France declares state of emergency after ISIS terrorist attacks kill over 100 in Paris
By Alex Lantier
14 November 2015

Horrific scenes of bloodshed filled the streets of Paris last night, as multiple simultaneous terrorist attacks starting around 10 p.m. claimed at least 140 lives and left at least 110 wounded, including dozens in critical condition.

Shortly before midnight, French President François Hollande announced that France was closing its borders and imposing a state of emergency under a 1955 law that suspends key democratic rights. Several areas of Paris were on lockdown early Saturday morning, and authorities called on Parisians to stay inside, as police helicopters circled overhead and paramilitary police and army units deployed across the city.

According to anonymous high-ranking officials cited by the media, there were at least seven nearly simultaneous terrorist attacks, which were likely coordinated. These attacks included:

* At the Bataclan theater in Paris’ 11th district, a team of three or four gunmen armed with grenades took hundreds of people hostage at a concert of the Eagles of Death Metal, an American band. According to some concertgoers who managed to flee the scene, the gunmen were shouting “Allah Akbar” and “This is for Syria.” Paramilitary police units stormed the building shortly after 12:30 a.m. Saturday, killing two terrorists. They said they found horrific scenes inside, with over 100 dead.

* Three bombs went off at restaurants and a cinema near the Stade de France stadium just north of the city, in the near suburbs, where tens of thousands of fans were watching a football match between France and Germany. One of the bombs was reportedly activated by a suicide bomber. According to initial reports, there were four dead and 50 wounded, including 11 in critical condition, in these attacks. Hollande, who was at the Stade de France watching the game, left for the Interior Ministry after the blasts, but the game was nevertheless allowed to continue to its conclusion.

* On Bichat street in Paris’ 10th district, there were 14 dead and 20 wounded including 10 in critical condition, according to Fire Department figures, after a series of drive-by shootings carried out by gunmen in a black car at several restaurants. Further shootings occurred across the area nearby, which is a popular hangout on Friday nights.

* There were four dead and 21 wounded, including 11 in critical condition, in shootings on the nearby Avenue de la République.

* There were 19 shot dead and 23 wounded, including 13 in critical condition on Charonne street.

* There were seven wounded, including three in critical condition, in shootings on Boulevard Beaumarchais.

* There were reports of other shootings in several other locations across downtown Paris, including at the Forum des Halles shopping area.

Authorities had been aware of potential threats earlier in the day. A bomb threat phoned in at noon to the Hotel Molitor, where the German national football team was staying, forced the evacuation of the hotel, which was sealed off with police tape before it was searched and then declared safe two hours later.

In a brief public address before attending a Council of Ministers meeting at midnight, Hollande announced that he had ordered an all-out deployment of the security forces and an intervention by the military.

“Two decisions will be taken: the state of emergency will be decreed, which means several places will be closed off, and traffic will be limited in certain areas,” he said.

Hollande continued: “The state of emergency will apply across the country. The second decision I have taken is to close the borders, so that the people who have committed these crimes can be apprehended. We know where this attack came from. We must show compassion and solidarity, but we must also show we are united.”

Though Hollande remarked that French officials “know where this attack came from,” as of this writing no terrorist group has taken responsibility. However, several media reports suggested that the attacks were carried out by members of the Western-backed Sunni Islamist militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

Former CIA director James Woolsey told ABC News that since the United States, France and other countries had killed top “management” of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militia, “We have to realize we are at war.”

The immense sympathy for the victims and the terrible suffering that their families will endure does not relieve us of the responsibility of assessing the source of this tragedy. If, as seems likely, the attacks were carried out by European veterans of ISIS or a similar militia, the hundreds of dead and wounded in the streets of Paris are victims of imperialist wars in the Middle East, waged for cynical geopolitical ends, that are now spiraling out of control.

Twelve years ago, when the Bush administration launched an illegal invasion of Iraq, the French government, foreseeing the disaster that would flow from the war, refused to participate. The reintegration of France into NATO’s military command in 2009, followed by its decision to join the United States and other NATO powers in Middle East wars in 2011, has proven to have disastrous consequences.

The French political establishment backed Islamist militias in proxy wars for regime change in Libya and Syria, encouraging its citizens to join these militias by widely presenting them in the media as “revolutionaries” fighting Gaddafi and Assad. Now these forces, trained to carry out terrorist attacks and guerrilla warfare in the Middle East, are returning home. This has created a political environment in which terrorism can flourish and spread rapidly, and as a result the war has come home to France.

“The danger comes from a more or less large team of guys from theaters of operation where they were blooded, maybe Syria or Libya, Yemen, who find weapons at home (in France) and go into action,” commented Yves Trotignon, the head of French foreign intelligence’s anti-terrorist services, to AFP. “Guys who are determined and ready to die, who have studied the target and are solid from an operational point of view can do enormous damage. The number of veteran jihadists is increasing every day.”

Since the Kouachi brothers waged their deadly terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in January, the ruling elite has reacted to such dangers not by shifting away from the policy of war for regime change in Syria, but by building up the state’s anti-democratic police powers.

After Hollande’s announcement, reporters on iTélé repeatedly said that France is at war, and that numerous harsh measures specified by the 1955 state of emergency law would be put into effect. The law allows French authorities to impose curfews, carry out arbitrary searches of private homes at any time, censor the press, impose military tribunals, order the house arrest of individuals without trial, close public places, and collect private weapons.

The last time the state of emergency was invoked was in 2005, when it was partially invoked in response to mass suburban riots provoked by the electrocution of two youth fleeing police. However, the last time all these powers were invoked by the French state was in the years after its promulgation, when it was used to impose a state of emergency in Algeria in a failed attempt to crush the revolt against French colonial rule in Algeria.

Media reported that there are plans for mass searches in the Paris area later today. Schools and universities, as well as all Paris public facilities, are to be closed and some political parties are closing down their campaigns for next month’s regional elections.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/14/fran-n14.html

Reports indicate an unprecedented terrorist attack has unfolded in France, with over 150 dead, many more injured and reports still trickling in regarding the full-scale of the violence. The BBC in its report, “Paris attacks: Bataclan and other assaults leave many dead,” stated:

France has declared a national state of emergency and tightened borders after at least 120 people were killed in a night of gun and bomb attacks in Paris.

Eighty people were reported killed after gunmen burst into the Bataclan concert hall and took dozens hostage.

The siege ended when security forces stormed the building.

People were shot dead at bars and restaurants at five other sites in Paris. Eight attackers are reported to have been killed.

The BBC has also released a graphic indicating at least 5 separate locations where the attacks unfolded, while other media organizations have reported that both bombs and small arms were employed, including military rifles.


How Did France’s Expanding Surveillance State Miss This?

On a scale significantly larger than the previous Paris terror attack carried out against several targets across the capital in January of this year ending in the death of 12, the Western media is already assigning blame to the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS/ISIL) or those “inspired” by ISIS.

It was in the wake of the January attacks that France expanded its already towering surveillance state. The Guardian in an article titled, “France passes new surveillance law in wake of Charlie Hebdo attack,” reported:

The new law will allow authorities to spy on the digital and mobile phone communications of anyone linked to a “terrorist” inquiry without prior authorisation from a judge. It forces internet service providers and phone companies to give up data upon request.

Intelligence services will have the right to place cameras and recording devices in private homes and install so-called keylogger devices that record every key stroke on a targeted computer in real time. The authorities will be able to keep recordings for a month and metadata for five years.

One of the most contentious elements of the bill is that it allows intelligence services to vacuum up metadata, which would then be subject to analysis for potentially suspicious behaviour. The metadata would be anonymous, but intelligence agents could follow up with a request to an independent panel for deeper surveillance that could yield the identity of users.

Despite having allegedly lacked these capabilities before the “Charlie Hebo attack,” it would be revealed shortly after that indeed, French security agencies were extensively familiar with the attackers years beforehand – letting the suspects “drop from their radars” just 6 months before the attack occurred, precisely the amount of time generally required for planning and executing such an attack.

Slate Magazine would report in their article, “The Details of Paris Suspect Cherif Kouachi’s 2008 Terrorism Conviction,” that:

Kouachi was arrested in January 2005, accused of planning to join jihadists in Iraq. He was said to have fallen under the sway of Farid Benyettou, a young “self-taught preacher” who advocated violence, but had not actually yet traveled to Iraq or committed any acts of terror. Lawyers at the time said he had not received weapons training and “had begun having second thoughts,” going so far as to express “relief” that he’d been apprehended.

CNN would report in an article titled, “France tells U.S. Paris suspect trained with al Qaeda in Yemen,” that:

Western intelligence officials are scrambling to learn more about possible travel of the two Paris terror attack suspects, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, with new information suggesting one of the brothers recently spent time in Yemen associating with al Qaeda in that country, U.S. officials briefed on the matter told CNN. Additional information from a French source close to the French security services puts one of the brothers in Syria.

The Wall Street Journal would reveal in an article titled, “Overburdened French Dropped Surveillance of Brothers,” that:

The U.S. provided France with intelligence showing that the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo massacre received training in Yemen in 2011, prompting French authorities to begin monitoring the two brothers, according to U.S. officials. But that surveillance of Said and Chérif Kouachi came to an end last spring, U.S. officials said, after several years of monitoring turned up nothing suspicious.

It is abundantly clear that the “Charlie Hebo attack” suspects were dangerous terrorists, tracked by the government because of this fact, but inexplicably allowed to continue on with their activities until they inevitably carried out a deadly act of terrorism on French soil – an act of terrorism quickly exploited to ramrod through unpopular security bills and further perpetuate France’s unpopular role in America’s various extraterritorial military adventures abroad, including the West’s proxy war in Syria.


Images: The “Charlie Hebo attack” suspects, were tracked by French security agencies for a decade before the attack unfolded – with the suspects dropping off French authorities’ radar for precisely the 6 months they needed to plan and carry out their grand finale.
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Those involved in this most recent attack will also likely be revealed to have been tracked by French security agencies long before the attacks – this is because the attacks will, by necessity, need to be linked to the Syrian conflict to justify the recent appearance of France’s largest warship, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, off the coast of Syria, and the much larger Western military intervention needed in order to save a proxy war that has been all but lost by the West.

State Sponsorship – But Which State? Gladio Extra

As the refugee crisis expanded in Europe, it was warned that it would be purposefully manipulated to create maximum hysteria to justify more direct military intervention in the West’s losing proxy war in Syria.

In a previous report titled, “Can Pan-European Hysteria Save NATO’s Syrian War?,” it was warned that:

What is taking form is a controlled strategy of tension, where far-right groups are being arrayed against the migrants and their European supporters, to create hysteria and eventually violence that will be leveraged by those who orchestrated it.

Permissive immigration policies and self-imposed quotas ensured a virtual tidal wave of migrants coming into Europe, while long-cultivated racist and xenophobic political groups – holdovers from NATO’s notorious “Gladio” Cold War stay-behind networks – attempted to create backlash and hysteria in the streets regarding a migrant “invasion.”


Image: ISIS is clearly state-sponsored, but not by any of the nations the West seeks to overthrow in the wake of terrorist attacks carried out on Western soil. Likely the terrorists who spilled blood on Parisian streets this week were armed, trained, and funded by the West itself and its own allies in the ongoing proxy war in Syria.
All that was left to complete the equation was an incredible act of galvanizing violence that would create the long-absent public support the West needed to justify further meddling in Syria – public support that the narratives of “helping freedom fighters,” recycled lies regarding “weapons of mass destruction,” and tales of “barrel bombs” failed to generate.

Among the targets in this most recent attack was a football stadium hosting a French-German match attended by French President François Hollande himself – which is particularly important to note since foreknowledge of Hollande’s location would have required significant planning and preparations. The choice of attacking a football stadium is also significant, considering that undoubtedly the primary demographic attending the football match would have been those most vocally opposed to the expanding refugee crisis.


Image: Conveniently, the French flagship, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle seen in this file photo, was just sent to Syria’s coast last week. It is now poised to take part in any expanded military campaign predicated on the attacks that just unfolded in Paris, by attackers likely funded, armed, and trained by the West itself.
In other words, it was an attack designed specifically to provoke French public opinion into supporting action.

The scale of the attack is that of a military operation. It would have required a large group of well trained militants, well armed and funded, with experience in planning and executing coordinated military operations, moving large amounts of weapons clandestinely, experts in the use of weapons and explosives, as well as possessing intelligence capabilities used to somehow circumvent France’s increasingly colossal surveillance capabilities.

Like the terrorists and their supply lines pouring out of NATO-territory into Syria itself, clearly with immense state sponsorship behind them, those involved in the most recent attacks in Paris are also clearly the recipients of state-sponsored funding and training.

While France will undoubtedly try to use this attack to justify further intervention in Syria to topple the government in Damascus, it was most likely France’s own allies in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and even Paris itself who were directly or indirectly involved in the training, arming, and funding of those who spilled blood on Parisian streets this week.

The first and most important question in examining any great crime is “cui bono?” or to whose benefit? Attacking Paris, and in particular a football match full of nationalists already increasingly violent and hysterical seems to only benefit a government seeking further justification to wage wider war abroad – a war it is currently losing and a war it currently lacks wide public support to continue fighting.

It now, all so conveniently, has the support it was looking for.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/attack-in-france-state-sponsored-terror-but-which-state/5488941

America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group

By Garikai Chengu
Global Research, November 14, 2015
Global Research 19 September 2014
Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', Intelligence, US NATO War Agenda
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Originally published by GR in September 2014

Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region.

The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.”

During the 1970′s the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980′s. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of “the database” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

America’s relationship with Al Qaeda has always been a love-hate affair. Depending on whether a particular Al Qaeda terrorist group in a given region furthers American interests or not, the U.S. State Department either funds or aggressively targets that terrorist group. Even as American foreign policy makers claim to oppose Muslim extremism, they knowingly foment it as a weapon of foreign policy.

The Islamic State is its latest weapon that, much like Al Qaeda, is certainly backfiring. ISIS recently rose to international prominence after its thugs began beheading American journalists. Now the terrorist group controls an area the size of the United Kingdom.

In order to understand why the Islamic State has grown and flourished so quickly, one has to take a look at the organization’s American-backed roots. The 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq created the pre-conditions for radical Sunni groups, like ISIS, to take root. America, rather unwisely, destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state machinery and replaced it with a predominantly Shiite administration. The U.S. occupation caused vast unemployment in Sunni areas, by rejecting socialism and closing down factories in the naive hope that the magical hand of the free market would create jobs. Under the new U.S.-backed Shiite regime, working class Sunni’s lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Unlike the white Afrikaners in South Africa, who were allowed to keep their wealth after regime change, upper class Sunni’s were systematically dispossessed of their assets and lost their political influence. Rather than promoting religious integration and unity, American policy in Iraq exacerbated sectarian divisions and created a fertile breading ground for Sunni discontent, from which Al Qaeda in Iraq took root.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used to have a different name: Al Qaeda in Iraq. After 2010 the group rebranded and refocused its efforts on Syria.

There are essentially three wars being waged in Syria: one between the government and the rebels, another between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and yet another between America and Russia. It is this third, neo-Cold War battle that made U.S. foreign policy makers decide to take the risk of arming Islamist rebels in Syria, because Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is a key Russian ally. Rather embarrassingly, many of these Syrian rebels have now turned out to be ISIS thugs, who are openly brandishing American-made M16 Assault rifles.

America’s Middle East policy revolves around oil and Israel. The invasion of Iraq has partially satisfied Washington’s thirst for oil, but ongoing air strikes in Syria and economic sanctions on Iran have everything to do with Israel. The goal is to deprive Israel’s neighboring enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of crucial Syrian and Iranian support.

ISIS is not merely an instrument of terror used by America to topple the Syrian government; it is also used to put pressure on Iran.

The last time Iran invaded another nation was in 1738. Since independence in 1776, the U.S. has been engaged in over 53 military invasions and expeditions. Despite what the Western media’s war cries would have you believe, Iran is clearly not the threat to regional security, Washington is. An Intelligence Report published in 2012, endorsed by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, confirms that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Truth is, any Iranian nuclear ambition, real or imagined, is as a result of American hostility towards Iran, and not the other way around.

America is using ISIS in three ways: to attack its enemies in the Middle East, to serve as a pretext for U.S. military intervention abroad, and at home to foment a manufactured domestic threat, used to justify the unprecedented expansion of invasive domestic surveillance.

By rapidly increasing both government secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government. Terrorism is an excuse to justify mass surveillance, in preparation for mass revolt.

The so-called “War on Terror” should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military. The two most powerful groups in the U.S. foreign policy establishment are the Israel lobby, which directs U.S. Middle East policy, and the Military-Industrial-Complex, which profits from the former group’s actions. Since George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror” in October 2001, it has cost the American taxpayer approximately 6.6 trillion dollars and thousands of fallen sons and daughters; but, the wars have also raked in billions of dollars for Washington’s military elite.

In fact, more than seventy American companies and individuals have won up to $27 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three years, according to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity. According to the study, nearly 75 per cent of these private companies had employees or board members, who either served in, or had close ties to, the executive branch of the Republican and Democratic administrations, members of Congress, or the highest levels of the military.

In 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense report stated, “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S.” Truth is, the only way America can win the “War On Terror” is if it stops giving terrorists the motivation and the resources to attack America. Terrorism is the symptom; American imperialism in the Middle East is the cancer. Put simply, the War on Terror is terrorism; only, it is conducted on a much larger scale by people with jets and missiles.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881

Paris Terror Attacks: Blowback or False Flag? France Declares a State of Emergency

By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, November 14, 2015
Region: Europe
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism'
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Multiple likely well-planned Friday night attacks in Paris had a disturbing aroma to them – including France’s knee-jerk police state reaction. Here’s what happened.

At least seven apparently well-coordinated attacks occurred, gunmen with automatic weapons and suicide belts killing over 150 victims. Many others were injured. Stade de France stadium was struck during a football (soccer) match between France and Germany.

So was the Bataclan theater during a concert, restaurants full of patrons, a cinema, and pedestrians on Bichat Street, the Avenue de la Republique and Boulevard Beaumarchais.

Reports indicated other Paris locations were attacked, including the Forum des Halles shopping area attracting an estimated 150,000 daily visitors.

The predictable aftermath so far includes French President Francois Hollande declaring a state of emergency – effectively suspending constitutional rights under martial law.

“Two decisions will be taken,” Hollande announced. “The state of emergency will be decreed, which means several places will be closed off, and traffic will be limited in certain areas.”

The state of emergency will apply across the country. The second decision I have taken is to close the borders, so that the people who have committed these crimes can be apprehended.

We know where this attack came from. We must show compassion and solidarity, but we must also show we are united. There is much to fear, but we must face these fears as a nation that knows how to muster its forces and will confront the terrorists.

Heavily armed French soldiers were deployed around key Parisian locations. Five metro lines were shut. Orly airport flights were suspended. All city schools and universities were closed.

De facto martial law legitimizes repressive police state powers. Constitutional protections are suspended. Following the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, a no-fly zone was ordered over a 3.5 mile radius of the incident.

Swat teams conducted pre-dawn raids throughout the greater area. Residents were terrorized. Helicopters patrolled overhead. Police and FBI operatives were everywhere. Managed news misinformation substituted for accurate reporting.

Post-9/11, Bush claimed unconstitutional “unitary executive” authority to govern extrajudicially in the name of national security.

He declared (phony) war on terror and hot war on Afghanistan. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Donbass and Yemen followed. Police state laws were enacted – still in force. Repressive National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directives were announced.

Hollande cancelled his G-20 summit participation, scheduled for November 15 and 16 in Turkey. It’s unclear if Obama will attend. The world’s leading perpetrator of state terrorism offered France “full support,” duplicitously saying America shares the bonds of “liberte, egalite and fraternite.”

US post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction blamed bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the attack – the mother of all Big Lies, we now know.

ISIS was automatically blamed for the Paris attacks – despite no evidence so far establishing responsibility. Official statements, actions and media hype created an atmosphere of fear, a likely public willingness to sacrifice freedom for so-called security, a rationale for harsh measures to try stemming the human refugee flood caused by US-led imperial wars, and a desire for revenge.

Perhaps the stage is set for escalated Western wars OF terror instead of unity to battle the scourge of ISIS and likeminded groups. Were Friday attacks state-sponsored terrorism – a carefully staged false flag for whatever may follow?

Herman Goering once explained how easy it is to get people to go along with “the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country,” he said.

Friday Paris attacks were either blowback for Western wars on Islam or a state-sponsored false flag. Odds strongly favor the latter. Western history of false flags for subsequent planned events suggests it.

On September 20, 2001, George Bush lied to Congress and the public, claiming America was attacked because we are “a beacon of freedom.” The attackers were “evil. This is civilization’s fight.” He suppressed Washington’s direct responsibility for what happened, perhaps complicit with Israel’s Mossad.

The aftermath of 9/11 is clear – endless US-led imperial wars, a phony Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), an assault on fundamental human and civil rights, police state harshness replacing them, an America unfit to live in.

Will France and other European countries become more belligerent and repressive than already in response to Friday’s incident?

Were Washington and perhaps Israel’s dirty hands involved in what happened?

Daesh (ISIS/ISIL/IS) is such an easy target to blame. It’s simple getting most people to believe it unquestionably.

The Big Lie repeated often enough works the same way every time. ISIS is the new “Enemy Number One.” Its creation by Washington and use as proxy foot soldiers is suppressed.

Was Friday’s Paris incident prelude to something similar planned for New York, Washington, and/or other US cities?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-terror-attacks-blowback-or-false-flag-france-declares-a-state-of-emergency/5488973

13/11 Paris Massacre: Cui Bono?

By Oriental Review
Global Research, November 15, 2015
Oriental Review 14 November 2015
Region: Europe
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', Intelligence, Police State & Civil Rights
print 1798 33 10 2606
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Yesterday night things changed in an instant in Paris. The available evidence suggest that the assaults were carried out by a professional killer group who used live bombs among other weapons. Today’s post by Pepe Escobar on his Facebook page sheds some light on symbolism and timimg of the massacre:

Scouring a ton of reports, I found a Danish citizen describing one of the attackers to a Paris café; ultra-pro, black-clad head to toe, AK-47, very well trained. These are not your usual al-Zawahiri underwear bombers; these are precision killers. This one left the scene undisturbed, and contrary to French police, may not have been captured. He wore no suicide vest.

French intel swears they are monitoring at least 200 nationals who came back from “Syraq”. Talk about a lousy job. Paris is hyper-policed. The mind boggles thinking of at least 8 jihadis promenading at will on a Friday night dressed as pro killers.

They picked a mix of heavily symbolic venues. You have a France-German match witnessed by the President in a stadium where all barriers – ethnic, religious – dissolve, a true symbol of multiculturalism. You have a gig by an American band in a concert hall filled with young people. You have your average, cool, neighborhood cafés in the 10eme and 11eme, young, hip, secular, bobo Paris hoods.

This points to a calibrated conceptual spectrum – carefully mapped out by French insiders; perhaps those “Syraq” returnees. This also points to a monumental fail by French intel and the Ministry of Interior.

Timing: crucial. Just as the US/Brits announce they “may” have evaporated with Jihad John. And a few hours before the Vienna talks are supposed to come up with an official Top Ten terrorist list in Syria.

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As always, the honest response to the question cui bono might be the last (and perhaps major) victim of the 13/11 tragedy in Paris.

Several strong voices in favor of internal false flag version have already appeared, while the weak French government and secret services totally relying on ‘American partners’ are hardly possessing enough resources to orchestrate the drama of such scale.

The underline reading of the hot-caked Stratfor report on the Paris attacks (certainly presuming undoubtful and entire Islamic State involment) suggests that the American neocons want to see a bigger French boot on the ground in Syraq. (More elaboration on NATO’s mobilization as a result of 13/11 is done by Patrick Henningsen from 21st Century Wire .) They were also not satisfied by the French resilence to fully tumble into the pan-European refugee turmoil and general public indifference to anti-Islamic provocateurs from Charlie Hebdo. The only side effect bothering Stratfor analysts is the apparent rise of Marine Le Pen which, according to them, should be nipped by setting Nikolas Sarkozy at the same electoral field.

As a matter of fact, the bloody night in Paris was launched to definitely bury the European project as it was originally seen in Paris and Berlin – economically powerful and politically sovereign concert of nations. The symbolism of attacks’ initiation near Stad du France during the France-Germany friendly match is obvious. We will not be surprised if the French investigation of the attack would discover a clear German trace of the perpetrators. The rules of the genre demand such storyline.

Very few in Europe are still taking seriously the immutable fact that the European Union allied with the Eurasian resourse base is even a bigger nightmare for the Wall Street owners than the established Russia-China alliance (please read more on the issue in our yesterday’s update Grandmaster Putin’s Trap-2). The incumbent Wall Street-controlled EU bureaucracy is rapidly loosing not only public support in the European countries (it is mauvais ton in Brussels to raise this question for long already), but of the local business elites and other power groups. Replacement of the old EU bureacracy by new representatives who would take the way of sovereignization of Europe was at the public request in the continent and seriously challenged the transatlantic partnership (didn’t you forget French trade minister Matthias Fekl threat to quit TTP talks last month?). Reinforcing the latter was the urgent task of the Wall Street political stooges on both sides of the ocean. Once the Ukrainian project factually failed and due to the notable shift in French approach towards the European Eastern policy, a foundation of the new transatlantic concensus was desperately needed. Black banner nearby Eiffel was virtually hoisted on the screens to disguide people from much more acute issues: what is the real agenda behind destabilization of the Middle East and where do the European interests rest in this regard?

So cui bono from this attack? Pour quel profit, France?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/1311-paris-massacre-cui-bono/5489112

Outrage at Paris Terrorist Attacks Masks Our Racism

By Jonathan Cook
Global Research, November 15, 2015
Jonathan Cook: The View from Nazareth 14 November 2015
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An article in the Australian publication New Matilda gets to the real point about last night’s attacks in Paris – one that no one wants to talk about. What westerners feel right now is a powerful and very selective outrage that identifies with the suffering of people “like us”. We mourn the deaths in Paris while not even noticing those killed in Lebanon a day earlier and almost certainly by the same fanatics that launched the attacks in France.

Lots of westerners like to dismiss such observations as “whataboutery”. It is natural, they say, to care more about people we know and who are similar to us. That knee-jerk reaction may be comforting, but it is precisely the problem.

After all, what drives our selective outrage if not selective compassion? But our selective compassion is what got us into this mess in the first place. As Europeans we have always viewed ourselves as fully human, but seen those in the Middle East and much of the rest of the world as slightly less than human, and not quite as deserving of our sympathy. It is such feelings that allowed Europe to colonise, abuse and exploit brown people.

The historic racism that we Europeans are all too ready now to acknowledge, and that we understand fed western colonialism, is not a thing of the past. It still thrives deep in our souls. Where once we felt the white man’s burden, we now feel his outrage. Both depend on the same arrogance, and the same ascription of lesser human qualities to those we see as different from us.

We are still trying to civilise brown people. We still think we have the right to change them, bend them to our will, improve them by force. We still want to lecture them, condemn them, threaten them, overturn their elections, arm their oppressive leaders, plunder their resources.

And after we have destroyed their societies, we expect to be able to shut our borders to them as they make desperate journeys to find some peace, some safety away from the war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere we either created directly or supported with our money and arms.

Our racism has not changed. It is alive and creating new justifications for our selective compassion every day.

What has changed is that technological advances have made weapons of death and destruction ever easier and cheaper to acquire. Those we once oppressed with impunity and far from our homes, out of sight, can now find us and give us a taste of our own medicine.

If we want to stop the attacks, and avoid turning our own societies into the oppressive dictatorships we have supported across much of the rest of the globe, then we need to stop interfering, pillaging, manipulating and abusing. And we have to start by refusing to allow ourselves to identify more with the victims in Paris than those in Beirut. If we were really as civilised as we believe, we would understand that both are equally deserving of our compassion.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/outrage-at-paris-terrorist-attacks-masks-our-racism/5489108

Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence
Details
Written by Chris Floyd
Published: 14 November 2015
Hits: 34
We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.

Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.

Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.

The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.

Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.

I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.

And one further cause of despair: that although this historical record is there in the open, readily available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again — creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/2531-age-of-despair-reaping-the-whirlwind-of-western-support-for-extremist-violence.html

Before Paris Terrorist Attacks, CIA Director Brennan Met With French Intelligence DGSE Chief Bernard Bajolet: Report

By legitgov
Global Research, November 15, 2015
CLG News 13 November 2015
Theme: Intelligence
print 1592 59 4 2504
John O. Brennan
The White House correspondent for French television network Canal+, Laura Haim, reported an interesting tidbit during a live report with MSNBC’s Brian Williams Friday evening.

Haim stated that Central Intelligence Agency director, John O. Brennan, recently met with his counterpart, French intelligence (DGSE) director Bernard Bajolet.

The French equivalent of MI6 and CIA is the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure. See: CIA-GW Intelligence Conference: Panel on The Shared 21st Century International Mission –GW Center for Cyber and Homeland Security 29 Oct 2015 Panel on “The Shared 21st Century International Mission” featuring CIA Director John Brennan, former UK MI6 Chief John Sawers, Director of the French Directorate for External Security Bernard Bajolet, and former Israeli National Security Advisor Yaacov Amidror.

Held as part of the 2nd Annual Ethos and Profession of Intelligence Conference, co-hosted by the Central Intelligence Agency and the George Washington University. Held on October 27, 2015.

Also, see: “Le Moyen-Orient d’avant ne reviendra pas” 28 octobre 2015

Le chef du renseignement extérieur français, Bernard Bajolet, a laissé entendre que des pays comme l’Irak ou la Syrie ne retrouveraient jamais leur ancienne physionomie. ”Le Moyen-Orient que nous avons connu est fini et je doute qu’il revienne”, a déclaré, en anglais, le directeur de la DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure), dans une conférence mardi sur le renseignement à laquelle participait également le directeur de la CIA John Brennan.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/before-paris-terrorist-attacks-cia-director-brennan-met-with-french-intelligence-ggse-chief-bernard-bajolet-report/5489143

Selective Empathy: Terrorist Attacks Rock Paris, Public Response to Tragedy Is Typically Disproportionate

By Daniel DeLafe
Global Research, November 15, 2015
sott.nett 15 November 2015
Theme: Crimes against Humanity
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"Peace for Paris" by Jean Jullien
In light of the Paris terror attack that killed at least 126, I have some observations to share regarding the social media response to such a tragedy. First, I want to share this particular story to help make a point: New evidence emerges showing the US deliberately attacked the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan.
…the Associated Press published a report providing further confirmation that the facility was targeted and bombed by US military personnel with full knowledge that it was a functioning hospital. The attack lasted for an hour, destroying the building and killing 30 people, including at least 13 MSF staff members and 10 patients.
…
The report follows a previous article citing a former intelligence official who said special operations analysts had mapped the entire area and drawn a circle around the hospital.

The new report adds to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that US forces knowingly and deliberately destroyed a hospital that was performing civilian functions, a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions and a violation of the US War Crimes Act. According to the latter, those found guilty of committing such a crime can be subject to life imprisonment or death.

Among the possible motivations for the attack is the fact that the hospital was the only major medical center in northeastern Afghanistan, and it provided aid to all those injured in the escalating conflict between US forces and the Taliban-led insurgency. Beyond those immediately killed, hundreds or even thousands will die as a result of their loss of access to medical care.

In a statement released on October 23, which reported an increase in the death toll from 22 to 30, MSF noted that the destruction of the hospital “will have a huge impact on access to surgical care for hundreds of thousands of people in the region… Last year, more than 22,000 patients received care at the hospital and more than 5,900 surgeries were performed.”

This is only one example among countless others I could use (many much worse), but it’s recent and I only need one to make this point. Where were all the “prayers” and “thoughts” for any of these people from most of you posting your condolences about what just happened in Paris? I’m sorry if this offends anyone, or if you feel like I’m trying to take attention away from the lives lost and disrespecting those grieving, but that is the opposite of what I’m doing. I’m trying to honor them.

I’m simply trying to get you to think and to feel deeper, and to expand your circle of empathy beyond Paris in order to grasp the bigger picture of why these attacks happen. This opinion piece gets to the core of some of those reasons: The Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence. A larger game is at work, one we often do not see.

Let’s start by asking: Why are you more upset over one group of people being murdered and not another group? Or is the bombing of a hospital not terrorism? Do Afghan lives not mean as much as Parisian lives?

The events yesterday in Paris are heartbreaking and disturbing. What I find more disturbing is how easily people ignore why these things are even happening and who actually arms and funds Islamic extremists. How many just swallow the mainstream media propaganda and are therefore oblivious to history? Most disturbing is that 90% of the people that send their prayers and condolences online to those who died in Paris (as good as their intentions are), never seem to bat an eye at, or send a single prayer to, the millions of people slaughtered by the U.S./EU/Israeli/Saudi war machine, which created these extremist groups in the first place through direct and indirect results of Western foreign policy and Western proxy armies.

When an attack like this happens in the West, everyone is so, so sad – yet when hundreds of homes are leveled in Gaza, or elsewhere in the Middle East, there is relative silence! We should be equally upset about all of this senseless killing orchestrated by psychopaths in the highest echelons of society, not just what our TVs tell us we should be upset about. We should be sending our thoughts and prayers everyday to all the innocents murdered with our tax dollars, not just when an attack occurs in Europe or the U.S. Such events are also used as a fear-monger tactic and fuel to continue the very same policies and wars-for-profit that result in such attacks, whether orchestrated by extremists or by intelligence agencies.


© Reuters
The biggest terror attack in Lebanon for 25 years. 41 people were killed in 2 suicide bombings on November 12, the day before the Paris attacks.
To those who expressed themselves over the Paris attacks, yet remained silent over countless similar atrocities, I ask: where were your condolences, your “thoughts”, your “prayers” for those killed in the attack on the Afghan hospital by US forces, or any other war crime committed by or supported by your own government? What determined your care for one group of people and not another? Was it your attitude? Your popularity? Maybe it was the type of information you are exposed to, or deliberately expose yourself to? Was it your beliefs?

Most likely it’s all of that – and more. The main question here is: Do you really have control over what you pay attention to and care about?

I guess terrorism is only what our psychopathic leaders and their media moguls tell us it is, and only then when it happens to us in the West, not when we’re the perpetrators. It seems that a lot of people only take the time to share their condolences about a tragedy when it’s trending and trendy to do so, and such trends are not only tracked and played upon by the power brokers in society, but are also manufactured and directed for larger political purposes. When Gaza was getting bombed to smithereens in summer of 2014, I didn’t see half the response I saw over this recent attack on social media and in conversation.

I’m sad for Paris today. I’m thinking about it a lot. I know this article, or a Facebook post, or a Tweet, won’t change anything in the grand scheme of things, but such things may do more than we think, and can plant seeds in people’s minds, just like the TV does. It helps to vent our frustration with all the lies, and to counter them even just a little bit. Many people decided to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media to voice their concerns, their “thoughts and prayers” about Paris, and I completely understand why you did this.

You cared that people got killed for no reason. I get it. I feel that way everyday. But this is also a sinister manipulation of the public at large, and anyone who is familiar with Edward Bernays knows that powerful people put lots of time, money, and research into figuring out how to control what people think, like, and care about (I highly recommend the documentary series The Century of the Self). We all must understand how and why we are programmed by psychopaths in power, the richest of whom are in control of our own countries here in the West, and how these same people influence us to be selective with our conscience, with our caring.

Every single day, even my best and happiest days (like right now – I’m on tour with a band called The Gray Company, staying in a beautiful home in North Carolina with amazing friends, and having a blast!) I set some time aside to think of all the others dying at the hands of our government and the Secret Government, the National Security State, and its military industrial complex. I devote some time to reading and studying, and I try to post and disseminate information. I don’t wait for the mainstream media to tell me when to be upset and when to care, and what is true and what isn’t. I try to look and work it out and hold off on concluding. I choose to care because I value Truth, and I understand Truth hurts us in the process of seeking Her, and I’m willing to endure the pain of knowing for a chance to dance with Truth.

I wasn’t always like this though. It takes hard work and effort to Love and to seek the Truth, to draw up Her bitter-sweet water and drink it and to be changed by Her – it’s a constant effort to care and know how crazy the world really is while at the same time allowing yourself to be happy when necessary, and to appreciate your own life, and to strive in such a crazy world without letting it get to you and still succeed. I understand why so many shut this stuff out and just want to focus on their own life and success, or only spare a thought or condolence when it’s trendy to do so, especially when it’s shoved in our faces, while other events get downplayed or ignored. It’s easier to believe the lies and watered-down truth when it’s spoon-fed to us – it’s more comfortable and takes no effort. But will it help us grow?

I wasn’t always like this. You also don’t have to be the way you may be, to be manipulated by powers you don’t understand. But only if you really want to seek knowledge, to objectively Love, to seek Truth – if you truly want to care MORE. Take the feelings you get from the Paris attacks, the sadness for those lives lost in the middle of a grander chess game, and use it as motivation to learn and to speak – to try and follow the moves on the board by unseen hands. Post your thoughts and feelings every single day about ALL the innocents dying, not just for one day – because such things happen every day, and we all carry the responsibility for it and for doing something about it. The least we can do is make an effort to really understand it, to pay attention and speak out as much as possible, rather than blindly accepting what the talking heads tell us is going down and whose deaths we should or should not care about.

Dr. Martin Luther. King, Jr. once said “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” Of course, once you are aware of that decision, it’s then up to you to choose. Choose wisely.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/selective-empathy-terrorist-attacks-rock-paris-public-response-to-tragedy-is-typically-disproportionate/5489179

“We Were Prepared”: Counter-Terrorism Emergency Exercise on “Multi-Site Attacks” Took Place On Same Day As Paris Terrorist Attacks

By Sean Adl-Tabatabai
Global Research, November 15, 2015
Your News Wire 15 November 2015
Region: Europe
Theme: Militarization and WMD
print 5738 213 23 7095
paris-military-exercise-634x350
Patrick Pelloux revealed on national radio on Saturday that a “multi-site” emergency exercise was held in Paris on the same day as the Paris attacks on November 13.

[This exercise pertains to an emergency scenario of a terrorist attack. It involves first responders, police, emergency services and medical personnel. Organized by SAMU. It is not a military exercise, GR ed.]

He said that the Paris emergency services were so well prepared, because “by chance” they had been planning for a similar scenario.

Transcript:

“By chance”, (le hasard a fait”) in the morning at the Paris SAMU (EMT), a multi-site attack exercise had been planned.”

“So we were prepared. What needs to be known is there was a mobilisation of police forces, firemen, EMTs, associations who came [to participate] and we tried to save as many people as possible.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/we-were-prepared-large-military-exercise-took-place-on-same-day-as-paris-terrorist-attacks/5489164

Important Events Leading Up to the November 13 Paris Terrorist Attacks. Sheer Coincidence?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, November 15, 2015
Region: Europe
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', Intelligence, Media Disinformation
print 7557 314 14 9518
paris-military-exercise-634x350
We are bringing to the attention of our readers four important events which preceded the Paris attacks.

1. The French media had already predicted a terrorist attack more than a month before the actual occurrence.

2. The head of France’s external intelligence was in Washington for consultations with CIA Chief John Brennan two weeks before the attacks.

3. On November 5 (one week before the Paris terrorist attacks), the Council of Ministers announced its decision to send France’s aircraft carrier group Charles de Gaulle to the Middle East, with a mandate to “fight against the Islamic state”.

4. On the morning of November 13, an emergency scenario of a multi-site terrorist attack is conducted in Paris, involving first responders, medical personnel, police and firemen.

At this early stage, it is impossible to confirm whether these events bear a relationship to the dramatic events of November 13th. What they do convey, however, is that France was on a “war footing” against the Islamic State prior to the events of November 13th.

War preparations allegedly against the Islamic State were ongoing prior to the official announcement by president Hollande that the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13 constituted “an act of war” against the French Republic.

The decision to dispatch the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier together with its GAN carrier group to the Middle East is of utmost significance. It constitutes a formidable force which will be joining its US and coalition partners.

This deployment of France’s naval and air power points to a strategy of military escalation directed against Syria and its allies. It is not intended to go after the Islamic State, which is protected by the US led coalition.

France claim’s the right to defend itself, intimating that the French Republic has been attacked from outside the country.

Are the Paris terrorist attacks being used as a pretext and justification to intervene militarily in Syria in violation of international law. According to French President François Hollande, the terrorist attack was “prepared, organized and planned from outside the country by the Islamic State, but with help from inside.”

October 2: Paris Media Predicts a French Style 9/11, “un 11 septembre à la française”.

The threat is real, according to Judge Trévédic in an interview with Paris Match.

”The attacks in France will be on a scale comparable to 9/11″

“Intelligence services fear a 9/11 French Style”

”impossible a dejouer”, suggesting that French intelligence is inept and unable to prevent a forthcoming terrorist attack, if and when it occurs




October 27: CIA Director John Brennan receives French External Intelligence (DGSE) Director Bernard Bajolet in Washington

On their Agenda: How to Fight the Islamic State, including Threats to National Security emanating from the Islamic State

News reports confirm that two weeks before the November 13 attacks, Bajolet arrived in Washington “for urgent meetings with his counterparts at the CIA and other agencies”. The meetings pertained to the war in Syria and the “threat from outside” emanating from the Islamic State.

CIA director, John O. Brennan and DGSE director Bernard Bajolet also participated in a panel (October 27) at George Washington University. The Panel was part of a Conference sponsored by the CIA and George Washington University.

In his presentation at George Washington University, Bajolet pointed to the “inside threat” of young radicalized Frenchmen, while intimating there was also:

“a threat from outside… either through terrorist actions which are planned [and] ordered from outside or only through fighters coming back to our countries.”

In the wake of the Paris attacks, President Hollande –who had been briefed by Bajolet– went on record: “This is an Act of War” -i.e. the Islamic State is waging war on France. Hollande’s words were very similar to those of Bajolet. According to president François Hollande, the Paris terrorist attack was “prepared, organized and planned from outside the country by the Islamic State, but with help from inside.”



3. November 5: Council of Ministers decides to Dispatch Charles de Gaulle Aircraft Carrier Group to the Middle East to Fight the Islamic State

Announced on November 5 (one week before the Paris attacks), the Council of Ministers confirmed that France had dispatched the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to the Middle East to “Fight Daesch (aka the Islamic State). France’s Charles de Gaulle only aircraft carrier is slated to leave for the Mediterranean “to join the fight against the Islamic State in the region” on November 18.

“The deployment of the battle group alongside the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier has been undertaken in order to participate in operations against Daesch [ISIS] and its affiliate groups” the French president’s office said in an issued statement. (quoted by RT, November 5, 2015)
“The aircraft carrier will enable us to be more efficient in coordination with our allies” President Francois Hollande said, adding that it will “bolster Paris’ firepower in the region amid international efforts to launch Syrian peace talks.” (Ibid)





3. Morning of November 13, An Emergency Exercise based on a Multi-site scenario of Terrorist Attacks was held in Paris, on the Same Day as the Attacks

Patrick Pelloux revealed on national radio on Saturday that SAMU conducted a “multi-site” counterterrorism emergency exercise in Paris on the same day as the Paris attacks.

It should be emphasized that this was not a military style exercise, it involved first responders, medical personnel and police.

He said that the Paris emergency services were so well prepared, because “by chance” they had been planning for a similar scenario to what actually ocurred.

TV Broadcast



The nature of this exercise which preceded the attacks were revealed in an interview with Thomas Loeb, responsible for medial services of SAMU at Garches.

The interview was conducted by Challenges.fr:

Relevant excerpts of interview

The eight SAMU Ile-de-France met on Friday [13 November] for an exercise pertaining to the simulation of a terrorist attack in Paris. What was the precise purpose of this initiative?

We gathered in the Coordinating meeting room of the defense area Ile-de-France, that morning, to work on the hypothesis [scenario] of an armed group involved in attacks in several locations Paris. This is what we call a tabletop exercise to consider the coordination of our actions.

It is an astonishing coincidence. Was this the first time you worked on this type of scenario?

No, this is a very clear working hypothesis for months, the idea of multiple simultaneous attacks. In the 2000s, we worked more on dirty bombs and risks called NRBC (Nuclear, Radiological, Biological, Chemical). Then it evolved to the risk of people being wounded by gunfire or explosion.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/important-events-leading-up-to-the-november-13-paris-terrorist-attacks-sheer-coincidence/5489228

aris under Attack: Was it a False Flag? A Pretext for NATO to Intervene in Syria and the Middle East?

By Peter Koenig
Global Research, November 15, 2015
Region: Europe, Middle East & North Africa
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', US NATO War Agenda
In-depth Report: SYRIA: NATO'S NEXT WAR?
print 5748 546 13 12.1K
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France is at war! – Exclaimed President Hollande several times in each of his three what appeared like scripted speeches he gave within 12 hours after the attack. He knew the names of the attackers and where they were from, while police was still struggling to put the puzzles together, and news reporting was sketchy, confusing and chaotic. He accused Daesch (the Islamic State) as the perpetrator before anyone claimed responsibility for the attack. That supposed ‘claim’ from ISIS came much later in the course of Saturday morning, the morning after.

France is at war – words reminiscent of George Bush and his clan after 9/11. President Hollande declared a state of emergency not unlike Bush’s state of emergency after 9/11 – and the new Homeland Security / Patriot Act, waiting in the drawers to be quickly ratified after 9/11. Hollande also decreed three days of national mourning.

Similar rules are in place in France since this blood-soaked Saturday morning – a swat of civil rights suspensions, including searches without warrants, curfew, government control of media, increased surveillance, strict border controls, road blocks and traffic control, suppression of protests and manifestations – and more.

Early Saturday afternoon, the media reported that a Syrian passport was found at one of the shooting places. This was a false flag give-away. As people started making the connection with the ‘lost ID’ of one of the ‘terrorists’ in the Charlie Hebdo get-away car, and the intact Saudi passport in the rubbles of the 9/11 twin-towers, and in an attempt to save some of the credibility of these made-up stories, the Syrian passport trove was downgraded as having been found on the body of a Syrian refugee.

Later in the evening, the police also suitably traced three of the 7 killed terrorists to cells in Belgium. Similarly, Charlie Hebdo ‘terrorists’ also had apparently connections to Belgian Jihadists; later the links even stretched further north to Denmark, another right wing, neoliberally managed country. The European Union with the non-transparent, secretive European Commission is headquartered in Brussels, where a clamp-down of liberties and people’s demonstrations, especially anti-TTIP protests, will soon be needed. Let’s see where the next links to Saturday’s attacks will suddenly appear.

Hollande called for revenge. France is strong. France may be hurt, but never conquered. France will fight back even stronger than before. Hollande at his best, blood revenge.

The western world is living in a blood cult. Killing is the order of the day. Blood must flow.

Is the French President seriously hoping that blood revenge will bring peace? That it will increase security in France, or throughout the world for that matter? –

Revenge is but business for the war industry – never mind innocent human lives lost, and human misery caused by the seeded wars and conflicts, all for greed and power – and paradoxically under the pretext of seeking peace. How brainwashed must people be to believe it and go along with it.

Back to France and Paris. France is at war, is not an insignificant statement by the President. It implies that France can retaliate. What that means is that France, or any other NATO member for that matter, can call on NATO for its defence (http://thesaker.is/a-warning-about-the-paris-terror-attacks/).

This act of terror of 13 November could be a precursor to NATO intervening in Syria and the Middle-East at large, leading to a confrontation with Russia.

It might be the beginning of WWIII – being played out primarily in the Middle-East, to spare Europe from a third devastation in the span of 100 years, though that is an illusion in the age of nuclear arms.

Europe is needed by the Washington-Wall Street led financial and industrial empire as a trading partner – TTIP – and as a stooge for promoting the master’s agenda around the world. The suddenly ‘found’ Syrian passport clearly indicates the target for a possible NATO intervention.

Incidentally, as reported by RT on 13 November, France’s only aircraft carrier and Europe’s largest, the Charles de Gaulle, is scheduled to leave Toulon on November 18 for the Persian Gulf.

“The aircraft carrier will enable us to be more efficient in coordination with our allies”, said François Hollande, and it will “bolster Paris’ firepower in the region amid international efforts to launch Syrian peace talks.”

(https://www.rt.com/news/321873-france-aircraft-carrier-Syris/).

Just the right approach for peace: ‘bolstering fire power’ – in a lead-up to ‘peace talks’.

No wonder, with so much demonstrated aggression by France towards Syria, and now also Iraq – and certainly everywhere the Washington masters point their blood-finger – that people in the Middle-East are getting angry – and, according to Washington, Jihadists take it a step further, namely to retaliate on innocent French people. Innocent are also the bombarded populations in the Middle-East – in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine – and the list is almost endless, who are mercilessly slaughtered and their livelihoods destroyed by the criminal alliance within which French Rafale and Mirage fighters combat.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in a brief interview after the Paris attacks, after expressing his condolences to the French people, he appropriately said that such terror is what Syria is living day-by day.

http://thesaker.is/president-bashar-al-assad-on-paris-attacks-interview-english-subtitles/

Nevertheless, when such well organized and superbly coordinated terror attacks occur, one should first ask, whom do they serve and why. Cui Bono?

Of course, it could be a blowback by Jihadist warriors for France’s continuous aggression in the Middle East. France was first along with the UK in allying with Washington in fighting the Assad regime in Syria – and shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, the French air force was joining the US and the Brits in Iraq. Earlier France had sent troops to Mali and Central Africa – responsible for killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent people.

In the meantime, it has become known that at least since mid-August there were warnings that a public place, like a music hall, might be singled out for a terrorist attack. Early October this year, Paris Match repeatedly warned from a 9/11 French-style

(http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-paris-terrorist-attacks-911-french-style-le-11-septembre-a-la-francaise/).

This leads to conclude that the French authorities were at least warned. Now, the police say some of the dead terrorists were known to them, had a police record – but not necessarily linked to jihadism. The father and brother of one of the dead had been arrested. What for? – How phony does this sound? – People wake up! – Please!

They are brainwashing us into fear – ‘if we don’t protect you by increased control over your movements, you’ll risk more attacks, more bloodshed.’ – That’s what they are saying. And People go along – worse, they are even grateful for more ‘protection’. It’s the typical ‘Shock Doctrine’ moment, when authorities can do whatever they want, taking people’s civil rights away, even their human rights – and when finally we discover that there are almost none left – it’s too late. Such shocks are often provoked (false flags) so that civil rights infringing measures can be easily implemented without popular resistance. The Patriot Act and its various updates since 9/11 have erased some 90% of citizen’s civil rights in the United States.

And why is that necessary in Europe? – Because much worse may be coming. People may wake up, take to the streets, making implementation of dictatorial measures more complicated, like the secretly negotiated TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact) – which would turn Europe into a wasteland of educated serfs for the corporate and financial elite, directed by Zionist-Washington, surveyed and enforced by its army and NATO. A European Patriot Act might prevent such troubles.
–

A peace-hungry (versus blood-thirsty) President Hollande could come forward turning the knife around – seeking reflection on France’s aggressive actions, on France’s vassalage vis-à-vis Washington. During the three days of morning such reflection could be promoted with the French people. Surely, France has plenty of intellectuals who could organize and lead groups of people to foster dialogue and discussions about France’s – and Europe’s for that matter – political stance in the world, about her interference in other countries’ sovereignty.

Instead of seeking more blood, Hollande could take the lead in setting up a European panel for discussion and reflection with common people participating – a step towards the old concept of Democracy.

If Mr. Hollande were serious about peace and security, he could use this attack on Paris and play a pivotal role in Europe in helping to bring these senseless and criminal wars and Jihadist terror to an end – marking a European difference against the will of Washington and NATO. He could help give back Europe its lost dignity, autonomy and national sovereignties – which the unelected Brussels clan gave away – or sold out – to the Anglo-Saxon masters that manage the One World Order on behalf of corporate finance and industrial conglomerates. – It’s never too late. Peace is patient – to a point.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-under-attack-was-it-a-false-flag-a-pretext-for-nato-to-intervene-in-syria-and-the-middle-east/5489159

France’s Aircraft Carrier Group Charles de Gaulle to Leave for Middle East “to Fight the Islamic State”

By RT
Global Research, November 15, 2015
RT 13 November 2015
print 285 38 2 1442
The French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. © Reuters
The only aircraft carrier in the French Navy’s fleet, the Charles de Gaulle, will leave for the Persian Gulf on November 18, to join the fight against Islamic State in the region, Paris has confirmed.

“The naval group will leave Toulon (a major French naval base) in a few days, on November 18, to arrive in the Persian Gulf in mid-December,” government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said, as cited by Le Figaro.

France announced the deployment of its only aircraft carrier against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) on November 5. [one week before the Paris terror attacks]



“The deployment of the battle group alongside the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier has been undertaken in order to participate in operations against Daesch [ISIS] and its affiliate groups” the French president’s office said in an issued statement.

“The aircraft carrier will enable us to be more efficient in coordination with our allies” President Francois Hollande said, adding that it will“bolster Paris’ firepower in the region amid international efforts to launch Syrian peace talks.”

France started its airstrikes in Syria in September, a year after it launched similar operations in Iraq. It is now using six Rafale multirole fighter aircraft stationed in the United Arab Emirates and six Mirage 2000 fighters deployed in Jordan.

France carried out about 1,300 aerial missions in Iraq with 271 airstrikes destroying more than 450 terrorist targets. Only a few airstrikes have been carried out in Syria.

The Charles de Gaulle is the biggest European aircraft carrier. It is also the only nuclear-powered vessel of this nature outside the US. The vessel can deploy up to 40 fixed wing jets and helicopters including 12 Rafales. The Charles de Gaulle has already been used against the IS militants in Iraq – in February and in April, 2015.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/frances-aircraft-carrier-group-charles-de-gaulle-to-leave-for-middle-east-to-fight-the-islamic-state/5489260

The state of emergency and the collapse of French democracy
19 November 2015

The measures being taken by the government of President François Hollande in response to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris constitute an unprecedented attack on democratic rights.

The Socialist Party (PS) government has declared a state of emergency and mobilized more than 100,000 security personnel throughout the country, including regular police, gendarmes, paramilitary riot police and military forces. It is impossible to walk the streets of any major city without running into individuals decked out in camouflage or dressed in black, toting automatic rifles. These paramilitary forces have been given the power to raid any home and arrest or kill anyone declared a threat, with no opposition from within the political or media establishment.

Now Hollande is proposing to amend the French Constitution to allow the president to decree emergency rule, extendable indefinitely, and vastly expand the powers granted to the army and police. The proposal, published online, provides the legal basis for transforming France into a presidential dictatorship.

The existing 1955 law grants the president and the security forces far-ranging powers during a state of emergency. They can carry out warrantless searches and seizures, impose curfews and ban public assemblies, detain and order the house arrest of anyone “whose activity proves dangerous to security and public order,” and dissolve any organization linked to people under house arrest that “participates in, facilitates or incites” disturbances of public order.

The changes introduced by the Socialist Party’s constitutional amendment make the law even more ominous. President Hollande has declared that he intends to renew it as long as France faces a threat from any terrorist group similar to ISIS, i.e., for an indefinite period of time.

An examination of the amendment makes clear, however, that the measures are not about fighting ISIS, which in any case emerged from the NATO powers’ own policy of sponsoring Islamist militias as proxy forces to wage war for regime-change in Syria. The horrific attacks in Paris are the pretext for implementing dictatorial measures that cannot be rationally explained by the threat posed by ISIS.

Under the cover of fighting ISIS, the French state is giving itself absolute powers against anyone it calls a threat to “security and public order.” This vague, all-embracing category has long been used against the constitutionally-protected right to strike and protest—as in the Socialist Party’s decision last year to ban protests against the Israeli state’s war in Gaza.

The legal changes introduced by the PS document effectively make any expression of oppositional sentiment potential grounds for arrest. Instead of allowing police to detain persons whose “activity proves dangerous for public security and order,” the amended law allows them to detain anyone “who gives reason to believe that his behavior constitutes a threat to security and public order.” The PS explains that this allows police to target “people who attracted the attention of police or intelligence services by their behavior, friendships, statements, or plans.”

The implications of these proposals are immense. To arrest and detain someone, police will have to do no more than assert that they believe that this person might conceivably disturb public order at some future time, based on something this person said or posted on social media, or on someone with whom he associated.

A statement suggesting sympathy with calls for strike action against a wage cut or factory closure, for a protest against war, or for any number of legal activities would be grounds for detention and house arrest.

It is worth recalling that the law the PS is now proposing to expand was drafted in 1955 to provide the legal framework for France to carry out mass torture and repression in a failed attempt to crush the Algerian people's struggle for independence in the 1954-1962 war against French colonial rule. This brutal war cost the lives of between 250,000 and 400,000 Algerians. It anticipated and fed into deep social tensions within France that erupted in the general strike of May-June 1968.

The current moves to effectively dismantle democratic rights in France are motivated by a similar crisis of class rule. First, as its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to ban last year's Gaza war protests showed, the PS government is desperate to suppress all opposition to the militarist policies of French imperialism. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Hollande has moved rapidly to expand France’s bombing campaign in Syria, part of the efforts of the French ruling class to assert its interests on a world stage.

Second, bourgeois democracy can no longer handle and adjudicate the immense and increasingly uncontrollable social tensions of contemporary capitalist society. In all of the advanced capitalist countries, including France, the state is controlled by tiny, super-wealthy elites who view rising discontent among broad masses of workers with hatred and fear.
The Hollande government epitomizes the domination of the financial aristocracy. Elected on promises that “austerity was not our destiny,” Hollande soon proved to be a pro-austerity politician presiding over surging unemployment and a “zero growth” economy.

The PS turned to a strategy of trying to divert social opposition to reactionary domestic policies by means of a foreign policy based on militarism and war. As Hollande launched a war in Mali in 2013, one official told Le Point that the PS hoped it would be their version of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Falkland Islands war: a “military adventure that ensured her re-election in 1983.” Wars across France's old colonial empire, however, have only contributed to the growing social tensions within France.

The political dynamic in France is mirrored in every major capitalist country. Since the “war on terror” began in 2001, governments throughout the world, led by the United States, have sought to erode and dismantle basic democratic rights. They have participated in the “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners for torture, mass warrantless wiretapping and extra-judicial drone murder. The domestic deployment of heavily-armed military units is now common.

From the police suppression of the 2011 youth riots in London to last year’s heavily-armed crackdown on protests against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, these measures are ever more clearly directed at the suppression of class struggle.

There is virtually no constituency for the defense of democratic rights within the political or corporate establishment. That task falls to the working class, which retains a deep commitment to democratic principles. However, there is no room for political complacency. The ruling class is moving very far with dictatorial measures to deal with internal crises for which it has no solution.

The defense of democratic rights and opposition to police-state forms of rule must be rooted in the independent political mobilization of the working class, based on a struggle against imperialist war and social inequality and their source in the capitalist system.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/19/pers-n19.html

After Paris attacks, Brussels placed on lockdown
By Stéphane Hugues and Alex Lantier
23 November 2015

The Brussels metropolitan area was on lockdown this weekend after Belgian authorities declared a security emergency in the night of Friday to Saturday. The government ordered subways and major public venues shut down and told residents to remain indoors, citing the danger of events like the November 13 attack by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) members in Paris.

Heavily armed police units launched a large-scale manhunt yesterday evening in several areas of Brussels, as authorities ordered residents to stay away from windows and hotel guests to remain indoors. Police imposed an information blackout during the attack, also instructing people in the area not to post information or updates about the situation in Brussels on social media.

Belgian federal prosecutors made a brief announcement well after midnight on the police operation, which Belgian Francophone Radio-Television (RTBF) reported had been in preparation for several days. It supposedly aimed to find Salah Abdeslam, an alleged member of the ISIS team that carried out the Paris attacks. However, despite police operations across Brussels, Abdeslam was not found. According to prosecutors, police did not find any arms or explosives, either.

It remains unclear what motivated the police operation and the lockdown of Brussels, or why such a supposedly carefully-prepared operation failed to find anything. RTBF reporters reported that official briefings were “tight-lipped.”

After the OCAM issued a new situation report yesterday, the Belgian government announced that it would keep all schools, universities and subways in Brussels closed today. Authorities confirmed that these shutdowns were being maintained even after last night’s police operation.

The emergency measures had been announced on Saturday by Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, citing non-specific warnings issued by the Belgian state’s Organ for Coordination of Threat Analysis (OCAM).

“This is the result of intelligence, which is relatively precise, about the risk of attack like which took place in Paris. We are talking about a threat involving the hypothesis where several individuals with weapons and explosives begin actions, maybe in several places at the same time,” he explained.

The OCAM warning led to the raising of the Belgian state’s threat level to four, the highest level. “Level four, as decided for Brussels, implies there is a ‘serious and imminent’ threat, as according to the law which organizes levels one to four in our country,” Michel said.

Belgian officials subsequently issued several contradictory statements about the character of the threat. On Saturday, Le Soir cited police reports that two terrorists were in Brussels, transporting a bomb like the ones detonated outside the Stade de France in Paris during the November 13 attacks.

At a Sunday press conference with the ministers of justice, defense, interior and foreign affairs, Michel again implied that a substantially larger terrorist operation was involved. “We fear an attack like that in Paris that could take place anywhere in the country, with several individuals launching attacks simultaneously in several locations,” he said. “The threat is considered to be serious and imminent, like yesterday.”

The Paris terror attacks have provoked a serious crisis for the unpopular and reactionary Michel government. While it is seeking to profit from the police hysteria unleashed after the Paris attacks and to burnish the MR-NVA’s law-and-order credentials, it is also under increasing attack internationally after reports emerged that several ISIS attackers came to Paris from Belgium.

The Michel government is an unstable coalition between Michel’s small, free-market francophone Reform Movement (MR) and various right-wing and far-right Flemish parties led by the Flemish-separatist New Flemish Alliance (NVA). Over the last year, it had been hit by repeated protest strikes amid mounting anger in the working class over its austerity policies. It also attracted criticisms due to its far-right sympathies.

Interior Minister Jan Jambon (NVA) provoked a scandal last year after reports emerged of his 2001 meeting with the Sint-Maartenfonds, an organization of veterans of the Belgian SS forces who fought for the Nazis against the USSR during World War II. Jambon gave an interview in La Libre Belgique downplaying the collaboration with Nazism in Belgium, declaring, “The people who collaborated with the Germans
had their reasons.” He called the collaboration an “error,” because afterwards “the Flemish nationalist movement was isolated for decades.”

In his address to the Belgian parliament on Thursday, Michel struck a bellicose tone against Islamist fighters returning to Europe from the Syrian war, declaring, “Jihadists who are coming back, they belong in the prisons.”

At the same time, however, he felt compelled to answer escalating attacks from French officials, who have blamed Brussels for the stunning failure of French intelligence to detect the November 13 attackers (see: Paris terrorists operated “in plain sight”). They claimed that Belgian authorities did not warn them about the attackers living in Brussels’ Molenbeek district—an area with around 100,000 inhabitants, a large immigrant community and high unemployment.

The increasingly hysterical tone in the French media is epitomized by the remark of Eric Zemmour, the radio commentator and far-right propagandist, who called for France to bomb Belgium: “Instead of bombing Raqqa [the capital of the IS-held area of Syria], France should bomb Molenbeek, where the commandos of Friday the 13th came from.”

On Thursday, Michel declared, “I do not accept the criticisms that have been made of our security services,” adding that the responsibility of French officials was at least as high as that of their Belgian counterparts.

The fighting between officials in Brussels and Paris underscores that the Paris attacks and the current police clampdowns across Europe are the product of NATO’s backing of Islamist militias in a war for regime change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Enjoying unofficial support from European authorities, they were able to recruit several thousand youth from across Europe to the war in Syria.
Philippe Moureaux, a former mayor of Molenbeek, gave an interview to Le Soir expressing regret for aiding the anti-Assad militias from which ISIS emerged. “When the first people left to go to to Syria, we were almost encouraging them, because they were going to fight a monster. We did not understand the risks. We have not done enough for the youth and, again, I bear some responsibility for this,” he said.
Now that these forces are returning to Europe, however, unpopular governments across Europe are seizing upon the attacks they are carrying out to launch draconian attacks on the democratic rights of the population. After French authorities imposed a three-month state of emergency suspending basic democratic rights and are moving to permanently write the state of emergency into the French constitution, the Belgian government has announced its own raft of security measures.

The government is planning to grant itself new powers to impose extraordinary measures during a state of emergency, to develop a “prevention and repression plan” for the Molenbeek area and expand police powers for search and seizure as well as for surveillance. Other measures include a €400 million increase in security spending, reinforced border controls, 520 more military positions and eliminating anonymous prepaid calling cards.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/23/brus-n23.html

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Paris terrorists operated “in plain sight”
21 November 2015

Numerous media reports over the past several days have revealed that most of the Islamists who engaged in the suicide attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, as well as the reputed organizer of the attacks, were known to the French and Belgian security services well before November 13. But no intelligence or police agency took action against them to prevent the murderous rampage.

Remarkably, these accounts come from American media outlets that themselves have close ties to the intelligence agencies—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN—as well as the official Voice of America and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

In an accompanying editorial, the New York Times noted, “Most of the men who carried out the Paris attacks were already on the radar of intelligence officials in France and Belgium, where several of the attackers lived only hundreds of yards from the main police station, in a neighborhood known as a haven for extremists.”

The Washington Post summed up the situation as follows: “Belgian authorities had close contact with some of the men believed to be behind the bloody terrorist attacks in Paris last week, a pattern that raises questions about how the suspects could slip through the fingers of law enforcement officials.”

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, said that several of the Paris attackers were on no-fly lists, indicating they were well-known to US intelligence as well.

Most of the accounts note that the US, Turkey and Iraq all warned France in advance of the November 13 attacks of plots under way, while Turkey actually supplied the name of one of the operatives involved, Ismael Omar Mostefai, who was himself known to the French authorities from 2010. Mostefai traveled to Syria in 2013 despite having a “fiche S,” a police dossier marking him as a security concern, and returned to France the following year. He was one of the gunmen who massacred nearly 100 people at the Bataclan theater before killing himself.

Another gunman at the Bataclan, Samy Amimour, was detained by French police in October 2012 on charges of terrorist conspiracy. According to the Times: “Suspecting he was planning to go to Yemen to fight, the authorities confiscated his passport and placed him under judicial control, meaning he was barred from traveling and had to report regularly to the authorities. Nevertheless, a year later Mr. Amimour managed to make his way to Syria undetected.”

The French daily Le Monde reported last December that Amimour was in monthly Skype contact with his family and that his father had traveled to Syria to try to convince him to return home. The police did not interview the father upon his return, and Amimour returned to Paris undisturbed sometime this year.

Bilal Hadfi, a suicide bomber at Le Stade de France, was known to Belgian authorities after a teacher in his class in a Brussels school reported his comments supporting the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He then went to Syria, a Justice Ministry spokeswoman told the Post, from where he posted comments on Twitter denouncing pro-Western forces as “infidels” and warning that the countries intervening in Syria “should no longer feel safe, not even in their dreams.”

“We knew Hadfi had traveled to Syria and had come back,” a Belgian police spokeswoman told the Post. After his return to Belgium, “For two weeks, the security services tapped the phone line of the house where he lived in Molenbeek,” the newspaper reported. Hadfi was well known as an Islamist radical who had fought in Syria, appearing on lists maintained by a police advisory group and by a Belgian journalist. In November he drove to Paris and took part in the assault.

Ibrahim Abdeslam was one of the suicide bombers at a Paris café. He was also Belgian, and known to have attempted to reach Syria in February 2015, although he was reportedly detained and turned back by Turkish authorities. He was known to police as a longtime associate of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the top ISIS figure in Belgium. His young brother Salah, 26, who is believed to be the only surviving attacker, was stopped three times by French police while driving back from Paris to Belgium the night of November 13-14. Each time he was let go.

Then there is the case of the alleged principal organizer of the attacks, Abaaoud, who was killed in a shootout with French police in the early morning hours of November 19, along with an as yet unidentified man and a woman, his cousin. Abaaoud was a well-known public voice of ISIS, interviewed in the February issue of its online magazine Dabiq under the name Abu Umar al-Baljiki.

In the interview, as described by Voice of America, Abaaoud “boasted about how he could operate in plain sight in Belgium and never get caught.” He added, “My name and picture were all over the news, yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary.” At one point he was stopped by police, but they let him go, supposedly not recognizing him. Yet he was so notorious that a Belgian court sentenced him to 20 years in prison, in absentia, for recruiting Belgian youth to fight for ISIS.

While Abaaoud attributed his seeming invisibility to divine intervention on the side of Islamic fundamentalists, there is a simpler explanation. During much of the time that Abaaoud was active in ISIS, the group was working as part of the anti-Assad campaign in Syria backed by the United States, France, Belgium and the other imperialist powers.

Until June 2014, when ISIS militants crossed the border into Iraq and seized control of Mosul, threatening the US-backed regime in Baghdad, the group’s activities were tolerated, even encouraged. Even after Mosul, the US-backed “coalition” conducted a notably desultory bombing campaign, suggesting that ISIS was still considered a potential imperialist asset, at least in Syria.

This continues the pattern that goes back as far as the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on September 11, 2001: the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, ISIS, and their innumerable offshoots, have their origins in the covert operations of imperialist intelligence agencies, particularly those of the United States.

Al Qaeda arose from the Arab forces involved in the US intervention to topple the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s, while the war in Iraq created the forerunner of ISIS, and the US-backed campaign of subversion in Syria turned the group into a powerful force holding territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border.

There is another pattern as well: terrorist attacks undertaken by groups created and armed by the imperialists become the pretext for a further expansion of the powers of the national security state. In the wake of the Paris attacks, the intelligence services of the imperialist powers, and particularly the American CIA, NSA and FBI, have launched a furious campaign to profit from the atrocity.

Top US security officials have made a series of speeches blaming the latest terrorist outrage on the revelations of Edward Snowden, on built-in encryption provided by the manufacturers of smartphones and other communications equipment, and on the handful of legal restrictions on government spying.

The bogus character of these arguments is shown by examining the actual events in Paris. French police recovered one of the cellphones used by the attackers and found unencrypted text messages and GPS data that enabled them to locate Abaaoud and others who allegedly formed part of the support network for the attacks. There is no evidence that any of the attackers used encrypted communications, or that they needed to, given the effective green light they had for their operations.

It is not possible, with the limited information so far made available, to give a full and definitive account of what took place in Paris on November 13, 2015, let alone its origins in the murky world where intelligence operations intersect with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

Two conclusions are inescapable, however: (1) Official propaganda about this and other terrorist attacks, aimed at stampeding public opinion behind the state and the intelligence services, are based on half-truths and lies. (2) The imperialist governments, whose savage wars for oil and geopolitical advantage in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia have created the conditions for the rise of Islamist terror organizations, with which they have collaborated, are once again using a terrorist atrocity as the pretext to implement longstanding plans for military escalation abroad and the abrogation of democratic rights at home.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/21/pers-n21.html

Weapon used in November 13 Paris attacks came from CIA-linked arms dealer
By Alex Lantier
18 December 2015

At least one of the guns used in the November 13 terror attacks in Paris was purchased by Century International Arms and then re-exported to Europe. One of the largest arms dealers in the United States, Century Arms has close ties to the CIA and has faced charges in America and Europe of involvement in illegal arms deals.

The weapon, an M92 semiautomatic pistol, was produced at the Zastava arms factory in Kragujevac, Serbia. Last week, factory manager Milojko Brzakovic told AP he had checked its records on seven weapons that it manufactured that were used in the Paris attacks. It delivered several of the weapons inside Yugoslavia before that country dissolved amid capitalist restoration and civil war in the 1990s, but it delivered the pistol in May 2013 to Century Arms, based in Delray Beach, Florida.

Century Arms officials refused Palm Beach Post reporters’ requests for comment, and it remains unclear how the M92 pistol was re-exported to Europe. Century Arms required US government approval to legally import the firearm into the United States, however, and whoever re-exported it to Europe would have had to submit a request to the US State Department in order to do so legally.

These reports further undermine the official presentation of the Paris attacks by governments, media, and pro-imperialist “left” parties. They insisted that the attacks were an act of Islamist terror in which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) alone was involved and bore full responsibility.

This presentation was always a political fraud, insofar as the NATO powers were undoubtedly politically implicated. The attacks were led by Islamist fighters trained in Syria—where the CIA, European intelligence and Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have given financial and military backing to such Islamist forces to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Though placed on watch lists and monitored by intelligence services, these fighters were somehow allowed to prepare highly complex, coordinated attacks in Paris.

Revelations of a concrete link between Century Arms and the Paris attacks, however, raise specifically whether elements in the intelligence services aided the attackers—either inadvertently, due to their reckless war policy, or deliberately, to shift the political atmosphere far to the right.

The ruling elite reacted to the November 13 attacks, predictably, by aligning policy on war and democratic rights with the views of the most aggressive sections of the military-intelligence complex. France is now preparing to impose a permanent state of emergency, effectively abrogating key democratic rights and boosting the political fortunes of the neo-fascist National Front (FN). NATO is ramping up support to its proxies in Syria, though this threatens to trigger an all-out military clash with nuclear-armed Russia.

While it remains unclear how the Paris attacks were organized, the link to Century Arms strongly suggests that elements acting for the intelligence agencies, in an official capacity or otherwise, were involved. Century Arms has had close ties to US foreign policy for decades.

In 1987, John Rugg, a former police officer and Century Arms employee, testified to the US Senate that the firm had run weapons to the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This illegal operation, led by the CIA in defiance of the Boland Amendment passed by the US Congress cutting off aid to the Contras, had exploded in the Iran-Contra scandal.

In 2004, according to the Palm Beach Post, Italian authorities halted shipment of 7,500 AK-47 rifles to Century Arms from Romania, where the firm had developed commercial ties since before the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe.

In 2007, according to a US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, Century Arms worked with Israeli arms dealer Ori Zeller to illegally recover and sell off American M-1 rifles shipped by Washington to the bloody Guatemalan regime during that country’s civil war. The cable also states that Zeller’s associates were convicted of money laundering in Belgium in 2003, and suspected of laundering $20 million in Al Qaeda funds via West African diamonds.

Nonetheless, the cable called Zeller a “valuable source for the USG [US government] in Guatemala.” It added that the US government used him to obtain information on Guatemala, Israel, Russian arms sales, and Mexican drug cartels.

Century Arms’ relationship with Mexican narco-traffickers apparently goes beyond providing information. The US Center for Public Integrity reported in 2011 that Romanian WASR-10 rifles sold by Century Arms had “become a favorite of the Mexican drug cartels, and in recent years hundreds of them have been traced to crimes in Mexico.”

This is not the first indication that connections existed between state forces and Islamist groups that carried out terror attacks in France.

On Wednesday, French police detained Claude Hermant, a former member of the FN’s security detail who is active in far-right circles in northern France and serves as an informant for police and customs officials, for questioning over the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher. Officials confirmed that he was being held for questioning as to whether he had trafficked weapons to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman at the Hyper Cacher.

This confirmed earlier reports that Lille prosecutors were investigating a link between Hermant and the January attacks. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve subsequently invoked the state secrets privilege in an attempt to block the investigation. However, this decision and more details of the investigation of Hermant were leaked to the press.

The Lille investigation is now apparently considering the possibility that Hermant himself was simply playing the role of middleman in a larger network involved in arming the gunmen. Officials close to the investigating team told La Voix du Nord, “In such trafficking, there is always one intermediary, or more. Claude Hermant did not necessarily know the final destination of the weapons. It would show, in any case, the links between certain Islamist circles and organized crime.”

The paper also reported that a customs official had been placed under investigation in the Hermant affair.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/12/18/cial-d18.html

These reports further undermine the official presentation of the Paris attacks by governments, media, and pro-imperialist “left” parties. They insisted that the attacks were an act of Islamist terror in which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) alone was involved and bore full responsibility.

This presentation was always a political fraud, insofar as the NATO powers were undoubtedly politically implicated

The discovery that this weapon was supplied by the US is evidence of what everyone already knew - the US supplies arms and ammunition to groups and agencies all over the world. It is one of the biggest businesses of the US bourgeoisie. Where and how this pistol found its way into the hands of terrorists in the years between 2013 and 2015 is at least a question. This discovery does not constitute the "smoking gun" the Trots are claiming (sorry for the pun). It does prove nicely that the US is pouring-out weapons and lethal products into the world at an overwhelming rate. If there had been no US sourced weapons found, that would have been amazing. I am NOT saying that the Paris attacks were NOT CIA ops, they very well may have been; it is just that tracing one of the weapons to a US arms dealer means much less (in that regard) than the Trots are purporting. Just think of the unbelievable amount of weaponry the US has dumped in the middle east over the last few years - it is mind-boggling. It is an established fact that these weapons are passed back and forth between belligerents at a steady pace.

As Lenin points out, imperialism is the source of worldwide woes that stagger the imagination. The Trots don't have to stretch this far to point out the US empire's bloody hands.