Remember1981? Libyan Hitmen in the US Capital?

remember1981? Libyan Hitmen in the US Capital?

Friday, 4 December 1981

U.S. intelligence identifies Libyan terrorists operating in U.S.; President Reagan and other high-ranking officials said to be targets; nationwide manhunt underway; Lebanese sources uncover plot to assassinate U.S. special envoy Philip Habib ..... Executive order signed by Reagan allows CIA to engage in domestic counterintelligence .....
.. Senate approves record defense appropriation, including funding for MX missile, Trident submarine and B-1 bomber ..... Nicaraguan government denies U.S. claim that MiG fighters and Soviet tanks are enroute via Cuba to Nicaragua ..... Former Maryland Governor Marvin Mandel, convicted on corruption charges, pardoned by Reagan ..... Reagan expands authority of CIA ..... Reagan reaches accord with Republican congressmen on reduction of non-military budget ..... November figures show rise in unemployment rate ..... Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in Ankara discussing possible U.S. military aid to Turkey ..... Verdict of guilty in trial of Eugene Tafoya, accused of being hitman for Libya responsible for murder in Utah.

Composite drawings of three of the suspected Libyan hitmen, published in TIME Magazine

From TIME MAGAZINE:

A Plot Thickens

Monday, Dec. 14, 1981

Hunting for the hitmen

The initial but unconfirmed reports that a Libyan hit squad had been dispatched to the U.S. by Muammar Gaddafi to assassinate President Reagan and other high federal officials took a more ominous turn last week. Intelligence officials grilling an informant about the plot are now impressed by the amount of detail he provided about the training and equipping of Libyan assassination teams. The informant claimed that five Libyan hitmen had already entered the U.S.

While corroboration of the informant's disclosures has not yet been established, FBI, Secret Service and CIA agents questioning him were worried enough to urge a nationwide search for the would-be assassins. The plotters were reportedly working on a number of options, including firing a surface-to-air missile at the President's plane, Air Force One; shooting rockets at his limousine; and attacking him with handguns. The alleged motive for the Libyan assault: Gaddafi's determination to seek revenge after U.S. military planes returned the fire of two Libyan aircraft and shot them down over the Gulf of Sidra in August. A Libyan government spokesman in Tripoli dismissed the reports as a product of "the CIA fantasy farm." Said he: "There is no such hit team working under orders from the Libyan [government]."

Beyond the man hunt, which involved FBI and Secret Service interviews with many Americans who may have had recent links with Libya, security precautions continued to be tightened around the President, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and members of the Reagan family. In addition, Secret Service protection was extended for the first time to the President's top aides, James Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese. White House officials, however, were understood to be extremely concerned about disclosures of specific security addafi measures.

One U.S. intelligence official summed up the situation as "a very serious threat." Said a high law-enforcement officer about the terrorists: "They want to make a sensation. If they can't get the President, they are apparently under instructions to kill anyone close to him." Said Reagan, talking about the threats from Libya: "I think in view of the record, you can't dismiss them out of hand."



In a lecture, Chomsky described two flaws in Manufacturing Consent's presentation of the "Propaganda Model":

If the two of us were rewriting it today, we would change some things. For one thing, I think when we talked about those "five filters," we realized at the time -- but we left it in -- that the fifth one, "anticommunism," is too narrow. That's really a sub-case of something more general: for the system to work properly, people have to be frightened, and they have to shelter under the wings of authority. Fear of the Soviet Union was a good way to frighten them. But by the time we wrote that book in the late Eighties, it wasn't working anymore. It was clear to the Reagan administration that the use of the Soviet Union as a device to intimidate and terrorize people wasn't going to work very long, because it was going to collapse. And in fact, if you look through the Reagan years -- and we should have put this in the book -- there was a constant search for some new devil to frighten people. So I don't know if you remember, but in 1981 the White House was surrounded by tanks because Libyan hitmen were supposedly wandering around Washington trying to assassinate our leader and so on. . . . And all through the Reagan years, just to try to intimidate people, Arab terrorism was a tremendous fear. It was a good way of frightening the American population.


Edward L. Bernays, Public Relations, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952. An excerpt (p. 78):



An important factor in developing the climate of public opinion was the demonstration to the peoples of the world in World War I that wars are fought with words and ideas as well as with arms and bullets. Businessmen, private institutions, great universities -- all kinds of groups -- became conditioned to the fact that they needed the public; that the great public could now perhaps be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and that the same methods could do the job.

Harold Lasswell [one of the leading figures of modern political science], "Propaganda," in Edwin R.A. Seligman, ed.-in-chief, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1933, Vol. 12 (reprinted in 1954 edition). An excerpt (pp. 527, 523-526):



[R]egard for men in the mass rests upon no democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. The modern propagandist, like the modern psychologist, recognizes that men are often poor judges of their own interests. . . .

[The spread of schooling] did not release the masses from ignorance and superstition but altered the nature of both and compelled the development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda . . . [which] attains eminence as the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery or other possible control techniques . . . [and] is no more moral or immoral than a pump handle. . . . [It is] certain that propaganda will in time be viewed with fewer misgivings.

New York Bali London Madrid (CIA Mossad MI6 and every weapons merchant and military black op secret (dis-) service intel false flag gladio attacker.

Interview Transcripts

Excerpts from transcripts of interviews with Peter Power, ex-Scotland Yard, who now heads private security firm Visor Consultants, which was running terror bombing drills in the London Underground on 7/7 , followed by an interview with John Loftus.

BBC Radio 5, July 7th, 2005
Power: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

Host: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?



Power: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
ITV News, London, July 7th



POWER: Today we were running an exercise for a company -- bear in mind now that I'm in the private sector -- and we sat everybody down in the city -- 1000 people involved in the whole organization -- with the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was, it was we based on a scenario of simultaneous attacks on a underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real.



INTERVIEWER: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?



POWER: Almost precisely. I was up to 2 o'clock this morning, because it's our job, my own company. Visor Consultants, we specialize in helping people to get their crisis management response, how you jump from slow time thinking to quick time doing. And we chose a scenario with their assistance, which is based on a terrorist attack because they're very close to a property occupied by Jewish businessmen there in the city, and there are more American banks in this city than there are in the whole of New York -- a logical thing to do.

The London July 7 bombings of this year were prepared by exercises named Atlantic Blue by the UK, Topoff III by the US, and Triple Play by Canada, which simulated an attack on the London Underground while an international conference was going on in the UK. On July 7 itself, Peter Power's Visor Associates were simulating explosions in the same stations at the same times that bombs exploded, as BBC 5 reported.


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"He Was Working for British Intelligence"



Fox News Dayside with Linda Vester, July 29, 2005:



MIKE JERRICK [FOX NEWS]: John Loftus is a terrorism expert and a former prosecutor for the Justice Department. John, good to see you again. So real quickly here, have you heard anything about this Osman Hussain who was just picked up in Rome? You know that name at all?



JOHN LOFTUS: Yeah, all these guys should be going back to an organization called Al-Muhajiroun, which means The Emigrants. It was the recruiting arm of Al-Qaeda in London; they specialized in recruiting kids whose families had emigrated to Britain but who had British passports. And they would use them for terrorist work.



JERRICK: So a couple of them now have Somali connections?



LOFTUS: Yeah, it was not unusual. Somalia, Eritrea, the first group of course were primarily Pakistani. But what they had in common was they were all emigrant groups in Britain, recruited by this Al-Muhajiroun group. They were headed by the, Captain Hook, the imam in London the Finsbury Mosque, without the arm. He was the head of that organization. Now his assistant was a guy named Aswat, Haroon Rashid Aswat.



JERRICK: Aswat, who they picked up.



LOFTUS: Right, Aswat is believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London.



JERRICK: On 7/7 and 7/21, this is the guy we think.



LOFTUS: This is the guy, and what's really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the Justice Department, and Britain.



JERRICK: Hold on, John. MI6 has been hiding him. Are you saying that he has been working for them?



LOFTUS: Oh I'm not saying it. This is what the Muslim sheik said in an interview in a British newspaper back in 2001.



JERRICK: So he's a double agent, or was?



LOFTUS: He's a double agent.



JERRICK: So he's working for the Brits to try to give them information about Al-Qaeda, but in reality he's still an Al-Qaeda operative.



LOFTUS: Yeah. The CIA and the Israelis all accused MI6 of letting all these terrorists live in London not because they're getting Al-Qaeda information, but for appeasement. It was one of those you leave us alone, we leave you alone kind of things.



JERRICK: Well we left him alone too long then.



LOFTUS: Absolutely. Now we knew about this guy Aswat. Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon.



JERRICK: So they indicted his buddy, right? But why didn't they indict him?



LOFTUS: Well it comes out, we've just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat.



JERRICK: Hello? Now hold on, why?



LOFTUS: And that's -- Well, apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence. Now Aswat's boss, the one-armed Captain Hook, he gets indicted two years later. So the guy above him and below him get indicted, but not Aswat. Now there's a split of opinion within US intelligence. Some people say that the British intelligence fibbed to us. They told us that Aswat was dead, and that's why the New York group dropped the case. That's not what most of the Justice Department thinks. They think that it was just again covering up for this very publicly affiliated guy with Al-Muhajiroun. He was a British intelligence plant. So all of a sudden he disappears. He's in South Africa. We think he's dead; we don't know he's down there. Last month the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He's alive.



JERRICK: Yeah, now the CIA says, oh he's alive. Our CIA says OK let's arrest him. But the Brits say no again?



LOTFUS: The Brits say no. Now at this point, two weeks ago, the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn't arrested when he lands, he isn't arrested when he leaves.



JERRICK: Even though he's on a watch list.



LOFTUS: He's on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence. He was a wanted man.



JERRICK: And then takes off the day before the bombings, I understand it --



LOFTUS: Yeah, And goes to Pakistan.



JERRICK: And Pakistan, they jail him.



LOFTUS: The Pakistanis arrest him. They jail him. He's released within 24 hours. Back to Southern Africa, goes to Zimbabwe and is arrested in Zambia. Now the US --



JERRICK: Trying to get across the --



LOFTUS: -- we're trying to get our hands on this guy.



JERRICK: John, hang around. I have so many questions now. [break]



LOFTUS: The US was used by Al-Muhajiroun for training of people to send to Kosovo. What ties all these cells together was, back in the late 1990s, the leaders all worked for British intelligence in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend the Muslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo. That's when Al-Muhajiroun got started.



IJAZ: Which is by the way why we know so much about them right now.



LOFTUS: Yes, I'm afraid so. The CIA was funding the operation to defend the Muslims, British intelligence was doing the hiring and recruiting. Now we have a lot of detail on this because Captain Hook, the head of Al-Muhajiroun, his sidekick was Bakri Mohammed, another cleric. And back on October 16, 2001, he gave a detailed interview with al-Sharq al-Aswat, an Arabic newspaper in London, describing the relationship between British intelligence and the operations in Kosovo and Al- Muhajiroun. So that's how we get all these guys connected. It started in Kosovo, Haroon was 31 years old, he came on about 1995.



JERRICK: OK. Here's another question for you.



AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, John. With the quid-pro-quo relationship that London obviously had with these terrorists early on, what changed that caused them to all of a sudden get away from the you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone situation?



LOFTUS: The Israelis say that the truce went on for years. Guys from Al-Muhajiroun for example would bring suicide bombers to Israel to blow up Mike's Place. There was a definite link there. And yet the trainer, Sadiki Al Kahn, was able to go back to Britain and not be touched.





The Phony War on Terror: Time to Quarantine the Real Aggressors



Speech to the Axis of Peace Conference or Axe de la Paix, held in Brussels, Belgium, November 17th and 18th, 2005. The conference gathered political and intellectual personalities from more than thirty nations, who are committed against the logic of war, with a view to establishing a permanent structure that will make the voice of peace be heard.

Text of speech to the conference by Webster G. Tarpley:



400 years ago this month, the English King James' first minister Robert Cecil unveiled his masterpiece, the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king and the parliament. The event was blamed on Guy Fawkes and other plotters, who were tortured and executed. The Catholics, the Pope, the Jesuits and the Spanish were blamed, setting up centuries of conflict and imperial expansion. But the plot was a synthetic provocation staged by Cecil. Terrorism was a birth pang of the Anglo-American financier faction, and terrorism accompanies that faction in its moribund senility today.



According to today's neocon Bush regime in Washington, the central event of world history is the attacks of September 11, 2001. The neocons demand that world affairs be organized around what they call the war on terrorism, supposedly waged by the United States, Great Britain, and the other English-speaking powers against the dark powers of radical Islam. This phony war on terrorism comes complete with preventive nuclear sneak attacks on any country the Bush regime chooses. These can be supplemented by conventional aggression, and by the so-called color revolutions, the new name for the traditional CIA "people power" coups.



The main premise of the war on terror is the myth of September 11 -- 3,000 people allegedly killed by a group of 19 hijackers including Mohammed Atta, all members of al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden operating from a cave in Afghanistan with a laptop computer, etc.