Stratfor: The Utility of Assassination

[elfismiles]

The Utility of Assassination
February 22, 2010 | 2052 GMT
By George Friedman

The apparent Israeli assassination of a Hamas operative in the United Arab Emirates turned into a bizarre event replete with numerous fraudulent passports, alleged Israeli operatives caught on videotape and international outrage (much of it feigned), more over the use of fraudulent passports than over the operative’s death. If we are to believe the media, it took nearly 20 people and an international incident to kill him.

STRATFOR has written on the details of the killing as we have learned of them, but we see this as an occasion to address a broader question: the role of assassination in international politics.

Defining Assassination
We should begin by defining what we mean by assassination. It is the killing of a particular individual for political purposes. It differs from the killing of a spouse’s lover because it is political. It differs from the killing of a soldier on the battlefield in that the soldier is anonymous and is not killed because of who he is but because of the army he is serving in.

The question of assassination, in the current jargon “targeted killing,” raises the issue of its purpose. Apart from malice and revenge, as in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of assassination is to achieve a particular political end by weakening an enemy in some way. Thus, the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by the Americans in World War II was a targeted killing, an assassination. His movements were known, and the Americans had the opportunity to kill him. Killing an incompetent commander would be counterproductive, but Yamamoto was a superb strategist, without peer in the Japanese navy. Killing him would weaken Japan’s war effort, or at least have a reasonable chance of doing so. With all the others dying around him in the midst of war, the moral choice did not seem complex then, nor does it seem complex now.

Such occasions rarely occur on the battlefield. There are few commanders who could not readily be replaced, and perhaps even replaced by someone more able. In any event, it is difficult to locate enemy commanders, meaning the opportunity to kill them rarely arises. And as commanders ask their troops to risk their lives, they have no moral claim to immunity from danger.

Now, take another case. Assume that the leader of a country were singular and irreplaceable, something very few are. But think of Fidel Castro, whose central role in the Cuban government was undeniable. Assume that he is the enemy of another country like the United States. It is an unofficial hostility — no war has been declared — but a very real one nonetheless. Is it illegitimate to try to kill such a leader in a bid to destroy his regime? Let’s move that question to Adolph Hitler, the gold standard of evil. Would it be inappropriate to have sought to kill him in 1938 based on the type of regime he had created and what he said that he would do with it?

If the position is that killing Hitler would have been immoral, then we have a serious question about the moral standards being used. The more complex case is Castro. He is certainly no Hitler, but neither is he the romantic democratic revolutionary some have painted him as being. But if it is legitimate to kill Castro, then where is the line drawn? Who is it not legitimate to kill?

As with Yamamoto, the number of instances in which killing a political leader would make a difference in policy or in the regime’s strength is extremely limited. In most cases, the argument against assassination is not moral but practical: It would make no difference if the target in question lives or dies. But where it would make a difference, the moral argument becomes difficult. If we establish that Hitler was a legitimate target, than we have established that there is not an absolute ban on political assassination. The question is what the threshold must be.

All of this is a preface to the killing in the United Arab Emirates, because that represents a third case. Since the rise of the modern intelligence apparatus, covert arms have frequently been attached to them. The nation-states of the 20th century all had intelligence organizations. These organizations carried out a range of clandestine operations beyond collecting intelligence, from supplying weapons to friendly political groups in foreign countries to overthrowing regimes to underwriting terrorist operations.

During the latter half of the century, nonstate-based covert organizations were developed. As European empires collapsed, political movements wishing to take control created covert warfare apparatuses to force the Europeans out or defeat political competitors. Israel’s state-based intelligence system emerged from one created before the Jewish state’s independence. The various Palestinian factions created their own. Beyond this, of course, groups like al Qaeda created their own covert capabilities, against which the United States has arrayed its own massive covert capability.

Assassinations Today
The contemporary reality is not a battlefield on which a Yamamoto might be singled out or a charismatic political leader whose death might destroy his regime. Rather, a great deal of contemporary international politics and warfare is built around these covert capabilities. In the case of Hamas, the mission of these covert operations is to secure the resources necessary for Hamas to engage Israeli forces on terms favorable to them, from terror to rocket attacks. For Israel, covert operations exist to shut off resources to Hamas (and other groups), leaving them unable to engage or resist Israel.

Expressed this way, covert warfare makes sense, particularly for the Israelis when they engage the clandestine efforts of Hamas. Hamas is moving covertly to secure resources. Its game is to evade the Israelis. The Israeli goal is to identify and eliminate the covert capability. Hamas is the hunted, Israel the hunter here. Apparently the hunter and hunted met in the United Arab Emirates, and the hunted was killed.

But there are complexities here. First, in warfare, the goal is to render the enemy incapable of resisting. Killing just any group of enemy soldiers is not the point. Indeed, diverting resources to engage the enemy on the margins, leaving the center of gravity of the enemy force untouched, harms far more than it helps. Covert warfare is different from conventional warfare, but the essential question stands: Is the target you are destroying essential to the enemy’s ability to fight? And even more important, as the end of all war is political, does defeating this enemy bring you closer to your political goals?

Covert organizations, like armies, are designed to survive attrition. It is expected that operatives will be detected and killed; the system is designed to survive that. The goal of covert warfare is either to penetrate the enemy so deeply, or destroy one or more people so essential to the operation of the group, that the covert organization stops functioning. All covert organizations are designed to stop this from happening.

They achieve this through redundancy and regeneration. After the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Israelis mounted an intense covert operation to identify, penetrate and destroy the movement — called Black September — that mounted the attack. Black September was not simply a separate movement but a front for various Palestinian factions. Killing those involved with Munich would not paralyze Black September, and destroying Black September did not destroy the Palestinian movement. That movement had redundancy — the ability to shift new capable people into the roles of those killed — and therefore could regenerate, training and deploying fresh operatives.

The mission was successfully carried out, but the mission was poorly designed. Like a general using overwhelming force to destroy a marginal element of the enemy army, the Israelis focused their covert capability to destroy elements whose destruction would not give the Israelis what they wanted — the destruction of the various Palestinian covert capabilities. It might have been politically necessary for the Israeli public, it might have been emotionally satisfying, but the Israeli’s enemies weren’t broken. Consider that Entebbe occurred in 1976. If Israel’s goal in targeting Black September was the suppression of terrorism by Palestinian groups, the assault on one group did not end the threat from other groups.

Therefore, the political ends the Israelis sought were not achieved. The Palestinians did not become weaker. The year 1972 was not the high point of the Palestinian movement politically. It became stronger over time, gaining substantial international legitimacy. If the mission was to break the Palestinian covert apparatus to weaken the Palestinian capability and weaken its political power, the covert war of eliminating specific individuals identified as enemy operatives failed. The operatives very often were killed, but the operation did not yield the desired outcome.

And here lies the real dilemma of assassination. It is extraordinarily rare to identify a person whose death would materially weaken a substantial political movement in some definitive sense — i.e., where if the person died, then the movement would be finished. This is particularly true for nationalist movements that can draw on a very large pool of people and talent. It is equally hard to reduce a movement quickly enough to destroy the organization’s redundancy and regenerative capability. Doing so requires extraordinary intelligence penetration as well as a massive covert effort, so such an effort quickly reveals the penetration and identifies your own operatives.

A single swift, global blow is what is dreamt of. Covert war actually works as a battle of attrition, involving the slow accumulation of intelligence, the organization of the strike, the assassination. At that point, one man is dead, a man whose replacement is undoubtedly already trained. Others are killed, but the critical mass is never reached, and there is no one target who if killed would cause everything to change.

In war there is a terrible tension between the emotions of the public and the cold logic that must drive the general. In covert warfare, there is tremendous emotional satisfaction to the country when it is revealed that someone it regards as not only an enemy, but someone responsible for the deaths of their countryman, has been killed. But the generals or directors of intelligence can’t afford this satisfaction. They have limited resources, which must be devoted to achieving their country’s political goals and assuring its safety. Those resources have to be used effectively.

There are few Hitlers whose death is morally demanded and might have a practical effect. Most such killings are both morally and practically ambiguous. In covert warfare, even if you concede every moral point about the wickedness of your enemy, you must raise the question as to whether all of your efforts are having any real effect on the enemy in the long run. If they can simply replace the man you killed, while training ten more operatives in the meantime, you have achieved little. If the enemy keeps becoming politically more successful, then the strategy must be re-examined.

We are not writing this as pacifists; we do not believe the killing of enemies is to be avoided. And we certainly do not believe that the morally incoherent strictures of what is called international law should guide any country in protecting itself. What we are addressing here is the effectiveness of assassination in waging covert warfare. Too frequently, it does not, in our mind, represent a successful solution to the military and political threat posed by covert organizations. It might bring an enemy to justice, and it might well disrupt an organization for a while or even render a specific organization untenable. But in the covert wars of the 20th century, the occasions when covert operations — including assassinations — achieved the political ends being pursued were rare. That does not mean they never did. It does mean that the utility of assassination as a main part of covert warfare needs to be considered carefully. Assassination is not without cost, and in war, all actions must be evaluated rigorously in terms of cost versus benefit.

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100222 ... assination

[AlicetheKurious]

And we certainly do not believe that the morally incoherent strictures of what is called international law should guide any country in protecting itself.

This is the money quote. International law is not "morally incoherent" except to sociopaths who believe they, and they alone, should have the right to violate it with impunity. Assassinating people only makes sense when the law of the jungle prevails, and there is no legal recourse available. That is why we have international laws in the first place: to deny killers and aggressors the excuse that there is no other way to defend themselves or seek redress. This criterion certainly applies to the victims of the Israelis, rather than the Israelis themselves. The zionists have successfully used and abused every legal avenue and recourse possible when it has suited their purpose, citing this law and that statute and this UN resolution only when it benefits them, at the same time ensuring that their victims are denied any protection under the same laws.

Using this author's utilitarian argument, the ideal target of such assassinations would be the politician, soldier or civilian who engages in war crimes against defenseless people, procures weapons that are used for war crimes or crimes against humanity, or who provides logistical or other support for war criminals and other violators of the Geneva Conventions, such as supporters of illegal colonies in Palestinian land. Not only would it be justifiable, using this author's own "moral" premises, but it would also make much more sense from his utilitarian point of view.

The author argues that from a practical perspective, killing Palestinian resistance leaders is not likely to significantly weaken the Palestinian people's will to resist, nor to prevent the emergence of new leaders to replace them. This is true, for the simple reason that the Palestinian people have no choice but to resist, unless one considers meekly acquiescing in their own dispossession, expulsion and extermination to be a choice. The record provides ample evidence that they never have and never will make such a choice; that on the contrary, the spirit of resistance is growing even stronger with each new generation, despite the unbelievable sadism of their oppressors.

The Israelis are a very different matter. Given the enormous financial and other rewards that accrue to those who serve the zionist project, it's reasonable to assume that many, if not most, are motivated primarily by a crude and venal self-interest. In this case, again using the author's own utilitarian criteria, engaging in assassinations (or "targeted killings") of these individuals would provide an excellent counter-force to those rewards, by raising the risk factor of such behavior to a level commensurate with the potential rewards.

Like most blinkered zionists, Mr. Friedman appears oblivious to the still-subtle shift that is gradually transforming the global landscape in a way that is not nearly as favorable for the zionist project and its minions as it was even a decade ago. Globally, the sheer number of individuals who increasingly feel disgusted and angry at the zionists' arrogant and contemptuous disregard for human life and basic decency and for their sickening "moral" double-standards long ago overflowed the borders of the Arab world and is rapidly becoming an international movement to be reckoned with. For "thinkers" like this author, who advocate a return to the law of the jungle on the presumption that their position as predators (rather than prey) is secure, that's something to think about.

[MinM]

Survivor of 1972 Olympic massacre, now living in New York, remembers – USATODAY.com

Munich 1972: When terrorism 'contaminated' the Olympics

MONTROSE, N.Y. – A thin wall separated victim from survivor when Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Village in Munich on Sept. 5, 1972. The terrorists took their first hostages — a group of Israeli coaches and officials in Apartment 1 — then moved on to Apartment 3, which housed Israeli weightlifters and wrestlers. Those in Apartment 2 were spared.

Forty years after 11 Israeli Olympians were killed in Munich, a thin wall still separates the beauty of the Games from the horror of that day, especially for Avraham Melamed, who was sleeping that night in Apartment 2.

"The Olympics were a virgin phenomenon," says Melamed, a two-time Olympic swimmer for Israel. "It's not a virgin anymore. Now you have to think about security. Now you have to think about terrorism. Now you have to plan for it. It comes at an enormous price. And this beautiful thing that's supposed to symbolize forgetting about politics, forgetting about war, for this period of time … now it's contaminated. Now it's contaminated forever."

*
VIDEO: Survivors remember 1972 Munich massacre

Still, this summer he will watch, intently as always, when the Olympics are held in London from July 27 to Aug. 12. "I sit mesmerized by the television," says Melamed, 67.
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What he will see is an Olympics much changed since the Munich massacre. The attack was a pivotal event in the evolution of global terrorism and the reason security for the Olympics has increased dramatically. The Munich Games employed 2,140 police and other law enforcement officers, according to the official report, Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said. The London Games will have a security force of 23,700, according to the British government's most recent report. With a security budget of at least $1.6 billion, the London Games are the largest peacetime security operation in Britain's history.

For London, there is plenty of reason for added vigilance. A day after the city was awarded the Games in 2005, suicide bombers attacked the city's transit system, killing 52 people. As a U.S. ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain is also increasingly concerned about the threat from Islamic militants.

'A little bit guilty'

Early on Saturday mornings, you can find Avraham Melamed, who is known as Bey, gliding across a modest pool at a health club about an hour north of New York City. Directly after the Munich Games, he flew to the USA to finish college and has lived here ever since. "I'm about 5-7, bald, aging and," he says by way of description, "better than your average recreational swimmer."

After his workout, the swimmers on the Premier Athletic Club masters team he coaches arrive for practice. Still wet, Melamed walks around the pool in bare feet, black swimming trunks and white T-shirt, coaxing and encouraging. Erika Krumlauf, 42, says she had no idea who Melamed was when she joined the team. After a quick Google search, she learned that he swam for Israel in the 1964 and 1968 Olympics. She later read that her coach survived the 1972 Munich massacre.

In February, Melamed told his swimmers he would miss practice because of a scheduled trip to Munich. "I asked him if it was for vacation," says Tom Seery, 51. "He said, 'Not really.' "

He didn't mention that he was returning to Munich for the first time in 40 years to be interviewed for the documentary The Eleventh Day — The Survivors of Munich 1972. The film, produced by the German Biography Channel in collaboration with the Israeli History Channel, will premiere on German television July 7, just ahead of the London Games.

Melamed still has mixed feelings about the attention. "I feel a little strange about sort of deriving notoriety from this incident. I feel a little bit guilty.

"My friends died," he says, rubbing his hand across his smooth head. "My friends died. I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor."

Melamed began swimming at a young age in Israel. He competed in the 1964 Toyko Games, failing to advance beyond the heats in the 200-meter butterfly. In the 1968 Games in Mexico City, he tied for 10th place in the 100 butterfly and 15th place in the 200.

After a chance meeting with a U.S. coach at the 1970 World University Games, Melamed headed to study in the USA and swim for West Liberty State College near Wheeling, W.Va. He encouraged three other Israel teammates to join him, and the Hilltoppers soon became an NAIA power. They were profiled in a lengthy feature in Sports Illustrated in 1972 titled, "Wandering Jews in an Unpromising Land." The piece took great delight in the incongruity. One passage, quoting Melamed, read: " 'Coach described it as a small town. But a small town in the States, I thought, would be 100,000 people — 50,000, at least.' What he (Melamed) found was a town of 500 — 450 of whom must be in perpetual hiding."

Melamed was a three-time NAIA All-American and won five individual national championships during his three seasons, according to the West Liberty Hall of Fame.

Once-lax security

In part because he was training in the USA and mostly because of internal politics in Israeli swimming, Melamed was not named to the 1972 Olympic team. Given he was one of the country's top swimmers, there was an uproar. The controversy was chronicled in an Israeli newspaper, which sent Melamed to Munich as a reporter. However, he didn't have a news media credential and thus was not granted official access to Olympic facilities. But because he had begun serving as a personal coach for one of the team's female swimmers, he was invited by Israeli officials to stay with the team's delegation in the Village — which, in a tragic irony, he was able to do quite easily without a credential.

In 1972, Germany's goal was to distance itself from its last Olympics, the 1936 Nazi Games in Berlin. Security personnel wore turquoise uniforms and patrolled the Games unarmed during the day. (In London, as in recent Olympics, there will be strict security measures at the Village. Credentials will be checked repeatedly and belongings will be X-rayed on entry.)

Melamed recalls sneaking into the Munich Olympic Village as a matter of routine. "I didn't even have a key to the apartment," he says. "They say there was no security. The truth is that the people there did not have guns, but it was much better protected than Tokyo, where you could get everywhere, and in Mexico City, where you just had to pay a couple of pesos."

The terrorists sneaked into the village with the ease of a kid who missed curfew. Wearing track suits and carrying duffel bags, they arrived in the middle of the night as some American athletes were returning from a night on the town. The two groups scaled the 6-foot fence together.

Before dawn, Melamed says he was awakened by a muffled shot and screams. "It sounded like someone in a room behind you kept their television loud and that there was a Western movie," he says.

In the next apartment, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg had been shot in a struggle. When Melamed was a student at a teacher's college in Israel, Weinberg was the head of residences, and the two were friends. "It seemed so like a dream that doesn't make sense," Melamed says.

The terrorists, who were part of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, forced the badly wounded coach to lead them to the apartments where other Israelis were housed. Weinberg skipped Apartment 2, where Melamed and other slightly built residents were, and moved on to Apartment 3, where the wrestlers and weightlifters lived, presumably with the hope that the latter group could overpower the terrorists. The residents of Apartment 2 slipped out of the back sliding door to safety.

How the rest of the story unfolded has been told and retold in books, films and documentaries. After the Olympians were taken hostage, long hours of negotiations followed as the world watched — and the footage of a terrorist in a stocking cap became the Games' indelible image. The 11 Israelis were killed after a botched rescue attempt at a military airfield.

"They let us visit the room, where they kept our friends. All of their belongings were strewn, and there was a huge pool of blood. It was like a dream that you observe from the outside. You want to feel something, but all you feel is anger," Melamed says. "Rationally we knew that the Germans had zero interest in supporting anything like this. But the whole association of Jews getting killed again on German soil, there was a lot of anger."

'You go on'

After the Games, Melamed returned to the USA, finished his undergraduate degree at West Liberty and went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, where he coached the men's swimming team from 1973 to 1979. "Being not in Israel helped me," he says. "I didn't feel like I became a different person, but my girlfriend at the time said I changed. The change was subtle; I don't know what it was. It's like people surviving a tornado. You go on. It was a tornado in my life. It was disruptive, but it passed."

Melamed went on. He became a computer science programmer in New York, married, started a family, divorced and continued to swim and coach the sport he loved. He didn't see or speak to any of the other survivors for 40 years, until he was contacted by the documentary filmmakers and asked to return to Munich. Seven survivors gathered on a chilly, rainy day. "It was good to hear their stories. Each one of us had slightly different perspectives. It was great to see them and the people they came to be," says Melamed, the only U.S.-based survivor.

Emanuel Rotstein, the director of production for the documentary, says no previous book or film has focused on the survivors. "It's almost unbelievable that those men who survived such a terrible assault on their lives disappeared from the collective memory and didn't play any role in the way the attacks were reported and even commemorated up to now," Rotstein says.

The group returned to their building in the Olympic Village, which is now a middle-class apartment complex. In front of Building 31, there is a memorial plaque. The building looks the same, but the surroundings aren't as stark, Melamed says. "Now there is a lot more flowers and plants. Time has taken its course and changed it," he says.

Those gathered asked if they could go into the apartment, but a woman living there refused.

"Our friends were very upset; I wasn't," Melamed says. "It was pretty ridiculous to expect them to know you, or to respect you. We were just intruders to them, all of a sudden, 15 people coming with cameras."

But the group didn't need to see the central scene of the tragedy to relive it. "I have memories, and they are fading as we speak," Melamed says with a small smile.

"Can you believe it's been 40 years since Munich?" he is asked.

"Do I have a choice? I can't believe I can't swim 200 butterfly anymore!" he says. "I can't believe this, I can't believe that, but I have to live."

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics ... 54325220/1

The Utility of Assassination
February 22, 2010 | 2052 GMT
By George Friedman

The apparent Israeli assassination of a Hamas operative in the United Arab Emirates turned into a bizarre event replete with numerous fraudulent passports, alleged Israeli operatives caught on videotape and international outrage (much of it feigned), more over the use of fraudulent passports than over the operative’s death. If we are to believe the media, it took nearly 20 people and an international incident to kill him.

STRATFOR has written on the details of the killing as we have learned of them, but we see this as an occasion to address a broader question: the role of assassination in international politics...

They achieve this through redundancy and regeneration. After the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Israelis mounted an intense covert operation to identify, penetrate and destroy the movement — called Black September — that mounted the attack. Black September was not simply a separate movement but a front for various Palestinian factions. Killing those involved with Munich would not paralyze Black September, and destroying Black September did not destroy the Palestinian movement. That movement had redundancy — the ability to shift new capable people into the roles of those killed — and therefore could regenerate, training and deploying fresh operatives.

The mission was successfully carried out, but the mission was poorly designed. Like a general using overwhelming force to destroy a marginal element of the enemy army, the Israelis focused their covert capability to destroy elements whose destruction would not give the Israelis what they wanted — the destruction of the various Palestinian covert capabilities. It might have been politically necessary for the Israeli public, it might have been emotionally satisfying, but the Israeli’s enemies weren’t broken. Consider that Entebbe occurred in 1976. If Israel’s goal in targeting Black September was the suppression of terrorism by Palestinian groups, the assault on one group did not end the threat from other groups.

Therefore, the political ends the Israelis sought were not achieved. The Palestinians did not become weaker. The year 1972 was not the high point of the Palestinian movement politically. It became stronger over time, gaining substantial international legitimacy. If the mission was to break the Palestinian covert apparatus to weaken the Palestinian capability and weaken its political power, the covert war of eliminating specific individuals identified as enemy operatives failed. The operatives very often were killed, but the operation did not yield the desired outcome.

And here lies the real dilemma of assassination. It is extraordinarily rare to identify a person whose death would materially weaken a substantial political movement in some definitive sense — i.e., where if the person died, then the movement would be finished. This is particularly true for nationalist movements that can draw on a very large pool of people and talent. It is equally hard to reduce a movement quickly enough to destroy the organization’s redundancy and regenerative capability. Doing so requires extraordinary intelligence penetration as well as a massive covert effort, so such an effort quickly reveals the penetration and identifies your own operatives.

A single swift, global blow is what is dreamt of. Covert war actually works as a battle of attrition, involving the slow accumulation of intelligence, the organization of the strike, the assassination. At that point, one man is dead, a man whose replacement is undoubtedly already trained. Others are killed, but the critical mass is never reached, and there is no one target who if killed would cause everything to change.

In war there is a terrible tension between the emotions of the public and the cold logic that must drive the general. In covert warfare, there is tremendous emotional satisfaction to the country when it is revealed that someone it regards as not only an enemy, but someone responsible for the deaths of their countryman, has been killed. But the generals or directors of intelligence can’t afford this satisfaction. They have limited resources, which must be devoted to achieving their country’s political goals and assuring its safety. Those resources have to be used effectively.

There are few Hitlers whose death is morally demanded and might have a practical effect. Most such killings are both morally and practically ambiguous. In covert warfare, even if you concede every moral point about the wickedness of your enemy, you must raise the question as to whether all of your efforts are having any real effect on the enemy in the long run. If they can simply replace the man you killed, while training ten more operatives in the meantime, you have achieved little. If the enemy keeps becoming politically more successful, then the strategy must be re-examined.

We are not writing this as pacifists; we do not believe the killing of enemies is to be avoided. And we certainly do not believe that the morally incoherent strictures of what is called international law should guide any country in protecting itself. What we are addressing here is the effectiveness of assassination in waging covert warfare. Too frequently, it does not, in our mind, represent a successful solution to the military and political threat posed by covert organizations. It might bring an enemy to justice, and it might well disrupt an organization for a while or even render a specific organization untenable. But in the covert wars of the 20th century, the occasions when covert operations — including assassinations — achieved the political ends being pursued were rare. That does not mean they never did. It does mean that the utility of assassination as a main part of covert warfare needs to be considered carefully. Assassination is not without cost, and in war, all actions must be evaluated rigorously in terms of cost versus benefit.

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100222 ... assination

[Nordic]

That was my first Olympics. I was living in Germany at the time, and there was all-day coverage of the events on TV.

It was also my first experience with middle-eastern terrorism, and my first experience with what we might call the "Israel-Palestinian conflict".

Needless to say it left a very negative impression upon me as far as the Palestinian side went. There was never any question in my mind as to who the bad guys were up until QUITE recently.

I'm sure many countless others of my generation felt the same way. And still do.

The PLO couldn't have made a worse appeal for public sympathy. They were so deeply hated for, well, practically ever, because of this.

Which now, in hindsight, begs the question: WTF? Israel itself could not have orchestrated a better appeal for permanent sympathy and support from the western world.

[MinM]

Anonymous - July 23, 2012 6:48 AM

"Speaking of false flags, Netanyahu asked for air time on Fox News so he could get his message in proximity to the Aurora massacre, a common technique in propaganda"

You are so right Kenny. The scumbag was also on CBS, and they played a clip of the Colorado stuff followed immediately by Netanyahu with Schieffer talking about the recent Bulgaria bombing and comparing the 2. Netanyahu went on to suggest that Iran is going to attack the Olympics. Which of course means the Mossad is going to attack the Olympics. With that coupled with Frank Lowy's connection to security at the games Im starting to side with those who say a false flag is imminent.

http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2012/ ... nt_23.html

[StarmanSkye]

Nordic wrote:

"The PLO couldn't have made a worse appeal for public sympathy. They were so deeply hated for, well, practically ever, because of this.

Which now, in hindsight, begs the question: WTF? Israel itself could not have orchestrated a better appeal for permanent sympathy and support from the western world."
****

Well blow me down with a feather!
It never occurred to me before to consider the 'who benefits' angle of the '72 Munich Olympics w/r/t a False Flag.

Just goes to underscore, How can we KNOW what we know about much of what passes for current events since it so often CAN be filtered by the manipulation of 'news' that disguises a hidden agenda according to the tactical dictates of propaganda, duplicity, false flags & deception viz uncommon warfare.

Most people (at least in the US) are woefully unprepared to analyze the possible/likely agenda that drives the information war being obscured by the script of official narrative.

The Munich Olympics terror attack was 5 years after the USS Liberty incident. Damage control?

And is it just coincidence that after the murder of JFK, US pressure on Israel to submit to non-proliferation weapons inspections at the Dimona Nuclear cite ceased?

[Hammer of Los]

...

From MinM;

The scumbag was also on CBS, and they played a clip of the Colorado stuff followed immediately by Netanyahu with Schieffer talking about the recent Bulgaria bombing and comparing the 2. Netanyahu went on to suggest that Iran is going to attack the Olympics. Which of course means the Mossad is going to attack the Olympics. With that coupled with Frank Lowy's connection to security at the games Im starting to side with those who say a false flag is imminent.

I don't like the sound of that one bit.

...

[hava007]

allegations to that effects where voiced, I believe, by one of the widows of the munich attack victims, but soon she went into silence and I believe married one op or so. Anyway, it boils down again to the same angle, of human rights of Israelis, vis a vis the gov. False flag also means murder of civilians by their gov. (that's in case anyone forgot that Israelis are humans, with the relevant "human rights")>

That was my first Olympics. I was living in Germany at the time, and there was all-day coverage of the events on TV.

It was also my first experience with middle-eastern terrorism, and my first experience with what we might call the "Israel-Palestinian conflict".

Needless to say it left a very negative impression upon me as far as the Palestinian side went. There was never any question in my mind as to who the bad guys were up until QUITE recently.

I'm sure many countless others of my generation felt the same way. And still do.

The PLO couldn't have made a worse appeal for public sympathy. They were so deeply hated for, well, practically ever, because of this.

Which now, in hindsight, begs the question: WTF? Israel itself could not have orchestrated a better appeal for permanent sympathy and support from the western world.

[MinM]

Anonymous - July 23, 2012 6:48 AM

"Speaking of false flags, Netanyahu asked for air time on Fox News so he could get his message in proximity to the Aurora massacre, a common technique in propaganda"

You are so right Kenny. The scumbag was also on CBS, and they played a clip of the Colorado stuff followed immediately by Netanyahu with Schieffer talking about the recent Bulgaria bombing and comparing the 2. Netanyahu went on to suggest that Iran is going to attack the Olympics. Which of course means the Mossad is going to attack the Olympics. With that coupled with Frank Lowy's connection to security at the games Im starting to side with those who say a false flag is imminent.

http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2012/ ... nt_23.html

gareth: the word you’re looking for is ‘patsies’

Israel Pins Bombing on Hezbollah to Get EU Terror Ruling
Gareth Porter, IPS News, Jul 24 2012

Netanyahu’s claim Sunday of absolutely reliable intelligence linking Hezbollah to the bombing in Bulgaria last week was apparently aimed at supporting his government’s determination to get the EU to declare Hezbollah a terrorist entity. The Netanyahu claim in interviews on Fox News Sunday and CBS Face the Nation of “rock solid” intelligence on the bombing was accompanied by an announcement that Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman would travel to Brussels Monday to meet with EU foreign policy chief Ashton and foreign ministers of nine EU member states to persuade them to put Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organisations. Netanyahu, who usually emphasises Iran’s role in terrorism, focused primarily on Hezbollah’s alleged culpability. Unlike the US, the EU has never officially considered Hezbollah to be a terrorist organisation, but Netanyahu believes that pinning the Bulgarian bombing on Hezbollah gives him political leverage on the EU to change that. Lieberman was quoted Sunday as saying:

This has changed the way in which Hezbollah is seen.

For months, Netanyau has been building a case that Iran has been carrying out a worldwide campaign of terrorism. That narrative is based, however, on a systematic and highly successful Israeli campaign of shaping the news coverage of a series of murky allegations about terrorist actions or efforts in Baku, Tibilisi, Bangkok and Delhi, and into stories fitting neatly into the overall narrative. Netanyahu used sweeping language about the alleged intelligence underlying his charge that Hezbollah carried out the Bulgarian tourist bombing, but refused to offer any further information to back it up. In the interview on Fox News Sunday, Netanyahu said:

We know with absolute certainty, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is a Hezbollah operation.

But despite being asked by interviewer Chris Wallace for some indication of the nature of the intelligence, he would say only that information had been shared with “friendly agencies.” When the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, Tamir Pardo and Yoram Cohen, briefed the Israeli cabinet Sunday on those agencies’ efforts against what were described as Iranian and Hezbollah plans for terrorism in more than 20 countries, they were not reported to have presented hard intelligence supporting the claim of Hezbollah responsibility for the Bulgarian bombing. If the Israeli government did share intelligence information on Hezbollah and the Bulgarian bombing with the CIA, as Netanyahu claimed, it did not register with the senior US officials on Jul 19. When a “senior US official” was quoted by the NYT that day confirming the Israeli assertion that the bomber who carried out the operation was “a member of a Hezbollah cell operating in Bulgaria,” he was apparently merely making assumptions rather than relying on any hard evidence. Also on Jul 19, Pentagon press secretary Little said:

I don’t know that anybody has assessed attribution for this cowardly action.

On Jul 20, White House spokesman Carney said:

We are not in a position to make a statement about responsibility.

Netanyahu declared immediately after the news of the Bulgarian bus bombing on Jul 18 that Iran was responsible for the attack. In support of the charge, he cited recent alleged terrorist incidents in a number of other countries and concluded:

All the signs lead to Iran.

But Netanyahu offered no proof, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington acknowledged to CNN on Jul 19 that it had no proof that Iran was the instigator of the attack. Netanyahu also argued in his Fox News interview as well as in an appearance on CBS Face the Nation that an Iran/Hezbollah connection to the bombing of the Israeli tourist bus could be reasonably inferred from a Hezbollah terrorist plan that had been discovered in Cyprus only a week earlier. Netanyahu said on Fox News on Sunday:

The whole world can see who it is. You would have known or been able to surmise it from Cyprus a week ago. A Hezbollah operative, exactly the same attack, exactly the same modus operandi.

But the case to which Netanyahu referred is much less clear-cut than his dramatic description. In fact, it is unclear who the alleged Hezbollah operative really is and what he was actually doing in Cyprus. The 24-year-old Lebanese man with a Swedish passport was arrested in his hotel room in Limossol on Jul 7, just two days after he had arrived in the country, following an urgent message sent to Cyprus from Israeli intelligence that the man intended to carry out attacks, according to Haaretz on Jul 14. The Israeli press have portrayed the unnamed Lebanese as “collecting information for a terror attack” being planned by Hezbollah (Israel Hayom) and as identifying the “vulnerabilities that would allow for maximal damage among a group of Israeli tourists in their first hours on Cyprus.” (Ynet News). But those descriptions may not reflect what the Lebanese man was actually doing...

http://niqnaq.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/ ... s-patsies/

Terry Gross repeated some of Netanyahu's assertions on her show today...

'The Twilight War' Between The U.S. And Iran

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is David Crist. He's the author of the new book "The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran."

Let's talk about where we are now with Iran. Iran appears to have backed the terrorist attack against - young vacationing Israelis in Bulgaria, which was what, about a week ago.

CRIST: Yes.

GROSS: The Stuxnet Virus - which it's unclear how much Israel and how much the United States had to do with that - but that virus destroyed a fair amount of Iran's nuclear program. And there were several Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated. And it is assumed - it is widely assumed that Israel is behind that. So this kind of low-level conflict is underway between the U.S., Iran, Israel and Iran. Where would you say we are now?

CRIST: Well, I think there is certainly a sort of low-level war that's being engaged between both sides. There's very little doubt in my mind the bombing of Bulgaria was in retaliation for what Iran thinks of the Israeli assassination of their scientists. And it's very much in keeping with the Iranians' playbook, which is you don't attack directly at a much stronger enemy. You use terrorism to sort of achieve the same result. And it provides the Iranian government with plausible deniability. It's hard - in many cases, it's hard to trace these back to the Iranian leadership.

But I think it's just a continuation of what I describe in the book, which is, in many ways, a 30-year quasi-war between the United States and Iran. And Iran has used terrorism a number of times - from Khobar Towers to the Beirut bombing - as a means of striking back in this covert war...

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =157248254

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=19329

[MinM]

Will NBC force Costas to back off pledge to honor slain Israeli athletes during opening ceremonies?
by Ed Sherman
July 25, 2012

I imagine there are some intense discussions taking place between Bob Costas and the high brass at NBC.

Last month, Costas told the Hollywood Reporter that he is planning his own tribute to the slain Israeli athletes in Munich during NBC’s telecast of the opening ceremonies Friday. The International Olympic Committee has turned down a request to honor the athletes on what is the 40th anniversary of that tragic event.

Costas said: “I intend to note that the IOC denied the request. Many people find that denial more than puzzling but insensitive. Here’s a minute of silence right now.”

But will it happen? Ah, this is where it gets interesting.

When asked about Costas’ plan this week, NBC bounced back with a statement: "Our production plans for the Opening Ceremony are still being finalized and Bob is part of that planning."

Indeed, this is a sticky situation for NBC. If Costas goes ahead with his plan, it will put the network in the position of being critical of the IOC on an extremely sensitive issue.

The IOC clearly doesn't want to interject the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the opening ceremonies. There is a concern how the Arab nations would react to a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes.

Last week, IOC president Jacques Rogge said that the opening ceremony, "is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident."

So NBC-IOC relations aren't going to be helped if Costas injects his own moment of silence into the telecast. Not that the IOC will return the billions from NBC with a TV deal that runs through the 2020 Games, but the two parties have to interact on many issues during the next eight years. An angry IOC could make things more complicated, if you know what I mean.

I'm Jewish and the Munich Massacre had a profound effect on me growing up as a 12-year-old boy. I'll have more on that at a later date.

The issue for today isn’t whether the IOC should honor the Israeli athletes during the opening ceremonies. That’s not going to happen.

Rather, should Costas stage his own moment of silence on the telecast?

As a journalist, Costas is well within his bounds to note the controversy over the IOC decision regarding the Israeli athletes. It’s news.

But can he back off a pledge to take it to the next level? That would put Costas in a tough spot since Jewish leaders have lauded him for taking a stand.

From an Associated Press story:

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said support from Costas would be welcome. Foxman’s organization, which promotes Jewish causes, has backed an effort to bring notice to the Munich victims at opening ceremonies for years.

“I think he’s right, and I think it will make a difference because of who he is,” Foxman said. “It’s sad that one has to characterize it as courageous. It’s such a common sense thing to do.”

NBC and Costas have two more days to make a decision. Interesting discussions, to be sure.

http://www.shermanreport.com/?p=3716

Nice bit of meme-reversal there. The media is overly sensitive to portraying Arabs in a bad light.