How Media Fuels Our Fear of Terrorism

A very large portion of the news we consume is about terrorism in America and Europe. That coverage has consequences on how people live their lives.

In the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, one women (who did not yet have kids) told the New York Times she planned to home school her future children for fear of mass shootings. Another man recounted that he now watches movies at home instead of in public theaters. Another stated she now steers clear of crowded public areas.

We hear about terrorists attacks in the media and then adjust our lives based on how we process that information. But is the amount of media coverage dedicated to terrorism in the West in anyway commensurate with the actual risk of terrorism we face?

In this article, let’s see how an American newspaper ( The New York Times ) covers terrorism, and show that this selective coverage can give us a distorted sense of the world using actual data. The aim of this analysis is to show how news media — especially social media — cover/distributes a non-representative set of events based on what is relevant/engaging to their audience. Readers and viewers then use this selective data to infer what the entire reality is.

Media is data for human decisions, and selective media is selective data. Selective data can lead to bad inferences and bad decisions, as was the case with the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger . Selective facts can actually be worse than no facts or fake news, as it can give us a false sense of confidence...

https://priceonomics.com/our-fixation-on-terrorism/

Dealer: Gun linked to Paris attack came through Delray firm

DELRAY BEACH —

A gun once owned by a Delray Beach arms dealer is among those linked to the Paris attacks that killed 130 people, the head of a Serbian arms factory told The Associated Press.

The M92 semi-automatic pistol’s serial number matched one the Zastava arms factory delivered in May 2013 to the family-owned Century International Arms in Delray Beach, said the arms dealer, Milojko Brzakovic.

How the pistol got from Delray to France remains unclear.

Century owner Michael Sucher did not answer calls Thursday. Doors were locked at the company’s Congress Avenue location just south of Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, where TV news trucks were gathering Thursday afternoon.

Employees trickling out of the building to go home declined comment. Sarah Levine, who worked next door, said “I had no idea that there was anything connected with guns or arms dealing in this vicinity.”

Century, a buyer and re-seller of military-grade surplus guns, is one of the largest arms dealers in the United States. Its specialty is buying firearms from overseas and reselling to dealers. The Palm Beach County business imports up to 25,000 guns every year from the Serbian firm alone, the AP reported...

http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/crime--law/dealer-gun-linked-paris-attack-came-through-delray-firm/zUfiUht53F8DwfCit1Y90K/

Chiquita: An Association With Corporate Terrorism Gone Bananas

The US War on Terror Has Cost $5 Trillion and Increased Terrorism by 6,500%

(ANTIMEDIA) — On September 11, 2001, one of the most tragic events in recent American history took place. Close to 3,000 civilians lost their lives in horrific terror attacks that took place on American soil. Fifteen years later, it is time to ask the question: have our counterterror efforts helped to reduce the amount of terrorism in the world? Or at the very least, have they tried to make the world safer?

According to a report released by Dr. Neta Crawford, professor of political science at Brown University, spending by the United States Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Veteran Affairs since 9/11 is now close to $5 trillion USD. Before we have the chance to ask how a country that has racked up over $19.3 trillion USD in debt can spend $5 trillion USD on war, the focus of this article is to ask: What has all of this spending achieved?

As Reader Supported News reported at the end of last year, terrorism has increased 6,500 percent since 2002 (they probably should rename it “the war of terror”). In 2014, the outlet noted, it was reported that 74 percent of all terror-related casualties occurred in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Syria. As stated by Paul Gottinger, a staff reporter for Reader Supported News, out of the aforementioned countries, “only Nigeria did not experience either U.S. air strikes or a military occupation in that year.”

Omitted from that assessment is the fact that the U.S. has been meddling in Nigeria for some time now. Why wouldn’t they? Until recently, Nigeria was Africa’s largest oil producer, as well as the continent’s largest economy until last month.

Hillary Clinton herself refused repeated requests from the CIA to place Boko Haram, the al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked terror group wreaking havoc across Nigeria (statistically they are far more deadly than ISIS), on the U.S. official list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Further, it was Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya that helped catapult Boko Haram into the menace it is today. In 2009, Boko Haram was a small-scale group with very limited weaponry. Following the invasion of Libya and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan armories were looted, and much of the weaponry was sent over to Syria. However, Boko Haram was able to capitalize on these looted weapons and the instability that rippled throughout Africa following the NATO-led war in Libya. As Peter Weber stated in The Week:

“[Boko Haram’s weaponry] shifted from relatively cheap AK-47s in the early days of its post-2009 embrace of violence to desert-ready combat vehicles and anti-aircraft/ anti-tank guns.”

http://theantimedia.org/us-war-terror-5-trillion/

Operation Northwoods [PDF]

Operation Northwoods

'My friends were afraid of me': What 80 million unexploded US bombs did to Laos

Xieng Khoung, Laos (CNN)For two years after the accident, Yei Yang refused to leave his home.
"I couldn't farm, I couldn't go to see friends, as they might be afraid of me," Yang tells CNN.
"I didn't want to live."

Yang was just 22 and burning rubbish near his village in the province of Xieng Khoung in north-eastern Laos, when a bomb blast tore off one of his eyelids, his top lip and an ear, mutilated one of his arms, and left him with severe scarring from the waist up.

"I remembered I burned the garbage, but after the explosion I was unconscious for two weeks," Yang says. "I felt extreme pain...all over my body. I still feel pain always."

His wounds were not caused by a modern day conflict, but by the remnants of a war that was waged more than 40 years ago, and is still destroying lives in this small Southeast Asian nation.
Some 80 million unexploded bombs are scattered across the country -- the deadly legacy of what became known as America's "secret war" in Laos -- a CIA-led mission during the Vietnam War...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/05/asia/united-states-laos-secret-war/index.html

Revelations About Prince Bandar And Osama Bassnan?

Hopefully you’ve heard about the partial release of the 28 redacted pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11. There are still many redactions throughout the pages.

Here is an excerpt from the pages:

“A CIA report also indicates that Bassnan traveled to Houston in 2002 and met with an individual who was (redacted). The report states that during that trip a member of the Saudi Royal Family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash. FBI information indicates that Bassnan is an extremist and supporter of Usama Bin Laden, and has been connected to the Eritrean Islamic Jihad and the Blind Shayk;” - pg. 417

Here is the entry from www.historycommons.org about this incident which is more descriptive, along with an excerpt from that entry:

“While in Texas, it is believed that Bassnan “met with a high Saudi prince who has responsibilities for intelligence matters and is known to bring suitcases full of cash into the United States.”

The only article I can find describing someone like that is Prince Bandar:

"How rich is Bandar? A friend of mine used to drive for the prince. I can't mention the name for fear of a fatwa, but I was told that there were often suitcases taken off the prince's airplanes that were literally bulging with cash."

So it SEEMS that Bassnan met with Bandar AFTER 9/11 to get more money in Houston. IF it is indeed Bandar (which I think it is).

In August 2002, both Bassnan and his wife are deported for visa fraud.

On October 21st-22nd 2003, Dieter Snell from the 9/11 Commission went to Saudi Arabia and interviewed Osama Bassnan.

In his Memoranda For The Record (MFR), it says that "the interview failed to yield any new information of note. Instead, in the writer’s opinion, it established beyond cavil the witness’ utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject."

In the footnote section of the 9/11 Report on page 516, it says "contrary to highly publicized allegations, we have found no evidence that Hazmi or Midhar received money from another Saudi citizen, Osama Bassnan."

Funny how they came to that conclusion considering his "utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject..."

http://911blogger.com/news/2016-07-18/revelations-about-prince-bandar-and-osama-bassnan

The British Empire - A Lesson In State Terrorism

For most people in Western nations today, terrorism has become synonymous with large scale spectacular acts of violence by small groups against a civilian population and, within the last 15 years, primarily in the name of one religion in particular - Islam. Historically speaking (and I mean up until the present day) there is no justification for this perception, and it can only have come about through a massive and prolonged public propaganda offensive on the part of those with a vested interest in creating and perpetuating it.

The historical record shows quite clearly that states, or those acting on behalf of the state, have been responsible for the vast majority of large-scale terrorist acts against civilians. If we pause to think about it for a moment, it seems natural that this would be the case. The ruling class in any nation, be it a monarchy, democracy or dictatorship, are naturally in opposition to the people over whom they rule because the ruling class enjoy privileges that the people do not. Indeed, the ruling class only enjoy these privileges because of this manufactured divide, that is to say, the 'haves' have because the 'have nots' 'have not'.

While the division between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' in terms of wealth and privilege is clear to most, many people still fail to realise that the very existence of a corrupt wealthy elite presumes the existence of two very different definitions and applications of morality and even the law.

Citizens live their lives by a moral code and expect their leaders to hold to the same standards, both in their own lives and in their dealings on the international stage as the representatives of the people. But this basic sense of morality or conscience adhered to by the people is, more often than not, an impediment to the selfish objectives of the elite. Basically, in our modern world, the elite would not be the elite if they held to the same moral code as a majority of the population. This is another reason why the civilian population are viewed as a threat to the established order and why the elite must not only lie to the population about their true intentions, but must also attempt to corrupt the general understanding of 'morality' (and reality) so that it more closely resembles the deviant world view of the elite.

This assessment of our modern social and political structures may be unsavory to many, but a quick look around the world today, or a brief glance over the past few thousands years, shows that sadly, it is the truth.

This imbalance often leads to corruption (of many kinds) among the ruling elite and it is hard to find examples where the people have not suffered as a result. When this corruption is taken to extremes (as has often been the case) some form of popular revolt is inevitable. When such insurrections have occurred, the established order have responded by attacking the civilians that pose a threat to their ascendancy. History is littered with examples of this. Since terrorism is most often defined today as an attack on a civilian population, it is reasonable then to state that it is the state that has historically had both the motive and opportunity to carry out most major terrorist acts.

State actors, however, have been careful to recognise that subversive movements very often represent the voice of the 'silent majority' of ordinary people and, as a result, can quickly garner wide-spread popular support. If an entire nation were to erupt against the elite, the game would be over. At the same time, the state cannot simply destroy such movements by 'decapitating' the leadership, because that would risk making popular heroes of the slain and perpetuate among the population the anti-establishment ideals for which the insurgents stood. This is particularly true in nations that are nominally democracies and whose leaders wish to maintain the 'democratic' facade both domestically and internationally.

The aim of state-sponsored counter-rebellion or 'counter-insurgency' is to subvert the rebels and the ideals for which they stand (most often social justice and equality, land rights etc.) and successfully portray the rebels and their ideology to the wider population (and world) as self-interested, fundamentally lawless, and immoral miscreants who must be dealt with severely. In pursuit of this aim, otherwise benign ideological divisions that exist within most populations can be stirred up and exacerbated in an effort to split the grass-roots support for any rebellion and align a significant percentage of the population with the state and against the rebels. If successful in this effort, the terroristic state policies that provoked the rebels to form in the first place can be increased and spun as lawful defence against the 'terrorism' of the rebels. Winning the public information battle - defining the nature of and reasons for the conflict - is therefore a key element in deciding the outcome. With the resources of the state on its side however, the ruling class or state usually have a distinct advantage in this respect...

https://www.sott.net/article/245044-The-British-Empire-A-Lesson-In-State-Terrorism

1973: Mossad Peeves Norway by Killing a Waiter There

On July 21, 1973, Israeli secret agents shot dead a man they believed was a Palestinian terrorist in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer. They had misidentified their target, however, and the man they killed was not arch-criminal Ali Hassan Salameh, but rather a Moroccan-born waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki.

The shooting of Ahmed Bouchiki took place within the context of an ongoing Israeli campaign codenamed Operation Wrath of God, which Prime Minister Golda Meir had set in motion following the terror attack on the Israeli team at the Olympic Games in Munich the preceding summer.

That attack, carried out by the Black September organization, which was in turn associated with the Fatah Palestinian resistance organization headed by Yasser Arafat, had resulted in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. In its wake, Israel resolved to track down and kill each of the people involved in the massacre.

Black ops vs the Red Prince

Intelligence pointed to Ali Hassan Salameh, nicknamed “the Red Prince,” as being the Black September operations chief and responsible for planning in Munich.

By the summer of 1973, Salameh had been tracked to Lillehammer, a resort town in central Norway. A team of some 15 Israelis assembled in the town, where they were joined by Mossad head Zvi Zamir and the supervisor of the operation, Mike Harari.

A UPI news report from 2005 refers to then-recently declassified British records claiming that members of the Israeli team in Lillehammer followed a man they had identified as a Palestinian courier to a public swimming pool, where he spoke with a man who matched their photos of Salameh.

In fact, the man the courier was speaking with was Ahmed Bouchiki, and he only resembled Salameh. His conversation with the Palestinian courier was apparently incidental.

With their presumed target now in their sights, the Israelis tracked Bouchiki until the following evening, when he and his wife, a Norwegian woman named Torill Larsen, alighted from a bus after seeing a movie together.

Bouchiki and Larsen began walking toward home when two assassins appeared and shot him, 13 times. Larsen, who was pregnant, was unharmed. By the time police and rescue squads arrived, Bouchiki was dead...

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/this-day-in-jewish-history/.premium-1.732289

The Strategy of Tension

WAS TAMERLAN TSARNAEV A DOUBLE AGENT RECRUITED BY THE FBI?

Omar Mateen had been on the FBI’s radar for some time before he opened fire at a nightclub in Florida, killing 49 and wounding 53 people. Now the public is asking why the FBI didn’t do something to prevent the tragedy.

Glenn Greenwald responded with an article in The Washington Post, “The FBI Was Right Not to Arrest Omar Mateen Before the Shooting”. He warned that pressure on the FBI to be more pro-active will inevitably lead to more draconian anti-terror legislation and the loss of even more civil liberties in the name of preventing the unpreventable.

But there is a legitimate reason to question the FBI. There are times when the Bureau seems to be playing dangerous games with dangerous people, as shown in the article below.

This was first published in June of 2013. At the time, we said there were ‘aspects of the Boston Marathon bombing where the official story just doesn’t add up. But what if these inconsistencies point to something amiss on a far deeper level? What if the FBI’s initial claim that it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were — when in fact it knew about them for several years — hides an even bigger embarrassment?

Update. Last month, WhoWhatWhy’s James Henry reported that, despite public denials, the FBI secretly flagged Tamerlan as a terrorist threat in his immigration records. And the Bureau admitted that it conducted a six-month-long “assessment” of Tsarnaev, two years before the bombing. But then the FBI said it closed the investigation after it “found no link or ‘nexus’ to terrorism”.

Contradicting that statement, both the FBI and CIA had actually put Tsarnaev’s name on the terrorist “watch list,” stating that he “may be armed and dangerous” — and that screening him is “mandatory” if he attempts to board an airplane.

So why didn’t they do so?...

http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/06/26/classic-whowhatwhy-tamerlan-tsarnaev-double-agent-recruited-fbi/

Jihadi John Executions Staged: Evidence

ORLANDO SHOOTING DAD A LONGTIME CIA ASSET

The father of the man who slaughtered 50 people in the Orlando nightclub shooting Saturday night is a longtime CIA asset, whose TV show receives funding from the Voice of America -Dari. Pictured below is Seddique Mateen with California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher

Rohrabacher was initially elected to Congress in 1988, with the fundraising help of friend Oliver North. Rohrabacher’s decades-long involvement in “all things Afghan” eventually earned him the nickname “Gunga Dana.” Today he chairs the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.

This morning President Obama called him a “home-grown” terrorist. In a series of phone interviews Monday morning, Donald Trump responded that “there’s something going on” with the President’s reaction to the Orlando shooting.

I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day...

http://www.madcowprod.com/2016/06/13/orlando-shooter-dad-longtime-cia-asset/

Inside Israel's Mossad: Efraim Halevy on UpFront

Senate passes bill allowing 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia

The U.S. Senate passed legislation on Tuesday that would allow families of Sept. 11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia's government for damages, setting up a potential showdown with the White House, which has threatened a veto.

The Saudis, who deny responsibility for the 2001 attacks, strongly object to the bill. They had said they might sell up to $750 billion in U.S. securities and other American assets in retaliation if it became law.

The "Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act," or JASTA, passed the Senate by unanimous voice vote. It must next be taken up by the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Judiciary Committee intends to hold a hearing on the measure in the near future, a committee aide said.

If it became law, JASTA would remove the sovereign immunity, preventing lawsuits against governments, for countries found to be involved in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. It would allow survivors of the attacks, and relatives of those killed in the attacks, to seek damages from other countries.

In this case, it would allow lawsuits to proceed in federal court in New York as lawyers try to prove that the Saudis were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir has said his country's objection to the bill is based on principles of international relations. "What (Congress is) doing is stripping the principle of sovereign immunities which would turn the world for international law into the law of the jungle," he said in a statement on Tuesday.

James Kreindler, a prominent trial lawyer who represents 9/11 families and won large payouts for the victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan American Airways Flight 103 over Scotland, said he expected the bill to pass the House and become law.

"It would be crazy for (President Barack) Obama to veto bipartisan legislation (which would) open (U.S.) courts to victims of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history," Kreindler said...

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-usa-congress-idUSKCN0Y8239

FROM THOSE WHO WERE THERE: INVESTIGATION REVEALS THAT AT LEAST 156 WITNESSED WTC EXPLOSIONS

 So much of the most important evidence the 9/11 Truth Movement has in its arsenal can be attributed to the work of researchers who went above and beyond what others were willing to do.

One who has made such a contribution is Canadian academic Graeme MacQueen. The retired university professor and author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy took on the daunting task of examining close to 12,000 pages of oral histories given by employees of the Fire Department of New York in the weeks and months after 9/11. These accounts reveal that many witnessed explosions in the World Trade Center that morning, supporting the position that the towers were brought down in controlled demolitions.

“It’s all well and good to say these buildings were demolished, but surely someone would notice, right?” MacQueen said in an interview. “Well, they did.”

This treasure trove of eyewitness evidence was just waiting to be examined, but for years the City of New York was determined to keep that from happening. It took a lawsuit by the New York Times to force the release of the pages in 2006.

The idea for the project, MacQueen explains, came from an article written early that year by David Ray Griffin, entitled “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories” in which 31 witnesses to explosions in the towers were identified. Fascinated by the selection of first-hand accounts that Griffin had presented, MacQueen thought a more detailed analysis of all 503 histories could reveal more. The accounts—from firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and paramedics—were recorded between early October 2001 and late January 2002.

“They suffered through the thing; many of them are sick now,” he explains. “They can tell me what they saw, what they heard, what they felt — just remarkable. What an opportunity to just get a sense of what it was like that day.”

As MacQueen discovered, many gave vivid descriptions of explosions. After carefully examining all the accounts, he arrived at a “cautious” total of 118 who reported blasts (he says he was actually criticized for underestimating)...

https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/wtc-explosions-witnessed/

The Emergence of Wahhabism and Its Historical Roots [PDF]

The Emergence of Wahhabism and Its Historical Roots_0 by breakingthesilence

Supreme Court rules in favor of terror victims

Washington (CNN) - The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in favor of victims of terrorism and their families in a 6-2 split, clearing the way for them to collect nearly $2 billion from the central bank of Iran.

The court decided Congress had not exceeded its authority when it passed a law aimed specifically at securing such restitution.

"(The law) provides a new standard clarifying that, if Iran owns certain assets, the victims of Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks will be permitted to execute against those assets," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing the majority. "Applying laws implementing Congress' policy judgments, with fidelity to those judgments, is commonplace for the Judiciary."

The ruling comes at a sensitive time of U.S.-Iran relations, and as Congress considers controversial legislation that would allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by odd bed fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented from the majority opinion, saying Congress had interfered with the role of the judiciary in passing the law while the case was pending in the courts....

http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/politics/supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-terror-victims/index.html

Belgian terror attacks bring this $937M Booz Allen contract into focus

The defense industry is once again in focus following Tuesday's terror attacks in Brussels, but it is government services — not the the bombs, the missiles and the airplanes — that typically get a boost in federal funding.

Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. (NYSE: BAH), for example, announced in September 2015 it won a $937 million task order to provide “global threat mitigation” services to the Pentagon. And while the details are sensitive as to exactly what the McLean-based company is doing under the contract, we do know that the growing specter of terrorist attacks drive more federal spending to it.

In the wake of the November terror attacks in Paris, Booz CFO Kevin Cook said the company is "certainly going to burn that ceiling and I think there’s a lot of room for growth" on the big contract.

“Global threat mitigation was a $900 million-plus contract we won in September to assess risks around the world and working with our defense and intel clients, craft mitigation strategies if these things were to occur,” Cook said. "Since we’ve won that, unfortunately, there’s been a lot of things going on in the world between Paris and Mali and others..."

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/blog/fedbiz_daily/2016/03/belgian-terror-attacks-bring-this-937m-booz-allen.html

Is Obama serious about declassifying 'dirty war' docs?

(CNN) Leading up to President Barack Obama's historic trip to Argentina this week, his administration dropped a mini-bombshell: The U.S. government would begin declassifying documents related to Argentina's "dirty war," the period between 1976 and 1983 when more than 20,000 citizens—known as "the missing" ("desaparecidos" in Spanish)—were secretly detained and tortured and murdered, their bodies never recovered.

Visiting Argentina on the 40th anniversary of the March 24, 1976, military coup that marked the beginning of that period was a political gamble—much less perhaps than his journey to the Castros' Havana—but a gamble nonetheless.

It was a watershed moment in a relationship that has been fraught for decades, in part because of a disturbing narrative of collusion between U.S. intelligence agencies and the Argentine military establishment which carried out the killings. Whether the narrative is true or not is almost incidental to its overwhelming power in Argentine society.

As so often happens in diplomacy, Obama was forced to strike a delicate balance on this trip.

For example, accusations of the involvement of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger loom large in the dirty-war narrative, though Kissinger has denied them.

And yet, in public speeches Obama steered clear of mentioning Kissinger or addressing his alleged role. His silence on the subject was deafening.

But Obama also extolled certain Americans who took huge risks to expose the atrocities of the dirty war. Obama praised Patt Derian, the assistant secretary of state for human rights under President Jimmy Carter -- who raised the alarm inside the State Department -- and Tex Harris, the courageous U.S. Embassy officer who documented human rights abuses and identified the missing. The President should be commended for recognizing these heroes.

As a whole, the trip was exactly what Obama does best: From dancing the tango and drinking mate tea to giving a moving tribute to the victims of the dirty war, Obama basked in applause from an Argentine public often critical of American policy, and a new pro-free market, pro-U.S. government...

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/26/opinions/obama-argentina-dirty-war-andersen/index.html