews and Socialists especially, the legend set out, had weakened the war effort.[33]
Walter Laqueur traces the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory to Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, for whom Bolshevism was "the revolt of the Jewish, Slavic and Mongolian races against the German (Aryan) element in Russia". Germans, according to Rosenberg, had been responsible for Russia's historic achievements and had been sidelined by the Bolsheviks, who did not represent the interests of the Russian people, but instead those of its ethnic Jewish and Chinese population.[34]
Vladimir Lenin, Karl Radek, Julius Martov, andEmma Goldman. Caricatures of Bolshevikleaders from Alfred Rosenberg's The Jewish Bolshevism
In Nazi Germany, this concept of Jewish Bolshevism reflected a common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its origin. The term was popularized in print in German journalist Dietrich Eckhart's 1924 pamphlet "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin" ("Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin") which depicted Moses and Lenin as both being Communists and Jews. This was followed by Alfred Rosenberg's 1923 edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1925, which saw Bolshevism as "Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself."
1941 Nazi propaganda poster in theLithuanian language, equatingStalinism with the Jews. The text reads "The Jew is your eternal enemy".
According to French spymaster and writer Henri Rollin, "Hitlerism" was based on "anti-Soviet counter-revolution" promoting the "myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot", entailing that the First World War had been instigated by a vast Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to topple the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires and implement Bolshevism by fomenting liberal ideas.[35][page needed]
A major source for propaganda about Jewish Bolshevism in the 1930s and early 1940s was the pro-Nazi and antisemiticinternational Welt-Dienst news agency founded in 1933 by Ulrich Fleischhauer.
Within the German Army, a tendency to see Soviet Communism as a Jewish conspiracy had grown since the First World War, something that became officialised under the Nazis. A 1932 pamphlet by Ewald Banse of the Government-financed German National Association for the Military Sciences described the Soviet leadership as mostly Jewish, dominating an apathetic and mindless Russian population.[36]
Propaganda produced in 1935 by the psychological war laboratory of the German War Ministry described Soviet officials as "mostly filthy Jews" and called on Red Army soldiers to rise up and kill their "Jewish commissars". This material was not used at the time, but served as a basis for propaganda in the 1940s.[37]
In his speech to the Reichstag justifying Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Hitler said:
For more than two decades the Jewish Bolshevik regime in Moscow had tried to set fire not merely to Germany but to all of Europe…The Jewish Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have unswervingly undertaken to force their domination upon us and the other European nations and that is not merely spiritually, but also in terms of military power…Now the time has come to confront the plot of the Anglo-Saxon Jewish war-mongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik centre in Moscow![38]
Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel gave an order on 12 September 1941 which declared: "the struggle against Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic, rigorous action above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.[39]
Historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Wehrmacht officers regarded the Russians as "sub-human", and were from the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 telling their troops the war was caused by "Jewish vermin", explaining to the troops that the war against the Soviet Union was a war to wipe out what were variously described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "red beast", language clearly intended to produce war crimes by reducing the enemy to something less than human.[40]
Joseph Goebbels published an article in 1942 called "the so-called Russian soul" in which he claimed that Bolshevism was exploiting theSlavs and that the battle of the Soviet Union determined whether or not Europe would become under complete control by international Jewry.[41]
Nazi propaganda presented Barbarossa as an ideological-racial war between German National Socialism and “Judeo-Bolshevism”, dehumanising the Soviet enemy as a force of Slavic Untermensch (sub-humans) and “Asiatic” savages engaging in “barbaric Asiatic fighting methods” commanded by evil Jewish commissars whom German troops were to grant no mercy.[42] The vast majority of the Wehrmacht officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as sub-human.[43]
While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.
— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, September 1935[44]

Outside Nazi Germany[edit]

Great Britain, 1920s[edit]

In the early 1920s, a leading British antisemite, Henry Hamilton Beamish, stated that Bolshevism was the same thing as Judaism.[45] In the same decade, future wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill penned an editorial entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism," which was published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald. In the article, which asserted that Zionism and Bolshevism were engaged in a "struggle for the soul of the Jewish people", he called on Jews to repudiate "the Bolshevik conspiracy" and make clear that "the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement" but stated that:
[Bolshevism] among the Jews is nothing new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.[46]
Author Gisela C. Lebzelter noted that Churchill's analysis failed to analyze the role that Russian oppression of Jews had played in their joining various revolutionary movements, but instead "to inherent inclinations rooted in Jewish character and religion."[47]

USA[edit]

Frank L. Britton, editor of The American Nationalist published a book, Behind Communism, in 1952 which disseminated the myth that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy originating in Palestine.[48]

Works propagating Jewish Bolshevism[edit]

The Jewish Bolshevism[edit]

The Jewish Bolshevism is a 31- or 32-page antisemitic pamphlet published in London in 1922 and 1923 by the Britons Publishing Society. It included a foreword by the German Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg who promulgated the concept of "Jewish Bolshevism".
This relatively obscure publication embodies the Nazi doctrine that "Jewishness" and Bolshevism are one and the same; or that Bolshevism is Jewish, whether or not everything Jewish is included within Bolshevism. The methodology used consists of identifying Bolsheviks as Jews; by birth, or by name or by demographics.
According to Singerman, The Jewish Bolshevism, which he dubs as item "0121" in his Bibliography, is "Identical in content to item "0120", the pamphlet The Grave Diggers of Russia, which was published in 1921 in Germany, by Dr. E. Boepple. In 1922, historianGisela C. Lebzelter wrote: "The Britons published a brochure entitled Jewish Bolshevism, which featured drawings of Russian leaders supplemented by brief comments on their Jewish descent and affiliation. This booklet, which was prefaced by Alfred Rosenberg, had previously been published in English by völkisch Deutscher Volksverlag."[49]

Dismissal of the concept[edit]

Researchers in the topic, such as Polish philosopher Stanisław Krajewski "[3] or André Gerrits, [4] denounce the concept of "Jewish Bolshevism" as a prejudice. Law professor Ilya Somin agrees, and compares Jewish involvement in other communist countries. "Overrepresentation of a group in a political movement does not prove either that the movement was “dominated” by that group or that it primarily serves that group’s interests. The idea that communist oppression was somehow Jewish in nature is belied by the record of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, and Cambodia, where the Jewish presence was and is minuscule."[50]

See also[edit]

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