Sunday, September 13, 2020
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Major General Mark Weatherington, Commander of the U.S. Joint-Global Strike Operations Center, bragged in a video interview: “We are sustaining a surge in bomber operations, vital to demonstrating peace and stability. We need to keep our adversaries off balance.”
Is it wise to keep a nuclear power “off balance?” It is precisely this kind of statement, combined with the recent nearly daily deployment of U.S. bombers and surveillance planes along the borders of Russia — in the Arctic, in the Black Sea, and along Russia’s borders in Europe — which has forced Moscow to conclude that the U.S. and NATO are in fact preparing for an invasion. The most recent case: three B-1 bombers Sept. 11 flew from Texas to the East Siberian Sea, a mission which “demonstrated how the U.S. strategic bombers are able to support any mission, anywhere around the globe at a moment’s notice,” according to a statement from the U.S. European Command.
Colonel-General Sergey Surovikin, the commander of Russia’s Aerospace Forces, briefed military attachés in Moscow Sept. 11 on the danger to Russia. “According to our assessment, during this event,” he said, “the B-52 crews worked out how to reach the threshold of using cruise missiles with a simulated missile strike on objects in the Kaliningrad region and other western regions of our country.” Regarding the Black Sea flights, he added, “According to our assessment, objects located on the territory of the Southern Military District were considered as targets.”
This escalation of threats is taking place, even as President Donald Trump insists that he wants friendly relations with Russia, while pulling down troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to end the “endless wars.” More explosively, the President has directly attacked the top brass at the Pentagon for working hand in hand with the military-industrial complex in fomenting wars. As Col. Richard Black (ret.) told the Schiller Institute conference on Sept. 5, there is a military coup being openly discussed among the flag grade officers who have waged these criminal “regime change” wars over the past 17 years under Bush and Obama.
What about Biden? While there are extremely serious questions about his mental capacity — an issue which is increasingly calling into question the state of the Democratic Party itself — the Biden campaign is stridently denouncing President Trump for being soft on the “dictators” Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. A Biden presidency, they rant, would not let China and Russia get away with their “aggression.” The parallel between their rhetoric and the ranting of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper could not be more obvious. Would Biden push the button, or rather, would whoever would end up running a Biden Administration push the button? Add to that the open support from Democratic leaders for the violent insurrection on the streets of many U.S. cities, which are escalating rather than declining, and the threat to the country is clear.
The extreme danger of a war breaking out, even before the election, must be countered with a person-to-person meeting among Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi. As Putin has decided not to personally attend the UN General Assembly this month, and Xi Jinping is also not attending, a direct meeting appears unlikely — but at least a virtual meeting is both possible and urgent. Beside the war danger, there are other “universal” issues which must be resolved by the world’s powers — the pandemic, the economic disintegration, the financial bubble, starvation facing millions in Africa and elsewhere.
The videos and transcripts of the four panels of the Sept. 5-6 Schiller Institute conference (https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2020/08/13/conference-war-drive-towards-armageddon-or-a-new-paradigm-among-sovereign-nations-united-by-the-common-aims-of-mankind/) provide detailed proposals for all of these issues, but their realization depends on a summit of these world leaders. The Imperial division of the world into warring blocs can no longer be tolerated by patriots of this or any other nation. As Schiller said, patriots must also be citizens of the world.
Telling the Truth About 9/11 — Is The Same Apparatus Behind The Coup Against The President? [dhs,dws,rhb,jkw,web] (see slug)
Ambassador Antonov Offers, Russia Is Ready To Step Up Counterterrorism Cooperation with U.S. (see slug)
U.S. Bomber Deployments Surging Against Both China and Russia (see slug)
Russians Conclude U.S. Bomber Exercises Are Practicing Missile Strikes on Targets Inside Russia (see slug)
Biden and the Teleprompter — Even His Press Conference Was Scripted (see slug)
How Low Can They Go? Netflix Launches Child Pornography Film (see slug)
U.S. Air Force Looking for More Than 100 B-21 Bombers (see slug)
Russia Military Officials Brief on ‘Kavkaz 2020’ Exercise (see slug)
AstraZeneca Has Restarted Its Phase 3 Testing of Covid-19 Vaccine (see slug)
New Covid Cases Restart Their Decline, Flu Vaccines Are Critical (see slug)
Large-Scale Vaccinations in China Seemingly Safe and Effective (see slug)
Sputnik V Vaccine Drawing Close to Deployment (see slug)
Vucic Stresses Trump Is OK with Serbia’s Close Relations with Russia and China (see slug)
Trump Again Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, for Serbia-Kosovo Deal (see slug)
Fires in Oregon, Washington and California (see slug)
The Wall Street Journal on Beethoven and Schiller (see slug)
In Lesbos Crisis, EU Sends Commissioner but No Aid (see slug)
Lavrov Counters the U.S. Is the One Meddling in Elections, not Russia (see slug)
Putin and Lukashenko Plan To Meet in Sochi on Sept. 14 (see slug)
Bahrain Also Reaches Peace Agreement with Israel — Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Bahrain announced on Friday, Sept. 11 that the Kingdom of Bahrain had reached a peace agreement with Israel, similar to the U.A.E.-Israel deal brokered by the Trump Administration. [mob]
U.S. Creates ‘Mekong-U.S. Partnership’ in Effort To Counter Belt and Road (see slug)
Afghan Peace Talks Open in Qatar (see slug)
China Pushing High-Quality Education for the New Era (see slug)
Operations Reports (see slug)
LaRouchePAC National Dialogue, with Col. Richard H. Black, (USA, ret.), William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and host Dennis Speed
Saturday, September 12, 2020
DENNIS SPEED: Hello! My name is Dennis Speed, and I’d like to welcome you to today’s Dialogue with Lyndon LaRouche. We are creating this presentation so you can use all or part of it to disseminate its message as rapidly as possible, and as far and wide as possible. To you is going to be given the task, should you agree to it, to help us bring justice not only to the victims of 9/11, not only to the unjustly accused, convicted, and imprisoned individuals such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Lyndon LaRouche, but to yourselves, your children, grandchildren, and all posterity.
Lyndon LaRouche, who died February 12, 2019, founded the magazine Executive Intelligence Review in 1974. He ran for President eight times from 1976 through 2004. From the first campaign to the last, and through the founding of the magazine, he was attempting to provide Americans with something that was, in his view, essential to the preservation of the republic. Lyn had written a book called The Toynbee Factor in British Grand Strategy, referring to the historian Arnold Toynbee. In that book he said:
“In a properly ordered republic, as the forces around Benjamin Franklin and George Washington understood this point correctly, the greatest single source of potential danger to the republic is the very sort of estrangement of the citizen from rational comprehension of national policy-issues which prevails in the United States today. This, as we shall shortly demonstrate, impinges directly upon the Toynbee syndrome.”
What he was referring to in part was the tendency of Americans, particularly after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, to more and more rely upon formulations of strategy and of history and of culture from London; particularly from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and from the intelligence forces thereunto attachéd. This is not to suggest that there were not American thinkers that were independent, but it is to suggest that the circumstances that we’re going to present to you today are presented to you because of the present crisis that we find ourselves in. This will be discussed in more detail as we get into our presentations, but we estimate at LaRouche PAC that the world may be closer now to thermonuclear war than it was at any time other than 1962, and even perhaps including that.
Exactly one week ago, there was a conference, September 5-6, held by the Schiller Institute. In introducing that conference, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and chairman of that organization, had the following to say:
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE [video]: The purpose of this conference of the Schiller Institute is to propose concepts and solutions for this present unprecedented crisis. We have, like never before, a com-bination of an out-of-control pandemic, a famine, the greatest economic crisis since the end of World War II, a pending financial collapse, and most deadly, the danger of a new World War, and last but not least, a deep cultural crisis. Because of the enormity of these interconnected crises, there cannot be a solution for each of these problems separately, or just addressing a partial aspect. What is needed is a completely new paradigm, a solution on a higher level than that on which all these crises erupted. We have to jump to a new level of thinking; something that Nikolaus of Cusa called the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites….
In September 2013, President Xi Jinping announced in Kazakhstan, the New Silk Road policy, which would quickly become the largest infrastructure program in history. The Schiller Institute immediately afterwards published a 360-page report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, an update of our economic platform for the preceding 40 years: how to overcome poverty and underdevelopment in the developing countries. We were extremely excited, because there was a great affinity between policy of Xi Jinping and life work of my late husband Lyndon LaRouche and our movement, who already in 1975 had proposed to replace the IMF with the International Development Bank, the idea to have a real development policy of the developing countries.
LaRouche, already in 1973, commissioned a biological taskforce to investigate how the IMF conditionalities, by lowering the living standards of entire generations over a long period of time, would invite the danger of the reemergence of old and new diseases like the present pandemic.
He developed the Oasis Plan in 1975. We worked out a first Africa development plan in 1976. We worked on a plan to develop Latin America with [Mexican President] López Portillo in 1982. A 40-year development plan to develop India. The Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, which was a concept to overcome the military blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and to use the associated science driver for a gigantic technology transfer to the developing sector. Between the 1988 “Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna” and in 1991 the “Eurasian Land-Bridge,” these were the many versions of the LaRouche recovery program, including his various U.S. Presidential campaign programs for the recovery of the United States.
Lyndon LaRouche’s conception of physical economy has the idea that the only source of wealth is the creativity of individual. The discovery of new universal physical principles applied as scientific and technological progress in the productive process, leading to an in-crease of productivity of labor power and the productive capacities, which requires a continuous increase in population, a greater division of labor, an increase of relative potential population-density, in correlation to higher and higher energy-flux densities.
Such a conception of the economy obviously pertains to the image of man. It sees mankind as the only so far known creative species in the universe. Human creativity is the most powerful geological force in the anti-entropically developing universe. It is that force which accelerates that development in an anti-entropic way.
With Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road, the economic power of second largest economy is now in affinity with this idea, to overcome the under-development of developing sector. Also, it is reconnecting the fight to the intention of FDR — what the old Bretton Woods System would have become, had Roosevelt not died at the wrong time: the idea that peace in the world at large is only possible if the living standard of all human beings is increased.
This was the issue between Roosevelt and Churchill; to make the American System available to the entire world, versus the British colonial system for the defense of the privileges of the upper classes at the expense of the majority of the population, both the British subjects, as well as those subjugated by the colonies. [end video]
SPEED: The failure to capture and to comprehend the critical role of British intelligence is something that Lyndon LaRouche brought to the attention of the American people often. On September 11, 2001, LaRouche appeared on a talk show with Dr. Jack Stockwell in the moments that the two buildings of the World Trade Center were being attacked. We captured a portion of that conversation in a documentary that we then released ten years after the original event, in 2011. We now present to you a portion of that documentary.
VIDEO: [Two TV weathermen talking about the weather in New York and Washington; voices overlapping.] Look at the clouds out there today. Nice as it can be across the Northeast, rough seas still from … Oh, would you look at Washington, huh? I’m going outside today. Anyway, we’re going to have to a pretty day, temperatures will be … high pressure is just the beginning, because another cold front moves in Thursday night around shower activity, so temperatures are going to be warm. It will be gorgeous Saturday and Sunday … outlook? Sunny and dry.
[plane crashes into the World Trade Center] This just in. You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. There is more and more fire and smoke enveloping the top of the building…. over New York City, and it appears to have crashed into — I don’t know which tower it is, but it directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers…. It does not appear that there is any kind of an effort up there yet. Remember — Oh, my God! My goodness! There’s another one! It seems to be on purpose…. Now it’s obvious, I think that there’s a second plane which just flew into the second tower. This has to be deliberate, folks…. I would begin to say that, yes…. We just saw on live television as a second plane….
JACK STOCKWELL: Interestingly enough, just yesterday I received a bundle of leaflets from your organization in Leesburg, warning of terrorist attacks in America here very shortly. Here we have, the morning that you’re on my program, what’s happening in New York at the World Trade Center.
LYNDON LAROUCHE: Obviously, this is not exactly an accident.
STOCKWELL: No sir, I don’t believe it is.
LAROUCHE: I mean, it’s not a coincidence. It’s obviously—this is so remote in probability that there has to be intention in this thing…. First of all, the first suspicion on this is going to be Osama bin Laden. That name is going to come up prominently whether as suspicion or just suspicion.
STOCKWELL: Certainly.
LAROUCHE: … We have a global process. Look, the financial system’s coming down. That’s always a dangerous thing. Because when the entire system is being shaken up the way it is now, by the financial collapse, political things happen, because various people try to intervene and orchestrate events by spectacular interventions, which will change, shall we say, get public attention off one thing and put it on another….
STOCKWELL: … a plane? A plane has flown into the Pentagon. They’ve had an explosion at the Pentagon now…. It is confirmed now, on several news sources, that the Pentagon is experiencing explosions right now….
LAROUCHE: This is a very systematic operation. If they’re snatching planes … if all three of these planes — the two we have from New York and this thing on the Pentagon — to get that kind of thing, to snatch planes like that … This means that there’s been some kind of either incompetence or fix on the whole security operation, because you can’t get this kind of thing without a real goof-up, on the security side. So, somebody in charge of security was really not very effectively in charge.
You can’t go around snatching planes in a coordinated fashion, like this. You can’t do it. Somebody has to be really sloppy. [end of Stockwell interview]
LAROUCHE [Jan. 3, 2001 webcast]: [E]ither we do the kinds of things I indicated in summary to you today, or else, what you’re going to have, is not a government. You’re going to have something like a Nazi regime….
What you’re going to get with a frustrated Bush Administration, if it’s determined to prevent itself from being opposed — its will — you’re going to get crisis management. Where members of the Special Warfare types, of the Secret Government, the secret police teams, and so forth, will set off provocations, which will be used to bring about dictatorial powers and emotion, in the name of crisis management.
You will have small wars set off in various parts of the world, which the Bush Administration will respond to, with crisis-management methods of provocation. That’s what you’ll get. And that’s what the problem is, and you have to face that. [end video]
SPEED: What you just saw was footage from a January 3, 2001 discussion that LaRouche was holding with various supporters from around the world. What we’re going to do now is to show you portions of that talk; specifically with respect to his earlier assertion at the moment that the second plane had hit, that the economic crisis is the matter that you have to take into consideration to understand what the entirety of this process was. So, now we’re going to show you sections from that January 3, 2001 talk.
LAROUCHE [video]: What happened with Y2K, was that the United States government, in collaboration with Wall Street, created one of the biggest swindles in the world, in world history. The swindle was based on the argument that, come the year Jan. 1, 2000, the danger would be that the world’s computers, which were operating on the basis of a final two-digit symbol for date, year-date, would crash, when ’99 became ’00. And that this was the thing that could blow out the entire system.
So, what happened over these years, was, a vast amount of money was poured in, on the basis of the panic, of fear of a Y2K blowout. It was poured into software rewriting. It was poured into financing new computer systems, which otherwise would not have been bought the way they were. It was also to create a vast amount, pool of money, of financial power, ready to stand ready on Jan. 1, 2000, to assure that the system didn’t go belly-up, when the computers failed to report the accounting figures for January 1, 2000, on.
Now, of course, that never happened. There never was any danger of that. The problem was being fixed in the meantime.
Well, what happened was, is that through this swindle called the Y2K swindle, they built up a fake industry, using the image of the so-called New Economy, and Internet-related industries, to build up a vast bubble, where you saw people who were worth nothing, becoming billionaires, based on stock appreciation. And now they’ve gone back to being non-billionaires, because their stock went back toward zero, and they’re out in the streets, saying, “I was a billionaire,” and they look like a bum, and they were a bum, beforehand.
But these things have collapsed. The dot.com crisis. We see the Internet collapse, the Nasdaq stocks collapsing, around the world. What they did is, they fought like the devil, throughout the year 2000, to try to keep this so-called New Economy, or Y2K bubble, alive. They were determined to keep it alive until after the November 7 general Presidential elections. Which is what they did. But the election came, and it was a bummer. Nobody was really elected, so the Supreme Court got in and decided who was elected, when nobody really knew. We still don’t know….
This didn’t start yesterday. We didn’t get into this mess yesterday. From 1933-1965, the U.S. was rebuilt from a depression caused by the policies caused by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge — was saved by [Franklin] Roosevelt, who understood the nature of the problem. Roosevelt carried the United States through the Depression, without setting up any kind of dictatorship which would upset our Constitution. Roosevelt got us through World War II, and the programs of Roosevelt, even though they were chopped down after his death, nonetheless, continued to support the United States and Western Europe in recovery from the wartime and Depression conditions.
So that, over the period 1933-1965, despite all the mistakes we made, we were the model economy of the world. So that, if we take away all of the bad things we did between 1933 and ’65 — there were lots of them — we still were, in net effect, a nation dedicated to improvement, the general improvement of the conditions of life, improvement in productivity, improvement of all of these things together. So, if we look back then, what we did between 1933 and 1965, in net effect, was successful. We were still a successful economy, despite all our mistakes. Since 1965, since Nixon started with his pro-racist Southern Strategy, and his wild free-trade policies, the United States has been going downhill.
Take the points: We collapsed in 1971, with the drop into a floating-exchange-rate world monetary system. That was the first catastrophe. As a result of Henry Kissinger’s, and similar efforts in causing a Middle East war, and some other crises, we were in worse condition by 1975. In 1976, the Southern Strategy took over the Democratic Party, the same racist policies that were behind Nixon, took over Carter. Carter did more damage to the U.S. economy in one term in office, than all other Presidents combined since 1965. He deregulated; he destroyed infrastructure; and he unleashed what he called, or what his Administration called “controlled disintegration” of the U.S. economy. And the U.S. economy has disintegrated.
1982, under Bush/Reagan, we had Garn-St Germain, which picked the bones of the banking system that Carter had bankrupted. We had Kemp-Roth, which told Wall Street to steal, not to invest in real industry. We had junk bonds, a form of theft, a form of swindle. We had derivatives, which took off in the 1990s, but were already there in the 1980s. Then, in 1989, 1990, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, and François Mitterrand pulled the biggest swindle, in the wake of the process of disintegration of the Soviet system, and moved to set up a world empire based in financial speculation, not production, and to eliminate the powers of the sovereign nation-state in the United States, as well as every other nation. It was called “globalization.” It was a return to the Roman Empire. And to the slavery that that implies.
So, over this period, the period from 1966 to the present time, the United States, which was once the world’s leading economy, is now become one of the worst …
So, the problem is not that we don’t have solutions. We do have solutions. We could go back to things that worked. We could agree with other nations, because there’s a depression, we could agree to convene a new international monetary conference, to establish again, the kind of fixed-exchange-rate system that got us out of the Depression in the postwar period; establish capital controls, exchange controls, regulation, reinstall regulation of our industries, such as the power industry, which is now in a crisis, to make sure we get power again. To restore our health-care system; to restore our educational system. We did these things before, under depression and depression-like conditions, and we can do them again. Other nations would agree with this. So, why don’t we do it?
There are solutions. Yes, the crisis is much bigger than Roosevelt faced. But, the lessons we learned from the success of Roosevelt and his legacy, shows us how we should approach these problems today. [end video]
SPEED: Now, with that outline and with that conception for the reason for the dialogue among nations — Russia, China, India, the United States in particular, we now will move to introduce our panel and our discussion for today.
With us today we have Dr. Jack Stockwell, who interviewed Lyndon LaRouche; we’ll be speaking to him in just a moment. Kirk Wiebe, former senior technical consultant for NSA; and Bill Binney, who everybody I think knows who’s been watching LaRouche PAC for the last three years. I don’t think I have to say more. And Diane Sare, who is the co-moderator with me here today. Later, we’ll be joined in about 30 minutes by Colonel Richard Black, and we’ll get to his message. He is the former head of the Army’s criminal law division at the Pentagon, former state senator from Virginia, and he spoke at conference last week on the topic, “Do We Risk a Military Coup?” So, we’ll be coming to that.
So, Dr. Stockwell, I want to thank you, first of all, for being with us today. I know you had to take some time out of your schedule. So, let’s go right to you and your reflections.
DR JACK STOCKWELL: Well, I’m honored to be here with such an auspicious panel here. I kind of wonder, “What in the world am I doing here?” But I appreciate the opportunity, even though it might have been somewhat coincidental that I was able to appear with Lyn on September 11. He had been a regular on my radio broadcast for some time, from maybe the time of Lady Diana’s murder. Talking to Jeffrey Steinberg, I had regular guests from the LaRouche organization on my radio show. Lyn had been on there a couple of times earlier. So, when this thing broke out that morning, my show started at 7 a.m. mountain time, so it was 9 a.m. East Coast time. Things had already been well underway. I remember Lyn wasn’t aware of it when the broadcast started, anymore than I think I was. We both learned of these unfolding events simultaneously. The first things that came out of his mouth were three things that really impressed me from the very beginning. Number one, things like this could not possibly happen without some essential stand-down in security awareness. I think as was clearly represented by the fact that the first jets ordered to be scrambled weren’t until a half an hour after the attack had begun. He was very quick to say that they were going to blame this on bin Laden. He, of course, was the quintessential bogeyman running around the Middle East at the time. In order to draw more American military attention against the Middle East, we had to have a Middle East bogeyman, and he said, they’ll blame it on him right away. And very interesting how quickly passports started showing up in some of the most opportune places, with people having information at their disposal way before normal investigative measures would reveal things. All again pushed to what he conclusively said would have to have been an inside job. As a result of this, you’ll see a push for greater legislation further corralling our God-given rights; especially the Bill of Rights.
Now, I had spoken to him in earlier interviews about PNAC, and how those things, the Project for a New American Century and the likes of [Richard] Perle and [Paul] Wolfowitz and [James] Woolsey and [Elliott] Abrams and [Donald] Rumsfeld and [Robert] Zoellick and [John] Bolton and eventually [Dick] Cheney and the rest of those mobsters; how they were trying to foment this paranoia within our own country against several foreign states. And how that would lead up to Lyn’s essential prophecy there in the beginning of 2001, and how fully that came to pass based on his ability to see the eventual unfolding of this dynamic which was brought to pass upon all of us.
This egomaniacal virus, I’m afraid, is still afloat, and I cannot see anything short of the Silk Road approach to saving humanity, let alone the world, from these crazies. My greatest fear is not the current viral paranoia, the masking, the social-distancing nonsense that’s going on, but the inability of the general population to stand up against an ever-encroaching hegemony bringing us less freedom and God-given rights. Or even becoming aware of what is going on to us individually any more than the general population was aware of what was going on, on 9/11 outside of Lyn’s forecasts several months earlier that year.
There was a thread that Lyn taught me in previous discussions on my radio show, a thread through the events of mankind, human history, human events, human culture, the comings and goings, that helped me to understand much better what was taking place when this unfolded. What I learned from Lyn and from that radio broadcast on 9/11, put a defining model in my mind for a much better understanding of what’s going on out in front and behind the scenes, as further events are brought to bear to crush the American System. It was also Lyn who gave me hope that can be truly averted, again through restoring the American System.
Of all the interviews — and I’ve had interviews with notables, interviews with celebrities, interviews with very important governmental people over my 20 years of radio broadcasting — that will stand out, as far as I’m concerned, as the seminal show of the Dr. Jack Stockwell radio talk show program. I still to this day have the fondest memories, having visited with Lyn on several occasions both in Europe and in the United States. Thank you.
SPEED: Thank you very much, Dr. Stockwell. We realize you may have limitations on your time. We want to thank you for being here with us. We’re going to go right now to Kirk Wiebe, who shocked our audience at our conference last Saturday, in making some assertions concerning 9/11, which I think are really important. Because, of course, he and Bill Binney and Ed Loomis, who are the people who invented a certain system he’ll describe — Thin Thread. They had an outlook, they had a vantage point on these matters. They then left. That is, Kirk and Bill, on October 31, 2001 — I don’t know if Ed went out as well that day — in protest of what they had seen as this problem, this breach of security. So, we’ll first go to Kirk, and then we’ll go to Bill.
KIRK WIEBE: Thank you, Dennis. Let me just say to begin that every time I listen to stories about Lyndon LaRouche, and the commentary by Jack Stockwell that we just heard, it makes me think how these concerns about the extenuation of power by those in power, and how they leverage crises, cuts right to the core. Whether it’s COVID-19, whether it’s 9/11. The thing that you said that was shocking that I said, was that NSA knew about 9/11; that it was coming, ahead of 9/11. I don’t know how much ahead, but they knew about it. How do I know that? A trusted colleague, Thomas Drake, another NSA whistleblower, told Bill, told me that a small pocket of analysts in NSA put together a report to warn the nation, the world, our allies, our partners about 9/11; and was prevented from disseminating it by the Director of NSA. I say the Director of NSA; well that would be logical, because that’s who heads up the NSA. Who was really the decision-maker that prevented the data from going out? I am sure the General Michael V. Hayden called the White House, and have spoken to either Cheney or the President, George Bush, told them about the information, and probably went through some discussion about how to rationalize whether to send it out or not to send it out. And the ultimate decision was made not to send it out.
You have to think about the Bush family. If you’re just looking at why would anyone risk the chance of harm to the American people? Why would you do that? What was so valuable to warrant that kind of a risk? The only thing I can think of is the Bush family’s relationship to Saudi Arabia. The United States relationship with Saudi Arabia. The operative word being “oil.” We were in a far different situation in 2001 than we are today, with fracking and the like. Our dependency was extreme. That’s the only thing I can think of that’s obvious. There may be other things under the table that would explain it as well, that maybe some of our colleagues might put up as a possibility.
But the bottom line is, Bill and I, after we walked out of NSA on October 31, 2001 — and I note that’s Halloween Day; rather fitting — in disgust. Because we had tried to put ThinThread, the technical capability that was designed to go against intelligence from the internet. We had tried to put that capability into the fight, and were denied from within the building. It wasn’t al-Qaeda that didn’t let us, it was Americans; Americans who were supposed to guard for the defense and the security of the nation, prevented ThinThread from being deployed. You’ve got to ask, “What kind of a mentality does that?” Egos. Without going into all the detail, I will tell you, egos and arrogance. Decisions by those in power to control outcomes.
In any case, I wanted to say that the nature of mass surveillance is the biggest threat to world democracy that we now face; none compares [to it]. Every major nation-state does mass surveillance, and many lesser states. But it’s not just nation-states; it’s cartels, other organizations that have the funding, the technical know-how to do it. Nothing prevents them. Business is now surveilling its customers like never before; wants to know everything, wants to predict what you’re going to do. We are the most surveilled people in the history of the world. And in our Revolutionary War, one of the things that caused us to fight a Revolutionary War against King George of England was his threat to put a soldier in every home, so that he would know that the colonists were thinking ahead of time. This thirst for information is out of control. And it undermines our very Constitutional republic. I would tell you that mass surveillance today undermines at least four of the ten rights in the Bill of Rights; at least four, and it’s not getting better. I see people in Congress on both sides of the political equation, dodging and weaving, trying to avoid this issue.
Even though these tools were used against the Trump candidacy and the Trump administration by an opposing political party, and it’s being investigated thoroughly. You notice how long it’s taking? I will guarantee that part of this issue is a reticence to bring mass surveillance into the equation. They just want to blame a few bad actors at the FBI. Let me tell you, the underlying threat is the availability of data about all of us, and the political will to protect it or not. The only thing that stops it from not being protected is somebody in power saying, “I want to know this; I want to know that.” People say, “Well, I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I worry about mass surveillance?” You don’t get to decide what’s wrong; somebody else does. Donald Trump did nothing wrong as a candidate for the Presidency. But somebody else in power thought it was wrong, and humans acted accordingly. If we don’t lock down the data of the innocent people of the world’s population and prevent it from casual browsing, this will repeat again and again.
That’s my piece, Dennis.
SPEED: OK, thank you very much, Kirk. Before we go to Bill, I just want to reference something that was said by Glenn Greenwald in the documentary which was done called, “United States of Secrets.” He was reflecting upon their first contact with Ed Snowden. Laura Poitras was the one who originally pursued the contact, and on their way to Hong Kong to meet him, they were sitting in the plane, and Poitras began to give some of the documents to Greenwald to look at. So, he spent hours looking at the documents. At one point, he said he “essentially couldn’t believe what it was that we had.” He “realized for the first time that we were dealing with the kind of story that had never occurred before in the history of American journalism.” That referred to events of 2013, but in 2001, Kirk and Bill and others, and just afterwards, found themselves — they were the precursors to all of that. I’d like as Bill speaks to us, he’s spoken to us many times, for him to also include for us a bit of a conception of just what it meant, and what Greenwald meant here, that he’s looking at, as you tell us whatever else you’re going to tell us today, Bill.
WILLIAM BINNEY: OK. Well, I’m not quite sure what Glenn was reading there, but he was reading about the mass surveillance which I would quote Wolfgang Schmidt, the former colonel of the East German Stasi. He said, “For us, this would have been a dream come true.”
But I’d like to address what Lyndon LaRouche was quoted on some of the things you were playing before, where he talked about the intelligence failure. This set up the whole problem with it and what we were doing inside NSA to solve the problems of the digital age, set up a swindle; one of the more significant swindles, I would add, and the basis for a power grab not just for people of the United States, but for people all around the world.
It went like this: They claimed you had to give up privacy for security. That meant they had to take everything in that you were doing, and they were justified because they said they were going to give you security. Well, that’s exactly what the Nazis did in 1933 with their Special Order 48, and that’s what they used to take over power. Well, it’s very similar to that. And this is what totalitarian states have done down through the ages. It’s nothing new; this is old. But the point was, when we were looking at all the information in the 1990s, from 1990 up, we could see the explosion of the digital age coming, and that we had to do things to try to address it. What they would do internally in the NSA was, they would have programs running where they were all funded. Anytime a new program came in, they would try to make it dependent on existing ones so that they would have to spend some of their funding to maintain the existing programs and the existing contracts. In other words, build an empire.
So, we, in the Second Automation Research Center, took a totally clean slate approach, and simply said, “What is the best way to solve this problem? Our analysts are buried; they can’t figure out what’s happening, because they can’t get through the data fast enough to see threats coming.” So, that was our entire focus. As a part of that, that meant we had to only pull out relevant information from the massive flows of data and figure out how do we do that. That’s what we built into ThinThread. It was a process selection of data; smart selection of information flowing by. The problem is, you had to be able to look at that data to be able to make a decision as to whether or not it was relevant. That meant you had sessionize everything on the internet, look at it, and say, “Is this something we deem as important to one of our targets, or not?” If yes, we take it in; if no, we let it go right by. So, in other words, that filtering process took away the leverage that the government currently has on everybody on the planet, except those who can be conclusively associated with bad activities, criminal activities, or militaries, or threats from externally. The point was, we gave everybody privacy with that filtering act by itself.
Then, anything we took in, if we couldn’t prove that the people were involved, until we could prove that, we encrypted all of their attributes so that we could look at their activity, see what they were doing, to build up probable cause to go after them. But, we wouldn’t be automatically including them as a target or a known criminal. Until we got our warrants, we wouldn’t actively open up their identification. So, no one inside NSA or the FBI or any other agency in the government coming into the databases, could tell who they were looking at. They could only see the kinds of activity they were doing. So, that was the point about the whole thing. Then, at the end of that, we had a third process we called the auditing routine, which looked at everybody coming into our network with our data from the ThinThread input, to see if, in fact, what they were doing, where they went, what they were interested in, all the actions they took while they were in our network. And we had that process to be looked at every day. We were preparing to build software to automatically analyze it, so it could automatically alert.
The whole point of this was, we want to automatically pull all the information out to our analysts so that it could create a rich environment for them to look at to try to succeed. Plus, we could have other algorithms running to show these are the kinds of relationships that exist, and these are the kinds of things we think the software thinks that they’re planning. We were even planning to do that. That was to reduce the load of analysts to the point where they could manage the amount of information passing around the world, and actually be able to discover and see threats coming, so they could take action to maybe prevent them. Like 9/11.
Sure enough, Tom Drake ran our program after that, I think it was in February 2002, and sure enough, all that data fell right out there. The difference is, our program didn’t allow for a single point of failure. For example, the analysts preparing that report were going up one chain of command. Along that chain of command were single points of failure. If anyone of them stopped it, it just didn’t go. Well, that wasn’t going to be the design of the ThinThread program. It said if you knew anything that happened, and you could recognize it with the software, anybody that needed to know, would be notified. So therefore, no one place could stop it.
The real underlying problem with Hayden and company, and Bush and Cheney and [then-CIA head George] Tenet, who were the core members creating this — removing the filtering to allow them to pull in everything, and then removing the protections of identity, allowing them to identify everything. And then removing the auditing program which said we’re going to do whatever we want to, and nobody’s going to see it; we’re not going to allow them to see it. Once they did that, they then destroyed the privacy of everybody in the United States and everybody in the world. All the members of parliaments around the world, the members of Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Supreme Court members, all judges in the United States; everybody. No one is excluded from this capture of information.
But the whole point was that, in order to do the program we presented, we developed it from scratch to operational at three different sites 24/7 for almost a year with $3.2 million. The first go at Trailblazer was for $3.8 billion for the first five years. But after 9/11, that more doubled and tripled, and by that time, they had destroyed all the filtering process and the whole logic that we put in to try to make our process constitutional and legal. They simply wiped it all out, took the massive input, and simply said, “We’re collecting everything.” Took mass input under Section 215 of Patriot Act; they justified that to take mass records from various businesses, telecommunications companies, banks, and so on. It just destroyed the fundamental foundation of democracy and our republic. Then, we spread that around the world, so now we’re basically adopting the same thing around the world. In Germany, in Denmark, some of it’s coming out in Denmark, where they’ve now discovered that they’re doing the same thing there. They removed the managers of these intelligence agencies in Denmark.
We didn’t do that here; we haven’t done any of that here. The whole thing about using and spending all this money on capturing all this information on everybody on the planet, was a swindle from the beginning. And they knew it, because we had already demonstrated inside NSA, the way to solve this problem without spying and violating the Constitution or anybody’s rights. Lyndon LaRouche was absolutely right; there was an absolute failure there in security.
SPEED: OK, I’m glad you brought that up, Bill. When Colonel Black joins us, we’ll come back to some of the Constitutional questions; I want him to be on when we have that discussion.
Diane, I want to go to you and just ask you, first of all, whether you have any comment on what you’ve heard, and then you may or may not have some questions there.
DIANE SARE: First of all, I would like to say that — and I apologize, the dog is barking in the background; if it’s too bad, you can tell me. He was very upset about matters himself.
The why of 9/11 I think is even worse than what Mr. Wiebe has said about it. Which is, if you go back to World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and his argument with Winston Churchill, because here we were fighting to defeat fascism, concentration camp methods, slave labor, and extermination of people. And what was British colonialism, or Dutch, or French? What was going on in Africa? What had been going on in India? He said, at the end of this war, we’re not fighting so that you can keep your colonies. At the end of the war, we are going to change the world. Every nation should have its independence; every nation has a right to sovereign economic development. LaRouche later talked about the machine-tool principle. What occurred was, FDR died April 12, 1945; basically four weeks before V-E Day. V-J Day was in September. Truman took over, and the whole plan of FDR was, in effect, thrown out the window. We dropped the nuclear bombs on two major cities in Japan, when Japan was already in the process of negotiating a surrender; the Emperor and the Vatican at the time. Why? To impose the idea of a global hegemon, a one-world government. Whoever has the use of the nuclear bomb dictates policy. This has come up again recently in a Congressional Research Service report that one of our people just unearthed, called, “Renewed Great Power Competition; Implications for Defense; Issues for Congress” from August 25th. But in the footnotes, they refer back to a discussion that was held in 1992, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, and once again, there was an incredible potential for a new kind of order among sovereign nations. There was a discussion that do we want to allow other major powers to become hegemons in their regions — namely, Russia and China — or not? Apparently, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney basically argued no, we can’t have any other regional powers. There is one superpower; that’s the United States.
Then, you put that together, and the United States on behalf of what? Not the American System; not John Quincy Adams; not FDR; but on behalf of the British imperial world outlook. You put that together then with LaRouche’s warning as you heard in 2001, of an impending financial and economic blow-out. That they would want to go for war; for control; for dictatorship. I would just add the most recent piece of that is what Mark Carney said explicitly at Jackson Hole. He was then the head of the Bank of England; he has now shifted to be the Green climate person for the United Nations. What he said at that Jackson Hole meeting of central bankers in August 2019 is, we need regime change. That is, we can’t have governments deciding their own economic policy. We need the central banks to make the policy. In other words, we don’t want sovereign nations. President Trump, President Putin, President Xi, leaders who might represent their populations. Rather, we want to have a global conglomeration of financial interests that determine what the countries do, including matters of war and peace.
I think that’s what we’ve seen in effect since that time, and I would argue that the events of 9/11 unfortunately put us in a very advanced way, on that road. I would say human beings being human beings, that that does not mean that they are going to succeed, because human beings don’t like to be in dictatorships. Which is what you saw with the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. But I think that’s where we are.
Related to that, I have a question, actually, for Kirk Wiebe; is that OK if I go ahead with that?
SPEED: Actually, Diane, I believe that Colonel Black is with us at this point. Is that correct? So, let’s bring Colonel Black into the discussion. I don’t see him yet, but Colonel Richard Black, former head of the Army’s Criminal Law division at the Pentagon, and former State Senator from Virginia. He also caused a bit of a stir last week, as the result of his discussion about the possibility of a military coup and the various people being involved. Colonel Black, welcome to our program today. I want to say a couple of things to bring you into what we’ve been talking about in the course of the last hour. It’s September 11, 2001. Dr. Jack Stockwell, who interviewed Lyndon LaRouche that day on radio live, and told Lyndon LaRouche about this, is with us, and he has described various things. The fact that LaRouche, for example, spontaneously said, well, this is going to be blamed on Osama bin Laden, right there on the radio at that time; some other things. Then, we’ve heard from Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe. Again, you of course heard their presentations at the conference, so you have a sense of what they talked about. The notion was the failure of intelligence, or the failure of security, rather, and the people that would have — shall we say — wished that to occur. So, that was being discussed.
So, in that context, we’re ready to hear whatever you have. By the way, we’ve got a lot of questions for you that have been coming in as a result of tens of thousands of people viewing your presentation. So, feel free to say whatever you’d like to now, and we’ll then get the discussion going.
COLONEL RICHARD BLACK: Thank you very much. I’ll just add to what you’ve been discussing recently here. I think one of the big questions that should be asked is, why. We don’t know all of the parameters of 9/11. The investigation into it was effectively squelched, so that we would not determine exactly the origins. But we do know that al-Qaeda provided the suicide flyers who flew the jets into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. I think one of the big questions that Americans should be asking in the aftermath of the anniversary of 9/11 is, why did we turn around and provide total diplomatic and military support to al-Qaeda, which was the group that killed 3000 Americans on 9/11? We did not attack Saudi Arabia, which provided almost all of the suicide flyers, and almost of the back-up for them through Saudi officials. One of the interesting things — very few people are aware of it — we had a total shutdown of civilian aviation right after 9/11. The President ordered every passenger jet grounded. The first plane that was allowed to go airborne was a jet that went around the country picking up relatives of Osama bin Laden and particular Saudi officials, and flew them out of the country where they were beyond the reach of investigation. This was reported in the New York Times, this is not some sort of a conspiracy theory. But it’s difficult to believe that anyone other than the President of the United States, who had ordered all planes grounded, could approve of the airlift of these particular Saudi individuals out of the country.
So, we really need to be looking. Why is it that we have doggedly supported al-Qaeda in Syria for ten years? We’ve imposed a total military blockade on Syria. They cannot receive food; they cannot receive fuel. We’ve actually taken their fuel away so that they will freeze in the winter time, they will starve other times. We’ve blockaded them so that they cannot receive medical supplies from any free country. All of this is done in order to support al-Qaeda in Syria, which now has been driven back to where they hold only Idlib province in Syria. The commander-in-chief of all of the military forces in Idlib is a fellow named al-Julani, who is on the State Department’s terrorist most wanted list; a $10 million bounty on his head. Yet, whenever Syria attempts to drive the terrorists from Idlib province, the State Department comes in and bemoans the fact that Syria is being so cruel to al-Qaeda.
I think there’s a very real question that should be asked; I don’t expect it to be asked by our Federal government, but it should be asked by the American people. Why do we continue to support al-Qaeda, both with arms and with diplomatic support?
SPEED: Very good. What I think we’ll do, I’d like to get our conversation going. Diane has questions, but I also want to see if maybe the response is from Bill and Kirk to what you just said. But there’s a question I’d like to ask you, because I think it’s an important one for people to consider. You gentlemen are veterans; you are persons who went to war, or you were tasked with the idea of preventing wars, or the mission. You studied military formations, you were in combat circumstances in some cases against them. That’s a different mindset than most Americans, thankfully, have ever had to experience. So, when you look at, and I’m going to start with you, Colonel Black, when you look at the present configuration, and when you’re making statements like “There’s an impending military coup; this is something that’s actually being considered”; or you’re hearing thing like, a breach of the fundamental security protocols. I’d like you to try to give those of us who never served, those of us who were never in this circumstance, what it means to prevent war; what it means to fight war; and what it means to be confronted by the present circumstance we find ourselves in, in the United States today. So, Colonel Black, let’s go to you first.
BLACK: Today, the greatest threat that the United States faces is domestic. It is not foreign, it originates in the United States. We have Black Lives Matter and Antifa ravaging cities across country, arson, looting, murder, brutality, a degree of unmitigated racism that I have not known in my lifetime. And I will tell you that when I was a teenager, I was zealously opposed to segregation and I took very forceful action to try to end it. Not because I hated anybody, but because I thought it was very demeaning and I thought we needed to end that. And so here I am today, and I’m seeing a much more violent, much more racism movement within the United States, and I think it is controlled, not so much out of the black community, as it is out of the liberal white community. We know that George Soros is very interested in this type of thing, and it has become very dangerous to the United States.
Now, with the generals, we’ve seen a number of articles that were published. The first one that I’ve run across was in 2017, which laid out a rather sophisticated sketch of how a coup should be undertaken in order to overthrow the government of the United States by ousting the President. And I recently ran across an article that was published in the Washington Post that was called “Five Myths about Coups” [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-coups/2020/05/07/9c64ee04-8f1d-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html] Now, this was from May 8th of this year, it was rather recent. And here are the myths — it says: They’re a thing of the past; they only happen in poor nations; they’re always violent; they lead to instability; they’re always bad for democracy. Now, of course, the position that was taken by the writer of this article is that they’re not a thing of the past, they don’t occur only in poor nations, they are not necessarily violent, they don’t necessarily lead to instability, and they’re not always a bad thing for democracy! So you see articles like this sort of laying the groundwork for military action.
And we have an article in Foreign Policy, which is very, very well read magazine. This is on June 4th — they seem to all be staged, one after the other. Foreign Policy has an article entitled, “Generals Denounce Trump’s Protest Crackdown Plan.” [https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/04/generals-denounce-trump-plan-mattis-milley-allen-esper/] And what was interesting in that is they sort of blew it [the Insurrection Act] off. They said, well, this is some two-century-old law — the fact is, it’s been invoked 22 times, by a multitude of Presidents, the recent ones being Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and H.W. Bush; so it’s been very commonly used.
And what we see is, in addition to these articles coming out, we’re seeing very prominent generals, including a four-star General James Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense; and we also see Colin Powell, four-star general. He was the fellow who famously went before the United Nations and waved a test tube mimicking sarin gas, and talking about the tremendous danger posed by this tiny, third world country of Iraq, and how, if we didn’t take them out, all of the world was going to somehow collapse. And as a result of his very deceitful testimony, millions of people since have died.
So, we see this uprising of the generals; and James Mattis is probably the most threatening individual. Mattis has made comments, and he said “we can unite as a nation without him” referring to the President! I don’t think he was talking about simply a time when the President would be overcome by Joe Biden, Joe Biden would be elected — I think he’s talking about something different. Now, Bob Woodward just came out with a book, and the Washington Post did a review of it, and they did one quote, and they said that Gen. James Mattis warned Daniel Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, that “‘there may come a time when we have to take collective’” against Trump." Now, I don’t think he’s talking about, we need to raise up a democratic army to meet him at the polls. The statements by James Mattis are very troubling, and they suggest a very poisonous atmosphere in the Department of Defense.
So, personally, I do not want to see an “et tu, Brute?” moment, where the United States faces the Ides of March. Because, you know, when Julius Caesar was assassinated, the Senators believed that he was a threat to their power. But the people of Rome rose up and they were horrified with what happened, and as a consequence, there ensued a long period of civil unrest, and eventually the Roman Republic came to an end, and the Roman Empire emerged with such luminaries as Caligula and Nero. I don’t want that to happen in the United States. So I think it’s very concerning.
We had a letter that was put out by an organization called “Defense One,” and they published this open letter by two retired lieutenant colonels. It was directed to General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in that letter the two colonels said that there may come a time when we must employ military force to remove the President of the United States, and you must give the order to make this happen. [“‘…All enemies, Foreign and Domestic’: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley” https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/08/all-enemies-foreign-and-domestic-open-letter-gen-milley/167625/]
And I’ve said before, I think it goes without saying that it’s impermissible for retired officers to call for the overthrow of the legitimate government of the United States. This, to my knowledge has happened, since George Washington first became President, and I am deeply disturbed that within the military there are a large number of generals who have chimed in and become a part of this. And some of them have, in my view, issued contemptuous words towards the President. And I won’t identify which ones I think they are. But I think there is a very poisonous atmosphere that has infected the Department of Defense. I think it threatens the potential demise of the great American experiment, the American republic, where in theory the people select the leader and through the leader and through their other elected representatives, they control the government.
I think all of that is at risk, and I think it’s very important what we’re doing today, and what we’ve done recently by exposing this potential, this talk of coup, of a military insurrection by exposing it to the light of day, and allowing people, including the members of the Armed Forces — we’ve allowed them to understand what might potentially happen, and why they should not play a role in it.
So, this is a very grave concern of mine. And I’m concerned that the Secretary of Defense has not criticized, he has not made a public statement, making it quite clear that members of the active and reserve military must not be involved in a coup to overthrow the government of the United States. His silence is deafening!
SPEED: Yeah, I could just ask, we have a lot of questions, there’s some people in the Zoom platform. But I want to get a response from Bill and from Kirk, specifically that you two gentlemen — Kirk had alluded earlier — to the violations of Constitution that are implied by these surveillance and related. So, both in terms of what Colonel Black said, but also just wanted to remind you of that. So Bill, why don’t we go to you first?
BINNEY: Well, I would just say that in the coffers of NSA storage they have all the data to back up what the Colonel has just said, and they’ve got — and I don’t really understand why the Department of Justice under Barr is not investigating the sedition laws, to see what applies here, for anyone trying to attempt to subvert the governing process of the republic. That’s written up under the sedition laws, somewhere, and it’s also in violation of posse comitatus and various other laws that exist.
So people advocating for this can be held accountable in a court of law, and they should be! And that’s what should happen to these people, and they shouldn’t be simply allowed to continue to say these kinds of things without being held accountable for their seditious remarks. That’s what I would say to that.
WIEBE: It’s extraordinary, as I’m listening to the Colonel, and what Bill’s saying and you’re saying, my mind’s working 100 miles an hour. But one begins to get the picture that those in power are consolidating that power, whether you talk about Congress, whether you talk about the Pentagon, whether you talk about the intelligence community, there is an obvious cabal that is trying to control the message, and that includes not holding people accountable: Our system of justice is under attack. I have never seen so much sandbagging of judicial process as we’re witnessing, and the Colonel can speak to that more eloquently than I can. But just as a citizen, look what’s happened to General Flynn! Every little loophole, nook and cranny is being played out! We know what the outcome’s going to be, at a minimum Trump can pardon General Flynn, maybe that’s what will be solved. But we are at loggerheads in all three pillars of government, in some respect or the other. I partly blame corruption — we are so corrupt we can’t function. But I also — well, if you could call power-grabbing a form of corruption, because our form of government actually argues against corruption and tries to combat it by giving supreme power to the people — us.
So this threatening of a coup, statements by Pelosi and others, questioning whether Trump would give up the Presidency if he were defeated — these are all whacks with a sledgehammer at our institutions and our belief systems as Americans! Something is afoot. I would tell you, the attempted coup against Trump, using the spy machinery of the United States government is and does constitute the most vicious, under-the-table attack within this nation, that we’ve ever seen.
And it’s insidious, because those in power use the word “classify” to hide everything they’re doing! When we know it’s against the law to use classification to hide criminality. But it’s all beyond that, it’s all beyond those rational kinds of discussion. So I, with the Colonel, am very worried, about what’s going to happen November 3rd, 4th, and a period of weeks and maybe months after that.
This is uncharted territory, and I know we can’t predict the outcome at this point, but it’s going to be messy! It’s just a question of how messy, and how serious thing become.
SPEED: I want to go back to Diane. I know everybody’s probably got things to say, and there are a lot of questions as well. I would just ask this as we proceed, we might combine some of the questions just so we can get through a good deal of them; and feel free to add in something or any response you may have to what you each said.
SARE: I have two questions: One for Mr. Wiebe and one for Mr. Binney. The one for Kirk Wiebe is from George Capsis who is the editor of WestView News, which is a very widely circulated community newspaper in the West Village, and I can say it’s well known and many of the people there, of course, given the proximity to the World Trade Center have great concern about this. Mr. Capsis writes: “I live down the street from Ground Zero. The implications of what you are saying are huge. I need you to re-state, clearly, why you are saying that 9/11 could have been avoided, and who, if you know, should be held accountable for what happened that day.”
And the second question for Mr. Binney, related to what was just said about the NSA and so on, comes from Mr. Stamps [ph] in Michigan: “Flynn attorney Sidney Powell has stated that a lot of this hidden information is in the NSA database and Mueller’s team and others keep showing up with ‘wiped out’ phones, begs the question, could someone in the deep state go into the NSA database and wipe out what they don’t want exposed?”
WIEBE: OK, so let me respond: There are three issues surrounding NSA and what happened on 9/11. Bill and I will tell you, we are 100% certain we would have prevented 9/11 had ThinThread been deployed, surgically, into certain segments of the internet, to pick up the right streams of data. It would have prevented 9/11 — it would have! There’s no doubt.
Why do I say that? We had been using ThinThread in a prototype mode, against real data, real internet data, and we could see how it was operating; we could see how the filters were working. And it was major, major breakthrough. Even the deputy director who came down and saw it, said, “My God, you’ve made major breakthroughs, why aren’t you telling anybody?” Well, the director wanted to cover it up, because he wanted a $4 billion budget and ThinThread was cheap, a couple million bucks. $9 million to deploy it, or something like that — Bill will remember the figure — to key points on the internet to stop 9/11. That’s number one.
Just to back up the idea that we would likely have captured the right data to know what was going on, later, when ThinThread was squashed, Tom Drake stood up and said “I want to use ThinThread inside the building” — in other words, off the internet — “I want to put it against NSA databases, and use that technology to see if there’s anything there, related to 9/11.” They found the information in spades! It was there — buried in databases, and none of the existing tools that analysts were using could discover it. But ThinThread did. But that was after the fact.
And the other fact, that I mentioned earlier, a pocket of analysts in NSA were prevented from reporting what they knew about a “coming” event on 9/11. I’m not privy to the amount of detail they had. Tom Drake used the words “they knew it was coming and were prevented from reporting it.” And I put myself psychologically in the place of the analysts, who were a small group of people, who were told they cannot report lifesaving information; and then are forced to watch, what happened on 9/11. I think I might come close to losing my mind. And I heard stories that the analysts were terribly psychologically affected by that incident. Just imagine yourself in that situation, OK?
SPEED: Thank you. Bill?
BINNEY: Well, let me address that question, could somebody go in the NSA database and wipe out data they didn’t want anybody to see? They could make an attempt, and I believe if they made a really concerted attempt they probably could do that. But you know, you have to get the right people to make that happen, to make it be effective, because NSA has many different ways of backing up things, and not just one person does it. And if you don’t get them all together to do the right thing, why, — to mean “do the right thing” in terms of the command, wiping it out — then it’s still there. And it’s hard to say where backups around the world are, all the places, so it’s really difficult for them to ensure that they can actually do that. To my mind, all these phone calls and everything they wanted to know, all these missing emails from Hillary Clinton, everything, it’s all in the NSA storage: All the President has to do is order them to “cough it up.” And if they don’t cough it up, that’s insubordination — fire them, and get people who will. That’s all we’d have to do, as President.
SPEED: We’re going to go to our Zoom platform, and then we’re going to come back to questions. Let me just say to everybody, we are getting a lot of questions and we are probably going to end up referring these to you. We may have to do just a Q&A session, so we may be talking to the panelists about that.
OK, go ahead. You have to unmute, we’re not hearing you.
Q: Thank you, Colonel Black for your service, Bill Binney and the rest of you guys, others being on some other meeting. I am in a meeting myself, also. But I did have a few questions to ask. I was concerned about for 9/11 happen, and the guys I learned about, the one step that was training to be a pilot over here in America, and they were training to take off and not land, why wasn’t the FBI contacted about that particular event? Those were the rumors that I heard.
And I was wondering, on the spying of the American people that happened, was it legal? Which now we know it was illegal, and all the while I’m saying to myself, was it legal? So, what are your thoughts on that, Colonel Black?
BLACK: You know, my impression — I’m not the detailed expert that some of the others are here, but there certainly signs that this was coming. There certainly were signs that were ignored. It is not clear, but they may have been deliberately ignored. I’m very uneasy about the whole thing: We know that there were senior officials in the Saudi Arabian government who personally financed members who were going through flight training, learning how to make these one-way flights by hijacking jets. And some of those people were pulled out of the country. I’m very uneasy about the relationship between the George Bush Administration and the family, personally, and some of the senior Saudi officials — I’m just uneasy that the commission that was put together to determine the causes of 9/11 was apparently deliberately hindered in its findings. I know that the FBI placed many blocks in the way of the commission determining the source of all this. And I suspect some of it has to do with the special relationship we have with Saudi Arabia, dealing with financial things, with this SWIFT international transaction system and that type of thing.
But I don’t think the American people ever got the answers, as to how did this happen, why did it happen, and who was behind it?
SPEED: OK, I think Bill was somewhat agitated and wanted to take a crack at it. Did you want to say something, Bill?
BINNEY: Well, just that between 1996 and 1998, we knew the entire worldwide al-Qaeda network, you know, those that we were supporting in Afghanistan, as well as those all the way into Indonesia and Bosnia and so and so. So it wasn’t a question of not knowing these people, or not knowing who these targets, — things we should have watched and watched closely: We knew them all! And so, it was a question of simply monitoring everything they were doing in the world, and that’s why we wanted to — when it came to an issue, we had finished the ThinThread to the point we could deploy it, I had proposed 18 sites that I got from my terrorist surveillance division working on this activity; I went to them and I said, “what are the sites that produce intelligence for you on the terrorist networks worldwide?” And they gave me a list of 18 sites. And I said, “well, OK, this is where we need to put ThinThread, right up front. We’ll go after terrorism immediately,” and we proposed that we do these deployments in January of 2001! About seven and a half months before 9/11, and most of it would be done and doable electronically, because we were simply remotely downloading software to be put on hardware to execute. But some of them required some deployments of hardware and software combinations, so those we were going to take care of. By mostly within a month of it, we could have gotten to those, too.
The point was, that would have given us all of that information, including the movement, the flight of several al-Qaeda members from Kuala Lumpur into San Diego and so on — all that would have been known. That would not have been a problem. All of this would have been discovered, and not channeled — it would have gone through the terrorist operations division, but they would not control all of that information: it would also be distributed to others, so there would be multiple ways that that information getting out. No one person could stop it, except for the Director of NSA in terms of reporting. But that didn’t stop other people from picking up the encrypted lines that were available on the phone network, and calling somebody in the FBI and saying “You better send some people out there to San Diego to look at these people. They’re coming off the plane from Kuala Lumpur, and they’re two, very serious al-Qaeda members.” So, from then on, they could have watched them, and followed them, and so could have NSA, because they could have gotten a warrant on them, and followed them internally in the U.S. and that would have been the way to stop it.
That would have laid out the entire network internally in the U.S., and then you could simply watch them, using the same credit cards, some of them, to buy airplane tickets and converting to airports on the same days? Come on! You’d know they were going to use airplanes at that point, and you go to the airport and get ready arrest them! That’s all! They could have picked them off the planes before they got on! That’s the way I would have seen that scenario, that’s all. [cross talk]
Q: Sounds like the context was made to totally ignore that, that’s what it sounds to me.
BINNEY: Yep, yep. For money: and that’s why accused the NSA and the government at the time, of trading the security of the people of the United States and the free world for money.
SPEED: Let me just take the opportunity to say for the caller and others, if you have additional questions, to get them to us, so we can put it up, at questions@larouchenet.net and we’ll follow them up. Thank you for your question.
DIANE: OK, there’s many for Colonel Black which are related. One person says, “Doesn’t President Trump know what you’re saying?” Another person reports who is also apparently one of the LarouchePAC activists as a Republican Party official in Minnesota, who sent the video of Colonel Black’s presentation to members of the Minnesota state legislature. Upon viewing this, one representative immediately sent it to all members of the Minnesota U.S. Senate delegation with a demand that they initiate an investigation of infractions in the military officers you’ve named. He also sent it to another U.S. Senator in another state. His question is, “Do you think it’s possible to get some serious and timely action from the Congress on this?”
Another person asks, “Is anything moving on this along the lines of what you’ve called for, and is it possible for just an American citizen — is there a pathway for an American citizen to demand action on this?”
BLACK: This has just very recently begun to break into the surface and break out publicly. It has been going on for quite a while. I discovered an article dated September of 2017 in The Conversation, which is a blogsite, The Conversation. And their question was “Thinking the Unthinkable: Could There Be a Military Coup in the U.S.?” What’s interesting about it is that it talks in considerable detail and some degree of sophistication about overthrowing the government, and basically taking the President captive. And they lay out things like “The most critical thing is to shut down all communications across the continental United States.” They said, “Trump might resort to Twitter to rally forces.” They said, “A cyber attack could be staged and the narrative of foreign attack used as a pretext for deploying troops on the street.” A very interesting article. [https://theconversation.com/thinking-the-unthinkable-could-there-be-a-military-coup-in-the-us-82403]
But you’ve seen this, and now this was sort of a on-off, in 2017, you know, President Trump was elected in 2016; but it’s a rather serious article. I mean, it obviously had some military coordination to it. But you begin to see more recent articles coming to light, where there are discussions, and of course the most recent being the review of the Bob Woodward book, where James Mattis talks with the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence; says, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” against Trump.
I think the most important thing we can do right now, is to shine the spotlight on what is going on in the Pentagon, how absolutely poisonous the atmosphere has become. Now, what I found in working with the Congress on the issue of Syria, is that you have several groups: You have those who are a very integral part of the deep state, and they know what’s going on, and they know where we’re headed, and they know it’s not good — but for them it’s good, it’s very profitable. Then you have a group of people who do have some understanding, and they’re scared. And they want to hold on to their positions in the Senate and in Congress and they don’t do anything. And then you have a very large body of people who they don’t know whether the Middle East is in South America or Africa. I mean, they literally are clueless about what they’re doing.
And so, the challenge is, the real people, the movers and the shakers, are too often an integral part of the deep state, so I don’t expect to see much out of them. I think it comes down to organizations like this, publications like this, that publicize and get the word out early enough to where people are very skeptical of sane military action. This one article, from back in 2017, The Conversation blog, it says that “the plotters of an American military coup would need to deny them information on what’s happening, and just as importantly to deny any would-be loyalists the time or ability to act.” Now, when they say, “deny them information” about the military coup, they’re talking about the American public. They’re saying it would be essential to prevent the American public from understanding what’s going on, and they lay out in detail how they would shut down the communications system in the United States to do this. And also “to deny any would-be loyalists the time or ability to act.”
I think what we accomplish through our discussions is to set up an environment in the Pentagon, where generals become a little bit nervous about what they’re doing. Keep in mind, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes it a criminal offense for a retired officer to use contemptuous words against the President of the United States. We’ve had a slew of four-, three-star generals, DOD officials, but as far as the top generals are concerned, this Article 88 does apply to them: They all know it very well, because every single retiring officer is briefed on Article 88. Now, it doesn’t prevent them from criticizing policies, but when they start to use contemptuous words directed at the President, they are in criminal violation. And I think the Secretary of Defense should be issuing letters of reprimand for their permanent files, and he should be stripping them of their security clearances. And I think that in itself would simply put all general officers on notice — you know, if you are talking about insurrection, there’s going to be costs to you, you’re going to lose your access — frankly, I’m going to tell you, I have no earthly idea why retired generals enjoy security clearances. It’s nothing but a mechanism to embed them into the deep state. We were always taught that you only had a security clearance as long as you had a need to know; and retired generals, in my view, do not have a need to know current intelligence. They can get their intelligence from open sources.
But anyway, I am disappointed that the Secretary of Defense does not take action when we have open, public discussion of overthrowing the government of the United States, from within the military establishment. This publication “Defense One” which is supported by prominent military contractors, Raytheon, Boeing, other groups, and they publish this open letter of the two of lieutenant colonels calling for the overthrow of the government. And the fact that this is happening openly, and is going unaddressed by the Secretary of Defense — he’s just, it’s like he’s been on a long vacation and he’s not aware of the fact that there is open discussion of military insurrection. Why would there be military insurrection? Because the deep state does not approve of the President elected by the people of the United States! It’s a very arrogant notion, that somehow, the deep state knows who should be the President, and the people of the United States cannot be trusted to select their own President.
What we’re doing today, I think, helps, because general officers get a little bit nervous — they go, “OK, I do remember Article 88, I do remember the briefing, I recognize that some of the things I’m saying publicly about the President are contemptuous,” and I think it is very helpful. It is very, very important that this talk about the potential for a military coup, spread across the country, if it does, I think it throws a steel rod in the turning wheels of the Pentagon, to where it freezes things up, and I think it will block a coup, if one is seriously being contemplated, as I suspect it is.
SPEED: I see we have somebody on our Zoom platform. Make sure you’re unmuted.
Q: Hi, I’m Kynan in Queens, and I just wanted to thank all of the panelists here for your courage and what you’re doing right now to get the truth out on these matters, especially you, Richard Black. But, I had two questions. One was directed towards Bill and Kirk: Yesterday, I had watched a PBS broadcast called “Frontline,” and it detailed what Thomas Drake did and what you had done, as well. And you, of course were interviewed there. But I wanted to ask, because Michael Hayden was also interviewed, and he was saying, quite some things, how massive surveillance, universal surveillance, Trailblazer, that was necessary, and how he was really sorry for all the terror that had been brought on 9/11.
So, I’m wondering what you two have to say, particularly, in response to that, given to the fact that he was responsible for the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans which could have been prevented.
And my second question, this is just in general to all the panelists: is what Lyn had stated, how financial blowouts in particular are related to terrorists attacks. So those are my two questions.
BINNEY: Let me address the first question, for Hayden saying the bulk collection was necessary: They were operating on the very simple operating principle that if they collect everything they’ve got all the data, so they’ll be able to investigate anything with all the data collected and stored. So, in other words, they thought the security was in having everything. What they didn’t realize, was, having data — which is all that is — is not intelligence or not understanding what’s going to happen, in any way! So what that means is that people, because they didn’t have any automated processes, that’s what we were going to build, and that’s what they didn’t want us doing; so they had to have people look at the data to decide what was important and what the threat was, in order to recognize something coming. And when you do that, and take in the bulk, what they didn’t realize was the massive amounts of data, no matter what queries you made, if you made dictionary select queries, which was the basis of them doing it at that time, and even now, that was exposed under Edward Snowden’s slides, too; which I pointed out to in our Supreme Court petition coming up later this month. But I mean, that buried all this data and they couldn’t see anything happening, they couldn’t anticipate a threat or detect a threat coming.
So, that was the whole idea behind ThinThread, of doing it properly, in a focussed, disciplined, professional way, so we selected out only those things that were relevant for analysts to look at about their targets, you know, crime, militaries, whatever. And so, that was the thing that wasn’t an expensive proposition. I mean, it built up an empire that cost tens of billions alone just to manage the data and keep it, they had to build large storage facilities and so on, and manage it with contractors and contracts, and queries and getting all kinds of programs coming in that came in with all kinds of tools; that all the tools ever did was package and group large amounts of data for analysts to look at! So, it still fell back to the person deciding what the need was in the data. That’s where they failed, and that’s where they continue to fail. And that’s not just true of the United States, it’s true of every terrorists attack or every kind of crime around the world, in all the governments of the world. I mean, look at the French, after Charlie Hebdo was attacked, they wanted another billion euros and another thousand analysts and more data. Well, they got all of that, and then nine months later, they had another attack in Paris — so what good did it do?
And that’s been our point from the beginning. There are smart ways to do this, smart selection is the key, and there are ways and means of making that happen without invading anybody’s privacy, and without giving power to any individual or any government to be able to have leverage on anybody in the world. That’s also the other factor they don’t want to give up.
WIEBE: Yeah, let me just add this for Kynan, about Hayden. Hayden came in as an electronic warfare manager. He really didn’t understand intelligence, especially intelligence in the digital age. And I have to tell you, when he launched his big Trailblazer program, billions of dollars which failed in five years by the way, he didn’t come down or send any specialist down to talk to the most knowledgeable analysts on the problem.
Now, can you imagine going into an organization — let’s say I go into the LaRouche organization, and I ignore Dennis Speed. Let’s say I ignore Helga. Just ignore everybody who’s been around and knows so much, and do my own thing — what’s the likelihood that I’m going to succeed? Zip, zero, nada! And that’s why NSA failed.
Under Hayden, the National Security Agency experienced the largest intelligence failure in its history, by leading them down the wrong path for five years, they went off a cliff. And I don’t even know today, years and years later, how much capability they actually have any more. Because once you lose continuity on targets, as that you’re not able to follow any more, it’s very hard to reestablish, and it takes a long time! Especially in terms of understanding their communications and what they mean and signify that may cause you to have to react in some way.
So when people talk about threats of global warfare, there’s not much worse you can do, than to subvert your intelligence process, do something stupid like Trailblazer, lose continuity so that you have less precision in your process, and you get a little risky in your interpretation, and launch World War III. How does that make you feel?
So, Hayden was a bull in a china shop. Probably one of the worst directors, if not the worst director, in the history of NSA.
SPEED: That seemed to be rather clear!
Senator Black, do you want to take a crack at the other question, concerning how financial crises can lead to war? I think that’s was the idea.
BLACK: Yes. Looking at the United States, right now, we start off in 1945 with this agreement with Saudi Arabia, that all oil would be bought and sold in U.S. dollars and that it would be run through the SWIFT system — I think there’s a mechanism whereby we take a certain small percentage of that, but it gave us dominance over the world, the global system for international transactions, and it really is the mechanism whereby we are able to spend money that we don’t have.
If you look at the debt of the United States, and there’s considerable argument about how great the debt is — some people have just it phenomenally astronomical, others more modest — but by any measures, we are entering this parabolic world where we’re just — the debt is shooting off into space. We’re following the Zimbabwe model, where they essentially had no production, nothing of value, and they just began to print more and more zeroes on their currency. I am concerned about that, and I think to some extent it has an impact on our foreign policy. There’s this feeling that unless we can continue to dominate the world currency system, we may be forced to cough up, we may be forced to pay the debts that we owe. And there’s no way to do it, except to inflate out the system, and to go into Weimar Germany’s type of inflation. And then basically you inflate out the debt.
So it creates a great deal of instability, because, what happens, we’re sanctioning other countries willy-nilly; essentially putting a financial/military blockade on Syria, on Iran, on Lebanon, on Venezuela and Cuba, on China, on Russia. It all mounts up to the point where we’ve got very powerful economic centers, particularly with China where they’re saying, “you know what? We don’t like the idea of running our money through the SWIFT settlement transaction system. We’re going to begin to transact business, with some sort of a gold-based currency, something that has at least some gold foundation, and we’re going to begin to trade in currencies other than the U.S. dollar.”
We’ve really brought this on ourselves by our enormously confrontational approach. If you listen to Foreign Minister Lavrov from Russia, just the other day, I saw him, he was talking about a very sharp, but small border clash between China and India, and he was the peacemaker. And I think with any luck, he will solve the dispute between China and India, which is been going on decades and decades. But you compare that with Secretary Pompeo, you seldom listen to a speech or presentation by Pompeo when he is not being extraordinarily aggressive. He never speaks in diplomatic language; he talks in terms of bombs and attacks and sanctions, and starving out people that he considers our enemies. These are not countries, typically, that are declaring us their enemy. They are countries that we are declaring enemies.
And I think you link this all back to the currency — no country probably wanted more to be on good, friendly relationships with the United States than did Russia at the end of the Cold War. I was part of NATO forces, prepared to die in the event of a conflict with the old Soviet Union. Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russia has no philosophy that makes them a threat. All of their issues are just on their close borders, like in the area that is sometimes claimed by Ukraine and sometimes by Russia — things that are of absolutely no concern to people of the United States, utterly no concern!
But because NATO has this huge infrastructure, they must have an enemy. And so, they have chosen Russia. Russia has half of our population; its economy is roughly the size of that of Italy; its military is far behind ours, except in one area, and that is nuclear power. They’re a significant and very real nuclear power. And if we would simply try to cooperate with them and try get along with them, they would love it! This is a country that, you know, we grew up learning that they’re an atheist state: and yet, today, their top military and civilian award is the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, the First Called. It’s a very long title — but basically St. Andrew within the Orthodox faith was the first Apostle called by Jesus Christ, and they want to make it clear: When Xi Jinping went to meet with President Putin, President Putin awarded him the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, the First Called.
We’re stuck in the past, in foreign affairs. We’re stuck in the days when the Soviet Union was so utterly different than Russia is today that there’s just no comparison. And yet, we are forcing, through our sanctions, through our bellicose approach, we’re forcing them to abandon transactions in American dollars. And beginning, I think for the first time, this year, now less than half of their transactions are in U.S. dollars, and they’re beginning to increase the proportion of currency exchanges with China at a very dramatic rate. This is going to happen, if we do not draw back from our bellicose foreign policy, our policy of aggression towards neutral non-belligerent states. At some point there will be shift, I don’t know how long it takes, but it is under way, and there will be a shift away from the dominant U.S. dollar. And when that happens, there is going to be a severe decline in the living standard for the American people. It’s something we don’t want to have happen, and if we’d simply use diplomacy rather than aggression, I think we c an recover it, I think we can get back to where people just by force of inertia continue to use the dollar for some time, and it gives us some breathing time to straighten out what’s happening in this country.
SPEED: Here’s what we’re going to do, we’re now in the final round. We’re going to go to Diane first, she’s probably got a group of questions. I’ve got a group also. We’ve got one person still on Zoom, so we’ll go to Zoom right after Diane asks you her questions, and then we’ll come back to me.
SARE: I have many — here’s two. The first is: “As I recall, Mr. LaRouche was scheduled to appear on the Stockwell show that [Sept. 11, 2001] to comment on the riots that had recently erupted in Seattle [in 2001], which were soon to be directed toward a larger mob action in Washington, D.C. In retrospect, it seems this all might have been a staged diversion to distract law enforcement from the real event, the 9/11 attacks. Can you comment on how the intelligence services sometimes deploy chaotic street action to cover for actual terrorism?” Maybe Bill or Kirk wants to take that.
There’s another question for Colonel Black which probably should be addressed at the end; I know he touched on it earlier, where someone says, “As has been implied, a November generals’ coup against the lawfully elected President remains a live, British intelligence strategy. Such a coup, were it to be launched, would likely move extremely quickly, coherent with the current hyper-warfare doctrine. In such warfare, decisions made rapidly under conditions of intense media and political propaganda, would affect the course of history as well as the lives of countless combatants, at breakneck speed. Those events would involve active and retired military personnel as well as leading members of the executive bureaucracies. What legal advice can you cite, besides Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as well as words of inspiration from an old Marine warrior for those forces, military and civilian alike, who may be tasked to make and defend rapid and potentially historic decisions to defend our Constitution, under conditions of political and financial turmoil and potential strategic warfare?”
Actually I would say all three of you are qualified to speak on that, because you’ve all been doing that.
SPEED: Bill would you like to start?
BINNEY: Well, sure. I would say, the standard thing, if you want to do something as your primary action, it’s nice to create diversions and manipulate your opposition or your counterforces in a different direction, so that you could successfully commit what you want. But I would think that — I would have to look a little closer, I don’t know enough about that to comment effectively, I think. But it would seem to me, I think that we would have sufficient reserve forces to handle just about anything of that nature, without really threatening or changing the ability to detect things and stop them.
The real issue are the ones that we already presented and talked about. Those are the real ones.
BLACK: Are we at the last questions?
SPEED: You’re right. I could ask the other questions now. I’ll do mine now, and that way we will be at the last ones, because there was one for you, specifically, which I should pose, and this is, “On Thursday, a federal magistrate overseeing the suit by the families of the 9/11 victims against the Saudi Kingdom for responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, said that 24 current and former Saudi officials must testify or submit to deposition in the case. Included in the order is Prince Bandar, the former Saudi Ambassador, who it is thought ran Saudi intelligence operations in the United States, and is personally close to the Bush family. Would you comment on this ruling, and the case generally?” So that was a very specific one for you.
Bill, this is for you and for Kirk: “You have said that one of the reasons ThinThread was not used or put in place, was that it would have also exposed the corrupt and other actions of the intelligence agencies themselves. Would you comment on how that may have impacted 9/11?”
I think I have one more here. This is from Chris for Bill: “Is he aware of any information related to the Pentagon bombing on 9/11? We were told it was struck by a passenger jet, but in my opinion, video of the destruction does not corroborate that.”
Those are the whole plethora of questions. So, Senator Black, if you would like to take up that particular one.
BLACK: I do know that there’s a wonderful group that represents the families of the victims of 9/11. They have struggled for two decades now, to attempt to hold Saudi Arabia liable for the actions of its officials who aided the hijackers. They have been blocked with dogged resistance by the State Department and other agencies. It is very difficult to penetrate because you’re talking about people who are an integral part of the fabric of the Saudi government, and if somehow it were to be disclosed that Saudi Arabia, more than any other country, was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, it would create a great deal of awkwardness at this late stage.
I think, at the time of the attacks, had we ordered an all-out attack on the nation of Saudi Arabia, perhaps it would have been justified, because they were the nation that had assisted in this, and now it’s become very, very difficult — lots of time has past, lots of diplomacy…. Just the other day, for example, we have the incident of [Jamal] Khashoggi where he was butchered and severed into pieces by a group of agents who were reportedly — according to the CIA — sent by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and they carried the body out in pieces in a suitcase. And time went by and then basically, they were all sort of let off and the whole thing blew over.
I think the same thing is happening with 9/11 — huge, huge amounts of money have changed hands, and there are people who are becoming mega-billionaires based upon some sort of involvement or some sort of knowledge, or intelligence they have about what happened. I think it’s going to be very difficult to hold the Saudis accountable. We went out and diverted public attention by attacking Iraq, which had never done anything to the United States, and had been sort of quietly allied with us, when we were concerned about the revolution in Iran. So we committed the lives of many American soldiers and sailors, airmen, marines, to risking their lives to attacking Iraq — for nothing.
But where we go in terms of holding people accountable, I think it’s going to be very difficult to do that at this late state. But I do think that Congress should make it as easy as they can for the 9/11 victims to get financial compensation for the losses they suffered.
SPEED: So, either Kirk or Bill for the other questions.
BINNEY: I would say about 9/11 and ThinThread ability to expose that, and just any other kind of activity anywhere in the world for terrorism or crime or so on, that was a focussed approach that would apply to all these issues and all these problems and targets in the world. So it wouldn’t just be 9/11, it would be all of them, before 9/11, after 9/11, and 9/11 — I mean just all of them. So, I don’t see that — by not adopting the approach we had with the ThinThread program, it put everybody in the world at risk, and that’s why I keep saying, they made the trade for money, and power, and they traded the security of people in the country — and around the world, for that.
As far as a Pentagon bomb, or, I don’t really have any info on that. I don’t know anything, peculiar about that.
WIEBE: On the issue of ThinThread and why it was not adopted, you can speculate that some people might have thought it would see too much if it matured, because remember, ThinThread was a prototype. It meant we could build more ThinThreads on a larger scale to deal with more data, and eventually that would evolve to different technology.
But it’s more the philosophy, I think, that was the demise. And remember, it was counter to what Hayden wanted. Hayden wanted a big, expensive budget of $4 billion and more! And ThinThread was cheap, relatively speaking, way cheap. And so he saw that as a threat to the budget.
But there was one other factor: Our philosophy in ThinThread was to protect privacy of the innocent. People didn’t care about that! These are people who have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, who violate their oath, every day!
And I’ve often wondered, why do we have all these Congressmen and managers, and directors of agencies, who routinely take the oath to defend the Constitution, don’t do it, and don’t get prosecuted for violating an oath of office? Maybe the Colonel can comment on that, but I always thought, if you’re going to take an oath, it ought to mean something. And if it means something, there ought to be a legal consequence for not doing it! We just are not in the business of upholding the law in this country, and until that happens for everyone, we’re going to be a mess!
SPEED: So, we’re at the conclusion, and I just want everybody, if there’s anything that you’ve left unsaid, anything you think has to be addressed, go right ahead. We thank you, obviously, for being with us. Let me start first with Mr. Binney.
BINNEY: I would just say that unless people are held accountable for all the crimes they’ve committed or are inciting, like inciting to sedition in this country — unless you hold people accountable for it, I mean, you never solve the problem. Just because they hold positions doesn’t make them immune from the law. I mean, that’s why I call the current Department of Justice, the Department of “Just Us” — because We, the People, are not included in that, it’s just the higher-ups in our government and the political bureaucracy and those selected other endeavors that are a part of that. The ones who are trying to take over all this, that are sponsoring this kind of subversion of our republic.
But we have to hold them accountable. If we do not, then it’s only going to get worse. Like I blame this entire process that’s ongoing right now, on Gerry Ford, President Ford, for pardoning Richard Nixon, for doing very similar things with the Minaret program at NSA, the COINTELPRO program at FBI, and the Chaos program at CIA — same three agencies, doing the same kind of thing on a much smaller scale, but he was still going to be held accountable and be indicted in court. And that’s when Gerry Ford pardoned him, and he said he did it, because, you know, it would take the country through a turmoil that we couldn’t stand now, so we have to pardon him. That was basically false: The real issue was, he wanted to pardon him so that every President could now be assured that — they needed to have the latitude to be able to do whatever they felt they needed to, and not be held accountable. So they needed somebody to say, “OK, the next President will pardon you, if you do something that you thought was necessary and it was really illegal, the next President will pardon you. So here’s your ‘get out of jail free’ card.”
And now it’s evolved to this massive surveillance we’ve got now, and use of that to violate and corrupt the courts, not just in the United States, but all around the world. And that’s really the metastasizing disease that we currently have. And the only way to resolve it, is when you find these people who did this, put ’em in jail.
SPEED: OK. Kirk, do you have something to add?
WIEBE: I just want to emphasize what Bill just said. The key to this is to enforce the law. Everything’s become so politicized that we don’t have the will to do it anymore. So we have nothing, we have no pillar of democracy to hang our hat on, so we’re going to crumble. And we are crumbling. And that’s — put the presidential election and the chaos in the voting systems and all the holes and weaknesses, and all the worries and concerns, we are approaching a perfect storm, that just may get out of hand.
SPEED: Colonel Black?
BLACK: From the beginning of the Trump Administration, I’ve been a Trump supporter — don’t agree with a lot of things, but I agree he is so far superior to his opponent that there’s simply no question about what to do; but one of his weaknesses, I believe is in the area of personnel. Every other President in recent years has published a plumb book, and the purpose of the plumb book is to identify about 5,000 positions — they’re commissions, they’re schedule C appointees, where the incoming President seeds the whole administration with loyalists, typically people who have worked real hard on his campaign. And they become his eyes and ears within all of the federal agencies. To my knowledge, President Trump never replaced all of the Schedule C appointees that were put in place by Barack Obama. If I’m wrong on that, I stand to be corrected, but I’ve spoken to a number of people who agree: the President must be more conscious of personnel. Personnel are policy.
Now, he is limited because he’s got to get people confirmed by the Senate. The Senate, much of it is composed of the deep state, but he does have the power to unilaterally put people in the White House, starting with the National Security Adviser. The idea that he selected John Bolton, who was probably, if all of us were to get together and submit nominations for the one person who would be the most damaging to U.S. national security, we probably would come up with a consensus candidate: John Bolton. And yet, the President selected John Bolton! He didn’t have to go through the Senate, he didn’t have to go through anyone.
So, the President is going to have to become much more keenly attuned to the idea that personnel are policy and that if you put the wrong personnel in place, you simply undermine yourself and you create centers for revolution. You select a Director of National Intelligence, like Dan Coats who apparently just despised the President and everything he stood for from the outset!
And you cannot do that. I know that the President interviewed Tulsi Gabbard — a Democrat — but a woman who understood foreign policy, and who was generally in agreement with the President.
The President has got to select people who believe in his policies and want to implement them for him. The failure to do that is a very dangerous thing and something we need to get away from.
Now, I want to conclude with sort of a personal thing: This 2017 article by The Conversion blog, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Could There By a Military Coup in the U.S.?” It actually laid out an order of battle so to speak, and it said, it’s not going to be sufficient just to take over Washington, D.C., you have to also take portions of Manhattan, and portions of Los Angeles. And it laid out who should do this, and it mentioned the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York; and it mentioned the 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, because they’re close to Los Angeles. I think every officer in the 1st Marine Division needs to understand that it is impermissible to be part of a coup to overthrow the government of the United States! And it’s personal to me, because I have shed a bucket of blood on the battlefield, and I’ve had my radiomen killed right beside me doing it; and if any officer of the 1st Marine Division betrays his oath, and joins a coup to overthrow the government of the United States, he will put a permanent stain of disgrace on the greatest division that we have in this country!
And I think officers of the military need to begin to take this dead seriously. They have an oath, the oath is to the Constitution, and there is no — no place for the military in deciding the outcome of an election. That is for the judiciary, that is for the congress, that is for the President, but it is not for the Department of Defense.
WIEBE: Hear, hear!
SPEED: Diane, is there anything you’d like to say?
SARE: I think I’ll leave it with what Colonel Black just said.
SPEED: Because that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the real way to commemorate 9/11, to follow that precise idea that you just laid out to us, Colonel. Thank you very much.
I want to thank the entire panel that was with us today: Dr. Jack Stockwell, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Col. Richard Black, as well as Diane Sare. We are now at our conclusion, and thank you.
And we will now leave you with something. Today is also another anniversary: This is 58th anniversary of the Sept. 12, 1962 speech by JFK at Rice University, at which he announced the Moon program. And the reason that we’re going to do this, is because this is the other implication of the United States, this is the true United States. This was the United States that was undermined, and in one sense, we can say that the coup against the presidency, may well have begun with the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963. His commitment to this idea of space was not a military commitment, merely, it was a commitment to a completely new vision of mankind, and it’s one that probably would stand us in good stead today, as we consider how other nations, whether that be Russia, China, others, other nuclear powers, would have to consider the prospects of a coup against the President of the United States, and who would be doing that, both within and without the United States.
And so, from that standpoint, we want to leave you today, with this, as the image of what one can think about the future, and it’s provided, as usual by Lyndon LaRouche.
[video of the first six minutes of “The Woman on Mars.”] [dhs/dws] [rhb] [jkw] [web]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS) — On the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said Russia was ready to step up cooperation with the U.S. against terrorism. “We are united by the moments not only when everything is fine, but especially in the moments of grief. Nineteen years ago, there was a disaster. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first who supported U.S. President George W. Bush and the American people,” Antonov told TASS. “As a sign of respect and sorrow for the people who died in the terrorist attacks, we lowered the flag at the Russian embassy.”
On Sept. 11, 2006, the Russian government donated a powerful monument, known as the Teardrop Memorial, dedicated to “The Struggle Against World Terrorism,” to the people and government of the United States in honor of those killed on 9/11 and victims of terrorism worldwide. The 40-foot tall sculpture of a tear-drop, was constructed in Bayonne, New Jersey, on the banks of the Hudson River overlooking lower Manhattan where people gathered on 9/11 to watch the horror taking place at the World Trade Center. It is virtually unknown to most Americans. The Schiller Institute NYC Chorus hosts an annual event at the Memorial with the Russian Embassy, police and fire color guards and others to commemorate the Alexandrov Ensemble which lost 60 members en route to perform for Russian troops in Syria on Christmas Day 2016. See http://www.911monument.com/.
“The fight against terrorism is a very good opportunity, an area where we could cooperate with the United States. We are ready for such interaction, now the ball is in the court of our American partners,” said Antonov.
He continued: “At the current stage, Russia-United States relations are in a deep crisis. We should hardly expect any breakthroughs in the near future, especially given the upcoming presidential elections in the United States. We are ready to develop relations to the extent our American colleagues are ready for.”
“So far, we do not see a great desire for it,” the ambassador observed. “That is why in this situation, communication and contacts between people, representatives of the spheres of culture and sports are especially important for us.” [dea]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Major General Mark E. Weatherington, commander of the 8th Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Force Operations Center, bragged that bomber operations have been shifted to a more “dynamic” operational and training deployment level throughout the Pacific theater to emphasize warfare “readiness” and deter potential adversaries, during remarks made to the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies, yesterday. “We are sustaining a surge in bomber operations, vital to demonstrating peace and stability. We need to keep our adversaries off balance. We have to persistently refine our operating concepts and develop new technologies,” he said. The thrust of the effort, Weatherington explained, involves not only increasing the number and frequency of Bomb Task Force (BTF) missions but also embracing a less “static,” more active and integrated war-preparation and deterrence posture. Weatherington’s remarks make clear that with these operations, the Air Force is preparing for war against America’s designated “enemies,” should they not be “deterred” from their alleged aggressive behavior. This is the logic of the “sole superpower” ideology behind the policy.
And just to show that they can fly to any place from any direction, three B-1 bombers flying out of Dyess, Texas, appeared over the East Siberian Sea yesterday, the body of water in the Arctic north of Siberia. The mission “demonstrated how U.S. strategic bombers are able to support any mission, anywhere around the globe at a moment’s notice,” U.S. European Command said in a statement. Afterwards, the bombers landed at Eielson AFB in Alaska to prepare for a deployment to Europe.
At the same time as the B-1s were flying over the East Siberian Sea, there was a “high end” combat exercise over the North Sea, called “Point Blank,” involving more than 50 aircraft, F-15s, F-16s, F-35s, Typhoons, B-52s, and KC-135s, from the U.K., the U.S. and the Netherlands, reported the Forces.net, a U.K. news site.
The cost of keeping all these aircraft airborne per flight hour is considerable, however. According to DOD data that have been published in several locations over the past few years, the B-2 costs more than $130,000 per flight-hour to keep airborne, while the B-52 flying hour cost runs around $70,000. The B-1 comes in at $61,000 per flight hour, a relative bargain. The six B-52s at Fairford have flown at least a dozen sorties averaging 10-12 hours each since they arrived there on Aug. 22, costing a total of roughly $8-$10 million, if not more. Such operations are a luxury when the food supply for millions of people in Africa is being eaten up by locusts and populations elsewhere in the world are being similarly affected by other natural disasters which are aggravated by inadequate responses to the pandemic. [cjo]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—In Russia, the surge in U.S. bomber flights close to Russia’s borders is seen as a definite threat, especially as they come in addition to a surge in flights of reconnaissance aircraft. Colonel-General Sergey Surovikin, the commander of Russia’s Aerospace Forces, said during a briefing for military attachés in Moscow yesterday that NATO has “significantly increased the intensity of the use of reconnaissance aircraft. Compared to last year, the number of such flights in August increased by more than 30%.” Only in August of this year, the Russian VKS aircraft rose 27 times to intercept them over the Baltic, Barents, Black and Okhotsk Seas. “Previously,” Surovkin stated, “we recorded mainly the actions of reconnaissance aircraft, but recently the number of combat aircraft flights has increased.”
While the B-52 has certain electronic capabilities of its own, the Russians believe that their intrusions so close to Russia’s borders are about more than that. On Aug. 31, as part of combat training flights from advanced air bases in Europe, three B-52s from Fairford air base flew over the territory of the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states to the area of the Estonian “Tapa” test site and back over the waters of the Baltic and North seas, Surovkin reported. “According to our assessment, during this event, the B-52 crews worked out how to reach the threshold of using cruise missiles with a simulated missile strike on objects in the Kaliningrad region and other western regions of our country.”
There was the same type of operation near Russia’s southwestern border (near Crimea) on Sept. 4. “According to our assessment, objects located on the territory of the Southern Military District were considered as targets,” he said.
The Americans and the British ensured the actions of strategic bombers by conducting an unprecedented reconnaissance operation over the Black Sea, Surovikin continued. Five reconnaissance aircraft and one strategic unmanned reconnaissance vehicle were in the air at the same time. Their minimum approach to the Russian border was 15 km, and exploration of the territory of Russia was conducted to a depth of 600 km.
“We believe that working out the issues of combat use of strategic aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the state border of the Russian Federation is hostile and provocative,” Surovkin warned. “In the air, the state border is not as clearly defined as on the ground. A combat aircraft performing maneuvers near it, given the speed of modern aircraft, can be in the adjacent territory in a matter of minutes. This can lead to a serious incident.”
“The actions of the U.S. and NATO Air Force fundamentally contradict the statements of Alliance officials about the desire to prevent incidents during combat training events. They can be avoided only due to the high level of professional training of Russian VKS pilots,” he continued. (As Helga Zepp-LaRouche said recently, if war avoidance depends on the skills of pilots we’re already in trouble.) “I also note that flights of any combat aircraft over the territory of Ukraine do not contribute to defusing tensions in the region.”
“We are not interested in escalating the situation, so most of the operational and combat training activities of the Armed Forces are carried out in the interior of the country,” Surovikin said. “We are committed to constructive cooperation to create conditions for safe operations in the airspace and prevent incidents.” [cjo]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—EIR reported earlier that a “press conference” by Joe Biden last week was obviously scripted, with every question from the fawning press simply stating Biden’s view on something and asking him to concur. Now, it appears that not only is the Biden campaign scripting questions for the media, but the answers are pre-scripted as well, and put on the teleprompter for the cognitively impaired candidate to read.
The evidence comes from a softball question asked of Biden in a virtual press conference earlier this week in which Biden sat quietly for several seconds looking confused, then said “move it up here” to someone in front of him, before responding. It appeared to be the teleprompter.
Fox News reporter Brett Baier had Biden’s national press secretary T.J. Ducklo on his show Thursday night, Sept. 10, and asked him directly if Biden ever used a teleprompter in answering questions at a press conference. Ducklo ducked and weaved for a few minutes, calling the question “Trump campaign talking points,” which Baier acknowledged was true, and pointing out that he’s giving Ducklo a chance to deny it. After several requests for a yes or no, Ducklo said: “I am not going to allow the Trump campaign to funnel their questions through Fox News and get me to respond to that.” [mob]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Netflix released a film called “Cuties,” paying 11-year-old girls to act as pornographic objects, provoking outrage around the world. “Cuties” is straight kiddie porn, with the girls humping the stage and rubbing their crotches to erotic music as part of the “story.” Tulsi Gabbard has joined with many others in demanding that the DOJ bring charges against Netflix. Reps. Tom Cotton and Jim Banks also demanded DOJ action, while a “#CancelNetflix” campaign is spreading. About 1 million people have signed a petition demanding it be removed from Netflix.
Cotton told the Daily Caller: “There’s no excuse for the sexualization of children,” Cotton said, "and Netflix’s decision to promote the film ‘Cuties’ is disgusting at best and a serious crime at worst. I urge the Department of Justice to take action against Netflix for their role in pushing explicit depictions of children into American homes.
“As a father of young daughters, I find it sickening. Not only is this movie fodder for pedophiles, it encourages very young girls to defy their parents’ wishes and share pornographic images of themselves with strangers,” Banks said.
Gabbard said the film would “whet the appetite for pedophiles” and “help fuel the child sex trafficking trade” while slamming the streaming service as “complicit.”
Netflix is owned mostly by hedge funds and investment firms, headed by Capital Research, Vanguard, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and BlackRock.
In 2018, Barack and Michelle Obama signed a contract to produce films for Netflix. The two produced so far were a documentary on a Chinese firm in the U.S., showing the Chinese owners in a very bad light, and a documentary on Michelle herself, perhaps intended to prepare for a run for the presidency. What does she think of the kiddie porn show? one might ask. [mob]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—The total number of bombers in the active U.S. Air Force fleet is about 125 aircraft, B-1s, B-2s and B-52s. With the new nuclear-capable B-21 stealth bomber coming on line, the size of the fleet is expected to increase to about 150 aircraft or so, as 100 B-21s are slated to replace about 80 B-1s and B-2s (The B-52s are expected to stay around until they’re at least 80 years old). Air Force officials, however, don’t think that 100 B-21’s will be enough.)
“Hundred or more B-21s will mean two-thirds or more of our bomber force will be low-observable (that is, stealthy—ed.), as opposed to 21% today,” Maj. Gen. Mark E. Weatherington, commander of the Eighth Air Force, told the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in a video interview, reported The National Interest. Weatherington also echoed what many senior service leaders now say, namely that the Air Force may well indeed acquire well more than 100 of the new bombers. “General Goldfein (former Air Force Chief of Staff) opened the door to a larger B-21 force. There will need to be flexibility as we see how the B-21 comes online,” he said.
“We will have 125 total bombers before the B-21 begins to join the force in significant numbers, creating the smallest number of bombers we have had since 1940. I do think we will see periods in the next 10 to 15 years where the force gets smaller before it gets bigger,” Weatherington said. [cjo]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Yesterday, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Colonel-General Alexander Fomin briefed military attachés in Moscow on the upcoming “Kavkaz-2020” exercise in the Southern Military District set to run from Sept. 21-26. “Such maneuvers are conducted in accordance with the existing training system of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” he said at the outset, according to the Russian Defense Ministry transcript. “It provides for a cycle of exercises with the troops of each military district once every four years. The previous similar maneuvers on the territory of the Southern Military District took place in 2016.”
Fomin said that military formations from Armenia, Belarus, China, Myanmar and Pakistan were invited to the exercise to work out joint actions as part of the Land Forces group of troops. Azerbaijan and Iran are invited to participate in the drawings of the maneuvers episodes in the Caspian Sea. “The practical stage of preparation for the maneuvers was started in March 2020, when a series of staff talks with military delegations of the states participating in the maneuvers took place in Moscow,” he said.
Fomin said that the exercise will involve about 80,000 troops across several locations, the largest single concentration of which will be about 12,900 troops. Equipment deployed for the exercise includes up to 250 tanks, up to 450 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, up to 200 artillery systems and multiple launch rocket systems.
Fomin stressed that the exercise will be in compliance with the 2011 Vienna document on confidence building measures concerning military activities among member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In addition, Fomin said, Russia has invited Defense Ministry officials to observe the final stage of the exercise at the Kapustin Yar training range in the Astrakhan region as well as representatives of military-diplomatic corps, stressing that the exercise is purely defensive. [cjo]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—AstraZeneca, one of the three companies currently engaged in Phase 3 testing of a Covid-19 vaccine that are funded by President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, put a pause on its Phase 3 testing on Sept. 8, due to indications of a possible adverse event in one of the test subjects. A follow-up report stated that the test subject may have a transverse myelitis, a rare disorder of the spinal cord that could result in weakness or paralysis. In addition to exposure to a vaccine, there are other causes of transverse myelitis, including autoimmune diseases. The test subject was hospitalized, and her condition was described as improving, with a discharge from the hospital likely in the next several days. Her diagnosis has not yet been confirmed.
Yesterday, STAT medical news agency reported, “A statement from AstraZeneca said that the independent U.K. investigation into the event has concluded, and it advised the Medicines Health Regulation Authority, Britain’s equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., that it was safe to resume the trial. The MHRA concurred and gave the green light for the trial to restart.” Thus far, the Phase 3 component in Britain has restarted. There are also Phase 3 components of the AstraZeneca trial in the U.S. and Brazil. STAT reported, “It’s not uncommon for clinical trials to be paused. This is the second known hold of studies of the AstraZeneca vaccine. A woman in the U.K. trial was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in July, but that event, which triggered the first pause, was deemed not to be related to the vaccine.”
STAT also wrote, “An AstraZeneca spokesperson previously described the decision as a ‘routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness’ in a trial. Still, the pause drew extraordinary attention because of the urgent need for progress on the Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic.”
Those who have accused Trump of pushing for use of vaccines which had been proven safe but not yet proven effective, which the Russians and Chinese are already doing, had used this case (falsely) to claim Trump was dangerously risking lives. More fake news. [nr]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—This week’s five-day average for new COVID-19 cases is just under 32,000 — and this includes the Friday, Sept. 11 figure, normally the highest day of the week. The seven-day average peaked in late July around 67,000 and has dropped consistently to 35,000 over the last seven weeks — with the exception of the Aug. 26-Sept. 5 period, when it was stuck around 41,000. This likely reflected infections in the last ten days of August from colleges and universities. Hopefully, this week’s figures suggest the overall pattern of dropping 5,000 new cases per week is continuing. The interesting question is whether the systematic actions by the schools — masking, social distancing, testing, isolating and disciplining, even expelling some — has succeeded in tamping down the outbreaks. At this point, each school is a testing ground. Most of the initial clusters have been traced to on-campus social events at fraternities and sororities plus off-campus parties. Since identifiable, there is hope of containing matters. However, there is anecdotal evidence that these same populations take steps to avoid testing, which would suppress the numbers, and, worse, frustrate containment.
The CDC warns of the upcoming admixture of flu with the present coronavirus. The obvious overlap of symptoms — fevers, coughs, shortness of breath, fatigue, sore throat, body aches, and runny or stuffy noses — will make for confusion amongst the population and frontline medical care workers, presenting diagnostic problems and a stress on the medical system. Beyond that, the infection weakens the lungs and stresses the immune system, making the person more susceptible to the other infection. Only 47% of the population took flu vaccines last year. The sooner that figure rises, the better. [dms]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—For the last two-three months, China has had several hundred thousand or so vaccinations to study amongst certain designated groups. (This is separate from the more rigorous study of 100,000 or so in three different ongoing Phase 3 trials.) This began with certain military units in June. Then in July, emergency-use authorization was provided to the National Biotec Group subsidiary of Sinopharm. This has involved hundreds of thousands — frontline medical workers, border inspectors, and Chinese working or travelling out of the country. So far, there have been no infections and no major adverse reactions. While these results are not meant to count toward decisions on general vaccine use, they are being followed. More specifically, Sinovac Biotech inoculated around 3,000 or their employees and family members and closely tracked them, finding similar positive results. Otherwise, one of the largest vaccine makers, CNGB, already has orders from other countries for a half-billion doses of their vaccine, while Bangladesh is getting 100,000 doses free. [dms]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—RT reports that the Phase 3 trials of Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine are in progress, that 40,000 Muscovites will be involved, that three-fourths will get the vaccine while one-fourth gets a placebo, and that over 35,000 residents have already applied. (Typical trials in the U.S. are for 30,000 people, with 15,000 getting a placebo.) Further, in a test of their distribution system, initial batches of the vaccine have been sent to all 85 regions. Mikhail Murashko, the Health Minister, stressed the importance of ensuring that there were no glitches in covering every part of the country. [dms]
Sept.12 (EIRNS) — In recent interviews Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has clarified the details of the economic agreement between Kosovo and Serbia brokered by the White House and signed in the presence of President Donald Trump on Sept. 4. After clarifying some of the controversy over the agreement drummed up by the media, Vucic chose to stress the economic benefits of the deal, especially the agreement to go forward with the “Mini Schengen” which is a sort of mini-common market among Serbia, Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia.
In reference to speculation that the deal was made to the detriment of Serbian relations with Russia and China, Vucic said: “Our relations with Russia are very good, our relations with China are very good, excellent. I am one of the few leaders, I can say that now, who also said before President Trump that we have decent and good relations with the People’s Republic of China, and I have to say that President Trump received us in a very cordial way.”
Speaking about the part of the agreement from Washington that refers to the use of the 5G network, that Serbia would avoid using 5G networks which are not safe, Vucic pointed out that there are no problems in the equipment of Huawei, with which Serbia signed a contract.
Vucic held what he called a very cordial and understanding telephone discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin to brief him on the agreement, and that Putin was fine with the agreement. Putin is expected to visit Serbia in October.
Vucic remarked on the call that “Serbia is a military-neutral country, and President Putin welcomed Serbia’s firm position. Despite the difficulties of its geopolitical, military and economic situation, Serbia will continue to defend the principle of military neutrality and will remain Russia’s true and proper partner.”
The most interesting part of the agreement was the consolidation of the Mini-Schengen Zone among Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo. The agreement was first declared on Oct.10, 2019 at a meeting in Serbia, with follow-up meetings in North Macedonia and Albania. It aims at creating a market of 14 million people among countries, which are not in the European Union, and while all of them are on the waiting list, none are expected to be accepted for some time. While Kosovo had agreed to the proposal, it never acted on it. The White House agreement now commits Kosovo to the project, as well as giving it U.S. backing.
Commenting on this Vucic pointed out: “Someone in the American administration understood well that this is the best way for lasting peace in the region, but also the greatest interest of the Serbian people…. If, for example, at all border crossings where we have phytosanitary inspections, when you make trucks wait for you 24 hours less than is the case today, then you make serious savings in operating business. Then you help the economies of your countries and you can show how much your economy is making progress.” He also said work permits for Tirana, Albania or Pristina, Kosovo, or Skopje, North Macedonia, will be valid in Belgrade, Serbia, as well.
“These are thousands of things that make life easier for ordinary people, which give them the right to hope that they will live in peace. It will stabilize the entire region. Not to mention that we have agreed on significant infrastructure projects, such as the Nis-Pristina highway,” Vucic stated. “Also, the railways that we have almost forgotten. We will reconstruct the existing Nis-Pristina road, and after that we will have complete infrastructure for passenger and freight traffic, all the way to Tirana and Durres (in Albania). What is even more important for us is that we expect that in the next month or two, for the office of the American Development Fund in Belgrade to be open.”
Apparently the U.S. has promised that American International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation will begin operations in Serbia in support of American investments. What that will actually mean in practice is another question.
In an article posted on his Facebook page, Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama warmly endorsed the agreement, especially its commitment to the “Mini-Schengen” which would make the Albanian port of Durres a port of entry for the west Balkans. [dea]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—For the second time, a member of parliament nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize on Sept. 11, this time together with the governments of Kosovo and Serbia, in response to the economic deal between Serbia and Kosovo brokered by President Trump.
“I have nominated the US Gov. and the governments of Kosovo and Serbia for the Nobel Peace Prize for their joint work for peace and economic development, through the cooperation agreement signed in the White House,” Sweidhs MP Magnus Jacobsson announced in a tweet.
“Trade and communications are important building blocks for peace,” he said further and included a copy of the full letter supporting Trump’s nomination, noting that “Trade and communications are important building blocks for peace.” pic.twitter.com/XuhkLbHZAV
This announcement marks the second 2021 Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Trump, who received support from Norwegian MP Christian Tybring-Gjedde on Sept. 9 over the commander in chief’s role brokering relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. (Bahrain today also reached an agreement with Israel.)
Avdullah Hoti, the current prime minister of Kosovo, said on both Facebook and Twitter that he was “extremely grateful” for the nomination.
The Trump Administration spearheaded talks between the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo, with the two Balkan states agreeing to normalize economic relations in a meeting at the White House last week.
Trump praised the development during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, saying the administration has “made additional progress on reaching peace in the Middle East.” [mob]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Oregon, in the midst of the insurrection, now has more than a million acres destroyed by the fires, one closing in on Portland, while the fires in California and Washington continue. It has been determined that some of these fires were intentionally set. At least 20 people have been killed in the three states, with many others missing. Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon said that the state’s air quality ranks the worst in the world. “Almost anywhere in the state you can feel this right now,” she said. More than 40,000 people in Oregon have already been evacuated, and about 500,000 are in zones that may be evacuated. Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland declared a state of emergency on Thursday night, Sept. 10, and residents of Molalla, about 30 miles to the south, packed highways as they fled from the approaching fires, CNN reported. Two towns have been “obliterated,” they report —Talent and Phoenix.
In California more than 3 million acres have burned. Gov. Gavin Newsom held a news conference in a burned out area, saying: “We have now — currently have — five active fires that are five of the most destructive fires in the history of the state…. Thirty-nine hundred-plus structures have been destroyed.” He said he had talked with President Donald Trump for half an hour on Sept. 9, who pledged support.
All three governors and all the pundits say it is all due to climate change, although CNN reports that Newsom at least “acknowledged that poor forest management over decades has contributed to the severity of wildfires.” He then added: “California is America in fast forward. What we’re experiencing right now is coming to communities all across the country.”
The Oregon prison system is moving over 2,000 prisoners out of the path of the fire, but acknowledges that this aggravates the severe COVID-19 problem among prisoners.
CNN also reports: “Studies have shown that when waves of smoke hit, the rate of hospital visits rises and many of the additional patients experience respiratory problems, heart attacks and strokes.” [mob]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—The Wall Street Journal weighed in on Beethoven on the year of his 250th birthday, giving him his due as a revolutionary, but sticking in several digs as well. The Journal’s Critic at Large, Edward Rothstein, who will soon release a book on Beethoven and the Enlightenment, describes him as “A product of the Enlightenment as well as a product of disenchantment with its certainties,” and as the “first modern composer.” As to modernity, he writes that “the Western art music tradition in which he plays such a central role has become a diminished force.”
Beethoven’s 200th birthday saw a huge celebration full of concerts and recordings of all his music, Rothstein writes, but now, due to the pandemic, but also due to the cultural shift, there is essentially nothing, while his music in today’s culture, “at best, is treated as one style among many clamoring for egalitarian attention in the entertainment marketplace. And though the Western art music tradition extends over a millennium in dozens of countries and is unmatched in its diversity and analytical range, it has been criticized as overly narrow. One composer even declared recently in the New York Times that the entire Western musical canon is permeated by ‘systemic racism.’”
Rothsein strangely refers to Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy as a “middling poem that attracted many composers of the era. It was written almost like a comradely drinking song, invoking the ecstatic joy of imminent brotherhood.”
Reflecting the common distortion of the German classical period as a product of the Enlightenment, Rothstein writes: “It sometimes seems as if the Enlightenment were being shown its limitations: Reason can only go so far, and then other forces come into play…. Ultimately, this individuality led to the reflective and impassioned self-explorations of Romanticism.” [mob]
Sept.12 (EIRNS) — Rather than sending massive amounts of emergency planes or ships to evacuate refugees, the European Union sent the Vice-President of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas to Athens to breathe some hot air. Schinas met with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on yesterday, and was told that a “new, ambitious policy for migration and asylum” was needed and that he was awaiting their proposals. All Schinas could offer was a statement that, “Europe cannot fail twice in such an important issue.”
A fire earlier this week at the Morias refugee camp on the island of Lebos left 12,000 refugees without shelter.
Mitsotakis told Schinas that a new facility must be built and operated on a different model of operation and administration as the first reception and identification location, where the refugees can be expected to leave the camp for other EU countries as had been agreed.
All Schinas offered was help in building better facilities, but nothing about removing 12,000 refugees, the population of a small city.
The refugees themselves have staged peaceful protests near the island’s port, hoping they will be evacuated. The Greek government has airlifted tents and other emergency equipment, which is totally inadequate. Furthermore, Greek health services are dealing with the spread of Covid-19 among refugees who have not been relocated. [dea]
Sept.12 (EIRNS) — Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said it is the U.S. that meddles in elections not Russia, speaking at a press conference on his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “We are open for honest dialogue [regarding interference in the U.S. elections]. However, for the dialogue to be honest, it is necessary to formulate one’s claims clearly, so that they can be understood,” he said.
“We offered to relaunch cybersecurity consultations. … We offered to make an official bilateral political statement by Russia and the U.S. in which we both categorically undertake not to meddle in each other’s domestic affairs. This has been going on for several years,” TASS quoted Lavrov as saying.
Lavrov then referred to the fact that the U.S. State Department spends $200 million a year on direct financing of Russian non-governmental organizations and in working in Russian civil society, explaining: “The U.S. itself does not see anything untoward in promoting its interests via illegitimate means on the sly or even approving laws openly. … If it’s not interference in domestic affairs, then I don’t know what it is.” [dea]
Sept.12 (EIRNS) — Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko will meet on Sept. 14 in Sochi, Russia. They will discuss the integration processes within the Union State between the two countries, and implementing joint energy projects and further development of Russian-Belarusian relations of strategic partnership and alliance, reported the Kremlin.
In related news on Belarus, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg has met with oppositionist Pavel Latushko, one of the founders of the so-called Coordination Council on Sept. 11 in Vienna, the Austrian Foreign Ministry stated. They agreed that repression against Council members and peaceful demonstrators must stop immediately. “The only way forward for Belarus is through an inclusive national dialogue,” the ministry tweeted. [dea]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—In addition to lecturing the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that they must cancel China’s many Belt and Road projects across Southeast Asia (roads, rail, ports, bridges, etc.), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also introduced a new U.S. scheme called the Mekong-U.S. Partnership, including $153 million in funds for the four Mekong countries along the lower Mekong (leaving out Myanmar and China upriver). The money is supposedly for sharing data on the water resources, crime prevention, and natural disaster support.
The fact is that just weeks ago, on Aug. 24, China’s Premier Li Keqiang met with the members of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Organization — which includes all six Mekong nations — in which they agreed on a plan for data-sharing to deal with floods and droughts. Li said: “We all drink from the same river,” demonstrating that “we are a community with a shared future.”
The Pompeo gang has long blamed droughts and floods in the lower Mekong nations on China’s dams on the Lancang (as it is called in China) and the dams they are building on the Mekong in Laos. In fact, the dams help control the river, and during last year’s drought China released huge amounts of water to help counter the problem. This author saw the Mekong literally dry up completely as far north as Vientiane, Laos, in 1968, such that you could walk across the river bed.
As for the U.S. “crime prevention” along the Mekong, Pompeo’s intention was made clear in his Sept 11 statement “The Enduring U.S. Commitment to ASEAN,” in which he accuses China of “escalating aggression and threats to sovereign nations’ ability to make free choices,” “aggressive campaigns of coercion and environmental devastation” in the South China Sea, and charging that they “manipulated upstream dams, exacerbating an historic drought,” and even “abetted arms and narcotics trafficking” along the Mekong.
The ASEAN nations generally smiled politely at Pompeo’s raging, and will continue on with the Belt and Road in nearly all cases. [mob]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government opened in Qatar this morning. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated at the opening ceremony that the talks are expected to be contentious. He said that the outcome is entirely up to Afghans, and not the U.S. “Each of you carry a great responsibility,” he told the participants. “You have an opportunity to overcome your divisions.” He praised both sides for their commitment to not allow Afghanistan become a launching ground for terrorist attacks against outside countries.
The sides will be tackling tough issues, The Associated Press reported. This includes the terms of a permanent ceasefire, the rights of women and minorities, and the disarming of tens of thousands of Taliban fighters and militias loyal to warlords, some of them aligned with the government. “One of the top most issues on the minds of the people is reduction in violence in a significant way … and also getting to … hopefully a permanent ceasefire,” Abdullah Abdullah, Chairman of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation, told Reuters in an interview, and stating it would be one of the first issues discussed when negotiators met the following day. [cjo]
Sept. 12 (EIRNS)—In regard to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent speech with scientists on the new push for creating an innovation economy, he also laid stress on upgrading the education system in order to produce the future scientists, engineers and artists for the continued growth of the nation. These are already reflected in some changes made in the exam criteria for Beijing junior high school level students.
Under the new plan students are tested in 12 subjects: Chinese, mathematics, foreign language, morality and the rule of law, history, geography, physics, chemistry, biology, sports and health, art (music), Fine arts, and comprehensive practical activities (information technology and labor technology). Comprehensive practical activities (information technology and labor technology) are tested upon completion of study. Geography and biology exams are arranged at the end of the second semester of the eighth grade. Physical education and health and art (music, fine arts) exams are arranged in the second semester of the ninth grade. The exam in Chinese, mathematics, foreign language (written examination), morality and rule of law, history, physics, chemistry is scheduled at the end of the second semester of the ninth grade.
Students are required to complete 10 open scientific practice activities in three years in junior high school, which are included in the academic proficiency test scores of physics, chemistry, and biology. Students in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades have to complete 10 comprehensive social practice activities every academic year, a total of 30 times.
How would the average U.S. junior high school student fare in these exams, one may ask? [wcj]
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