The Liquid Bomb Hoax: The Larger Implications (James Petras)

[struggle4progress]

by James Petras
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 25, 2006

... The arrests were followed by the search for evidence, as the August 12, 2006 Financial Times states: “The police set about the mammoth task of gathering evidence of the alleged terrorist bomb plot yesterday.” (FT, August 12/, 2006) In other words, the arrests and charges took place without sufficient evidence -- a peculiar method of operation -- which reverses normal investigatory procedures in which arrests follow the “monumental task of gathering evidence.” If the arrests were made without prior accumulation of evidence, what were the bases of the arrests?

The government search of financial records and transfers turned up no money trail despite the freezing of accounts. The police search revealed limited amounts of savings, as one would expect from young workers, students and employees from low-income immigrant families.

The British government, backed by Washington, claimed that the Pakistani government’s arrest of two British-Pakistanis provided “critical evidence” in uncovering the plot and identifying the alleged terrorist. No Western judicial hearing would accept evidence procured by the Pakistani intelligence services that are notorious for their use of torture in extracting ‘confessions’. The Pakistani dictatorship’s evidence is based on a supposed encounter between a relative of one of the suspects and an Al Qaeda operative on the Afghan border. According to the Pakistani police, the Al Qaeda agent provided the relative and thus the accused with the bomb-making information and operative instructions. The transmission of bomb-making information does not require a trip half-way around the world, least of all to a frontier under military siege by US led forces on one side and the Pakistani military on the other. Moreover it is extremely dubious that Al Qaeda agents in the mountains of Afghanistan have any detailed knowledge of specific British airline security, procedures or conditions of operations in London. Lacking substantive evidence, Pakistani intelligence and their British counterparts touched all the propaganda buttons: A clandestine meeting with Al Qaeda, bomb-making information exchanges on the Pakistani-Afghan border, Pakistani-Brits with Islamic friends, family and terrorist connections in England ... ...

Instead of providing relevant facts clearing up basic questions of names, dates, weapons, and travel dates, Commissioner Clark gives the press a laundry list of items that could be found in millions of homes and the large number of buildings searched (69 so far). If stair climbing earns promotions, Clark should be nominated for a knighthood. According to Clark the police discovered more than 400 computers, 200 mobile telephones, 8,000 computer media items (items as catastrophic as memory sticks, CDs and DVDs); police removed 6,000 gigabytes of data from the seized computers (150 from each computer) and a few video recordings. One presumes, in the absence of any qualitative data demonstrating that the suspects were in fact preparing bombs in order to destroy nine US airliners, that Commissioner Clark is seeking public sympathy for his minions’ enormous capacity to lift and remove electronic equipment from one site to another in up to 69 buildings. This is a notable achievement if we are talking about a moving company and not a high-powered police investigation of an event of “catastrophic consequences” ...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Petras25.htm

Petras continues to be worth the read ...

[SmokingJacket]

1. Interesting -- pretty much what I suspected.

However, what's with the "World Zionist" stuff? Can't the author simply analyze this incident without going down that path? Argh.

[struggle4progress]

3. As I read the article, Petras is making a specific reference to ...

political lobbying by a militaristic faction in the World Zionist Organization WZO. I do not think Petras intends his readers to interpret his remarks as supporting broad-based conspiratorial theories.

Perhaps the following help establish context:

WZO is the current name of what was once the Zionist Organization ZO: this is perhaps the oldest and most influential Zionist political organization, as suggested (for example) by the following link from the American Friends of Likud website: http://www.thelikud.org/Archives/Structure%20of%20the%20World%20Zionist%20Organization.htm

Weizman became president of the WZO around 1920. Here, from the WZO website, is an account of the origin of the Balfour Declaration:

Arthur James, First Earl of Balfour (1848-1930)
By: Rochelle Mass

... In l909, a meeting took place in Manchester, England between Chaim Weizmann and Lord Balfour:

Balfour asked Weizmann: "Why should Palestine - and Palestine alone - be the basis for Zionism?

"Anything else would be idolatry!" Weizmann protested, adding: "Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London. Would you take it?"

"But, Dr. Weizmann," Balfour retorted. "We already have London."

Weizmann rejoined: "That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a merely a marsh." http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1546&subject=78

Ben-Gurion was also ZO president at one time. Jabotinsky was on their executive committee before the Revisionist split around 1923. From a recent Boston Globe piece:

Jabotinsky's ghost...
<see article for photo>
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (left). A photo of Vladimir Jabotinsky (right) loomed over former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he spoke at the Likud Party convention in August, 2004. (Getty Images Photo / Pedro Ugarte)

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft | August 13, 2006

... Like his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, Olmert was born into the political tradition known as Revisionist Zionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. A brilliant and intensely controversial figure, Jabotinsky split the Zionist movement in the 1920s, preaching a ``Greater Israel," with a Jewish majority outweighing the Arab population, to be won by force and guarded, in his famous phrase, by an ``Iron Wall" ...

All of this dismayed Weizmann ... He went further. Today only the bitterest enemy of Israel would call its government fascist, but that was just the accusation once made-by other Zionists-against the Revisionists. In 1929, Weizmann even told a friend, the New York lawyer Morris Rothenberg, that the Jewish extremists displayed ``Hitlerism in its worst possible form." (This was before Hitler came to power .. and Weizmann would scarcely have used this phrase later. But it was startling even then) ...

Shortly after the creation of the new state, Begin visited America, and was fiercely denounced in a letter to The New York Times from 28 eminent Jewish liberals, among them Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein. Begin was a ``terrorist, right-wing chauvinist," they said, whose movement was ``closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties" ...

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/08/13/jabotinskys_ghost/?p1=MEWell_Pos4
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.boston.com

Some discussion of Jabotinsky's relation to the ZO:

Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze'ev; 1880-1940)

... For a time Jabotinsky worked for the World Zionist Organization trying to gain Ottoman support, but at the outbreak of World War I he was sent to Western Europe as roving correspondent for a Moscow newspaper. While in Alexandria, with Joseph Trumpeldor, he suggested raising a Jewish Legion to join the Allies in liberating Erez Israel from Turkish rule ... After the war, the Legion was disbanded despite Zionist protests.Anticipating anti-Jewish violence by Arab extremists, in 1920 Jabotinsky organized the Haganah in Jerusalem ... In 1923, after disagreement over Zionist acquiescence in the British role in Palestine, Jabotinsky left the Zionist Organization and tried to draw attention to the shortcomingsof its policies, calling for greater militancy and for mass immigration to Palestine. The failure of an agreement with David Ben-Gurion to ease the internal conflict of Zionism, now faced with the growing Nazi menace, led Jabotinsky to found his own New Zionist Organization (NZO) ... Following the Arab riots of 1936, Jabotinsky became supreme commander of the terrorist IZL in 1937 ... http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/people/BIOS/jabo.html

It should be clear from these links that the WZO has been politically effective in the past and that it, and allied organizations, have sometimes experienced significant factionalism related to questions related to militarism.

[IntiRaymi]

4. Interesting stuff.

I remember the sort of justifications that fascist Italy had for invading Libya in the 1920's: It had once been part of the roman empire,

'Weizmann rejoined: "That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a merely a marsh."'

The selfish view of history allows atrocity to happen.

[babylonsister]

2. Add another reason to hate this admin. nt

[Imagevision]

5. I've read the alledged terrorists had no passports nor plane tickets