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Indybay Feature
A Neo-Conservative Ghoul Runs for the SF Board of Supervisors
One of the Candidates for District 3 of the SF Board of Supes has a dark and sordid track record...
The upcoming November 3rd election showcases United States democracy at its most benignant and august, with a choice in the Presidential race between the egregious Donald Trump and the egregious Joe Biden. November 3rd is also election day in numerous small races around the country, among them District 3 of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
District 3 includes Chinatown, North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill and the Financial District. The District 3 seat is currently held by Aaron Peskin, one of the more left-liberal-inclined members of the Board. Peskin faces three rivals, who in typical San Francisco style range from bad to worse regarding San Francisco's catastrophic and wholly artificial market-generated housing shortage and other accelerating ills generated by commodity relations in San Francisco and everywhere else.
The top priority on District 3 candidate Spencer Simonsen's campaign website is found under the heading 'Crime and Property Damage.' This is Simonsen's call to bring the hammer down on SF's ever-expanding populace of the desperate poor, since petty theft and vandalism committed by some of them adversely affects "local tourism and business conference events." Along with Simonsen there is newbie real estate lobby tool Danny Sauter, the President of North Beach Neighbors, an association of business-sector-oriented types. In a city where there are five times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless individuals, smart feller Sauter wants to prioritize the building of even more units of market rate housing. Apparently since the market is our God, and our God has stopped listening to us, the only possible response is to pray harder.
With choices as abhorrent as these it's hard to imagine worse -- but don’t sell District 3 candidate Stephen Schwartz short! A long time professional repentant former leftist and fan of the Nicaraguan Contras, and more recently an enthusiastic high profile apologist for Uzbekistan's late dictator Islam Karimov, the neo-conservative war enthusiast Stephen Schwartz also styles himself as one of the world's leading authorities on the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. District 3 candidate Schwartz remakes his persona more frequently than most yuppies change their socks -- generally in pursuit of fresh employment opportunities -- and he is currently going by the name 'Lulu.'
Schwartz was raised in San Francisco as a self-proclaimed "red diaper baby" in the milieu of the pro-Soviet Union Communist Party U.S.A. In his youth he experienced a suspiciously Oedipal-sounding rebellion against the C.P. and became a Trotskyist. Schwartz also styled himself as a later-day surrealist poet, did some heavy-duty hanging out in the late 1970's to early 1980's punk rock scene of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, and wrote articles in the SF punk newspaper 'Search and Destroy' under the name Nico Ordway. For several years he was also a one-man ultra-left Trotskyist organization with the grandiose name of 'Fomento Obrero Revolucionario Organizing Committee in the US.' In this context he published a sort of fanzine-to-himself called 'The Alarm.' Schwartz wrote in it under the names 'Comrade Sandalio' and 'S.Solsona,' perhaps attempting to cloak himself in a dashing air of mystery and adventure that was otherwise out of reach for an obnoxious, overweight, foul-mouthed cafe habitué who couldn't get dates with hot young punk rock chicks.
Schwartz was widely derided by those who encountered him in the flesh. Anarchist writer Bob Black dissed him in a 1982 leaflet as a "tendentious pedant" and "an after hours militant with nothing to say in six languages." After meeting him in person, his ostensible comrades in France and Spain declared that they had "broke all relations" ("...rompemos toda relacion con ellos.") with his one-person "group" in the May 1982 issue of their publication 'Alarma.' (1) Another acquaintance from that time, anarchist John Zerzan, has said of Schwartz: "...he always struck me as a pretty ridiculous character. He went from Stalinist to Trot to `Surrealist Trot' to what he called `very close to classical anarchist,' and given his flakiness it didn't seem to matter nor did it seem like it would surprise me whatever turn he would take. Now I know this sounds like a claim to omniscience, but he always struck me as an unstable case who could end up anywhere!...he made himself a joke by trying to recruit San Francisco punks - who all laughed at him while spending his money..." (2)
THE POETASTER'S DISHONOR...
By the end of Ronald Reagan's first term Schwartz stopped publishing 'The Alarm' and quickly became a neo-conservative. This coincided with a massive improvement in his job prospects. Schwartz went from being a guy who had recently made a living driving a cab to employment as an editor at a San Francisco-based, Reagan Administration-affiliated think tank called the Institute for Contemporary Studies. This was a rare charitable indulgence on the part of the Reagan right, since at the time of his hiring Schwartz didn't have an undergraduate degree and had never been involved in anything more politically consequential than sharing his opinions about anarchism, Trotskyism and the Spanish Civil War in a loud voice in bars.
"...ICS (the Institute for Contemporary Studies) was launched in 1974, during the waning days of Governor Ronald Reagan's Administration, by Edwin Meese III and other close Reagan associates...Defending America, a 1977 ICS title with an introduction by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, built an early case that the Soviets had opened a `window of vulnerability' in U.S. nuclear defenses...ICS, which receives the bulk of its funding from corporations such as Bechtel, Chevron, IBM and Chase Manhattan Bank (also Alcoa, Union Carbide, Coors, Exxon, and the Hearst Corporation, at that time the owner of the San Francisco Examiner, where the news article quoted from here appeared) and from key right-wing fundraisers like Richard Mellon Scaife, has been called `Reagan's favorite think tank.' " (3)
In his role as an editor at the Institute for Contemporary Studies, the newly-minted-former "Comrade Sandalio" of the 'Fomento Obrero Revolucionario Organizing Committee' worked enthusiastically to help create a favorable public relations climate for US-backed counterinsurgency efforts in Central America. Among tasks he performed in this vein was to help organize materials for a book published by ICS Press titled 'The Grenada Papers.'
Published shortly before the 1984 US elections, 'The Grenada Papers' was a collection of internal documents of the 'New Jewel Movement,' the leftist regime that had governed the Carribean island of Grenada and self-destructed shortly before the 1983 American invasion and occupation of Grenada. The documents had been seized and analyzed by the CIA and Air Force Intelligence in the wake of the US invasion and then forwarded to the Institute for Contemporary Studies.
Edited by University of California-Berkeley Professors Paul Seabury and Walter McDougall, the book extolled the US invasion as the first time a so-called Communist regime had been overthrown by democratic forces. The book was structured to justify the invasion of Grenada to an audience mostly made up of stupid American congressmen. 'The Grenada Papers' demonized by association the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and leftist guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. The editors' key point was that leftist movements in the Caribbean and Central America were proxies for Soviet foreign policy goals and a dire strategic threat to the United States (we should have been so lucky). Events in Grenada were presented as an argument for increased aggression by the US government in Central America.
Schwartz wrote introductions to sections of the book in which the "Left-wing" West German Social Democrats were taken to task for not being sufficiently supportive of US defense goals.
'The Grenada Papers' was published in the fall of 1984. In the Fall 1984 issue of the ICS's 'Journal of Contemporary Studies,' Schwartz called attention to his participation in a presentation based on the materials in 'The Grenada Papers' before an "Outreach Group on Central America" at the Reagan White House on Oct. 31, 1984.
In the same period, in a letter to the contemporary version of the Industrial Workers of the World dated October 24, 1984, Schwartz eulogized a recently deceased Marxist member of the current-day version of the IWW, Ed Spira, saluting Spira as a "working class warrior.'' Schwartz signed his letter by name and by his then-current IWW membership number, X333361.
Schwartz was also available for performances as an "expert" on Central America extolling the upside of a possible US invasion of Nicaragua at neo-conservative conferences.
An article by Sara Diamond in the March 5, 1985 issue of The Daily Californian, a University of California campus-oriented newspaper in Berkeley, reported that the Institute for Contemporary Studies hosted a $165-a-seat public policy conference early in 1985 at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. About 80 academics, business leaders and intelligence analysts attended this gathering. Reagan's attorney general, champion of the death penalty and W.C. Fields look-alike Edwin Meese delivered a speech lauding the virtues of the Reagan economic program. Other topics at this conference included education, Grenada, Nicaragua, and "The Future of the Soviet Empire.''
Quoting from The Daily Californian article: " 'I think...Nicaragua could easily become Grenada Two,' said Stephen Schwartz...The `lesson of Grenada,' he said, is that in 'certain of the Soviet satellites...there are gigantic possibilities of internal instability and collapse.' U.C. Berkeley political science professor Paul Seabury, who edited The Grenada Papers along with Schwartz and U.C. Berkeley history professor Walter McDougall, said the documents provide analysts with a rare opportunity to study Soviet 'proxy operations'.
"While he said he's not advocating any particular action, Seabury said that 'as a scholar, I would just love to see the Managua documents.'' '
Participating in this conference didn't prevent Schwartz from taking out an ad calling attention to his membership in the current-day version of the IWW on page 11 of the May 1985 issue of the IWW newspaper, 'Industrial Worker.'
On the editorial page of the San Francisco Examiner, April 11, 1986, an opinion piece by Schwartz was published under the title "Support Contras:" '
"We helped bring down Somoza, and we donated more aid to the Sandinista regime, at first, than we gave Somoza in 20 years. But the new regime from the beginning treated us as `the Yankees, enemies of humanity'....'' Schwartz used the plural possessive-"we" form almost once for every sentence here, and claimed that if "we'' of the United States government didn't aid the Nicaraguan Contras, the Sandinistas would overrun Guatemala and Mexico and threaten the United States the way the Germans did to France in 1940.
PEEK-A-BOO, I-SEE-YOU...
The following year, Schwartz bragged on a television news broadcast that he used his insider knowledge as a former long-time leftist to spy on opponents of US policies in Central America, and feed information on them to the Feds.
On Thursday November 10, 1987, San Francisco's KRON-TV Channel 4, broadcast a report titled ``Private Spies,'' on its 6pm ``Evening Edition.''
The following is from a transcript:
Sylvia Chase (anchor on set): People and groups who speak out against Reagan administration policies put themselves in jeopardy of surveillance by private intelligence gathering organizations.
Target 4 has learned it's a kind of private spying network: conservative groups, with close ties to the White House. Members say they pass on the information that they collect to federal agencies, like the Justice Department. And on occasion to the White House itself...When Congress blocked aid to the Contras, the White House got around the law by turning to a private network to raise the money. That triggered the Iran-Contra scandal...
...Now, there's evidence of another private network. This one spies on the President's political opponents...Here's how it works. Around the country, people gather information on left-wing activities and funnel it to private conservative groups...like the Council for Inter-American security, the Capital Research Center, the Young America's Foundation, and the Institute for Contemporary Studies.
All have close ties to the Reagan Administration.
Stephen Schwartz (Institute for Contemporary Studies): We'll be seeing all of the NSC (National Security Council) people, I'm sure. I'll be seeing all of the NSC people.
Sylvia Chase: Stephen Schwartz is a member of what he calls the commie-watching network. He works at the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a San Francisco think-tank founded by top Reagan aids like Ed Meese. Schwartz says he addressed a White House meeting attended by Oliver North and even met former CIA director, William Casey.
Schwartz says there are lots of ways to get information.
Schwartz: When a left-wing group publishes, say a list of its state committee and throws it in the garbage and somebody finds it in the garbage and brings it to me, then I know the names of all those people and sometimes there will be more information, too.
Chase: What techniques are being used today...going through the garbage. That's one way.
Schwartz: Going through garbage.
Chase: Lifting things off the desk when no one's looking.
Schwartz: Now, that's something which is something that I don't believe in. But that's not fair.
Chase: But you know that it happens?
Schwartz: Yeah. I do know that it happens.
Chase: What other techniques would people use?
Schwartz: Well, if any leftist group has an open office where there are a lot of people around, you know you can walk in and if there's something lying on a desk, you don't have to filch it. You might just write down what's on it...see a list of names or something like that.
Chase: Are there other people like you around the country keeping track?
Schwartz: There are people that are collecting information. Yes.
Chase: And are they able to get it to people in government?
Schwartz: Yes. But the people in the government are not, frankly, able to do anything more with it than simply collect the information and keep track of the information..."
Schwartz's tenure with the Institute for Contemporary Studies hinged on his ability to pontificate soulfully about the evils of Communism. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union this extremely narrow field of specialization was past its sell-by date. Without Stalinism, Schwartz was left without anything to not believe in. His bosses were probably tired of Schwartz running around their offices hollering about the latest developments in the feud between Trotsky and Stalin, anyway, so the ICS fobbed off the now otherwise unemployable Schwartz on an accommodating San Francisco Chronicle, where he was assigned the lowly task of helping to write obituaries.
Imagine the letdown. He'd gone from huffing and puffing in the pages of 'The Alarm' about the left communist critique of labor unions, which he didn't have the intellectual chops to grasp in the first place, to shaking hands with the famous Oliver North and CIA Chief William Casey in President Reagan's White House. Punk rockers, anarchists and ultra-leftists had all "laughed at him while spending his money," but with the sinister and cynical neo-cons the porcine pedant had finally found a place at the table. Now he was marooned scribbling obits at the 'Chron,' a sarcastic tribute to his previous efforts to help keep Nicaraguan cemeteries abundantly supplied with fresh corpses of the working poor. He'd even become the butt of humorous derisive local news coverage when he was ticketed by police for writing graffiti claiming that he was not "the philosophical whore of North Beach." (4) His life must have seemed like a great gaping nullity, now that this guy with a Trotsky fixation no longer had great and sanguinary events to attach himself to and powerful men to fawn over.
TO THE BALKANS..."AT LEAST IN SARAJEVO THEY CAN'T CALL ME 'THE PHILOSOPHICAL WHORE OF NORTH BEACH' -- IN SARAJEVO THERE'S NO BEACH..."
In the 1990's the former Yugoslavia became a focus of US national security concerns. Weary of his sinecure at the Chronicle, and drawn irresistibly to the smell of human blood being shed in copious quantities, Steve Schwartz now remade himself as an "expert" on the Balkans. As a part of this Schwartz gave himself a complete fashion makeover. He grew a long beard, started sporting a skull-cap, and relocated to Sarajevo, Bosnia, where he converted to the Sufi branch of Islam and changed his name -- at least for the duration of direct U.S. military intervention in the Balkans -- to Suleyman Ahmad Stephen Schwartz.
The newly-minted Suleyman Ahmad Schwartz appiled the cheerleading moves he'd honed on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras to the Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, describing him as "an authentic warrior in a legitimate jihad," and on return to the U.S. Schwartz was a militant propagandist for U.S. miltary involvement in the war in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The September 11th 2001 blowback from former Presidents Carter and Reagan's foreign policy antics in Afghanistan gave Ahmad Suleyman Schwartz new opportunities to exercise his brand of journalism, penning pompous pro-war pronunciamentos in such venues as William Kristol's 'The Weekly Standard' and the 'Wall Street Journal.' Hired in July 2001 and fired in June 2002 from a job as a journalist with the Voice of America, Schwartz soon found a more suitable and secure position as a "Senior Policy Analyst" at a small, Washington DC-based pro-war lobby called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
In his role as an apparent convert to Islam, Schwartz wrote a book titled (without apparent conscious ironic intent) 'The Two Faces of Islam.' Schwartz and his 'Two Faces' elicited a scathing and dismissive mention in a review of then-recent works on Islam by leading U.S. anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in the July 3, 2003 issue of 'The New York Review of Books:'
"Stephen Schwartz, who has also run into political difficulties in the capital, and stirred thereby a teacup-storm on the right, is a strange and outlandish figure. He grew up in San Francisco as part of the City Lights literary crowd around Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom his father had published; he became a so-far-left-he's-right Trotskyist-anarchist under the nom de guerre "Comrade Sandallo," (sic) worked for a while as an obituary writer and street reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, shifted his affections and his energies to Reagan during the micro-war in Grenada, and ultimately made his way as a freelance journalist to Sarajevo in the 1990s, where he converted to Islam and joined a Naqshabandi Sufi order. He changed his name again, at least for some purposes, to Suleyman Abmad, (sic) and found the Medusa's head every conspiratorialist needs: "Wahabism."
Geertz notes of Schwartz, "whose rhetoric has survived his allegiances," that in his "Two Faces:"
"His book consists in a monomaniacal tracing out, laborious and repetitive (the word "wahhabi" or "wahabbism" appears in almost every paragraph), of the thousands of ways, ingenious, insidious, and implacably relentless, in which the machinations of the House of Saud in the service of this mad creed reaches out to poison the souls of Muslims, turn them against one another, against us, against everybody. Mobilizing their petro-dollars to found religious schools all over the world, set up popular-front-type propaganda foundations, finance lobbying efforts, bribe the powerful, infiltrate legitimate organizations, recruit supporters, eliminate enemies, and most especially to finance jihad, terrorism, and the destruction of Israel, the Saudis work tirelessly to turn Islam, in its essence a peaceful, mystical, unifying force "preaching love and healing," into a world-dividing, world-destroying "two-faced" one.
"There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this, as there is in any comprehensive indictment of faction-ridden politics, and the Saudi factions, like the Ayatollahs, Hamas, Syria, and Mubarak are, surely, playing for keeps. But Schwartz's discussion (he has virtually nothing to say about the concrete details of intra-Islamic conflict and, except for the Koran, he does without source references) is a prime example of how to transform an arguable argument into an obsessional fantasy:
(Schwartz:) "With the collapse of the Soviet State, Wahhabism effectively replaced the Communist movement as the main sponsor of ideological aggression against the democratic West... The ideological division of humanity into "two worlds" has been promulgated on different bases: Wahhabism applied a religious distinction, Communism a class standard, and Nazism a racial criterion... Wahhabism, like the other totalitarian ideologies... compelled members of the new middle classes in the Saudi kingdom and the Gulf states to eagerly kill and die, rather than to procreate and live... The conduct of the Saudis was devious. They assured the West of profound affection, while fomenting worldwide adventurism and seeking to bring every Sunni Muslim on the face of the earth under their control... The Wahhabi-Saudi regime...embodies a program for the ruthless conquest of power and a war of extermination... [Its] face...is a great deal uglier than that of a general Islamism, or radical Arab nationalism,...or even of Soviet Communism, and its threat to the peace of the world is immensely greater..." (5)
Geertz gets some of the chronology regarding Schwartz's gyrations wrong, but his insight into the intellectually hollow core of a man of 'ressentiment' is on target.
As someone else has noted elsewhere:
"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself: and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye -- this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself -- is of the essence of 'ressentiment:' in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act -- its action is fundamentally reaction." (6)
THE FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES THAT BOIL PEOPLE TO DEATH...
In his job at the Foundation, Schwartz went to bat for the then-reigning torturer tyrant of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. Karimov was a former Soviet apparatchik reborn in the post-USSR era as a love child of the Israeli and United States National Security establishments. This ex-Stalinist thug turned pro-US thug's contribution to the annals of early 21st century human rights abuses was a penchant for having prisoners killed by scalding them to death.
Right-wing libertarian Justin Raimondo of 'Antiwar.com' noted:
"Uzbekistan, land of torture, where opponents of the barbaric regime are routinely jailed, beaten and murdered -- you woudn't think that Uzbek "President" Islam Karimov would have any Western defenders. But, then, you probably weren't taking ex-leftist-turned-Muslim Stephen Schwartz into account.
"The fifty-something "senior policy analyst" for the ironically-named Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a rabid war bird formerly with the Voice of America, doesn't have much of a problem with Uzbekistan's estimated 600 political arrests per year and some 6,500 political prisoners -- many of whom face death by torture.
Praising Uzbekistan in a speech as "a new, young, transitional democracy,' Schwartz explained:"I cannot claim to provide a full endorsement of the Uzbek regime without going there. Obviously, as in any country, there have been abuses. However, I note that much of the discussion of Uzbekistan and the claims of Islamic figures in that country to being victims of repression, rests on extremely vague terminology. For example, the latest U.S. State Department report on human rights abuses around the world was released on March 4. It includes numerous allegations against Uzbekistan, many involving the government's struggle to suppress Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a clandestine subversive movement originating in Arab countries. This is a battle in which the United States should probably be cheering Karimov on, rather than condemning him."
Raimondo went on to write: "According to a forensic report compiled last summer by the British embassy in Uzbekistan, two prisoners of this 'transitional democracy' were boiled to death. Their screams were not too audible in the West, drowned out, perhaps, by Schwartz's cheers and the support of the U.S. government. American taxpayers shelled out $500 million in direct aid to Uzbekistan, $79 million of which went directly into the pockets of the torturers, i.e. the police and intelligence apparatus.
"Apologizing for torture, murder and the parboiling of human beings -- for the man they call "the philosophical whore of North Beach," it's all in a day's work..." (7)
Another useful source on Uzbekistan and its now deceased US-backed despot Karimov is found on the blog of Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004.
An article of June 2005 says of Islam Karimov:
"...This dictator simply tolerates no opposition. And he expresses his lust for blood quite openly. Of political opponents, Karimov has said, “Such people must be shot in the forehead.” And more: “If necessary, I’ll shoot them myself.” On another occasion, he averred: “I’m prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic... If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head.”
"...Uzbekistan currently serves Washington in a more sinister way: it is believed to be one of the destination countries for the highly secretive “renditions program,” in which the CIA ships suspected terrorists to third-party countries where abusive interrogation methods are employed that are illegal in the United States. Essentially, the “renditions program” is the conscious and deliberate outsourcing of torture...As the London Times put it: “The CIA would not shop anywhere else, which is why a mysterious Gulfstream 5 executive jet routinely delivers terrorist subjects from Afghanistan [to Uzbekistan] for interrogation and, perhaps, percolation.”
"...Perhaps the greatest American apologist for Uzbekistan’s tyrant has been Stephen Schwartz, a one-time member of the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who is most celebrated for his purple prose advocating regime change in Saudi Arabia...As he wrote in the neocon journal The Weekly Standard in 2002, the situation in Uzbekistan was about as good as it could get.
"Explaining away the grisly record of the Karimov regime, Schwartz asserted that “before freedom can be established, the enemies of freedom must be defeated. The fate of democracies that do not defeat the enemies of democracy is illustrated by the histories of Germany and Italy after the First World War. Democracies can grant mercy to their enemies only from a position of unchallengeable strength...Since September 11, the United States no longer accepts the claim that the free exercise of terrorist agitation, incitement, and organization outweighs the benefits of legal sanction,” Schwartz wrote.
(Schwartz, quoted in Murray,) "The United States, which has entered into a military alliance with Uzbekistan, must support the Uzbeks in their internal as well as their external combat, and must repudiate the blandishments of the human rights industry.” (8)
As Justin Raimondo noted in a series of grim, humorous and on-target columns about the sordid and clownish Suleyman/Sandalio/Schwartz:
"Here is someone whose long march through the ideologies started out on the far-left fringe of Trotskyism -- as "Comrade Sandalio," he was the leader (and sole member) of the 'Fomento Obrero Revolucionario' of the United States' (FOCUS) -- and who wound up on the opposite shore, where he became "Suleyman Ahmad," the Jewish convert to Islam and a self-described "New Age rightist."
"No matter what sort of ideological drag he turns up in, however, Schwartz always sings essentially the same song. During his travels through the Balkans, he teamed up with Albania Catholics, whom he claimed were "threatened by Christian Orthodox Imperialism -- 'Yugoslav,' Macedonian, Greek." Clinton had barely begun bombing some of the oldest cities in Europe when Schwartz popped up on Bay Area television cheerleading the Kosovo war. Now the enemy is Wahabism, instead of Orthodoxy, but it's the same old story: the US must conduct a religious war to suit Schwartz's latest persona -- whatever that is...
"...From the sectarian politics of the left-communist fringe to the halls of the Institute for Contemporary Studies and on to the Voice of America, this chameleon has changed his spots several times over, but always, you'll note, in search of a job. The only problem is that he has to blot out half his resume in search of the next one.
"Aside from opportunism, however, there is an ideological theme to Schwartz's recent career: Wherever there is a war, there is Stephen Schwartz, hovering vulture-like, demanding an escalation of the conflict. From the class war, to the Kosovo war, to the "war on terrorism," the war-bird Schwartz pops up on every battlefield, like some macabre jack-in-the-box..." (9)
And in "Portrait of a War Bird..."
"...Busy, busy, busy, and always in the service of conflict...there is Stephen Schwartz, circling over the battlefield and feeding off the carnage. Caw! Caw! Caw!" (10)
TO BE CONTINUED...
Footnotes:
(1) "Vista la actitud del unico militante de FOCUS que concemos y que es plenamente apoyado por otros miembro (hasta ahora desconocides) de este grupo rompemos toda relacion con ellos." ("In view of the attitude of the only militant of FOCUS that we know of and who is plainly supported by the other members of this group (who we know nothing about) we totally break all relations with them.") ALARMA #13, May 1982.
"This group has never contained (till our break up with it) anyone but Sandalio, as far as we know."(Correspondence of FOR with Morgan Miller of Portland, Oregon, dated 9-12-83.)
ALARME: (write without mentioning the name) BP 329 Paris Cedex 13 FRANCE
FOR is, or was, a small left communist tendency in France and Spain, founded in 1958 by a group including the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret and Grandizo Munis. The FOR originated in the Trotskyist movement after World War Two.
Copies of FOR materials regarding 'Comrade Sandalio' are available from me, at tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com
(2) Letter of John Zerzan to the Detroit, Michigan anarchist newspaper the 'Fifth Estate', Nov.12, 1985
(3) "Buttoned-Down Bohemians - Welcome to San Francisco's New Age Right.'' 'Image' magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Sunday August 3, 1986
(4) "When “New Age Rightist” Stephen Schwartz discovered graffiti calling him “the philosophical whore of North Beach,” the former Trotskyite turned red with rage. He uncapped his felt-tipped pen and was printing a reply to the scurrilous scribblings when he was busted by Mayor Feinstein's anti-graffiti police squad on a charge of malicious mischief, defacing the wall of a Vallejo Street construction site.
Schwartz...has demanded a trial to exonerate his exercise of free speech.
“I was just going to answer that I was not the philosophical whore of North Beach,” said Schwartz, 37.
If he wants a trial, he can have it, said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Hoffman, who believes citizens have the right to speak out under the First Amendment — but with limits.
“The remedy is that he can stand on a street corner and yell all he wants that he's not the philosophical whore of North Beach,” Hoffman said. “But he can't go around defacing other people's property.”
('A Battle Over Right to Write.' He wanted to rebut graffiti with graffiti. By Dennis J. Opatrny, of the Examiner staff. 'San Francisco Examiner', May 7, 1987.)
(5) Clifford Geertz, "Which Way to Mecca." 'New York Review of Books,' Volume 50, Number 11, July 3, 2003
(6) Frederich Nietzsche. "On the Genealogy of Morals," Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books/Random House, 1967. First Essay, Section 10, page 36.
(7) Justin Raimondo, "Wackos, Weirdos and Wingdings. The War Party -- a scary, ugly lot." 'Antiwar.com,' June 2, 2003. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j060203.html
(8) Stephen J. Snikgoski, "Idealistic democracy, total hypocrisy, and Israel: America's man in Uzbekistan." June 22, 2005. http://craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/06/idealis... on the blog of Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.
Quote of tough guy Schwartz dismissing "the blandishments of the human rights industry" regarding systematic police rapes, torture, and boiling people to death is from Schwartz, "Defending Freedom from Islamist Terror," 'Weekly Standard,' July 19, 2003.
(9) Justin Raimondo, "The VOA Folies -- 'Voice of America' loses a writer -- and the War Party gains a martyr." 'Antiwar.com,' July 5, 2002. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j070502.html
(10) Justin Raimondo, "Portrait of a War Bird -- 10 questions for 'the philosophical whore of North Beach." 'Antiwar.com,' Dec.6, 2002.Portrait of a War Bird, by Justin Raimondo
(11) See also 'From Munis to Meese: Left Communism or State Department Surrealism.' From Munis to Meese: Left Communism or State Department Surrealism?
Kevin Keating
tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com
District 3 includes Chinatown, North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill and the Financial District. The District 3 seat is currently held by Aaron Peskin, one of the more left-liberal-inclined members of the Board. Peskin faces three rivals, who in typical San Francisco style range from bad to worse regarding San Francisco's catastrophic and wholly artificial market-generated housing shortage and other accelerating ills generated by commodity relations in San Francisco and everywhere else.
The top priority on District 3 candidate Spencer Simonsen's campaign website is found under the heading 'Crime and Property Damage.' This is Simonsen's call to bring the hammer down on SF's ever-expanding populace of the desperate poor, since petty theft and vandalism committed by some of them adversely affects "local tourism and business conference events." Along with Simonsen there is newbie real estate lobby tool Danny Sauter, the President of North Beach Neighbors, an association of business-sector-oriented types. In a city where there are five times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless individuals, smart feller Sauter wants to prioritize the building of even more units of market rate housing. Apparently since the market is our God, and our God has stopped listening to us, the only possible response is to pray harder.
With choices as abhorrent as these it's hard to imagine worse -- but don’t sell District 3 candidate Stephen Schwartz short! A long time professional repentant former leftist and fan of the Nicaraguan Contras, and more recently an enthusiastic high profile apologist for Uzbekistan's late dictator Islam Karimov, the neo-conservative war enthusiast Stephen Schwartz also styles himself as one of the world's leading authorities on the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. District 3 candidate Schwartz remakes his persona more frequently than most yuppies change their socks -- generally in pursuit of fresh employment opportunities -- and he is currently going by the name 'Lulu.'
Schwartz was raised in San Francisco as a self-proclaimed "red diaper baby" in the milieu of the pro-Soviet Union Communist Party U.S.A. In his youth he experienced a suspiciously Oedipal-sounding rebellion against the C.P. and became a Trotskyist. Schwartz also styled himself as a later-day surrealist poet, did some heavy-duty hanging out in the late 1970's to early 1980's punk rock scene of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, and wrote articles in the SF punk newspaper 'Search and Destroy' under the name Nico Ordway. For several years he was also a one-man ultra-left Trotskyist organization with the grandiose name of 'Fomento Obrero Revolucionario Organizing Committee in the US.' In this context he published a sort of fanzine-to-himself called 'The Alarm.' Schwartz wrote in it under the names 'Comrade Sandalio' and 'S.Solsona,' perhaps attempting to cloak himself in a dashing air of mystery and adventure that was otherwise out of reach for an obnoxious, overweight, foul-mouthed cafe habitué who couldn't get dates with hot young punk rock chicks.
Schwartz was widely derided by those who encountered him in the flesh. Anarchist writer Bob Black dissed him in a 1982 leaflet as a "tendentious pedant" and "an after hours militant with nothing to say in six languages." After meeting him in person, his ostensible comrades in France and Spain declared that they had "broke all relations" ("...rompemos toda relacion con ellos.") with his one-person "group" in the May 1982 issue of their publication 'Alarma.' (1) Another acquaintance from that time, anarchist John Zerzan, has said of Schwartz: "...he always struck me as a pretty ridiculous character. He went from Stalinist to Trot to `Surrealist Trot' to what he called `very close to classical anarchist,' and given his flakiness it didn't seem to matter nor did it seem like it would surprise me whatever turn he would take. Now I know this sounds like a claim to omniscience, but he always struck me as an unstable case who could end up anywhere!...he made himself a joke by trying to recruit San Francisco punks - who all laughed at him while spending his money..." (2)
THE POETASTER'S DISHONOR...
By the end of Ronald Reagan's first term Schwartz stopped publishing 'The Alarm' and quickly became a neo-conservative. This coincided with a massive improvement in his job prospects. Schwartz went from being a guy who had recently made a living driving a cab to employment as an editor at a San Francisco-based, Reagan Administration-affiliated think tank called the Institute for Contemporary Studies. This was a rare charitable indulgence on the part of the Reagan right, since at the time of his hiring Schwartz didn't have an undergraduate degree and had never been involved in anything more politically consequential than sharing his opinions about anarchism, Trotskyism and the Spanish Civil War in a loud voice in bars.
"...ICS (the Institute for Contemporary Studies) was launched in 1974, during the waning days of Governor Ronald Reagan's Administration, by Edwin Meese III and other close Reagan associates...Defending America, a 1977 ICS title with an introduction by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, built an early case that the Soviets had opened a `window of vulnerability' in U.S. nuclear defenses...ICS, which receives the bulk of its funding from corporations such as Bechtel, Chevron, IBM and Chase Manhattan Bank (also Alcoa, Union Carbide, Coors, Exxon, and the Hearst Corporation, at that time the owner of the San Francisco Examiner, where the news article quoted from here appeared) and from key right-wing fundraisers like Richard Mellon Scaife, has been called `Reagan's favorite think tank.' " (3)
In his role as an editor at the Institute for Contemporary Studies, the newly-minted-former "Comrade Sandalio" of the 'Fomento Obrero Revolucionario Organizing Committee' worked enthusiastically to help create a favorable public relations climate for US-backed counterinsurgency efforts in Central America. Among tasks he performed in this vein was to help organize materials for a book published by ICS Press titled 'The Grenada Papers.'
Published shortly before the 1984 US elections, 'The Grenada Papers' was a collection of internal documents of the 'New Jewel Movement,' the leftist regime that had governed the Carribean island of Grenada and self-destructed shortly before the 1983 American invasion and occupation of Grenada. The documents had been seized and analyzed by the CIA and Air Force Intelligence in the wake of the US invasion and then forwarded to the Institute for Contemporary Studies.
Edited by University of California-Berkeley Professors Paul Seabury and Walter McDougall, the book extolled the US invasion as the first time a so-called Communist regime had been overthrown by democratic forces. The book was structured to justify the invasion of Grenada to an audience mostly made up of stupid American congressmen. 'The Grenada Papers' demonized by association the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and leftist guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. The editors' key point was that leftist movements in the Caribbean and Central America were proxies for Soviet foreign policy goals and a dire strategic threat to the United States (we should have been so lucky). Events in Grenada were presented as an argument for increased aggression by the US government in Central America.
Schwartz wrote introductions to sections of the book in which the "Left-wing" West German Social Democrats were taken to task for not being sufficiently supportive of US defense goals.
'The Grenada Papers' was published in the fall of 1984. In the Fall 1984 issue of the ICS's 'Journal of Contemporary Studies,' Schwartz called attention to his participation in a presentation based on the materials in 'The Grenada Papers' before an "Outreach Group on Central America" at the Reagan White House on Oct. 31, 1984.
In the same period, in a letter to the contemporary version of the Industrial Workers of the World dated October 24, 1984, Schwartz eulogized a recently deceased Marxist member of the current-day version of the IWW, Ed Spira, saluting Spira as a "working class warrior.'' Schwartz signed his letter by name and by his then-current IWW membership number, X333361.
Schwartz was also available for performances as an "expert" on Central America extolling the upside of a possible US invasion of Nicaragua at neo-conservative conferences.
An article by Sara Diamond in the March 5, 1985 issue of The Daily Californian, a University of California campus-oriented newspaper in Berkeley, reported that the Institute for Contemporary Studies hosted a $165-a-seat public policy conference early in 1985 at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. About 80 academics, business leaders and intelligence analysts attended this gathering. Reagan's attorney general, champion of the death penalty and W.C. Fields look-alike Edwin Meese delivered a speech lauding the virtues of the Reagan economic program. Other topics at this conference included education, Grenada, Nicaragua, and "The Future of the Soviet Empire.''
Quoting from The Daily Californian article: " 'I think...Nicaragua could easily become Grenada Two,' said Stephen Schwartz...The `lesson of Grenada,' he said, is that in 'certain of the Soviet satellites...there are gigantic possibilities of internal instability and collapse.' U.C. Berkeley political science professor Paul Seabury, who edited The Grenada Papers along with Schwartz and U.C. Berkeley history professor Walter McDougall, said the documents provide analysts with a rare opportunity to study Soviet 'proxy operations'.
"While he said he's not advocating any particular action, Seabury said that 'as a scholar, I would just love to see the Managua documents.'' '
Participating in this conference didn't prevent Schwartz from taking out an ad calling attention to his membership in the current-day version of the IWW on page 11 of the May 1985 issue of the IWW newspaper, 'Industrial Worker.'
On the editorial page of the San Francisco Examiner, April 11, 1986, an opinion piece by Schwartz was published under the title "Support Contras:" '
"We helped bring down Somoza, and we donated more aid to the Sandinista regime, at first, than we gave Somoza in 20 years. But the new regime from the beginning treated us as `the Yankees, enemies of humanity'....'' Schwartz used the plural possessive-"we" form almost once for every sentence here, and claimed that if "we'' of the United States government didn't aid the Nicaraguan Contras, the Sandinistas would overrun Guatemala and Mexico and threaten the United States the way the Germans did to France in 1940.
PEEK-A-BOO, I-SEE-YOU...
The following year, Schwartz bragged on a television news broadcast that he used his insider knowledge as a former long-time leftist to spy on opponents of US policies in Central America, and feed information on them to the Feds.
On Thursday November 10, 1987, San Francisco's KRON-TV Channel 4, broadcast a report titled ``Private Spies,'' on its 6pm ``Evening Edition.''
The following is from a transcript:
Sylvia Chase (anchor on set): People and groups who speak out against Reagan administration policies put themselves in jeopardy of surveillance by private intelligence gathering organizations.
Target 4 has learned it's a kind of private spying network: conservative groups, with close ties to the White House. Members say they pass on the information that they collect to federal agencies, like the Justice Department. And on occasion to the White House itself...When Congress blocked aid to the Contras, the White House got around the law by turning to a private network to raise the money. That triggered the Iran-Contra scandal...
...Now, there's evidence of another private network. This one spies on the President's political opponents...Here's how it works. Around the country, people gather information on left-wing activities and funnel it to private conservative groups...like the Council for Inter-American security, the Capital Research Center, the Young America's Foundation, and the Institute for Contemporary Studies.
All have close ties to the Reagan Administration.
Stephen Schwartz (Institute for Contemporary Studies): We'll be seeing all of the NSC (National Security Council) people, I'm sure. I'll be seeing all of the NSC people.
Sylvia Chase: Stephen Schwartz is a member of what he calls the commie-watching network. He works at the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a San Francisco think-tank founded by top Reagan aids like Ed Meese. Schwartz says he addressed a White House meeting attended by Oliver North and even met former CIA director, William Casey.
Schwartz says there are lots of ways to get information.
Schwartz: When a left-wing group publishes, say a list of its state committee and throws it in the garbage and somebody finds it in the garbage and brings it to me, then I know the names of all those people and sometimes there will be more information, too.
Chase: What techniques are being used today...going through the garbage. That's one way.
Schwartz: Going through garbage.
Chase: Lifting things off the desk when no one's looking.
Schwartz: Now, that's something which is something that I don't believe in. But that's not fair.
Chase: But you know that it happens?
Schwartz: Yeah. I do know that it happens.
Chase: What other techniques would people use?
Schwartz: Well, if any leftist group has an open office where there are a lot of people around, you know you can walk in and if there's something lying on a desk, you don't have to filch it. You might just write down what's on it...see a list of names or something like that.
Chase: Are there other people like you around the country keeping track?
Schwartz: There are people that are collecting information. Yes.
Chase: And are they able to get it to people in government?
Schwartz: Yes. But the people in the government are not, frankly, able to do anything more with it than simply collect the information and keep track of the information..."
Schwartz's tenure with the Institute for Contemporary Studies hinged on his ability to pontificate soulfully about the evils of Communism. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union this extremely narrow field of specialization was past its sell-by date. Without Stalinism, Schwartz was left without anything to not believe in. His bosses were probably tired of Schwartz running around their offices hollering about the latest developments in the feud between Trotsky and Stalin, anyway, so the ICS fobbed off the now otherwise unemployable Schwartz on an accommodating San Francisco Chronicle, where he was assigned the lowly task of helping to write obituaries.
Imagine the letdown. He'd gone from huffing and puffing in the pages of 'The Alarm' about the left communist critique of labor unions, which he didn't have the intellectual chops to grasp in the first place, to shaking hands with the famous Oliver North and CIA Chief William Casey in President Reagan's White House. Punk rockers, anarchists and ultra-leftists had all "laughed at him while spending his money," but with the sinister and cynical neo-cons the porcine pedant had finally found a place at the table. Now he was marooned scribbling obits at the 'Chron,' a sarcastic tribute to his previous efforts to help keep Nicaraguan cemeteries abundantly supplied with fresh corpses of the working poor. He'd even become the butt of humorous derisive local news coverage when he was ticketed by police for writing graffiti claiming that he was not "the philosophical whore of North Beach." (4) His life must have seemed like a great gaping nullity, now that this guy with a Trotsky fixation no longer had great and sanguinary events to attach himself to and powerful men to fawn over.
TO THE BALKANS..."AT LEAST IN SARAJEVO THEY CAN'T CALL ME 'THE PHILOSOPHICAL WHORE OF NORTH BEACH' -- IN SARAJEVO THERE'S NO BEACH..."
In the 1990's the former Yugoslavia became a focus of US national security concerns. Weary of his sinecure at the Chronicle, and drawn irresistibly to the smell of human blood being shed in copious quantities, Steve Schwartz now remade himself as an "expert" on the Balkans. As a part of this Schwartz gave himself a complete fashion makeover. He grew a long beard, started sporting a skull-cap, and relocated to Sarajevo, Bosnia, where he converted to the Sufi branch of Islam and changed his name -- at least for the duration of direct U.S. military intervention in the Balkans -- to Suleyman Ahmad Stephen Schwartz.
The newly-minted Suleyman Ahmad Schwartz appiled the cheerleading moves he'd honed on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras to the Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, describing him as "an authentic warrior in a legitimate jihad," and on return to the U.S. Schwartz was a militant propagandist for U.S. miltary involvement in the war in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The September 11th 2001 blowback from former Presidents Carter and Reagan's foreign policy antics in Afghanistan gave Ahmad Suleyman Schwartz new opportunities to exercise his brand of journalism, penning pompous pro-war pronunciamentos in such venues as William Kristol's 'The Weekly Standard' and the 'Wall Street Journal.' Hired in July 2001 and fired in June 2002 from a job as a journalist with the Voice of America, Schwartz soon found a more suitable and secure position as a "Senior Policy Analyst" at a small, Washington DC-based pro-war lobby called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
In his role as an apparent convert to Islam, Schwartz wrote a book titled (without apparent conscious ironic intent) 'The Two Faces of Islam.' Schwartz and his 'Two Faces' elicited a scathing and dismissive mention in a review of then-recent works on Islam by leading U.S. anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in the July 3, 2003 issue of 'The New York Review of Books:'
"Stephen Schwartz, who has also run into political difficulties in the capital, and stirred thereby a teacup-storm on the right, is a strange and outlandish figure. He grew up in San Francisco as part of the City Lights literary crowd around Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom his father had published; he became a so-far-left-he's-right Trotskyist-anarchist under the nom de guerre "Comrade Sandallo," (sic) worked for a while as an obituary writer and street reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, shifted his affections and his energies to Reagan during the micro-war in Grenada, and ultimately made his way as a freelance journalist to Sarajevo in the 1990s, where he converted to Islam and joined a Naqshabandi Sufi order. He changed his name again, at least for some purposes, to Suleyman Abmad, (sic) and found the Medusa's head every conspiratorialist needs: "Wahabism."
Geertz notes of Schwartz, "whose rhetoric has survived his allegiances," that in his "Two Faces:"
"His book consists in a monomaniacal tracing out, laborious and repetitive (the word "wahhabi" or "wahabbism" appears in almost every paragraph), of the thousands of ways, ingenious, insidious, and implacably relentless, in which the machinations of the House of Saud in the service of this mad creed reaches out to poison the souls of Muslims, turn them against one another, against us, against everybody. Mobilizing their petro-dollars to found religious schools all over the world, set up popular-front-type propaganda foundations, finance lobbying efforts, bribe the powerful, infiltrate legitimate organizations, recruit supporters, eliminate enemies, and most especially to finance jihad, terrorism, and the destruction of Israel, the Saudis work tirelessly to turn Islam, in its essence a peaceful, mystical, unifying force "preaching love and healing," into a world-dividing, world-destroying "two-faced" one.
"There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this, as there is in any comprehensive indictment of faction-ridden politics, and the Saudi factions, like the Ayatollahs, Hamas, Syria, and Mubarak are, surely, playing for keeps. But Schwartz's discussion (he has virtually nothing to say about the concrete details of intra-Islamic conflict and, except for the Koran, he does without source references) is a prime example of how to transform an arguable argument into an obsessional fantasy:
(Schwartz:) "With the collapse of the Soviet State, Wahhabism effectively replaced the Communist movement as the main sponsor of ideological aggression against the democratic West... The ideological division of humanity into "two worlds" has been promulgated on different bases: Wahhabism applied a religious distinction, Communism a class standard, and Nazism a racial criterion... Wahhabism, like the other totalitarian ideologies... compelled members of the new middle classes in the Saudi kingdom and the Gulf states to eagerly kill and die, rather than to procreate and live... The conduct of the Saudis was devious. They assured the West of profound affection, while fomenting worldwide adventurism and seeking to bring every Sunni Muslim on the face of the earth under their control... The Wahhabi-Saudi regime...embodies a program for the ruthless conquest of power and a war of extermination... [Its] face...is a great deal uglier than that of a general Islamism, or radical Arab nationalism,...or even of Soviet Communism, and its threat to the peace of the world is immensely greater..." (5)
Geertz gets some of the chronology regarding Schwartz's gyrations wrong, but his insight into the intellectually hollow core of a man of 'ressentiment' is on target.
As someone else has noted elsewhere:
"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself: and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye -- this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself -- is of the essence of 'ressentiment:' in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act -- its action is fundamentally reaction." (6)
THE FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES THAT BOIL PEOPLE TO DEATH...
In his job at the Foundation, Schwartz went to bat for the then-reigning torturer tyrant of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. Karimov was a former Soviet apparatchik reborn in the post-USSR era as a love child of the Israeli and United States National Security establishments. This ex-Stalinist thug turned pro-US thug's contribution to the annals of early 21st century human rights abuses was a penchant for having prisoners killed by scalding them to death.
Right-wing libertarian Justin Raimondo of 'Antiwar.com' noted:
"Uzbekistan, land of torture, where opponents of the barbaric regime are routinely jailed, beaten and murdered -- you woudn't think that Uzbek "President" Islam Karimov would have any Western defenders. But, then, you probably weren't taking ex-leftist-turned-Muslim Stephen Schwartz into account.
"The fifty-something "senior policy analyst" for the ironically-named Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a rabid war bird formerly with the Voice of America, doesn't have much of a problem with Uzbekistan's estimated 600 political arrests per year and some 6,500 political prisoners -- many of whom face death by torture.
Praising Uzbekistan in a speech as "a new, young, transitional democracy,' Schwartz explained:"I cannot claim to provide a full endorsement of the Uzbek regime without going there. Obviously, as in any country, there have been abuses. However, I note that much of the discussion of Uzbekistan and the claims of Islamic figures in that country to being victims of repression, rests on extremely vague terminology. For example, the latest U.S. State Department report on human rights abuses around the world was released on March 4. It includes numerous allegations against Uzbekistan, many involving the government's struggle to suppress Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a clandestine subversive movement originating in Arab countries. This is a battle in which the United States should probably be cheering Karimov on, rather than condemning him."
Raimondo went on to write: "According to a forensic report compiled last summer by the British embassy in Uzbekistan, two prisoners of this 'transitional democracy' were boiled to death. Their screams were not too audible in the West, drowned out, perhaps, by Schwartz's cheers and the support of the U.S. government. American taxpayers shelled out $500 million in direct aid to Uzbekistan, $79 million of which went directly into the pockets of the torturers, i.e. the police and intelligence apparatus.
"Apologizing for torture, murder and the parboiling of human beings -- for the man they call "the philosophical whore of North Beach," it's all in a day's work..." (7)
Another useful source on Uzbekistan and its now deceased US-backed despot Karimov is found on the blog of Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004.
An article of June 2005 says of Islam Karimov:
"...This dictator simply tolerates no opposition. And he expresses his lust for blood quite openly. Of political opponents, Karimov has said, “Such people must be shot in the forehead.” And more: “If necessary, I’ll shoot them myself.” On another occasion, he averred: “I’m prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic... If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head.”
"...Uzbekistan currently serves Washington in a more sinister way: it is believed to be one of the destination countries for the highly secretive “renditions program,” in which the CIA ships suspected terrorists to third-party countries where abusive interrogation methods are employed that are illegal in the United States. Essentially, the “renditions program” is the conscious and deliberate outsourcing of torture...As the London Times put it: “The CIA would not shop anywhere else, which is why a mysterious Gulfstream 5 executive jet routinely delivers terrorist subjects from Afghanistan [to Uzbekistan] for interrogation and, perhaps, percolation.”
"...Perhaps the greatest American apologist for Uzbekistan’s tyrant has been Stephen Schwartz, a one-time member of the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who is most celebrated for his purple prose advocating regime change in Saudi Arabia...As he wrote in the neocon journal The Weekly Standard in 2002, the situation in Uzbekistan was about as good as it could get.
"Explaining away the grisly record of the Karimov regime, Schwartz asserted that “before freedom can be established, the enemies of freedom must be defeated. The fate of democracies that do not defeat the enemies of democracy is illustrated by the histories of Germany and Italy after the First World War. Democracies can grant mercy to their enemies only from a position of unchallengeable strength...Since September 11, the United States no longer accepts the claim that the free exercise of terrorist agitation, incitement, and organization outweighs the benefits of legal sanction,” Schwartz wrote.
(Schwartz, quoted in Murray,) "The United States, which has entered into a military alliance with Uzbekistan, must support the Uzbeks in their internal as well as their external combat, and must repudiate the blandishments of the human rights industry.” (8)
As Justin Raimondo noted in a series of grim, humorous and on-target columns about the sordid and clownish Suleyman/Sandalio/Schwartz:
"Here is someone whose long march through the ideologies started out on the far-left fringe of Trotskyism -- as "Comrade Sandalio," he was the leader (and sole member) of the 'Fomento Obrero Revolucionario' of the United States' (FOCUS) -- and who wound up on the opposite shore, where he became "Suleyman Ahmad," the Jewish convert to Islam and a self-described "New Age rightist."
"No matter what sort of ideological drag he turns up in, however, Schwartz always sings essentially the same song. During his travels through the Balkans, he teamed up with Albania Catholics, whom he claimed were "threatened by Christian Orthodox Imperialism -- 'Yugoslav,' Macedonian, Greek." Clinton had barely begun bombing some of the oldest cities in Europe when Schwartz popped up on Bay Area television cheerleading the Kosovo war. Now the enemy is Wahabism, instead of Orthodoxy, but it's the same old story: the US must conduct a religious war to suit Schwartz's latest persona -- whatever that is...
"...From the sectarian politics of the left-communist fringe to the halls of the Institute for Contemporary Studies and on to the Voice of America, this chameleon has changed his spots several times over, but always, you'll note, in search of a job. The only problem is that he has to blot out half his resume in search of the next one.
"Aside from opportunism, however, there is an ideological theme to Schwartz's recent career: Wherever there is a war, there is Stephen Schwartz, hovering vulture-like, demanding an escalation of the conflict. From the class war, to the Kosovo war, to the "war on terrorism," the war-bird Schwartz pops up on every battlefield, like some macabre jack-in-the-box..." (9)
And in "Portrait of a War Bird..."
"...Busy, busy, busy, and always in the service of conflict...there is Stephen Schwartz, circling over the battlefield and feeding off the carnage. Caw! Caw! Caw!" (10)
TO BE CONTINUED...
Footnotes:
(1) "Vista la actitud del unico militante de FOCUS que concemos y que es plenamente apoyado por otros miembro (hasta ahora desconocides) de este grupo rompemos toda relacion con ellos." ("In view of the attitude of the only militant of FOCUS that we know of and who is plainly supported by the other members of this group (who we know nothing about) we totally break all relations with them.") ALARMA #13, May 1982.
"This group has never contained (till our break up with it) anyone but Sandalio, as far as we know."(Correspondence of FOR with Morgan Miller of Portland, Oregon, dated 9-12-83.)
ALARME: (write without mentioning the name) BP 329 Paris Cedex 13 FRANCE
FOR is, or was, a small left communist tendency in France and Spain, founded in 1958 by a group including the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret and Grandizo Munis. The FOR originated in the Trotskyist movement after World War Two.
Copies of FOR materials regarding 'Comrade Sandalio' are available from me, at tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com
(2) Letter of John Zerzan to the Detroit, Michigan anarchist newspaper the 'Fifth Estate', Nov.12, 1985
(3) "Buttoned-Down Bohemians - Welcome to San Francisco's New Age Right.'' 'Image' magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Sunday August 3, 1986
(4) "When “New Age Rightist” Stephen Schwartz discovered graffiti calling him “the philosophical whore of North Beach,” the former Trotskyite turned red with rage. He uncapped his felt-tipped pen and was printing a reply to the scurrilous scribblings when he was busted by Mayor Feinstein's anti-graffiti police squad on a charge of malicious mischief, defacing the wall of a Vallejo Street construction site.
Schwartz...has demanded a trial to exonerate his exercise of free speech.
“I was just going to answer that I was not the philosophical whore of North Beach,” said Schwartz, 37.
If he wants a trial, he can have it, said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Hoffman, who believes citizens have the right to speak out under the First Amendment — but with limits.
“The remedy is that he can stand on a street corner and yell all he wants that he's not the philosophical whore of North Beach,” Hoffman said. “But he can't go around defacing other people's property.”
('A Battle Over Right to Write.' He wanted to rebut graffiti with graffiti. By Dennis J. Opatrny, of the Examiner staff. 'San Francisco Examiner', May 7, 1987.)
(5) Clifford Geertz, "Which Way to Mecca." 'New York Review of Books,' Volume 50, Number 11, July 3, 2003
(6) Frederich Nietzsche. "On the Genealogy of Morals," Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books/Random House, 1967. First Essay, Section 10, page 36.
(7) Justin Raimondo, "Wackos, Weirdos and Wingdings. The War Party -- a scary, ugly lot." 'Antiwar.com,' June 2, 2003. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j060203.html
(8) Stephen J. Snikgoski, "Idealistic democracy, total hypocrisy, and Israel: America's man in Uzbekistan." June 22, 2005. http://craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/06/idealis... on the blog of Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.
Quote of tough guy Schwartz dismissing "the blandishments of the human rights industry" regarding systematic police rapes, torture, and boiling people to death is from Schwartz, "Defending Freedom from Islamist Terror," 'Weekly Standard,' July 19, 2003.
(9) Justin Raimondo, "The VOA Folies -- 'Voice of America' loses a writer -- and the War Party gains a martyr." 'Antiwar.com,' July 5, 2002. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j070502.html
(10) Justin Raimondo, "Portrait of a War Bird -- 10 questions for 'the philosophical whore of North Beach." 'Antiwar.com,' Dec.6, 2002.Portrait of a War Bird, by Justin Raimondo
(11) See also 'From Munis to Meese: Left Communism or State Department Surrealism.' From Munis to Meese: Left Communism or State Department Surrealism?
Kevin Keating
tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com
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"The September 11th 2001 blowback from former Presidents Carter and Reagan's foreign policy antics in Afghanistan"
Perhaps it will inspire Mr. Keating to refer to the 9/11 Inside Job as such when he sees the horror of the anti-science US government response to COVID19 since the Bush Administration's anti-science conspiracy theory on the 9/11 Inside Job should be rejected as much as Trump's anti-science opposition to the use of masks to stop the spread of COVID19.
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has taken the lead in pursuing the reversal of the NIST false decision that fires supposedly caused the collapse of the 110 Story Twin Towers and the 47 Story Building 7, based on the massive evidence provided by commercial TV coverage on 9/11/01 where reporters described the demolition explosives they heard and witnessed. See
“9/11 News Coverage: How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11” by Ted Walter and Graeme McQueen, 7/9/20 at
https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-36-reporters-brought-us-twin-towers-explosive-demolition-911/5718119
and
https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/technical-articles/articles-by-ae911truth/696-how-36-reporters-brought-us-the-twin-towers-explosive-demolition
“Editor’s Note: As of the publication of this article, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is awaiting a decision from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding the request for correction that AE911Truth and ten family members of 9/11 victims submitted to NIST on April 15, 2020. The request seeks corrections to eight separate items of information in NIST’s 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, any of which would effectively force NIST to reverse its conclusion that fires caused the building's destruction.”
“NIST informed AE911Truth on June 12, 2020, that it was unable to meet its goal of responding within 60 days. Under the procedure governing such requests, NIST must provide a decision within 120 days of the submission, which would fall on August 13, 2020. If NIST elects not to take the corrective action being sought, AE911Truth and its fellow requesters would then have 30 days to file an appeal with NIST. Should NIST fail in any way to comply with the procedure governing requests or should it fail to rectify the information quality violations documented in the request, AE911Truth and its fellow requesters are prepared to take legal action.”
“In the meantime, AE911Truth is taking one further step toward correcting the record on the destruction of the Twin Towers with the publication of this article. This exhaustive review of 70 hours of 9/11 news coverage reveals that the hypothesis of explosions bringing down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters covering the events in New York City on 9/11 but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis.”
On August 31, 2020, AE911 Truth announced it is appealing NIST’s reactionary decision of August 28, 2020 “ denying the request for correction that we — together with ten 9/11 family members and 88 architects and structural engineers — submitted on April 15, 2020, regarding NIST’s 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7”. See https://www.ae911truth.org/nist
If Mr. Keating were under age 30, he would at least have the excuse of not remembering the 9/11 Inside Job, the American Reichstag Fire, perpetrated by the US military under the directions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice & Guiliani, to promote war and fascism so as to maximize profits, the greatest profits being in oil and munitions. Since Mr. Keating has been around a while, we can assume Mr. Keating remembers the 9/11 Inside Job.
Since Mr. Keating seems to like to read, a good sign, he should make a serious effort, 19 years later, to do the reading now. He will learn some basics as follows which show that there was no blowback, so it was an Inside Job:
1. NO AIR DEFENSE means 9/11 was an inside job as we have an excellent air defense over this country for which we pay millions, if not billions, of dollars. This alone is sufficient proof that 9/11 was an inside job.
2. If he needs more, there was the CONTROLLED DEMOLITION of the Twin Towers, each 110 storys, and the 47 story Building 7, which Building 7 was not hit by any plane, all of which fell in their own footprint, in 10 seconds or less demonstrating there was no resistance, a clear sign of CONTROLLED DEMOLITION, in small enough pieces to illegally cart away the evidence, which is what happened.
3. The evidence, described in the sources cited below shows that the planes, which were half full and would not normally have been flown since such flights were not profitable, had no hijackers on board; they were on automatic pilot guided by the US military.
4. 9 of the so-called hijackers were alive on 9/12/01.
5. One demolition substance used was nanothermite, only used by the military. In the dust of the World Trade Center Towers was found thermite, a military incendiary substance, was created by SCP Partners, a Mossad-run private equity company concerned with “security,” which had in its portfolio a company called Megallurg Holdings, Inc. capable of producing and applying an advanced form of super-thermite. This company was run by former Israel Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Israel is part of the American military machine and so it is no surprise that Barak was involved in the 9/11 Inside Job. Bombs were exploding in the many basements of the buildings that were demolished. The buildings were shut down many times before 9/11/01, including the weekend before, clearly to plant the bombs and demolition explosives. The entire World Trade Center was run by a security outfit led by Marvin Bush, a brother of the then president, and Wirt Walker, III, a cousin of same. The Pentagon was hit by construction explosives on the side that was under construction that housed bookkeepers about to reveal the till-tapping, as well as by either a small military plane or a military missile. The hole in the ground in Pennsylvania had no bodies, said the coroner; the plane that supposedly crashed there landed at the Cleveland airport. The CIA doubles were incompetent pilots and drunken womanizers, clearly not religious, and obviously not capable of the extraordinary maneuver over the Pentagon or flying huge heavy planes.
6. We must always ask WHO BENEFITS? Only the US capitalist class had the MOTIVE, MEANS AND OPPORTUNITY to carry out this heinous crime, killing some 3,000 people instantly, and only the US capitalist class benefited from the 9/11 Inside Job. The government’s anti-science conspiracy theory must be rejected as we reject Nazi Germany’s lies about who perpetrated the Reichstag Fire. With the Communist bogeyman gone as of the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union perpetrated by the CIA, the ruling class had to come up with a new excuse for their profitable war machine. They spent 10 years perfecting drone planes and imported their puppet Israel’s scapegoating of Muslims, all with the help of Israelis. There was NO ATTACK FROM OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; THIS WAS AN INSIDE JOB, AN AMERICAN REICHSTAG FIRE. THERE WAS NO BLOWBACK. The concept of blowback is ridiculous when one considers the magnitude of the operation. The concept of blowback is also inherent in the anti-Muslim racism perpetrated by the US government as a cover for their 9/11 Inside Job.
There is much more. You can start viewing and reading the following:
DVD that is a Must See at http://loosechange911.com/
Youtube Movies:
10 Disturbing 9/11 Facts: 6 minutes at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnht6NCDtJI
“9/11 Inquiry: Lawyers and Victims’ Families File Petition for Federal Grand Jury Investigation” by Ted Walter, 4/12/18 at
https://www.globalresearch.ca/911-inquiry-lawyers-and-victims-families-file-petition-for-federal-grand-jury-investigation/5635854
The petition is at https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/grand-jury-petition-executive-summary/
7 Critical Things Everyone Needs to Remember about 9/11 https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/7-critical-things-everyone-needs-to-remember-about-9-11/
Israelis – Not Muslims – Cheered in Jersey City on 9/11 by Glen Ford, 11/27/15 at
http://www.globalresearch.ca/israelis-not-muslims-cheered-in-jersey-city-on-911/5491920
From: https://www.blackagendareport.com/israelis_cheered_9/11
9/11 Suspects: The Dancing Israelis, The Corbett Report: 17 minutes at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XHm56O2NTI
Correction on speculation that the Laughing or Dancing Israelis were a distraction: The Zionists knew they had absolute immunity from prosecution in their complicity in perpetrating the 9/11 Inside Job and view themselves as a master race, “the chosen people,” which we see daily now in Israel. This is further proof that all nationalism is reactionary and religion is both superstition and reactionary.
“9/11 Truth: Under Lockdown for Nearly Two Decades” by Max Parry, 4/9/20 at
https://www.globalresearch.ca/911-truth-under-lockdown-for-nearly-two-decades/5709215
(Contains more information on the “Laughing Israelis.” )
“Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks” by Whitney Webb, 5/17/19
https://www.mintpressnews.com/newly-released-fbi-docs-shed-light-on-apparent-mossad-foreknowledge-of-9-11-attacks/258581/
“The Dancing Israelis: FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks” by Whitney Webb, 9/10/19 at
https://www.mintpressnews.com/newly-released-fbi-docs-shed-light-on-apparent-mossad-foreknowledge-of-9-11-attacks/258581/
Laughing Israelis at World Trade Center on 9/11/01 identified themselves on TV, and much more on Israel’s complicity in the 911 Inside Job which should surprise no one since Israel, a US military base since its inception in 1948, is and always has been part of the US military-agent provocateur-spy system of US imperialism. EHUD OLMERT, mayor of Jerusalem in 2001, from a terrorist Irgun family, visited New York City on 9/10/11. While all civilian flights were grounded immediately after the 9/11/01 Inside Job and for at least a week thereafter, a full El Al Boeing 747 left New York City’s JFK airport for Israel with authorization from the US Department of Defense, and US military officials were at the JFK airport to make sure this flight was cleared for take-off. Florida, the alleged base of the non-existent “Arab hijackers” was and is a base for Israeli Mossad operations as is the rest of the USA. EHUD BARAK, who has degrees in physics and mathematics, attended Stanford University, was Israel’s Defense Minister during the Massacre of Gaza of 2008-2009, making him a war criminal according to the Goldstone Report of 2009, and was Prime Minister of Israel from July 1999 to March 2001, after which he came to the US to work as a partner in SCP Partners, a Mossad-run private equity company concerned with “security,” which had in its portfolio a company called Megallurg Holdings, Inc. capable of producing and applying an advanced form of super-thermite, a powerful explosive, which was found in the dust of the Twin Towers. On 9/11/01, he stated on BBC TV that the world faces a War on Terror and called for an invasion of Afghanistan, clearly the cover for the 911 Inside Job.
PBS Documentary 9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out Final Edition, 60min (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l-8PFk8j5I
“Fire Did Not Cause 3rd Tower’s Collapse on 9/11, New Study Finds” by http://www.ae911truth.org/ (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth), 9/4/19 at
https://www.globalresearch.ca/fire-did-not-cause-3rd-tower-collapse-911-new-study-finds/5688098
“On September 11, 2001, at 5:20 PM, the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed into its footprint, falling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second destruction.”
“Today, we at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth are pleased to partner with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in releasing the draft report of a four-year computer modeling study of WTC 7’s collapse conducted by researchers in the university’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The UAF WTC 7 report concludes that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was caused not by fire but rather by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
“911 Truth: WTC 7 Not Destroyed by Fire, Concludes Final University of Alaska Fairbanks Report” 3/25/20
https://www.globalresearch.ca/wtc-7-not-destroyed-fire-concludes-final-university-alaska-fairbanks-report/5707783
911 Suspects: Rudy Giuliani, The Corbett Report: 11 minutes at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl85JSvDmsA&index=1&list=PLN6xa7kD9dZ9gFFM6v6EloLGmQZFyeGqm
CIA Agent Confesses On Deathbed: ‘We Blew Up WTC7 On 9 11’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmx-DiWUqfs
http://www.heartson.com/Politics/advanced_knowledge.html#warning
Advance warning to Democrat Willie Brown came from Condoleeza Rice
(Republican Rice was Secretary of State; Democrat Willie Brown was San Francisco’s mayor.)
“The warning to San Francisco's mayor not to fly to NY eight 8 hours before the September 11th attack came from Condoleeza Rice. [Pacifica Radio, Friday, May 17, 2002]”
http://rethink911.org/
https://rethinkseptember11.wordpress.com/ (Global Interactive Broadcast)
“Video: The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw” by Barrie Zwicker and Michael Welch, 9/9/18 at:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-the-great-conspiracy-the-911-news-special-you-never-saw/5653489
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgbhALwH9DY
http://911expertsspeakout.org/
http://911blueprintfortruth.org/
https://www.bing.com/search?q=Active+Thermitic+Material+Discovered+in+Dust+from+the+9%2F11+World+Trade+Center+Catastrophe&PC=U316&FORM=CHROMN
https://www.globalresearch.ca/active-thermitic-material-discovered-in-dust-from-the-9-11-world-trade-center-catastrophe/13049
http://benthamopen.com/contents/pdf/TOCPJ/TOCPJ-2-7.pdf scientific article: “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”
by Niels H. Harris, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen.
See also:
http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/gold.html
http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/analysis/anomalies.html
http://fightingforgod.com/ (Gold, Oil, Drugs)
http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/the-911-files (The 9/11 Files)
http://www.projectcensored.org/
http://projectcensored.org/radio/
http://stephenlendman.org/?s=9%2F11
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/08/03/18740935.php
*Steve Lendman: Fake Washington Terror Plot, 8/4/13: BBC, Fox & Pakistan Observer reported Bin Laden’s death in December 2001; August 2013 closing of embassies is staged.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=49f_1172526096 article entitled “Video: BBC Was Half An Hour Too Early Reporting On WTC7 Collapse” and
“BBC Foreknowledge of 9/11 Collapse of WTC Building Seven: British Man Won Law Suit against BBC for 9/11 Cover Up” 3/10/15&8/26/20 at
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bbc-foreknowledge-of-911-collapse-of-wtc-building-seven-british-man-won-law-suit-against-bbc-for-911-cover-up/5438161
http://boston911truth.org/
http://www.dc911truth.org/ (Washington DC)
Military incinerated remains of 9/11 victims of this military operation, 2/28/12 AP report, “Partial remains of 9/11 victims went to landfill”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2t9PK-Kato
“Ten Irrefutable Devastating 9/11 Facts” by Elias Davidsson and Craig McKee, 4/24/18, originally published at :
https://www.globalresearch.ca/ten-irrefutable-devastating-911-facts/5637525
“HuffPost’s Attack on Academic Integrity, Truth and Justice” by Elias Davidson, 12/6/18 at
https://www.globalresearch.ca/huffposts-attack-academic-integrity-truth-justice/5662038
(A good legal investigation that exposes lie of any hijackers on the planes used as bombs while treated as drones guided by the US military in George Bush’s 9/11 Inside Job.)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/911-truth-15-years-later-jenna-orkin-on-epa-lies-and-the-legacy-of-911-investigator-michael-ruppert/5548047 9/27/16:Jenna Orkin report on poisons at World Trade Center controlled demolition of 9/11/01 including dust and debris containing dangerous quantities of not only asbestos, but also lead, mercury, cadmium, toxic organic compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), glass fibers, pulverized concrete, and caustic particles so alkaline they had pH levels near that of liquid drain cleaner.: “Over 1,000 people have died from illnesses tied to exposure to debris. That number is expected within five years to exceed the number who were killed on the day of the attacks.” Jenna Orkin, a resident of New York City, co-founded World Trade Center Environmental Organization.
See also: https://www.globalresearch.ca/911-attacks-thousands-of-911-first-responders-have-cancer/5653071
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-unspoken-truth-on-911-september-11-the-new-pearl-harbor/5354760 and some 5 hours total DVDs at
http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=167
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-unanswered-questions-of-911/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-911-reader-the-september-11-2001-terror-attacks/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-third-wtc-building-which-collapsed-on-911-was-not-hit-by-a-plane/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/search?q=9%2F11+Truth+Movement
http://www.globalresearch.ca/theme/9-11-war-on-terrorism
9/11 Truth and the Collapse of Steel Framed Buildings
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24721
Evidence Refutes the Official 9/11 Investigation: The Scientific Forensic Facts
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21436
9/11 Truth Organization Unearths Striking Video Photo WTC Evidence
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21907
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15601 (Griffin: Bin Laden died Dec 2001)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24622 (Dr. Pieczenik: Bin Laden died Dec 2001 of Marfan syndrome, genetic disease that shortens life span.)
http://911blogger.com/news/2011-05-06/michael-ruppert-proof-obama-lying-about-killing-bin-laden (DNA sample not possible in time frame given.)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25898
(Roberts, 8/4/11: The Mysterious Death of OBL: Creating Evidence Where There Is None)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden-was-an-american-hoax/5350261
(Roberts: 9/17/13: The Killing of Osama bin Laden was an “American Hoax”)
Dead Men Don’t Talk: US Navy Seals Destroyed to Cover Up Washington’s Bin Laden Execution Hoax?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25923
List of Politicians, Military and Intelligence Experts who Question the “Official” 9/11 Narrative
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26897
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24625 (In 48 hours, bin Laden “death” story changed for pending presidential election)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30654 (“Who Was Osama? Who Is Obama? By Michel Chossudovsky)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30671 (One Year On, Still No Evidence For Osama Bin Laden's Killing by Brit Dee)
https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/the-toronto-hearings-on-911-uncovering-ten-years-of-deception/ (2011 Toronto Hearings on 9/11 Truth)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/duty-to-warn-911-and-cognitive-dissonance/5347923
“WTC 1 and 2: Justice and 9/11 Demands Accountability. Forensic Evidence Indicates Presence of Controlled Demolition Material” by Dick Gregory, 9/10/10.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/wtc-1-and-2-justice-and-9-11-demands-accountability-forensic-evidence-indicates-presence-of-controlled-demolition-material/20979
http://www.communitycurrency.org/MainIndexMX.html
http://www.ic911studies.org/
http://uwaterloo911.wordpress.com/
http://911speakout.org/ (physics tutorial)
http://www.scientistsfor911truth.com/
http://www.journalof911studies.com/
http://www.911truth.org/
http://www.911truth.org/911-truth-statement/ (has excellent investigative questions)
http://wtc7.net/
http://lawyersfor911truth.blogspot.com/
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/core.html
http://patriotsquestion911.com/
http://www.ThePentacon.com
http://www.citizeninvestigationteam.com/
http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php/911-facts.html
READ ALL OF THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:
1.Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert
2.9/11 Facing Our Fascist State by Don Paul (Excellent research all done in 2001-2002; obviously an Inside Job from the beginning. The evidence is in this book.)
3.Waking Up From Our Nightmare by Don Paul and Jim Hoffman (Good color photos & research)
4.Cognitive Infiltration by David Griffin (2010) (The title is an insidious phrase promoted by an appointee of Democrat Barack Obama, Cass Sunstein, a lawyer, (husband of Samantha Power, Obama appointee US ambassador to UN), promoting an illegal activity, joining and disrupting 9/11 Truth Movement organizations instead of open debate, providing evidence for the government’s conspiracy theory, which does not exist. Sunstein-Obama were openly promoting fascism. On Democrat Sunstein: He was appointed to oversee the National Security Agency in 2013, is a defender of military commissions and endorsed warrantless wiretapping. This book does reiterate all the evidence for the 9/11 Truth Movement in 156 pages plus 477 footnotes.)
5.The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7 by David Griffin (2009)
6.Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? by David Griffin (2009) (Bin laden died in Dec 2001). See also http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15601
7.New Pearl Harbor Revisited by David Griffin (2008)
8.The Hidden History of 9/11, ed by Paul Zarembka (2008), articles by David Griffin, Jay Kolar, Zarembka, Don Trent Jacobs, Nafez Ahmed, David MacGregor, Bryan Sacks, Diana Ralph, with Appendix by Bertrand Russell: 16 Questions on the JFK Assassination (teaches how to investigate a crime)
9.The 9/11 Conspiracy, edited James Fetzer (2007), articles by John Austin, David Griffin, James Fetzer, Jack White, Judy Wood, Joseph Firmage, Morgan Reynolds, Rick Rajter, Elias Davidsson, Peter Dale Scott, John McMurty plus excellent photos
10. 9/11 Contradictions by David Griffin (2008)
11. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions & Distortions by David Griffin
12. The New Pearl Harbor by David Griffin
13. Debunking 9/11 Debunking by David Griffin
14.Painful Questions by Eric Hufschmid
15. The Iron Triangle (on the Carlyle Group) by Dan Briody
16. 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions by Rowland Morgan & Ian Henshall
17. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Tarpley
18. Body of Secrets by James Bamford (Good on Operation Northwoods)
19. The War on Truth by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed
20. Towers of Deception by Barrie Zwicker (with DVD enclosed)
21. 9/11 and American Empire edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott
22. Flight 93 Revealed by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan
23.The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson
24.Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta & the 9/11 Coverup in Florida by Daniel Hopsicker
25.The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistleblowers and The Coverup by Sander Hicks
26.The Terror Conspiracy by Jim Marrs
27.Inside Job by Jim Marrs
28.Forbidden Truth by Jean-Charles Brisard & Guillaume Dasquie
29.Pentagate by Thierry Meyssan
30.9/11: The Big Lie by Thierry Meyssan