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| Ver aqui e aqui |
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| Ver 1, 2 e 3 |
«"Al-Qaeda Stronger than Ever." "U.S. Concern at Al-Qaeda Strength." These and similar titles accompanied news stories that began breaking during the second week of July, announcing leaks of a disturbing new classified intelligence report. Prepared for President Bush by the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), the five-page report entitled Al-Qaeda Better Prepared to Strike the West paints a picture of a revived, more dangerous terror network led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The Associated Press reported on July 11 that an unnamed counterterrorism official familiar with the still-unreleased report paraphrased the briefing paper as finding that al-Qaeda is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago," and that it has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001." The terror group is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States," the same official reportedly said.
John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, echoed this same grim assessment of al-Qaeda's resurgence during his July 11 testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. "They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen said concerning al-Qaeda. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising."
The same week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff set off a political furor when he expressed a "gut feeling" that the United States faced a heightened risk of terror attacks from al-Qaeda this summer. Accentuating reports of a revitalized al-Qaeda is a noticeable upswing in the group's propaganda campaign over the Internet, radio, and television. As the Christian Science Monitor reported on July 16, there is "no question that Al-Qaeda propaganda outlets have been working at a high rate over the past year, with frequent and timely broadcasts from the group's No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri."
The Monitor story noted that al-Qaeda's media production unit, known as As-Sahab, has released at least 63 audio and video messages so far this year, compared with 58 in all of 2006. And in many of those messages, it points out, "Mr. Zawahiri has been able to respond to the news events within days," indicating not only a high level of technological sophistication by the media-savvy Zawahiri, but a high level of confidence in his ability to get his message out without giving away his location.
Thus, six years after the 9/11 terror attacks on America, and after enormous expenditures of U.S. military and economic resources in the "war on terror," we appear to be back to square one. At an October 25, 2006 White House press conference, President Bush was asked: "Are we winning?" He responded: "Absolutely, we're winning. Al-Qaeda is on the run." But as Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted recently, "Al-Qaeda is not on the run, it is on the march." The new National Counter Terrorism Center report appears to agree with Professor Hoffman's assessment.
Al-Qaeda, of course, is not the only kid on the terrorist block. Dozens of other groups are also very active and noteworthy players on the global terror stage: Hezbollah, Hamas, PLO/al-Fatah, Islamic Jihad Group, Taliban, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Abu Sayyef--to name but a few.
And those are only the "Islamist" actors. There are other important terrorist groups as well, despite the fact that the "radical Muslim" or "Islamic fundamentalist" organizations appear to be the only ones that obtain the terrorist label or news mention these days. Communist-oriented terrorist organizations seem to be completely off the mental radar screen, even when they are murderously active (like the Basque ETA in Spain) or when they control a vast narcotics empire and a geographical area the size of Switzerland (like the FARC in Colombia).
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| Soldados do Exército colombiano |
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| O presidente colombiano, Juan Manuel Santos, e o líder terrorista das FARC, Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, em Havana. |
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| Juan Manuel Santos e Barack Obama |
Modern international terrorism, especially as it came to the fore in the 1960s and '70s, was exemplified by Marxist-Leninist "liberation" groups that more or less openly aligned themselves with Moscow and/or Beijing. They operated out of the Soviet-bloc countries or Moscow's surrogate Third World regimes in Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America. The Soviet KGB and its proxy intelligence services in East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Cuba were indispensable to the terrorists' existence, providing arms, money, training, explosives, passports, safe houses, coordination, and critical intelligence. Virtually all counterterrorist authorities recognized that, with few exceptions, terrorist organizations were merely cats' paws for the Soviet Union, which was both the primary benefactor and beneficiary of their violent campaigns.
However, a little over 15 years ago, conventional wisdom has it, a geopolitical paradigm shift occurred that changed all that. That 1991 sea-change event, usually referred to as the "collapse" of the Soviet Union, not only dramatically altered the East vs. West dimension that had dominated global political dynamics throughout the 20th century, but, supposedly, also brought an abrupt end to Russian sponsorship of terrorism worldwide.
Henceforth, the primary terror threats would emanate not from Moscow, Berlin, Havana, and Prague, but from Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, and Khartoum. They would march not under the red banner and hammer and sickle of communism, but rather, under the green banner and sword and crescent of Islam. Muhammad, not Marx, the Q'uran, not the Communist Manifesto, would provide the motive force to move the new revolutionaries.
The new dynamic in world conflict, many now insist, is no longer the clash of ideologies, as typified by the Cold War, but the clash of civilizations, as exemplified by the 9/11 attacks, the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the increasing militancy of "fundamentalist" Muslims worldwide. "The Clash of Civilizations" is, of course, the title of a seminal 1993 article by Professor Samuel P. Huntington for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It is my hypothesis," wrote Huntington, "that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." "The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics," he averred, and "the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
The chief battle line in this global vision is the one between Western civilization and a militant Islam aligned with China. Huntington developed this theme more fully in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, hyped by some as the most influential political treatise of the post-Cold War era.
Huntington's hypothesis of a realigned world order based on a clash of civilizations has become the working blueprint for the policy elites of both the Republican and Democratic parties. According to this establishment-favored hypothesis, our longtime strategic adversary, (Soviet) Russia, has become our new strategic ally in the war on terrorism. After all, beneath Russia's decades-long encrustation of communist repression bestirs an Orthodox Christian heritage. And, like us, our new Russian "partners" also are beset by Muslim extremists and terrorists, including al-Qaeda.
One of the most forceful exponents of the clash of civilizations is Thomas P.M. Barnett, controversial author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004) and Blueprint for Action (2005). Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College who has had a great influence on the Bush administration, divides the world into regions labeled the "Functioning Core" — the United States, European Union, Russia, China, and the Pacific Rim countries, and others that are adapting to "globalization" — and the "Non-Integrating Gap," comprised of countries that must be forced militarily to accept globalization and become part of the "Core."
That means, for starters, mostly Muslim countries. However, Barnett advocates using the troops of "Leviathan" (his term for a U.S.-led global army) to subjugate Christian countries as well. The Muslim problem, he says "only accounts for about 40 (max, 50) percent of the Gap's total population. The rest is largely Christian (Catholics and Protestants, with evangelicals and Mormons gaining fast), whose version of those religions is likewise far more fundamentalist than their counterparts in the Core." Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to call President Bush to offer condolences and support. For those of the Huntington/Barnett school of thought at the Council on Foreign Relations and similar centers of influence, this was a transformational moment signaling an epochal opportunity to turn the former chief sponsor of global terror into our main ally against the new terror threats.
This amazing transformation of the old world order began almost immediately. Several months after the 9/11 attacks, leaders at the June 2002 G8 Summit in Kananaskis, Canada, launched the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. The main feature of this partnership was a $20 billion investment by the G8 members toward the objective of "preventing terrorists, or those who harbour them, from acquiring or developing nuclear, chemical, radiological, and biological weapons." The bulk of this treasure chest was targeted first and foremost for Russia, which was deemed the most at risk to lose WMDs and related technology to terrorists.
Vladimir Putin and Russia are, arguably, the biggest beneficiaries of the 9/11 attacks, both monetarily and politically. More valuable to the Kremlin than the multibillion-dollar booty mentioned above are the diplomatic, trade, defense, and intelligence doors that have been opened to Russia as our purported valued partner in the war on terror. In fact, President Bush and other U.S. leaders are so solicitous of Putin's "aid" in this regard that they are more than willing to either ignore his aggressive installation of Soviet-style governance, or to let it pass with perfunctory verbal criticism.
Consider, for example, the mounting evidence that former KGB/FSB chief Putin was behind the very public execution-by-poison in England of FSB defector Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko. Despite the evidence, the Bush administration has said and done little to nothing in response, apparently unwilling to risk upsetting Putin and the supposedly vital U.S.-Russian "relationship" in the mutual effort against Islamic terrorism.
For, as a November 24, 2006 Reuters report on the Litvinenko assassination pointed out, "Putin has been an ally of the West against Islamic extremism since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States," even though "relations have been strained in recent years over what Western governments call Moscow's slide towards authoritarianism."
However, the Litvinenko assassination--apparently an act of state terror--should have shined a very important spotlight on our budding relationship with Putin and called into question just how "mutual" the concerns of our two nations are when it comes to terrorism. Lt. Col. Litvinenko's murder was obviously intended to silence him as well as to set an example that would dissuade others from defecting. Regarding the former, Litvinenko was bringing out many disturbing charges and facts showing that Putin's KGB/FSB is continuing to sponsor the global terror network launched by the Soviet KGB in the 1960s and nurtured by them through the 1980s. That includes current sponsorship and direction of al-Qaeda and its two top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
FBI's "Most Wanted" Terrorists
Very likely, one of the specific reasons for Alexander Litvinenko's liquidation was the publication of his exposé, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror. Litvinenko's explosive book provided an FSB insider's confirmation that the sensational terrorist bombings in Russia attributed to Chechen Islamic nationalists were actually the work of Putin's FSB Special Operations Groups, part of the restructured and renamed Soviet KGB. Extensive evidence already published by independent investigators and journalists had pointed to the same conclusion, but having that conclusion confirmed by Litvinenko undoubtedly unnerved the Russian commissars.
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| 'KGB' Alexander Litvinenko, envenenado em Londres. |
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| 'KGB' Vladimir Putin |
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| Marina Litvinenko |
However, Litvinenko upped the ante in 2005 when he revealed, from his ex-FSB contacts, that "Islamic fundamentalist" Ayman al-Zawahiri had been trained by the Russian FSB. This is incredibly significant since Dr. al-Zawahiri is the reputed operational mastermind behind al-Qaeda and is second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" list. "Ayman al-Zawahiri trained at a Federal Security Service (FSB) base in Dagestan in 1998," Litvinenko told the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, in a July 17, 2005 interview. "He was then transferred to Afghanistan, where he became Osama bin Laden's deputy," the defector said. "I was working in that section at the time and I can confirm the fact Zawahiri was not the only link between the FSB and Al-Qaeda."
Bin Laden and Zawahiri had been closely associated in jihadi activities for more than a decade by that time. By 1998, Zawahiri formally merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad with bin Laden's al-Qaeda, creating a single unified command.
Is there anything besides Litvinenko's sensational charge indicating that Zawahiri might actually be an FSB operative? As a matter of fact, yes. We will digress to 1996 and an account of three travelers in Azerbaijan. Parts of this story have been told in various public sources ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the websites of intelligence analysts from the Jamestown Foundation and Axis Information and Analysis (AIA). We have drawn from these and other sources to put together this brief rendering of a very telling episode.
In December 1996, a minivan carrying three men was headed toward Chechnya, making its way across the narrow strip of Russian territory between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea. Near the city of Derbent, the men ran into a Russian roadblock. Lacking visas, they were arrested and turned over to the FSB for interrogation. One member of the trio, a "businessman" traveling on a Sudanese passport, carried $6,500 worth of cash in several currencies, a satellite phone, a laptop, and other electronics equipment. The laptop contained many coded messages in Arabic. The Sudanese "Mr. Amin" was, in reality, the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad — Ayman al-Zawahiri. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Dr. Zawahiri spent the next six months in a crumbling jail, fretting that the Russians would discover his true identity." But, in the end, "his cover held, and he was freed."
The authors of the 2002 Wall Street Journal article, Andrew Higgins and Allen Cullison, are inexplicably willing to accept at face value Dr. Zawahiri's wildly implausible explanation for his travels in Russia and his even more unbelievable account of his release. Higgins and Cullison write:
The [Russian] judge rejected prosecution demands for a three-year sentence and gave the men only six months. They'd already been in jail five months, so the Russians soon freed them.
"God blinded them to our identities," Dr. Zawahiri wrote later, in his account of his trip. "God's mercy accompanied us during these months." The Russians returned the cash, the communications gear, and the computer, its mostly Arabic-language documents nearly all unread. Abulkhalik Abdusalamov, their court-appointed lawyer, says he never got close to his clients and couldn't figure out what they were up to or why they were carrying so much electronic equipment.
Freed from Russian jail in May 1997, Dr. Zawahiri found refuge in Afghanistan, yoking his fortunes to Mr. bin Laden. Egyptian Jihad, previously devoted to the narrow purpose of toppling secular rule in Egypt, became instead the biggest component of al-Qaeda and major agent of a global war against America.
"Eight months after the Russian fiasco," Higgins and Cullison continue, "Dr. Zawahiri and Mr. bin Laden announced an alliance dedicated to killing Americans, a task they called the 'duty of every Muslim.'"
Another news account quotes an FSB spokesman named Sergei Ignatchenko who says that Zawahiri "had four passports, in four different names and nationalities. We checked him out in every country, but they could not confirm him. We could not keep him forever, so we took him to the Azerbaijani border and let him go." Which is even more fantastic than the Journal's account.
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Emblema do Serviço Federal de Segurança da Federação Russa (FSB). |
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| Quartel-General do FSB, na Praça Lubyanka, em Moscovo. |
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| Bandeira do FSB |
Perhaps most difficult to believe from Zawahiri's version is that his captors would not have read the Arabic information contained within his laptop computer," commented Dr. Evgenii Novikov, a Russian defector and scholar in Islamic affairs who is now a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Virginia. "Russian intelligence has probably the best Arabists in the world.... These individuals would have been able not only to read Zawahiri's Arabic text, but also to decode his encrypted messages without any problem."
But we are supposed to believe that a generous Russian judge and some kindly KGB/FSB guys simply said: "Gee, fellas, you've really stumped us with your codes here, and nothing in your stories checks out, and everything else about you is incredibly suspicious, but we're in an especially good mood. So here's all your money, fake IDs, computer, and spy stuff. Be sure to be more careful next time. So long now and drive safely."
More likely, says Dr. Novikov, the KGB/ FSB would have realized very quickly who Zawahiri was and would have applied to him the torture and blackmail techniques for which they are infamous. Zawahiri, after all, was a well-recognized and much-photographed leader of one of the world's major terrorist groups, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Novikov believes Zawahiri "broke" under torture and became an asset of the FSB. Which makes much more sense than the Journal's story.
However, there is another explanation that makes even more sense, and that is that Zawahiri was already working for the FSB when he was "arrested" in 1996. That is, he was thrown in jail as a cover (a common ploy of police and intelligence agencies) while he and his superiors worked out future terror plots. This fits with earlier suspicions among the Afghan Mujahedeen concerning Zawahiri's ascendance there following the assassination of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.
Sheikh Azzam, a Palestinian professor who had mentored young Osama bin Laden, urged Arabic Muslims to declare jihad against the Soviets for their invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Setting up camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, Sheikh Azzam, backed by the wealth of bin Laden, soon was the recognized leader of the Arabic Mujahedeen.
Zawahiri sought Azzam's influence over the wealthy bin Laden, and with that objective in mind Zawahiri soon became the young billionaire's personal physician. He also began placing his Egyptians in critical slots around both bin Laden and Azzam. Zawahiri tried to get Azzam to change his focus from fighting the Soviet invaders and their communist Afghan appointees to instead directing the Mujahedeen to attack America and overthrow secular Arabic regimes. When Azzam adamantly refused, Zawahiri began spreading rumors that Azzam was a CIA spy. On November 24, 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed when their car was blown up while on the way to the Peshawar mosque.
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| Ayaman al-Zawahiri num tribunal egípcio (1982). |
Many who were close to the situation have expressed their beliefs that Zawahiri was the one who ordered the hit. Finnish terrorism expert Aansi Kullberg is among those who state it as a fact. Regardless, we do know for sure that the murder of Azzam resulted in bin Laden and Zawahiri inheriting Azzam's Mujahedeen army. They began its radical reorientation into a virulently anti-American terrorist group.
Much more could be said to support Mr. Litvinenko's thesis that Ayman al-Zawahiri is a Russian agent, rather than an Islamic fundamentalist. And he is not unique in this regard. In fact, as we show in "The Real Terror Paymasters" and "Who's Who in Terrorism," many other important leaders of "Muslim" terrorist organizations possess similar pedigrees, demonstrating that Islamic terrorism is joined at the hip with the international terror network sponsored by the Soviet Union/Russia».
William F. Jasper («Behind Islamic Terror», in The New American, 03 September 2007).
«Pointing to the latest terror attack to hit the United Kingdom, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May (shown) again called for "international agreements" to regulate and censor the Internet under the guise of battling “extremism.” Under the proposed plot, international agreements would be used to regulate speech in cyberspace with a goal of stopping “ideologies” that authorities do not agree with from having a “safe space” online. The scheme also seeks to conscript private companies and foreign powers into the government assault against freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But critics have expressed alarm over the Orwellian implications of allowing the government to decide what can and cannot be said.
As is typical when politicians are working to restrict freedom and expand government power, the plot to clamp down on free speech online was marketed as a tool to keep people safe. At first, it would reportedly be used primarily to target certain violent Islamic teachings and “extremism.” But just as has occurred with assaults on other freedoms around the world, the schemes will undoubtedly expand. And already, top British political leaders have revealed that they want the dictator-dominated United Nations to wage a global war against even “non-violent extremism.” That would include a crackdown on unapproved conspiracy theories, End Times prophecies, biblical views on sexuality and marriage, and much more, top U.K. officials have said.
Speaking after the London Bridge attack that left seven dead and some 50 wounded over the weekend, an attack that followed the recent suicide bombing in Manchester, May blamed free speech, ideology, online freedom, and a lack of government regulation for the atrocities. “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” May said Sunday, without elaborating on the ideology but demanding more war abroad and an end to “safe spaces” for extremism online. “Yet that is precisely what the Internet and the big companies that provide Internet-based services provide.”
Like May's predecessor from the same Conservative Party, former Prime Minister David Cameron, May outlined a vision suggesting she wants the war against unapproved ideologies and speech to be global in scope. “We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning,” she said in a speech following the Islamist terrorist attack, one of several to hit Europe in recent months. “We need to do everything we can at home to reduce the risks of extremism online.” Ironically, many brutal dictatorships, including the mass-murdering regime ruling Communist China, have made similar statements in recent years amid the push for global Internet regulation.
Beyond the Internet, May also called for “robust” efforts aimed at “stamping out” so-called “extremism,” not just online and in foreign nations, but across the British government and even across “society.” Already, homeschooling families and Christian churches have been caught up in the U.K. government's “extremism” crusade, with churches and Sunday schools forced to register with authorities to prevent “radicalization.” School teachers have been conscripted, too, with authorities demanding that children with a negative view of homosexuality, for example, be reported to police and social services for “extremism.”
May also hinted at what sounded like a plan for government-mandated integration of fast-growing Muslim communities in Britain with the natives. “The whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism, and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom,” the prime minister said, noting that her agenda would require “some difficult and often embarrassing conversations.” In other parts of Europe, private property is already being commandeered to house Muslim migrants.
Of course, even before the latest terror attacks, May and other top British politicians were pushing the exact same agenda. Most recently, the ruling Conservative (Tory) Party released a manifesto calling for an Orwellian censorship regime to control speech and ideology online. “Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet,” the bizarre manifesto explains. “We disagree.” Under the plan, the United Kingdom would become “the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet,” presumably usurping that dubious honor from the mass-murdering regime in Beijing and its so-called “Great Firewall of China.”
Despite the focus on Islamism and jihad for the purpose of marketing the totalitarian plan, the Tory manifesto makes clear that the war on speech and online freedom will be much broader than simply targeting Islam. “We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users — even unintentionally — to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm,” the Conservative Party explained, without admitting that in Britain and across much of the European Union, speaking out against homosexuality or Islam, for example, is a criminal offense under totalitarian “hate speech” laws.
As this magazine has documented extensively, the status of free-speech rights in the U.K. and all over Europe is already abysmal. In Britain, quoting former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's negative views on Islam has resulted in arrest — even of a political leader. Quoting the Bible on homosexuality, too, has landed people in jail. And in Sweden, “justice” authorities decided that the Bible itself — the foundation of Western civilization — runs afoul of draconian “hate speech” laws for its condemnation of homosexual activity as a sin. The list of prohibited speech is constantly expanding.
Instead of displaying hate speech or “other sources of harm” — an undefined term that is ripe for abuse — tech companies such as search engines and social media would be forced under the Tory scheme to help promote government propaganda in the form of “counter-extremist narratives,” the manifesto explains. To fund it all, the government would impose a new tax on Internet companies, the burden of which would of course be shared by Internet users. The money raised would then be used to fund government propaganda that would “support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms,” according to the manifesto.
It would hardly be the first time propaganda has been used to change minds. U.K. authorities have already been caught using “behavioral science,” government-run social-media trolls, and online propaganda to manipulate public opinion and destroy the reputation of critics at home and abroad. The scheming, run by the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” (JTRIG), used propaganda and its legions of online trolls to promote “obedience” and “conformity,” official documents revealed. And even that was not enough, with the out-of-control bureaucrats seeking still more “behavioral science support” to further enhance their “capabilities” for manipulating public opinion.
Even the news media — much of which is already controlled and funded by government — will be affected under the Tory plot to crush online free speech. According to the manifesto, the Conservative Party intends to use government to “take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy.” In what sounded like a bid to gin up support from the press for the totalitarian vision, the Tory plan would seek ways to coerce online companies and social media platforms to ensure that establishment media outlets are able to earn enough money via ad revenues. So far, though, independent media outlets have reacted to the plot with horror, with one prominent outlet saying May was plotting to “shut down the Internet as we know it.”
The widely reported Tory manifesto demanding government control of the Internet follows the recent entry into effect of the Investigatory Powers Act drastically expanding authorities' snooping powers under the guise of fighting terror. Under the highly controversial U.K. scheme, the government is allowed to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to hand over their customers' browsing history to authorities. The scheme also allows authorities to break into people's online communication services such as WhatsApp so the government can spy on the content of private messages. And back doors into programs and hardware are being demanded to facilitate the mass surveillance.
Of course, the agenda for a global jihad on free speech and even “non-violent extremism” is nothing new. As The New American reported in 2014, then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron told the UN and its largely autocratic member regimes that a global war on Internet freedom was needed to combat extremism and ideologies, even if they were not violent. As examples of the sort of thought crimes that should not be tolerated, Cameron pointed to unapproved conspiracy theories about terrorist attacks as well as religious prophecies about the end of the world.
“We must be clear: to defeat the ideology of extremism we need to deal with all forms of extremism — not just violent extremism,” he explained, acknowledging that the machinations would not be entirely “compatible” with free speech and intellectual inquiry. “For governments, there are some obvious ways we can do this.... We shouldn’t stand by and just allow any form of non-violent extremism. And we need the strongest possible international focus on tackling this ideology — which is why here at the United Nations, the United Kingdom is calling for a new Special Representative on extremism.”
With a broad coalition of strongmen and mass-murdering dictatorships spending years demanding UN regulation of the Internet, the UN and the Obama administration were more than happy to jump on the bandwagon. In fact, in October of 2015, the UN and Obama unveiled a global plot to wage war on unapproved “ideologies.” Among the ideologies in the UN's crosshairs, the dictator-dominated global outfit said, were “anti-Muslim bigotry,” as well as opposition to immigration. The UN plot calls for a combination of censorship and government-funded propaganda.
Domestically, Obama unleashed “intervention teams” to tackle ideologies he did not think should be tolerated. The Obama FBI even conscripted school teachers into the war on extremism, urging them to report children as “extremists” if they disagreed with homosexuality or Islam. And before that, multiple Obama bureaucracies disgorged bizarre propaganda reports painting conservatives, libertarians, patriots, veterans, pro-life activists, nationalists, and others as “extremists” and even potential terrorists. U.S. troops were even subjected to an indoctrination course labeling Catholics, evangelical Christians, and Orthodox Jews as “religious extremists” and equating them with terror groups such as Hamas and al Qaeda.
In the EU, the lawless superstate's fledgling “law enforcement” agency Europol already unveiled its plot to censor the Internet under the guise of stopping “extremism.” Globalist-controlled U.S. tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and others eagerly joined in the censorship mania, promising to work with the EU to remove content that the unelected, unaccountable superstate deems unacceptable. “The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech,” claimed Vera Jourová, the EU “Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality.”
At the global level, the UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU) — currently led by a Chinese Communist who claimed censorship is in the eye of the beholder — is being groomed to become a global Internet regulator. And now, with Obama's giveaway of key Internet architecture, it will be much easier for the global censorship movement — backed by dictators, communists, socialists, progressives, Islamists, globalists, and the establishment — to make progress on creating an international regime to control the World Wide Web and the content that appears on it. Global taxes have been proposed, too.
British voters are now being told that a vote for the Conservative Party in the upcoming election is a vote for breaking free from the oppressive and unpopular European Union — something voters already voted for when they approved the referendum last year for a British exit from the EU, known as “Brexit.” However, now, the party is also hitching withdrawal from the EU to its manifesto and the plot to crush online freedom. In other words, if voters vote for Tories to get out of the EU, as expected, authorities will exploit that as a public mandate in support of Internet censorship and will move ahead with their anti-free speech jihad.
That totalitarian-minded politicians would blame free speech and online freedom for terrorism is hardly surprising — before that, they blamed gun rights and succeeded in disarming the British population. More credible analysts, though, have blamed the ongoing tsunami of terrorist attacks on everything from Islamic teachings from the Koran to the influx of millions of Muslim migrants and the “blowback” resulting from U.S. and U.K. government bombings and regime-change operations across the Middle East and North Africa. Much of the terrorist threat has actually been deliberately fostered by governments around the world.
One thing, at least, is certain. As America's founders are said to have warned, giving up liberty under the guise of security will result in having neither liberty nor security. And so, giving up more rights — in this case, free speech, online freedom, and free expression — will not stop terrorism. Instead, it will further empower government and will undoubtedly be followed by further government attacks on fundamental human rights. The British people must stand firm for their liberty by refusing to be bullied or terrorized by either Islamist terrorists or totalitarian politicians. Americans, too, must hold the line».
Alex Newman («U.K. Leaders: Fight Terror With Global Internet Censorship», in The New American, 07 June 2007).
«The following article surveys the "Islamist" terror groups PLO/al-Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and their connections to the international terror network sponsored by the Soviet/Russian KGB. For information documenting al-Qaeda's connections to the Kremlin, see the related article "Behind Islamic Terror."
PLO/al-Fatah. For nearly four decades, the PLO has been the largest, wealthiest, and most politically connected terrorist organization in the world. For most of that time, it was held in the firm grip of Yasser Arafat's iron fist. But Arafat was not the fierce, independent actor he posed as; he was completely dependent on the Soviet KGB and its surrogate Warsaw Pact intelligence services for arms, training, logistical support, funds, and direction. His KGB handlers included Vasali Samoylenko, Vladimir Buljakov, and Soviet "Ambassador" Alexander Soldatov. Arafat's closest friend and head of PLO intelligence, Hani Hassan, was actually an agent of the DIE, the Romanian subsidiary of the KGB.
Former DIE chief General Ion Pacepa reported in a 2003 Wall Street Journal article:
I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
During the 1960s and '70s, Arafat and the PLO did not hide their Marxist ideology and openly proclaimed their solidarity with the Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Cuba, and every other Marxist dictatorship. But in recent years, as communist-backed "Islamic fundamentalist" groups like Hamas have gathered more popular support, the PLO leadership has attempted to portray itself as authentically Muslim. It has adopted more religious rhetoric and used Muslim names and symbols, even naming Islam as the official and exclusive religion of Palestine in the 2003 Palestinian constitution. Since Arafat's death in 2004, veteran PLO hand Mahmoud Abbas has tried, unsuccessfully, to fill his shoes.
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| Yasser Arafat |
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| Bandeira adoptada pela Organização para a Libertação da Palestina (OLP), em 1964. |
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| Brasão de Armas da Palestina |
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Emblema de Israel |
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| Localização de Israel |
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| Extensão do Reino de Israel e Judá no séc. XI a. C. |
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| Massada, lugar da batalha final da Primeira Guerra Judaico-Romana. |
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| Réplica do Segundo Templo, em Jerusalém, destruído no ano 70 d. C. pelo Império Romano. |
Hamas swept to power in the 2006 parliamentary elections (winning 76 seats to Fatah's 43), and in June 2007 Hamas' military took control of the Gaza Strip in a series of gun battles through the streets of Gaza's cities that left 120 people dead and hundreds more wounded. Three of the four so-called Quartet of Middle East peace brokers — the United States, United Nations, and European Union — announced their I backing for Abbas and the PLO and their rejection of Hamas. The remaining member of the quartet, Russia, has been playing both sides. During the last week of July, Mahmoud Abbas visited Putin in Moscow, seeking his endorsement. Putin gave it, but didn't rule out continuing negotiations and relations with Hamas. "I want to assure you that we will support you as the lawful leader of the Palestinian people," Putin told Abbas at their July 31 meeting.
Hamas. The Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni terrorist organization founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. One of Hamas' claims to infamy is its popularization of suicide bombing as a terror weapon, pioneering in recruiting females and children as suicide killers. Although posing as the ultimate in Islamic fundamentalism, like al-Qaeda it has a curious relationship with Putin's KGB/FSB. According to a March 2006 report by Axis Information and Analysis, "At present, five of the seven biggest Hamas websites are functioning from the territory of the CIS member-states. Three of these sites use services of the Russian providers.... There are two more smaller but rather well-known websites that are functioning from Russia's territory." This is especially noteworthy since the Putin regime has clamped down on all media and Internet access by its political opposition and all unapproved parties. Hamas' Internet sites, which have been so essential in building Hamas' stature, recruiting, and propaganda prowess globally, are clearly operating with Putin's approval.
Russia does not include Hamas on its list of terrorist organizations. Not surprisingly, Hamas' political director, Khaled Mashal, has repeatedly affirmed the organization's close friendship with Moscow. Mashal presides over the Hamas "Politburo," which, in name, structure, and function, is much more in line with Marxist-Leninist than Islamist thought. Mashal has led Hamas delegations to Moscow for talks with Putin and has met with Putin and Yevgeniy Primakov, the KGB's top Middle East scholar, at other forums in Khartoum, Tehran, and Ankara. Although Hamas never provided any significant aid to its fellow Muslims who were being slaughtered by the Russians in Chechnya, it did, up until 2004, offer them rhetorical support. Since 2004, though, it has urged the Chechens to "heal the wound" and surrender in the interest of "a strong and integrated Russia."
Hezbollah. In Arabic, Hezbollah means "Party of God." But there is little that is godly about the group, which has exploded in size, power, and influence since first coming to Western attention by bombing the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing over 300 Marines. It is supported chiefly and directly by Iran and has adopted the revolutionary theology and ideology of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. It also receives military aid directly and indirectly from Syria and Russia, as manifested by the weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah after their rocket attacks on Israel last summer. The containers were clearly marked: "Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBR Tula, Russia."
Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, who has been General Secretary of Hezbollah since 1992, keeps in touch with Moscow through regular communications with Russia's Beirut embassy. This was confirmed in a 2006 interview with Russia's Ambassador to Israel, Mikhail Bogdanov. That is not the only channel by which Moscow and Beirut stay in touch. In a detailed 2005 report by Axis Information and Analysis, entitled Dangerous Liaisons: Covert "Love Affair" Between Hezbollah and Russia, author Michel Ebaz reports:
Hezbollah's special operations unit ("Muntamat al-Jihad al-Islami" — MJI or "Islamic Jihad Organization") emissaries have been active in Russia since the middle of the nineties. Residing in Moscow, Imad Hadj Hassan Salame heads this special operations unit. His men were an integral part of Hezbollah's international network for smuggling weapons to Lebanon.
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| Bandeira do Hezbollah |
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| Apoiantes do Hezbollah |
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| Hamas |
Yevgeniy Primakov's appointment in 1996 as Russia's Foreign Minister was a critical step in propelling the Hezbollah-KGB relationship forward. As the KGB's most experienced hand in Middle East terrorism matters, he was the perfect choice for insuring a smooth transition when the KGB transformed into the FSB. His official meetings in the 1990s with Lebanon's political leaders also provided him (and his assistant, Viktor Pasovaluk) with opportunities to meet secretly with representatives of Hezbollah. In the 2005 elections, Hezbollah and its allies in the Resistance and Development Bloc won 35 seats (27 percent) of the Lebanese parliament».
William F. Jasper («Who's Who in Terrorism», in The New American, 03 September 2007).
The Real Terror Paymasters
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions.
In the quote above, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, head of the DIE, the KGB's little sister in communist Romania, reveals a conversation he had with chairman Andropov, the Soviet leader. "We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world," Andropov told Pacepa, "and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe."
Gen. Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978, recounted this story in an August 24, 2006 article for National Review entitled "Russian Footprints." "According to Andropov," said Pacepa, "the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch."
Gen. Pacepa explained how this was put into operation:
In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service, the [Romanian] DIE --along with other East European sister services--to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our "sphere of influence." Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world.
Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world. Likewise, Anatoliy Golitsyn, one of the most important KGB defectors to come to the West, noted in his 1995 book, The Perestroika Deception, "Under concealed Russian guidance, the Muslims of the former Soviet Union ... will seek to cooperate and ally themselves with Muslims in Iran and the Arab states while Russia maintains its open policy of cooperation and partnership with the West. In this way China openly and Russia secretly will jointly attempt to swing the balance of power in their favor in the highly strategic, oil-producing Arab/Iranian areas of the Middle East."
A July 1997 article by Associated Press writer Anthony Shadid provides one measure of the impact of this Soviet KGB (and ongoing Russian FSB) strategy. The AP story, "Marxism Makes Way for Islam," profiles a number of influential Marxist-Muslim intellectuals. It begins with the observation that "on the bookshelf of Adel Hussein sits an odd collection for one of Egypt's leading Islamic thinkers." Titles like Socialist Integration, On Communism, and Planning in the U.S.S.R. by leading Marxists, notes Mr. Shadid, "speak more of class struggle than the hand of God."
Like a surprising number of others across the Arab and Muslim world, Adel Hussein "is a one-time Marxist and nonbeliever who has turned to Islam, part of a new intellectual generation reshaping the religion." "I benefited from Marx in both theory and practice," Hussein told Shadid, "but now, Islam is my starting point and my framework." That doesn't mean he's abandoned Marx, however. "Hussein, for instance, says his goals have not changed," Shadid reported. "But he now sees Islam, through its ability to persuade and to mobilize, as the best tool." In other words, Islam for Hussein is a means to an end, and the end is a Marxist world.
Adel Hussein, says AP's Shadid, is representative of a significant number of today's influential imams and mullahs. "In a jarring twist, they are the same thinkers who a generation ago drew the ire of religious Muslims because their Marxist disavowal of God was seen as the biggest threat to Islam," Shadid reported. "Today, they are often the public face of Islam — writing in leading Arabic newspapers, speaking at conferences and on television talk shows, enjoying the support of many younger, more political Muslims interested in their attempts to rethink Islam's relationship to democracy, minorities and the West."
Evidence for the existence of an ongoing Soviet/Russian strategic plan to foment and use Islamic extremism is very extensive and goes far to explain the inordinate hatred of Muslim fundamentalists for America and the West. Not only is al-Qaeda aligned with the Kremlin (see the related article "Behind Islamic Terror"), so are the other major "Islamist" terror groups including PLO/ al-Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah (see "Who's Who in Terrorism"). Of course, none of those groups would amount to much if not for the immense assistance they receive from Iran and Syria, regimes that were primary client-state terror sponsors for the Soviets and continue in that role for Russia under Putin.
Putin continues to build Iran's nuclear program and upgrade its long-range missile program, not to mention provide Ahmadinejad's regime with all of the conventional weapons that Tehran and its surrogate terrorists can use. Likewise for the longtime terrorist-sponsoring regime of Bashar al-Asad in Damascus. In January 2005, Putin welcomed President al-Asad to Moscow and forgave 73 percent of the $13.4 billion debt owed by Syria to Moscow. Then, a couple months later, he sold Strelet surface-to-air missiles to Asad and has been showering him with weapons.
Moscow Masterminds
In the 2005 action film Lord of War, Nicolas Cage plays Russian arms dealer Yuri Orlov, whose merchandise — guns, tanks, grenades, missiles, planes, bombs — spreads slaughter and genocide across Africa. The fictional Orlov is a portrayal of the real-life Viktor Bout, a "former" KGB officer who has built a global empire with his fleet of Soviet transport planes and helicopters and his unmatched access to a bottomless supply of Soviet armaments. It would be difficult to find a war, civil war, revolution, terrorist organization, dictatorship, coup, or attempted coup in Africa, the Middle East, or Central Asia over the past decade and a half that hasn't been fueled by Bout's deadly merchandise.
Viktor Bout was for years the main arms supplier for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He subsequently became a major supplier to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. While operating a dizzying array of companies and shell companies out of Belgium and the United Arab Emirates, Bout has always maintained a home base and safe haven in Russia.
When the Belgian government issued an international arrest warrant for him in 2002, Bout fled to Moscow. "Asked if Bout was in the country when the arrest warrant was issued, the Russian foreign ministry said no, even though Bout was giving live radio interviews from studios in downtown Moscow," note Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors of Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible. "The next day, officials grudgingly acknowledged he might be in Russia but said they had seen no evidence that he had committed any crime, and therefore could not act."
According to Farah and Braun and other investigative reporters, Viktor Bout more recently has been running arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the forces of the radical Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. Bout's status as a private entrepreneur provides protective deniability to his bosses in the Kremlin — including the top KGB/FSB man himself, Vladimir Putin — but it is obvious that they are supplying him and protecting him so he can continue stoking the fires of terror and revolution that they have sparked and fed for decades. Incredibly, Western governments that verbally condemn Bout's sinister blood trade are more than willing to do business with his companies. For instance, the U.S. Defense Department has paid Bout's air transport companies millions of dollars to fly supplies into U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As indispensable as Viktor Bout has been — and is — to the Kremlin's ongoing terror strategy, there are others who are even more important. One of the most important is Yevgeniy Primakov, the former KGB chief in charge of Middle East terrorism during the Cold War. Primakov has been at the pinnacle of Soviet politics for decades: Soviet Politburo member, former Russian Foreign Minister, head of the Russia Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Russian prime minister. Now he is Putin's right-hand man as a "private citizen." As head of the Russia Chamber of Commerce, he continues his role directing Russia's client terror states and terrorist groups while on commercial visits throughout the Mideast.
In 2006, Primakov presided at the founding meeting of Russia's new forum for Muslim countries, the "Russia-Islamic World Strategic Vision Group." The new group held its first session in Moscow on March 27-28, attended by delegates from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and 12 additional Muslim states. Putin greeted the delegates. Significantly, the "statesman" who presided at the meeting was Primakov, a renowned Arabist who played a key role in formulating the Soviet Union's ties with the Muslim world during the cold-war era.
Jihadist Hatred for America
Is the ongoing Soviet/Russian propaganda and terror strategy really at the heart of the militant jihadist hatred directed at the United States? The overwhelming evidence would seem to answer resoundingly in the affirmative. After all, the jihadists should have good reason to view as enemies the regimes in Moscow, Beijing, and the Commonwealth of Independent States that have killed Muslims on a daily basis. In fact, the Soviet Union murdered over one million Muslim Afghans and made over five million of them refugees. Post-Soviet Russia brutally subjugated Muslim Chechnya, killing tens of thousands of civilians and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The Soviet Union persecuted (and present-day Russia continues to persecute) tens of millions of Muslims in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. The current openly communist government of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan carried out the Adijan massacre of 2005, slaughtering as many as 5,000 Muslim civilians, with Moscow and Beijing both publicly voicing support for Karimov's action. Communist China has carried out a decades-long ruthless persecution of its Muslim Uighar minority.
Communist regimes have forbidden study of the Q'uran, publicly burned countless copies of this sacred text of Muslims, imprisoned and tortured Muslim believers, and beaten Muslim clerics and then paraded them in public humiliation. Contrast that with the Western countries, where Muslims are granted full political and economic rights, can worship freely, and can obtain a Q'uran at any library or local bookstore. Yes, the jihadists have used our military presence in Iraq to fan the flames of hatred against the United States, but how about the communists?
Do the jihadists hate America more than the non-Muslim communist states because we are uniquely decadent? It is true that Western post-Christian culture, especially as seen in popular fashions and through Hollywood's ubiquitous and depraved lens, is offensive to devout Muslims (as it is to devout Christians). But Russia is not pristine by comparison. Putin's Russia boasts one of the largest pornography industries in the world, featuring the most hard-core kiddie porn. Russia's mainstream media is much more salacious than its counterparts in the United States. Russia and the Muslim-populated (but non-Muslim-ruled) countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) are also notorious for forced prostitution, gambling, and the production, consumption, and export of drugs and alcohol, all of which should earn them condemnation from the militant Muslim faithful. Instead, the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, al-Fatah, and other "Islamic fundamentalists," not only ignore the transgressions of their infidel sponsors in Russia and China and the cries of their persecuted Muslim brothers, but they regularly break bread with and publicly support the atheist persecutors of Islam.
We in the Christian West should not kid ourselves — as certain "liberals" would have us do — into accepting the false proposition that Islam is perfectly compatible with our social-political system. It is not. And we must not succumb to their arguments that we should accept new waves of Muslim immigrants. But neither should we allow ourselves to be further dragged into a military "clash of civilizations" (as we already are in Iraq and Afghanistan) by "Muslim" front men for our so-called allies in Moscow and Beijing.
In his October 11, 2001 news conference, President George W. Bush characterized the new global conflict as "a war against all those who seek to export terror, and a war against those governments that support or shelter them." Striking the same theme, but with greater specificity, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol declared in a July 21, 2006 article, "Radical Islam Takes On Democracy," that "our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders — Syria and Iran."
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| Ver aqui e aqui |
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| George W. Bush |
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| Durão Barroso, Tony Blair, George W. Bush e José Maria Aznar na Cimeira das Lajes ou Cimeira da Guerra nos Açores (16 de Março de 2003). |
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| O globalista Durão Barroso no papel de Presidente da Comissão Europeia. |
But why stop with the middlemen? The real paymasters and commanders aren't in Damascus and Tehran; they're in Moscow and Beijing, as they have been for decades. These paymasters and commanders are also patient strategists. They will not try to engage us in head-on military conflict when they can more easily wear us down by leading us into many "quagmire" conflicts with their surrogates (in «The Real Terror Paymasters», in The New American, 03 September 2007).
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| Animated gift |
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