See responses below
-Chip Berlet
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Hakki Alacakaptan" <nucleus at superonline.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 5:15 AM Subject: RE: Hakki, Paranoia, and Fascist Garbage
> I would like to see you sticking your neck out to present an alternative
> analysis, or counter-arguments. I would like to see you as eager to debunk
> the government spin regurgitated on this list without any attempt to analyze
> it. Instead, all I see is knee-jerk conspiracy-baiting.
>
> Instead of making these star appearances and pontificating, why don't you
> contribute something substantive to the list and risk getting your ass
> kicked, or just shut the fuck up?
>
> Hakki Alacakaptan
=============================== Chip:
Hakki would like me to post something "Substantive."
OK.
I argue that some of the material you are posting is unreliable and right-wing conspiracism.
I object to posting right-wing conspiracism for two reasons.
1) It is often not based on a logical analysis of facts, but is engaged in conspiracist scapegoating which is a waste of everyone's time and victimizes the scapegoats.
2) It provides an endorsement of right-wing sources published by groups who may be engaged in a current campaign to recruit people toward right-wing xenophobia and authoritarian solutions based on a crude conspiracist anti-elite analysis divorced from any structural, systemic, or institutional basis.
Please note that I have never objected to posting such right-wing material on left lists as long as it is identified as such so people can decide if they wish to pursue it for whatever reason.
please read on...
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Hakki Alacakaptan" <nucleus at superonline.com>
> Chip,
>
> It's tiresome replying to people who don't read what you write. The stuff in
> the Bush book is common knowledge and is from official transcripts.
==============
Chip:
I have read the book by LaRouche network activists Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, "Bush: The Unauthorized Biography." It is not, as you claim, "common knowledge and is from official transcripts." It takes a large volume of facts and spins them into a paranoid froth of conjecture and conspiracism. How they could take a mountain of hard evidence about wrongdoing by the Bush family and reduce it into a septic molehill of gossip and hyperbolic speculation was really quite a feat.
Consider "Chapter -XXI- Omaha" which starts with homophobic titillation and proceeds to imply that Bush was somehow implicated in a child sex ring based in Omaha. The entire "Franklin" affair has been thoroughly discredited in the Nebraska media as a paranoid conspiracy theory. It is part of a larger right-wing hysteria over satanic ritual abuse that usually ends up scapegoating gay people, feminists and pagans.
Material from the LaRouchites mixes facts with selective misleading quotes and excerpts, fallacies of logic, rumor from unnamed sources, and factual innacuracies. Nothing from a LaRouche source should be cited without tracking down the original documentation.
Tarpley is also known for his work defending the LaRouche thesis that the world is controlled by the House of Windsor and the Queen of England. Here is an example:
================ BRITISH FINANCIAL WARFARE: 1929; 1931- 33 HOW THE CITY OF LONDON CREATED THE GREAT DEPRESSION by Webster G. Tarpley
"The thesis of this paper is that the great economic and financial cataclysm of the first half of the twentieth century, which we have come to know as the Great Depression, was caused by the Bank of England, the British government, and the City of London. The potential for the Great Depression derived from the economic and human destruction wrought by World War I, which was itself a product of British geopolitics and especially of the British policy, exemplified by King Edward VII, of creating an encircling anti-German alliance in order to wage war." http://www.tarpley.net/29crash.htm
===================
Chip:
Now some, like myself, argue that LaRouche uses the idea of world control by the British oligarchy as a stand-in for classic antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jewish bankers. This is common in right-wing conspiracism, the classic work being E.C. Knuth, "Empire of 'The City': A Basic History of International Power Politics, (Mequon, Wisconsin: Empire Publishing Co., 1946); A tract claiming Jewish bankers run Britain and control international politics from the London financial district.
Tarpley digs himself deeper into the conspiracist sewer in The Venetian Conspiracy, by Webster Tarpley, The [LaRouchite] Campaigner, September, 1981. Alas, it recently was pulled offline.
As for Anton Chaitkin, he claims the Freemasons ran the KKK. http://hardtruth.topcities.com/scottishriteproject.htm Most historians dismiss this claim, because it is based primarily on the KKK having named (without his prior knowledge) General Pike, a leading Freemason in the South, to be a state leader; a pleasure he declined.
Here is a snippet from Chaitkin: http://hardtruth.topcities.com/scottishriteproject.htm The Scottish Rite's KKK Project by Anton Chaitkin
==="...Then, August Belmont, the U.S. representative of Britain's Rothschild banks, paid for Pierce's 1852 election campaign. Though this blatant foreign intrusion caused a flare-up of resentment among the voters, Pierce was elected the 14th President, and his foreign and domestic backers took over..."
==="But let us ask, does Mr. Pike's organization have an ``un-Christian or anti-Christian character''? Albert Pike responded in 1861 to a Mason who tried to claim the Scottish Rite was somehow Christian. Pike said that if the Scottish Rite ``had a Christian basis, how did it chance that most of those who had possession of it in this country from 1763 to 1800 were Hebrews?'' In fact, Pike and the Scottish Rite borrowed a good deal of numerology and other superstition from the Jewish cabala, a neo-pagan tradition in direct opposition to the Mosaic law underlying the Jewish religion."
The Jews!
==="The Terror Project The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, an instrument of British Empire strategy, directed a continuous offensive of murder and racist terrorism against the U.S.A. "
The Queen!
==="Since then, other ``Israelites with Egyptian principles,'' those Jews who like Benjamin attached their destinies to the British Empire and its racialism, have become a vital component of the Anglo-American Eastern Establishment; ``honorary Anglo-Saxons,'' they have helped transform the United States into an essentially mindless British model imperium."
The Queen and the Jews!
Chaitkin goes on to weave together the old antisemitic conspiracy theory about secret cabals of Jews controlling the banks and the media.
Yawn...
=====================
From: Hakki Alacakaptan To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 2:33 PM Subject: RE: more on Falk
=============== Hakki Alacakaptan: The record bears some straight-setting here. The U.S. bombing of Libya during which Kaddafi's adopted daughter was killed was in retaliation to the 1986 Berlin "La Belle" disco bombing, which a ZDF investigative report revealed to be a joint CIA-MOSSAD false flag operation. The full report can be found at www.wsws.org under "US Militarism". MOSSAD defector Victor Ostrovsky wrote that his ex-employers subsequently planted a transmitter in Libya that the NSA picked up, prompting the time-honored knee-jerk U.S. response of sending in the carriers (paid for em, might as well use em).
<<SNIP>>
===============
Chip:
Blowing up the disco was a "CIA-MOSSAD false flag operation" according to Hakki. Really? Quite a scandal. Visit the page at http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/aug1998/bomb1-a27.shtml and there is less than meets the eye. It is a rewrite by a German correspondent for wsws.org of a German TV program. Many of the claims are single-source and unverifiable. Another interpretation of the article is that most of the perpetrators were mercenaries for hire, and that it is unclear who hired them.
Here is how the Federation of American Scientists reports on the case:
"On 4 December, [1992] German prosecutors identified two Libyan Embassy workers as having helped a Palestinian carry out the 1986 La Belle disco bombing that killed two US soldiers and a Turkish woman and wounded more than 200. The Libyans implicated in the case were working at the time at Libya's Embassy in East Germany and supplied the Palestinian with weapons and other cover support. In addition, the two Libyans had worked with the Palestinian in plotting an attack against a location where US soldiers congregated. This latest confirmation of Libyan involvement in the La Belle bombing serves as a reminder of Tripoli's traditional practice of using its diplomatic missions abroad to carry out terrorist acts."
FAS is highly critical of US intelligence operations. The right-wing libertarian Cato Institute also blames Libyan agents.
Let's see where this story starts. What does journalist Eric S. Margolis report?:
http://www.foreigncorrespondent.com/archive/murders.html
"Tripoli became a Mecca for every sort of third world revolutionary group. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a defector from Israel's secret service, Mossad, Israel decided to mount a false-flag operation designed to further discredit Libya, and provoke the US to attack an Arab nation. A transmitter loaded with pre-recorded messages was planted in Tripoli, Libya, by a Mossad team.
The `Trojan Horse' beamed out fake messages about Libyan-authored bombings and planned attacks that were immediately intercepted by US electronic monitoring. Convinced by this disinformation that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco in which a US soldier died, President Ronald Reagan ordered massive air attacks on Libya, including an obvious- and illegal(according to US law)- attempt to assassinate Qadaffi. Some 100 Libyan civilians were killed, including Qadaffi's daughter. A year later, senior Libyan officials told me they still could not understand why they were attacked. "
There is no information here that Libyan agents did not carry out the bombing of the disco, just that Mossad planted a transmitter inside Libya where a false message was sent purporting to be from Libyans claiming they had done the bombing. This is the "false flag" operation, not the bombing itself.
According to the Christian Science Monitor of 11/01/01: "American authorities, too, were vaguely aware of an impending attack. According to East German Foreign Ministry files, days before the La Belle bomb went off, the US government informed East German authorities of its concerns about a brewing Libyan conspiracy, but the authorities took no action. On the night of the attack, the US commander in Berlin had ordered that American servicemen be cleared from places where they usually congregated, Mehlis says, adding that military police were on their way to the La Belle disco when the bomb went off. "
The case is reported to be near its end.
=============== Hakki Alacakaptan:
In 1988, The USS Vincennes downed an Iran Air jet killing 290 people. Iran put out a contract for a retaliatory terrorist attack. The contractor was Ahmed Jibril of the FPLP-GC, based in Damascus. Ollie North's arms/drugs/hostages operation also got involved and less than 6 months after the Iran Air massacre, PanAm 103 went down with the full knowledge of the CIA, taking with it a DIA team that was headed back to Washington to blow the whistle on Ollie. The "evidence" incriminating Libya was planted on the Lockerbie crash site weeks later in afterthought. Read about it here.
<<SNIP>>
OK, this is an amazing claim. So I go to that link marked in the "here" in the last line above, and it is a website run by a person who runs the Constitutional Militia listserver. Let's be generous, and call them a right-wing Patriot activist and Militia supporter. Great source, Hakki. OK, what about the article you link to at that site:
http://www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt_08.htm
"Lockerbie - A Parallel"
Let's check some of the cites.
===1365. (986) John DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up (Lincoln, NE: AWT, Inc., 1996), pp. 345-46
Back to the LaRouche-promoted "Franklin" conspiracy that was the "Omaha" chapter in the LaRouchite Tarpley & Chaitkin book on Bush.
===1368. (988) General Benton K. Partin, interview with author.
Partin is a right-wing crank who claims there were secret bombs inside the Oklahoma federal building.
===1353. (979) Ace R. Hayes, "Sacrificial Goat," Portland Free Press, July/October, 1997.
The late Ace Hayes was a notorious "leftist" conspiracy crank who worked closely with the right-wing Patriot movement. He once wrote an article calling me "Pope Berlet" suggesting I was an undercover agent for the Feds and the Political Research Associates was funded by the CIA. Thanks a bunch
===1348. (975) ... Debra Von Trapp, interview with author.
Let's let pro-conspiracy advocates characterise Von Trapp:
"NBC's Dateline attempted to pooh-pooh any theory that the government's version of events was not on the up and up by interviewing two of the most outrageous conspiracy theorists they could find: Debra Von Trapp, who claims the bombing was a retaliation for the Japanese subway gassing, and former FBI agent Ted Gunderson, who claimed the bomb was a miniature nuclear weapon, and even someone who cooks up details from Ouija board."
I mean, if conspiracists call Von Trapp "outrageous," what can I add?
===1338. (968) Jack Terrell, NBC transcript, quoted in Christic, Op Cit. The Octopus would attempt to silence Terrell by informing the FBI that he had threatened the life of the President.
Citing the discredited Christic Institute, talking about the vast "Octopus," music to my ears.
===1291. (930) Gene Wheaton, "Secret Island Spy Base," Portland Free Press, July-October, 1996. Wheaton and Hunt both claims that an ABC news helicopter was shot down over the island in 1985, killing a female reporter. The incident was covered up for reasons of "national security."
This claim of a secret spy training island is one of the false leads that distracted attorney Danny Sheehan from actually doing a thorough job preparing the solid pats of the lawsuit. Folks know that the plaintiffs in the case, Avirgan and Honey, sued Sheehan for blowing the case with pointless conspiracy theories, right?
===1317. (951) William Jasper, "The Price of Peace," The New American, 2/5/96.
The John Birch Society, promoters of the Illuminati/Freemason conspiracy theory.
===1286. (927) Daniel Brandt, "Organized Crime Threatens the New World Order," NameBase NewsLine, No. 8, January-March 1995.
Brandt, a major conspiracy-monger, moved from the left to promoting the antisemitic and fascist Spotlight newspaper.
===1267. (**) Alex Constantine (Blood, Carnage, and the Agent Provocateur), who interviewed local residents, discovered that some of the arsonists were clearly not locals.
Just try search for Constantine on the web. Quite a treat if you believe in government mind control through secret waves. For a sample link:
"THE CONSTANTINE REPORT No. 1 'Remote Viewing' at Stanford Research Institute or Illicit CIA Mind Control Experimentation? Alex Constantine is the author of Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A. (Feral House, 1995), an exploration of electromagnetic mind control, cults formed by the CIA, collaboration with old guard Nazis, media disinformation and other outrageous acts of federal malfeasance." http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhreport/articles/const1.html
===1226. (882) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "IRA 'supplied detonator for Oklahoma terror bomb,'" London Sunday Telegraph, 3/30/97.
Please, spare me.
=======================================
So Hakki, I think I can rest my case here?
Ta!
-Chip