Tag: israel

The Most Incredible Story Never Told: LBJ’s Order to Destroy the USS Liberty

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON is a president who has escaped the scrutiny and judgment of history despite considerable documentation that should make him an outstanding candidate for historical review, critique, and analysis. His primary biographer, Robert Caro, consistently gets rave book reviews from mainstream media for his disingenuous puff piece books on LBJ. It’s entirely possible that LBJ is the most evil or one of the most evil presidents in US history. (ILLUSTRATION: The USS Liberty post-Israeli attack)

Some researchers believe that LBJ was the mastermind behind JFK’s assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination.

However, one of the greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for four worthless .50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.

Not a whole lot has been written about the USS Liberty. It’s just another critically important issue that has been buried in history, but two extraordinary books document the truth. James M. Ennes Jr., is a retired US Naval Officer and a survivor of the Liberty attack who wrote a book that documents his investigative disclosure of the truth, here.

Peter Hounam, an investigative journalist, wrote Operation Cyanide, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounam’s extraordinary book, published in 2003, relies heavily on the work of Ennis and also documents numerous interviews that Hounam conducted with the USS Liberty survivors as well as other folks in the US, British, and Israeli governments.

The “official” story of the USS Liberty, according to the government and mainstream media version of the event, is that on June 8, 1967 the Israelis accidentally bombed the Liberty off the coast of Egypt and killed 34 American sailors.

The real story is that President Johnson, who was being battered in the polls over the Vietnam War and facing a general election loss and even losing the Democrat primary, asked the Israelis to bomb the Liberty to create a casus belli and to secure a Gulf-of-Tonkin-style resolution to explode the world into war — because in America everybody loves an outraged and indignant president who will use the full force of the military at the slightest provocation, even a government-planned false flag attack.

The USS Liberty, however, encompasses far more than a murderous psychopathic American president resorting to hideously evil deeds to get re-elected. In addition to ordering the total destruction of the USS Liberty and potentially sending 294 Americans to a watery grave in the Mediterranean Sea, LBJ also ordered the nuclear bombing of Cairo, an event specifically designed to create a nuclear war by blaming the entire USS Liberty affair on Russia or Egypt. More horrifying, it’s documented that US planes were on emergency standby orders as pilots waited on the runways in their planes armed with nuclear weapons. The nuclear bombing of Cairo was called off only three minutes before the nuclear bomb drops.

As fate would have it, LBJ’s plan blew up in his face and the world got a reprieve from a US-induced nuclear holocaust.

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‘Disarm or be disarmed by force’: Trump issues new threat to Hamas

US President Donald Trump issued a new threat against Hamas on 14 October, affirming that they will either surrender their weapons or be disarmed by force. 

“They said they were gonna disarm,” the president claimed, despite Hamas and other resistance factions repeatedly rejecting Israeli terms for the surrender of arms. “They know I’m not playing games.”

The president praised the “monumental” achievement of returning the captives, adding that this was needed “above all else.”

He also expressed support for Hamas’s crackdown on outlaw militias in Gaza. “They did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad … That didn’t bother me,” he said. 

“But they will disarm, you understand me?” Trump told a reporter. “Everyone’s always saying they won’t disarm … They will disarm. And I spoke to Hamas, and I told them you’re gonna disarm. Yes sir, we’re gonna disarm, that’s what they told me,” Trump claimed. 

“And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them – and it’ll happen quickly and, perhaps, violently, but they WILL disarm,” he threatened.

Israel has also threatened to disarm Hamas through military force if the resistance group refuses to surrender. “All hell breaks loose” if Hamas does not disarm, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

The Deputy Secretary General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, Mohammad al-Hindi, rejected Trump’s comments and said “the resistance factions did not agree to disarmament,” adding that “we do not accept the threat of disarming them by force.”

Hamas has also repeatedly stressed that it will not surrender its weapons until a Palestinian state is formed. 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday that Britain could play a leading role in helping to disarm Hamas in Gaza by drawing on its experience persuading militant groups in Northern Ireland to surrender their weapons. 

According to European diplomats cited by Reuters, the Northern Ireland peace process is being discussed as a potential model for Gaza’s future. They noted that no detailed plan has yet been drawn up.

“Of course, this is going to be difficult, but it’s vital. It was difficult in Northern Ireland in relation to the IRA (Irish Republican Army), but it was vital,” Starmer said.

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Israel violates ceasefire with deadly attacks on Palestinians in Gaza

The Israeli army killed several Palestinians in Gaza on 14 October despite the new ceasefire agreement which has taken effect across the strip. 

In total, nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli ceasefire violations, Palestinian media reports said. Three bodies arrived at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, while another six arrived at Gaza City’s Baptist hospital.

An Israeli quadcopter targeted civilians in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighborhood while they were inspecting their homes.

Israeli artillery also shelled areas in Jabalia and Al-Tarans, accompanied by gunfire. There was also gunfire reported in the Al-Tahlia area of Khan Yunis in south Gaza. 

Additionally, a group of young men near Al-Fukhari, east of Khan Yunis, was targeted by Israeli forces, resulting in one death. 

The Israeli army announced that it killed five Palestinians on Tuesday. It said the they had crossed the Yellow Line, where Israeli forces withdrew to as part of an initial pullout stipulated in the ceasefire deal’s map. 

The army said it acted to “remove the threat,” claiming the Palestinians refused to disperse. 

“The IDF calls on Gaza residents to follow its instructions and not to approach the troops deployed in the area,” the army statement added.

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Backfire: Biden Finally Responds to Peace Deal, But with Unexpected Admission That He Failed on Everything

It’s another Biden backfire — and on the global stage.

With President Donald Trump riding high on a deal that has brought the first stages of peace in the Israel war against Hamas, the man who preceded him in the White House finally weighed in.

And like just about everything else involving Joe Biden, it turned out badly.

At first blush, Biden’s statement is unobjectionable:

“I am deeply grateful and relieved that this day has come,” Biden wrote, in a first paragraph that spoke of the Israeli hostages released and Palestinian civilians who suffered thanks to the savagery of Hamas.

Then came the second paragraph, in which Biden actually had the class to congratulate Trump on the international deal coming together. But he couldn’t do it without an attempt to put his own slant on history — an attempt that only ended up emphasizing his own ineptitude.

“My Administration worked relentlessly to bring hostages home, get relief to Palestinian civilians, and end the war,” Biden wrote.

That’s only true if by “worked relentlessly to bring hostages home,” Biden meant he put endless pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull his punches against Hamas terrorists who had committed the Oct. 7, 2023, attack — the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

It’s only true if by getting “relief to Palestinian civilians,” Biden meant engaging in endless performance politics meant to appease the American Democratic Party’s leftiest fringe — including the construction, at considerable cost to the American taxpayer, of a pier to funnel supplies to Gaza that was doomed from the start and ended in debacle.

But in the real world of actual fact, it isn’t true at all.

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Secret Israeli military bunker located under Tel Aviv tower struck by Iran, analysis shows

The Grayzone has geolocated the underground bunker of an important military command and control center nestled within a densely populated Tel Aviv neighborhood. Known as ‘Site 81,’ the U.S.-built facility houses a hyper-secretive intelligence base.

When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. “The building on this compound was just hit,” Trey Yingst of Fox News reported as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. But within seconds, Israeli police officers arrived to aggressively shunt Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road. 

That day, Iranian missiles struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst’s location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the “Canarit” / “Kannarit” Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is host to a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as “Site 81.”

Israel aggressively censors information relating to its urban military and intelligence facilities while simultaneously accusing its adversaries of engaging in ‘human shielding’ – a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law. While the existence of a U.S. Army project to expand Site 81 to a 6,000 square-meter facility was widely reported from government records circa 2013, the specific location remained unknown.

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Samantha Power secretly colluded with Israel to enhance UN role, leaked emails show

Behind closed doors, the noted ‘humanitarian interventionist’ successfully lobbied for Israel’s inclusion on important UN committees even after the Human Rights Council accused it of targeting civilians in Gaza.

The leaked emails also reveal that Israel furnished Power with a dodgy dossier on Syrian chemical weapons as she pushed regime change in Damascus.

Former US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power secretly coordinated with a top Israeli diplomat to secure Israel’s access to multiple prestigious UN committees, leaked files show.

Several unsolicited emails sent by Power to the then ambassador of Israel to the UN, Ron Prosor, show the diplomat celebrating her role in polishing Israel’s image on the global stage.

The emails between the two diplomats reveal how the US-Israeli special relationship operates at a granular level, and help map out the personal interactions which ensure Israel enjoys constant diplomatic cover at an international level. They are among the latest batch of hacked files belonging to Israeli government officials which were leaked by the Handala hacking collective.

A November 2013 email exchange between Power and Prosor reveals how the US ambassador helped secure Israel entry to the UN’s Western European and Others Group (WEOG). Three days before the vote succeeded, Prosor predicted “a Hanukkah miracle,” telling Power, “I know what [a] crucial role you played in making this happen. This success will last way beyond our time and will always carry your figure [sic] print on it.”

Power replied by thanking him for sending “such a nice note,” and agreed that Israel’s ascension to WEOG was “so overdue and so ridiculous that it has taken this long.”

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Israel Is the Excuse To Snatch Away Freedoms We Once Took for Granted

In interviews and a comment article over the weekend, the UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson made clear she plans to exploit the pause in the Gaza genocide to snuff out criticism of Israel’s criminal actions – and, of course, her own government’s collusion in that criminality.

Naturally, the British establishment media have been keen to amplify her message that there will be painful consequences both for individuals who continue protesting against Israeli atrocities and for institutions, such as universities, that mistakenly assume they have a duty to uphold centuries-old freedoms by tolerating such protests.

These protests, let us remember, are fully in line with a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which declared:

a) Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian populations there – and has been doing so for decades.

b) Western governments are obligated to do what they can to bring that illegal occupation and Israel’s apartheid system to an end as quickly as possible.

Instead, those same governments are violating the ruling, and international law, both by continuing to support Israel’s criminality and by preventing their own citizens from putting pressure on them to end their support.

The government of Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has even categorized protest against genocide as “support for terrorism”. For the first time in British history, a direct-action group, Palestine Action, has been banned as a terrorist organization – in its case, for targeting weapons factories in Britain arming Israel’s genocide. It is now illegal to express any support for the group.

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Trump’s Sham Peace Plan

here is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary”relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish a “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a polite term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

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From AI to TikTok to TV, This Pro-Israel Billionaire Is Expanding Power in US

Larry Ellison’s name isn’t always mentioned alongside more public-facing megabillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. But as he vaults to the top of the U.S. power elite after a string of high-profile corporate deals, that’s about to change.

Ellison, the founder of the tech giant Oracle, is quickly emerging as the new face of oligarchic power in the U.S. Oracle has become an AI powerhouse at the same time Ellison and his son David have acquired Paramount and its vast media empire. With Donald Trump’s recent executive order, Ellison and Oracle will also now oversee TikTok’s algorithms, shaping a platform that reaches 150 million U.S. users.

What’s more alarming than Ellison’s sheer wealth — in September, he briefly surpassed Musk as the world’s richest person — is that he’s building his concentrated power and control in collaboration with the Trumpian project of attacking so-called “wokeness,” all while supercharging the corporate expansion of artificial intelligence and tech surveillance.

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Israeli Defense Minister Says IDF Will Destroy Gaza Tunnels Once Hamas Releases Israeli Captives

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Sunday that the Israeli military would destroy tunnels in Gaza after the remaining Israeli captives are released by Hamas, which is expected to happen on Monday.

“Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States,” Katz wrote on X.

“This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons. I have instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission,” he added.

According to the outline of the Gaza ceasefire proposal released by the White House, all “military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt,” and there will be a “process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors.” But the details of how those steps will be taken, including who will be doing it, are unclear.

So far, Israel and Hamas have just entered the first phase of the ceasefire deal, which involves the release of the Israeli hostages in exchange for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, the IDF pulling back to an agreed-upon line, and Israel allowing more aid to enter Gaza. Details on implementing the rest of the agreement still need to be worked out in negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

Katz’s comments come as many are concerned Israel will restart its genocidal war once Hamas releases the Israeli captives. Also on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military “campaign is not over,” though he could be referring to other areas where Israel is at war or potential escalations elsewhere in the region.

“And I want to say: Everywhere we fought – we won. But in the same breath, I must tell you: The campaign is not over. There are still very great security challenges ahead of us,” Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his office. “Some of our enemies are trying to rebuild themselves to attack us again. And as we say – ‘We’re on it.’”

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