Bubblehammerblog

During the Irish Troubles the Thatcher government passed a law prohibiting the media from broadcasting the voices of Irish Republican spokespeople. This was to deny republicans what the government called 'the oxygen of publicity'. So we witnessed on TV the odd spectacle of the likes of Gerry Adams explaining Sinn Fein policy in silence, while his words were read out by someone else, in a Northern Irish accent. It was daft, & made the government look ridiculous. But What it highlighted was the way that the State decides that its citizens are incapable of distinguishing information from propaganda. Our eyes & ears must be protected from exposure to certain views, because there are those among us who are impressionable & lack judgement, & might be in some part persuaded by them.

Some British Asians have found themselves being prosecuted, or losing their jobs, for visiting jihadist websites. We have to assume that, if you're a Muslim Asian, it is in fact illegal to investigate the reasons why some Muslims violently oppose American & British foreign policy. It's not illegal, but decidedly dangerous, for British Muslims to openly oppose, within their own communities, government actions, even when done so peacefully. Determined government pressure has been put on Muslims to accept the view that US & British actions in the Middle East & elsewhere are neither cause nor motivation for jihadist violence, even when such a view is obviously absurd. The public in general needs to get with the program, & accept that religious fanatics blow up themselves & others because 'they hate our freedoms'.

Launching Cruise missiles at crowded cities, & detonating explosive belts in busy markets, both result in exactly the same thing. The bloody bodies & ripped apart limbs of innocent civilians: mothers, fathers, sisters & brothers. Let's leave aside that fact that the former is far more effective in terms of numbers of victims. The people who instigate such actions are criminals.

Which brings me to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad - the Al Qa'ida 'mastermind' of the 911 attacks. Some will have seen the news photo of the dishevelled, unshaven, slack bellied KSM, (recall Saddam emerging from his rat-hole), being led into captivity by Pakistani police. Despite having one of the most gruesome terrorist rapsheets of modern times, the public knows little about him. Even less is known about the 19 hijackers who perpetrated the defining crime of our era. Hitler, Pol Pot, Charlie Manson, Geoffrey Dahmer, Harold Shipman...all the subject of endless fascination & speculation. But KSM's name barely registers on the street, let alone Mohammad Atta or Hani Hanjour. Odd.

I came across a transcript of the proceedings of KSM's 'Combatant Status Review Tribunal', which took place last March in Guantanamo. It can be found here:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Combatant_Tribunals.html

He claims to have been tortured while in detention, which immediately renders his testimony suspect. (Incidentally, Senator John McCain would know about the effectiveness of torture techniques - having made no less than 32 propaganda recordings for the North Vietnamese, telling listeners that he & his fellow pilots had been ordered to target schools & hospitals.)Here's KSM's confession, which I reproduce without comment:

1. I was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center Operation.
2. I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation. frm A to Z.
3. I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.
4. I was responsible for the Shoe Bomber Operation to down two American airplanes.
5. I was responsible for the Filka Island Operation in Kuwait that killed two American soldiers.
6. I was responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which was frequented by British and Australian soldiers.
7. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing the New (or Second) Wave attacks against the following skyscrapers after 9/11:
a. Library Tower, California.
b. Sears Tower, Chicago.
c. Plaza Bank, Washington State.
d. The Empire State Building, New York City.
8. I was responsible for planning, financing, and follow-up Operations to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers in the Staights of Hormuz, the Straights of Gibrater, and the Port of Singapore.
9. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying and financing for the Operation to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.
10. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American Presidents, including President Carter.
11. I was responsible for surveying, planning and financing for the bombing of suspension bridges in New York.
12. I was responsible for planning to destroy the Sears Tower by burning a few fuel or oil tanker trucks beneath it or around it.
13. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the operation to destroy Heathrow Airport, the Canary Wharf Building, and Big Ben on British soil.
14. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the destruction of many nightclubs frequented by British and American citizens on Thailand soil.
15. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of the New York Stock Exchange and other financial targets after 9/11.
16. I was responsible for planning, financing and surveying for the destruction of buildings in the Israeli city of Elat by using airplanes leaving from Saudi Arabia.
17. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the destruction of American embassies in Indonesia, Australia, and Japan.
18.. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of the Israeili embassy in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, and Australia.
19. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of an Israeli El -Al Airlines flight on Thailand soil departing from Bangkok Airport.
20. I was responsible for sending several Mujahadeen into Israel to conduct surveillance to hit several strategic targets deep in Israel.
21. I was responsible for the bombing of the hotel in Mombasa that is frequented by Jewish travelers via El-Al Airlines.
22. I was responsible for launching a Russian-made SA-7 surface-to-air missile on El-Al or other Jewish airliner departing from Mombasa.
23. I was responsible for planning and surveying to hit American targets in South Korea, such as American military bases and a few nightclubs frequented by American soldiers.
24. I was responsible for financial, excuse me, I was responsible for providing financial support to hit American, Jewish, and British targets in Turkey.
25. I was responsible for surveillance needed to hit nuclear power plants that generate electricity in several US states.
26. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing to hit NATO Headquarters in Europe.
27. I was responsible for the planning and surveying needed to execute Bojinka Operation, which was designed to down twelve American airplanes full of passengers. I personally monitored a round-trip, Manila to Seoul, Pan Am flight.
28. I was responsible for the assassination attempt against President Clinton during his trip to the Philippines in 1994 or 1995.
29. I shared responsibility for the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul the second while he was visiting the Philippines.
30. I was responsible for the training and financing for the assassination of Pakistan's President Musharaf.
31. I was responsible for the attempt to destroy an American oil company owned by the Jewish former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, on the Island of Sumatra, Indonesia.

If you pick the broken English of KSM's rambling statement to the court, you'll notice that he ends it by expressing regret at the civilian deaths caused by the actions he claims resposibility for. This hardly qualifies him for sainthood, but it's not something I recall hearing Bush or Blair do.

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18:53 25/09/2008

It being the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service, BBC 4 screened a biography of Aneurin Bevan. An emotional exeprience for me. Surprised to find that Greg Dyke was an admirer too, he described closing the second volume of Michael Foot's biography of Nye Bevan in a flood of tears. Bevan was a giant, a proper working class hero, & his life inspires an emotional response like this.Seems we weep for the heroes of socialism like the shi'a weep on hearing the story of Imam Hussain.

The birth of the NHS was something of a miracle.Without a bruiser like Bevan making it happen with his fists it would never have come into being. Lots of doctors didn't want it, fearing, among other things,being overwhelmed by a stampede of poor people demanding treatment - which is exactly what happened.There were even reports of people getting prescriptions for gauze bandage to put up as net curtains. Bevan had to bribe the doctors, as he put it, with gold.

At the time the country wasn't generally enthusiastic about much at all. There was food & fuel rationing, & everyone had shivered through the coldest winter on record in 1947. The dismal details of the miserable postwar years can be found in David Kynaston's excellent Austerity Britain,1945-51. Though an avowedly socialist government had been elected, there was no mass movement of trades unionist & socialist activists - every gain was a struggle against the class interests of the former rulers & the inertia of the dog tired & often disinterested workers. Shagged out, war-ravaged economies are not ideal incubators of socialist revolution, as Marx had farsightedly pointed out. In Petrograd in 1917 the Bolsheviks had no more than 8,000 members.

During the BBC Nye Bevan documentary the Tory brahmin Michael Brilliantine was interviewed about the current relevance of the socialism that inspired Bevan. He leaned back in his chair & smiled. Yes it was smug, self satisfied. He said that, as Tony Blair had made clear, it was all utterly irrelevant now. So what my grandfather fought for after the First World War, what my father learned from the Second World War & down the pits, & what both of them passed on to me, is irrelavant. A waste of time as it turned out. As they say, how does that make you feel?

This had me thinking about my relationship to the past. My beautiful youngest daughter has never heard of Nye Bevan, despite her expensive university education. I wonder what she can possibly make of my pride at being the son of coal miners & steel workers. How could she make any sense of that? Will my gransons even know about it? We are people without a past, nothing connects us to where we came from.
Even our defeat is irrelevant.

It's also 40 years since 1968. What a year that was, I was 18 years old. The title 'Summer of Love', invented years later, wouldn't have meant much to me, being a self-styled freak rather than a hippie. Hippies were mostly a student & media phenomena.

I went to the the '68 Grosvenor Square demonstration against the war in Vietnam. I'd hitch-hiked down to London with the celebrated poet Robert E. Gilpin. It'd taken us nearly three days to get down the M1 motorway, since Bob, (or 'Dog's Knob'as his mates & admirers called him),had shoulder length hair, & motorists either hurled sexual abuse at us, or amused themselves by pulling in to stop, then screeching off as we panted towards them with our heavy kitbags.

The demo had already turned nasty when we arrived, & the scuffers were running at people with truncheons. At one point we came across three coppers dishing out a shoeing to a comrade, who was curled up on the pavement in a foetal position clutching his copies of Black Dwarf. I ran over & picked up a Wall's Ice Cream sign from outside a shop & floored one of the coppers with it. Dog's Knob managed to pull off another's helmet, & deployed it on the prostrate copper's head, swinging it by the chinstrap, much like a handbag. The bloodied comrade managed to get to his feet & leg it, then the enraged police came after us. One of them threw this trunchoen at my head, just missing. We legged it too.

They chased us for what seemed like miles. Belting down Kensington High St. with the coppers 20 yards behind us, Dog's Knob crashed into a young couple who were stepping out of what was then called a 'boutique', a shop that sold poncey clothes. She had on a startling white fur coat & white thigh boots,he an orange silk shirt & candy striped flares, & the bags of clothes they'd bought were scattered all over the pavement. Dog's knob thought this was funny, & let out an insane cackle that impeded his running. We dived down a side street then up a passageway, pinning ourselves against a wall, panting & sniggering.

When we heard the the police pass the end of the passageway we held our breath. The feller with the orange shirt was with them, we could hear him saying, 'They must've come this way, officer, you should cordon off the street.' After about 10 minutes we made a bold break for it, & to our amazement, got clean away. It took me ages to talk Dog's Knob out of the notion of setting off to find the twat in the orange shirt & caving his head in with a housebrick. When I spotted him on television years later I recognised him immediately, it was David Bowie.

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Let's get something straight, right from the start. Over here in Europe we regularly see comments sent from US citizens to our 'serious' newspapers telling us that we shouldn't 'interfere' or concern ourselves with American politics. It's not our business, they claim. Some have even suggested it's too complicated for us to understand. Oh Really? Then Why did 200,000 Berliners turn out to support Barack Obama?

Because what happens in America is vitally important to us. Like France in the 19th century, America has universal significance. Because all progressive, to use an American term, Europeans want to see the American project succeed. America has come to be Europe's spiritual homeland. And if we're angry & saddened by the fact that America has been hijacked by crooks & warmongers, it's because we're pro-American.

Now hear the best of America. A fine speech by Van Jones delivered a couple of days ago at Netroots Nation 2008 in Austin, Texas.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/99550/?page=1

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I don't really want to talk about Damien Hirst, it's far too depressing. We're told he's raked in another $22 million. The press has been bigging up his 'inovative' notion of flogging off the shite he turns out at auction, in one comprehensive greatest hits' sale, rather than having an exhibition as lesser talents might. Sensational.

His agent 'let slip' that he's now coined himself a billion, pounds or dollars doesn't matter. He's bought himself more palaces that Saddam Hussein dreamed about.

I'm relaxed about people skanking the hyper-rich. Given the chance I'd do it myself,it's preferable to eating them.'Art', Hirst is on record as saying, 'has always been about money'. Well, yes, but this short sentence implies that he views himself as an artist, to be considered in the same breath as the great patronised artists of the European heritage. He's nothing of the sort. He's a con-artist, pure & simple. The man's sheer greed makes the flesh crawl - maybe that's the whole point of the endeavour. Perhaps this is the emotional response he's really after, clever devil. Mildly diverting 'art' that causes a feeding frenzy among a lot of vacuous rich people.'I'd stop fucking them up the arse', he says, 'but they won't let me.'

I met him once in a pub in Soho, though he wasn't well known at the time. He was with Lilly Allen's old fellah, who I sort of recognised as a bit part actor I'd seen on TV. They were both obviously seasoned piss artists, all one line wisecracks & bellylaughs.I noticed he never bought a round of drinks, & I'd stupidly left a packet of Bensons on the table which they both helped themselves to. The only time I made eye contact with him was when he gurned at my fag packet & seeing only one left made a grab for it. Just in time I swept up the packet, put the fag in my mouth, & grinned at him in triumph. He pointedly ignored me for the rest of the afternoon.

As it happens I may have a souvenir of that afternoon. There's a bin liner somewhere in my attic containing items I ought to have dumped, but couldn't bring myself to - my Communist Party membership card for instance, & a couple of photographs of a former girlfriend I can't bear to look at now. There's half a beermat with the phone number of someone I've forgotten on one side, & a drawing by Damien Hirst of a matchstick man pissing into a bucket on the other. Offers over $20,000 will be considered.

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Anyone looking into the the events of September 11 2001, which are likely remain the defining moment of our lifetime, will in a short space of time come upon statements like this: 'Researchers are uncovering extensive, credible evidence that the official account of the 9-11 attacks is untenable.' or 'Evidence is mounting that the September 11 attacks were instigated, if not carried out, by elements within the US administration.' I'll not bother to provide citations for these statements, since views like this are so commonplace, but both were made by people occupying professorial chairs at North American universities. Various polls, conducted by the likes of Zogby, have revealed that something approaching a third, & in some polls up to a half, of the US population believe that the official account of the 9/11 attacks is false.

The events that unfolded on 9/11 were incredible. Had this been pitched as the plotline of a Hollywood blockbuster it would seem too far-fetched. The ease with which the 19 hijackers evaded airport security to board the planes, carrying knives, stanley blades ('box cutters') & perhaps cannisters of mace. The way they were able to overcome the crew & passengers, & get into the flight decks of the planes with such primitive weapons. The flying skills of the hijacker pilots, three out of four scoring direct hits on their targets. Then the seeming lack of response from the Airforce, which was supposed to be protecting US airspace. They were able to hit the Pentagon, surely the most heavily protected building on the planet.

Then there was the incredible way the Twin Towers simply collapsed into their own footprints in a matter of seconds, videos of which were shown repeatedly in the following days, becoming the iconic image of the attacks. The nearby WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, later came down in the same way, & it looked just like familiar footage of a building being demolished, as one shellshocked television commentator remarked at the time - 'un-be-lievable', he said. It was counterintuitive - three buildings collapsing at what looked like free-fall speeds down the path of maximum resistance.

No wonder that the day after the attacks, when a group of Arab terrorists were revealed as the culprits, there was already widespread scepticism. Some people just couldn't believe that Arabs, particulary ones directed by a cartoon villain skullking in a cave in Afghanistan, were capable of such a spectacularly sucessful & sophisticated operation, against the most advanced society in the world. We saw Palestinians in the streets, firing guns into the air & passing round trays of sweets in celebration, but in the Arab press many quickly pointed the finger at Mossad.

The behavior of the Bush administration only fuelled more scepticism. Following on the baffling 'My Pet Goat' incident, both Bush & Condoleeza Rice claimed at press conferences that the idea of bad guys flying planes into buildings had never ocurred to anyone. Then there was the barefaced attempt to stitch up the Iraqis. The blatant drumming up of fear & panic in the press was brought to a pitch by the bizaare anthrax mailings that October, which again they tried to pin on the Iraqis. It all seemed to be falling into place so conveniently for an administration that had been waiting for just such an opportunity to come its way. You could almost hear the sound of palms being rubbed briskly together in anticipation of wars they'd been planning for years. The Patriot Act was passed before anyone had a chance to read it. The secret Continuity of Govenment provisions were put in place, & the legislature remains in the dark about what's contained in them.

Over the past few years I've seen dozens of documenty films, & read hundreds of articles & blog posts dealing with the 9/11 attacks, including the US government's 911 Commission Report. So far I've yet to come across any bankable nailed-on evidence that implicates the Bush administration, or any 'deep state' elements within it, in the attacks.

Many of the documentaries I've sat through have been frankly preposterous, attempting to peddle conspiracy theories crafted to contradict even the most reasonable assumptions based on firm evidence. Some of the earliest ones, for instance, promote the so-called 'no planes' theory, which contends that the attacks, in particularly the one one the Pentagon, were carried out using missiles fired by the US military. The fact that hundreds of drivers passing by on the beltway, that runs some 300 yards beside the Pentagon, reported seeing a Boeing jetliner crash into it is dealt with by describing mass hypnotism techniques developed by the CIA. I've read closely argued papers, obviously written by highly educated people used to handling complex data, that come to similar, and barmier, conclusions. Taking the time to delve into the backgrounds of such writers can uncover connexions to looney tune religious or rightwing political organisations.

But there are plenty of investigative journalists, filmakers, scientists & academics who attempt to tackle the issues raised by the 911 attacks with honesty & integrity. Loose Change, (Final Cut) by far the best known 911 documentary, which has been downloaded & seen by millions around the world, is slickly produced & has a catchy soundtrack. It seems clear that the earnest young filmakers who put it together are not covertly pushing a political agenda. Three years ago it was plausible enough to have me burning copies & handing out or mailing them to everyone I thought might be interested. I wasn't the only initial enthusiast, the Labour MP Michael Meecher tried to arrange a screening at the House of Commons. A month later I was sending out apologies by email, directing people to places on the Net where they could find convincing demolitions of most of the film's major contentions. Now, if I ever come upon any real evidence, I probably won't be able to find anyone to consider it.

There are determined & highly competent investigators researching the murky wilderness of mirrors inhabited by the various state intelligence & security operations, which interface at points with organised crime. It's here where you can glimpse the odd shard that briefly reflects a little dim light. But the tangled threads of relationships & identities are far too complex for anyone but a dedicated specialist, with some access to inside knowlege, to persue. If anything like evidence were (or has) emerged from here, it could only be accessible to a small circle.

The same goes for the matter of the extraordinary way the three building collapsed. An advanced education in physics is needed to appreciate the ever increasing body of arguments that either advance or refute the notion that they were brought down by controlled demolition. To the layman they merely appear to have been.

Having said all this I can't agree with Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch) that there are no serious questions about the events of 911. But I do agree when he says that the whole '911 Truth' issue has been a major distraction for the Left, most seriously in the US. There is, after all, ample solid evidence that Bush, along with Blair, are war criminals, who ought to be impeached. Plenty of brave attempts to get the ball rolling on this have been sunk by a lack of mass support. If just a quarter of the people currently sitting at terminals giving themselves migraine looking for the 911 clincher had put their backs into impeachment, Bush & Blair would be in jail by now.

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I have some minor experience of the drugs market. I'll admit that I once foolishly got myself addicted to smoking heroin. But it was only for perhaps 25 - 30 years. I'd had enough by then.

So I obviously still know lots of people in the business, & they're all telling me that there's a chronic shortage of heroin. The only gear available is very weak, & for the most part bashed to death with paracetamol. This has been so for the past 2 or 3 months. It seems the shortage isn't confined to this area.

Lack of junk is an excellent motivator. If it could inspire Coleridge to walk all the way from Somerset to London to get opium, think how far present day junkies might range. This is a national phenomena. I doubt a drought as profound as this has happened in to the last 2 decades. It's even been covered in the national dailies.

My intuition, along with my reading in the papers & online about the bumper harvests in Afghanistan, with the British Army guarding the fields for the farmers while they bring in the crop, tells me that this is a case of a failure of distribution rather than supply. Heroin is money, stockpiles are kept by wholesalers in order to influence prices. It looks as though the one or two kilo level distributors are being denied supplies. This is unlikely to be the result of specific police activities. The function of the police is to apply sufficient pressure to keep the price buoyant. It's unheard of for the police to disrupt supply for more than a few days.

Although the average user rarely rubs shoulders with mid-level distributors, or middle management, rumours do trickle down as far as the neighbourhood dealers. The one I've heard the most is that some major players, from a country I won't name, believe that their organisation has been infiltrated by traitors & informers, & until these have been rooted out supplies are being witheld. This plot seems plausible.

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We're currently seeing frequently rotated recruitment adverts for the British Army on television. They show a group of squaddies in the back of a bumping lorry, one of them tells the camera, 'We work hard, but we play even harder'. They pull up at a wrecked village, & jump out into the lashing rain & mud. They are not carrying guns. The young woman commanding them briskly gives them their orders, then explains to us, rain teeming from her forage hat, that this is a disaster relief mission. There's been a hurricane, & they're there to help the villagers. It's clear that this village is in neither Afghanistan nor Iraq.

Perhaps the 'play even harder' bit might help explain the recent findings by Napo, the probation officers union, that at least 9 percent of the UK prison population of 93,574 (the biggest in Europe), is made up of ex servicemen, most of them having served in Afghanistan & the Gulf. That's over 8,500 - more troops than the British currently have stationed in Iraq.

The report says the number could be higher, & cites violent offences fuelled by alcohol & drugs as a common factor. It also said that the most of the men in the case studies had shown symptoms of untreated post traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, it's easy to find yourself behind bars in Britain. The prison population is not just the largest in Europe, it's bigger than the prison population of the rest of Europe combined. Locking people up in large numbers has been Government policy for the past three decades, both under the Tories & what used to be the Labour Party. Some magistrates & members of the judiciary, hardly bastions of liberalism, regularly complain about having to bang up so many people. The Government responds by proposing the building of 'Titan' prisons, to hold vast numbers of overwhelmingly poor, damaged or mentally distressed inmates - including more of the young men & women lured into the forces, sent to futile or illegal wars to be brutalised, devastated, & then let loose on the streets, awash with other youths enjoying our renowned culture of binge drinking & casual violence.

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