ARTICLES FRANCAIS A DROITE/DEUTSCHE ARTIKEL RECHTS

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“AIPAC ordered Bush to attack Iran”

SOURCE: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/05/gordon-duff-aipac-ordered-bush-to-attack-iran/

by Gordon Duff

ACCUSED AIPAC SPIES, ROSEN AND WEISSMAN

A LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

In a unique interview with an official at the highest policy levels of the Pentagon, White House and, eventually, CIA, we are offered a unique “behind the curtains” look at areas of policy making during the period between 1999 and 2007.  Extensive notes have been taken of meetings with President Bush and all his top policy advisors.  This is only a teaser.

A highly placed source within the White House and CIA confirmed, in an interview, that the invasion of Iran was scheduled for 2006 but planned in 1999.  We have heard some of this before but not with so many pieces and, I am told, more to come. In an interview with a Bush administration policy official:

Q.  What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of your work at the White House?  You have read my articles, what do you think of my take on things?

A.  You are closer than anyone else in understanding how things worked, the only person willing to simply put it out there.  You also come at things like the Pentagon people I have worked with, the ones who stood against Bush, Cheney and the AIPAC gang at the NSC (National Security Council.)  I can also see that you don’t have background material that you need.  Some of it you have wrong, particularly the motives for Iraq.  It was always Iran, Iraq was simply a door.

“The Iraq invasion was a ‘done deal’ in 1999, but not as you thought to steal oil and bilk billions, that was all gravy.  Iraq, the entire Bush presidency, had one purpose, to remove Iran from the picture.”

Q.  You talk about journalists.  What has your experience been?

A.  I have good friends at the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Washington Post and others.  They know all of this.  They aren’t fooled.  They could write anything but it would never hit print.

Q.  Back to the 2000 election.  The first impediment was, I am told, removing John McCain from the picture.   Was this the case?

A. “He was enemy # 1, stubborn, unpredictable and already tarnished by the Keating 5 scandal, with all his faults, he didn’t have the serous skeletons in his closet that would fit the bill.  McCain couldn’t be blackmailed like Bush, thus McCain is a risk.

Unless you can be controlled, blackmailed or bought or both, you will go nowhere in Washington.

McCain is a womanizer, the real thing.  For a war hero, with McCain’s charm that’s nothing, he would never fall into the kind of trap Clinton did.  Rove was assigned the job of getting rid of McCain.  We all saw what was done in South Carolina.  It was a masterful job.”

Q. When you talk about McCain not being vulnerable, he certainly was in South Carolina, a few rumors and smears and he was gone.  You say Bush is more vulnerable?

A. “A window into a lot of this can be found in the Rosen-AIPAC lawsuit.  Bush has serious issues, let’s just leave it at that.

As for Rosen, he just wasn’t an AIPAC lobbyist,  he sat inside the National Security Council until 2005 as the Rand Corporation’s Director of Foreign Policy.  When the press talks about an AIPAC employee and spying, he didn’t join AIPAC until later, after his arrest.

The FBI investigation and his indictment for spying covered a time when he was at the center of the Bush administration, a key policy formulator at the highest levels of government.  Rosen, indicted in 2004 for spying for Israel, was responsible for formulating American policy in the Middle East and largely responsible for the fate of the Palestinian people, a bit of a conflict of interest for an Israeli lobbyist and accused spy.”

Q. Rosen has made some accusations, says AIPAC spies all the time and that they do nothing but watch pornography there.  You worked with this guy, what do you know?

A. “Rosen has dirt on absolutely everyone.  His divorce depositions are fascinating reading.  They are sealed now but there are copies out there.  I know that reporters at Time Magazine have them, others too.  The FBI has tons, they were after Rosen for years.  As for AIPAC, Rosen told me of their spy operations many times, but nobody needed telling, they were more than obvious to all of us.

Q. You talk about Rosen and his “black book,” that he has dirt on “everyone.”  The news stories mentioned only porn.  That doesn’t sound so serious. Dirt, not just porn, what kind of dirt?

A. “Mostly sex stuff, gay bondage, clubs, expense money being spent on sex, liaisons in public restrooms, that kind of thing.  Many of the key people around the president are involved and there is FBI surveillance, massive amounts of it, photographs, videos, and one or more undercover informants recorded conversations with top National Security Council members.  Spying, nuclear secrets passed to Israel, this was common place.

I witnessed, with two others, the top Bush counter-terrorism official, actually primary advisor to Bush on counter-terrorism, who had served Clinton and others, pass nuclear weapons plans to an Israeli agent, like it was nothing.”

Q. Did the FBI know about this?

A. “For years, FBI agents, I have a list of names, worked to stop this.  Then I learned that the Department of Justice killed the prosecution, Rosen’s lasted into the Obama administration before it was dropped.  Witnesses were threatened with prosecution and the guilty, the spies, were allowed to keep doing what they are doing.  This is what Rosen knows and what he is talking about when he says AIPAC was involved in spying.

It isn’t just that AIPAC is said to receive information it is that it came from top administration officials.”

Q. Let’s get back to the sex thing.  How high up does it go?

A. “One famous joke around the NSC, there was a photo of someone kissing Laura Bush on the cheek and shaking hands with President Bush.  The same person had, not that long before, using those same lips and hands in a men’s restroom.”

Q. What do you know about 9/11?

A. “9/11 was planned as early as 1999 or before, to be executed as soon as the Bush team was in place.  One meeting in April 2001, a meeting outlining the invasion of Iraq, may have been the green light.’  Chalibi was in place early on, from day number one.  I remember telling them he was a known crook, totally disreputable and that things in Iraq would fall apart immediately.  Nobody in the National Security Council ever spoke about what they would do once Saddam was overthrown.  Nobody really seemed to care.

Of course, none of those people have real experience with military issues or, in fact, much of anything else.”

Q. How was the Iran invasion supposed to work?

A. “This is where so many have it wrong.  In fact, there was never serious discussion about terrorism or Al Qaeda or bin Laden.  These things weren’t even a sideshow.  The only talk about any of it was how it could be used to justify going into Iraq and then attacking Iran.

Q. The intel on Iraq, we all know it was wrong.  When was that learned?

A. “The administration didn’t believe false intelligence, it created it, order it in place before the election to be ready for, well I guess, 9/11.  Silencing Plame and Joe Wilson, those were the same people who planned the creation of the phoney intelligence.  There was never a discussion of a serious terrorist threat against the United States.  These guys would have fallen off their chairs laughing themselves to death.  It was all a joke to them, 9/11, the Iraq invasion, all of it.”

Q. Back to Iran, how was the invasion to start?

A. “Everything was going to happen in Bahrain.  Plans were to attack Americans, blow up clubs, restaurants.  There were plans to stage a “Tonkin Gulf’ type attack and blame it on Iranian torpedo boats. Guys in the military were aware of this and there was strong opposition.   Marine Colonel Joe Molofsky was the real hero here.  He did more to scramble administration plans than anyone else, Molofky and General Mattis.  These were really straight shooters, how I learned to trust the Marine Corps.

Wiki on Mattis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mattis

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JdN: I did some research on Molofsky, who was Jewish and died at age fifty.three.……

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/baltimoresun/obituary.aspx?n=joseph-molofsky&pid=117176944

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The government there, their security services, I believe they were deeply involved.  It would have been good to see something about this in Wikileaks.”

Q. You said that war had to start by 2006.  Was there a timetable?

A. “Absolutely.  General Petraeus was sent to Iraq to quiet things down, not to win a war or create a lasting peace, nothing like that.  His job was to shut things down so an operation against Iran could be staged from Iraq.”

Q. But that never got off the ground…

A. “No kidding, and Bush was enraged.  It was the only reason he was put in office in the first place, as long as Iran survived, he was a failure, no matter what happened to the US.”

Q. Didn’t they know that war with Iran would have driven oil to $300 a barrel and collapsed the American economy?

A. “There were never briefings on that like there were never briefings on stabilizing Iraq.  Nobody cared, nobody noticed and it was never discussed.  It was really all about Iran and orders came in and people did what they were told like good little soldiers.”

Q. Orders?  From where?

A. “All of it, all foreign policy issues, were out of AIPAC, they ran everything in the Bush administration.           That was the whole point of it.  We never were told why we had to destroy Iran only that it had to be done.  Nobody ever asked why.  Nobody ever believed Iran had a credible nuclear program and, eventually, we were all very certain they never would.  There was never an issue about Iran being a threat or not.  There was never an issue of motive of any kind.  These were orders, plain and simple, the administration that will come into office in 2001 will be tasked with destroying Iran, tasked by AIPAC who will control all key position in the administration.”

Q. Was there talk about Lebanon and the threat of Hezbollah?

A. “There really weren’t talks at all, only planning on how to follow policy, never on what policy should be or what was right or wrong.  There was never a discussion about the United States, what was good for America or bad for America.  People were generally oblivious to there being an American.”

Source: Veterans Today

=============China’s skyline soars, but who is designing it?

JdN: Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that some races can create, others maintain and use, and still others can only destroy. We see here once again that the Chinese achievements are based entirely on Western design and knowhow. This is just as in my blog a few months back, on how some new high-speed train was launched in China, the Chinese then boasted it was all their technology, and then a German said: Ahem.……

China’s skyscraper boom buoys global industry

BEIJING – The 121-story Shanghai Tower is more than China’s next record-setting building: It’s an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders.

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Modern China Architecture – Shanghai Tower Twists its Way to the Top

source: http://www.trendir.com/ultra-modern/modern-china-architecture-shanghai-tower-twists-its-way-to-the-top.html

Reaching for the sky, the spectacular design for The Shanghai Tower is a twisting, winding marvel of modern architecture. At 632 meters, Shanghai Tower is said to rise 140 meters higher than the Mori Building –currently the world’s highest observatory – securing its title as the tallest building in China. Consisting of nine cylindrical buildings, stacked and enclosed in an outer double skin, this ultra-modern design, by San Francisco-based Gensler, will house office space, a luxury hotel, nine gardens, a retail component and entertainment, and will be a stop along Shanghai’s new Metro stop. Gensler
via World Architecture News

JdN: Frankly, I find all three buildings, of which the one on the right ios the Shanghai tTwer, not just big but also rather creepy. Gensler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gensler) is a Jew, btw; the name means “geese breeder” in Yiddish.

Posted by Lydia on December 5, 2008 5:15 PM

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Financial gloom has derailed plans for new towers in Chicago, Moscow, Dubai and other cities. But in China, work on the 2,074-foot (632-meter) Shanghai Tower, due to be completed in 2014, and dozens of other tall buildings is rushing ahead, powered by a buoyant economy and providing a steady stream of work to architects and engineers.

The U.S. high-rise market is “pretty much dead,” said Dan Winey, a managing director for Gensler, the Shanghai Tower’s San Francisco-based architects. “For us, China in the next 10 to 15 years is going to be a huge market.”

China has six of the world’s 15 tallest buildings — compared with three in the United States, the skyscraper’s birthplace — and is constructing more at a furious pace, defying worries about a possible real estate boom and bust. It is on track to pass the U.S. as the country with the most buildings among the 100 tallest by a wide margin.

“There are cities in China that most Western people have never heard of that have bigger populations and more tall buildings than half the prominent cities in the U.S.,” said Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

China is leading a wave of skyscraper building in developing countries that is shifting the field’s center of gravity away from the United States and Europe.

India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have ultra-tall towers under construction or on the drawing board. In the Gulf, Doha in Qatar and Dubai — site of the current record holder, the 163-story Burj Khalifa — each has three buildings among the 20 tallest under construction, though work on all but one of those has been suspended.

The shift is so drastic that North America’s share of the 100 tallest buildings will fall from 80 percent in 1990 to just 18 percent by 2012, according to Wood. He said by then, 45 of the tallest will be in Asia, with 34 of those in China alone.

“So 34 percent of the 100 tallest buildings will be in a single country. That has only happened once before, and that was with the USA,” he said.

In China, skyscrapers are going up in obscure locales such as Wenzhou, Wuhan and Jiangyin, a boomtown north of Shanghai. It is building a 72-story, 1,076-foot (328-meter) hotel-and-apartment tower that will be taller than Manhattan’s Chrysler Building.

China’s edifice complex is driven by a mix of demand for space in a crowded country with economic growth forecast at 10 percent this year and local leaders who want architectural eye candy to promote their cities as commercial centers.

Dozens of midsize Chinese cities are building new business districts to replace cramped downtowns. They look to the model of Shanghai’s skyscraper-packed Pudong district — China’s Wall Street — created in the 1990s on reclaimed industrial land.

[Related: India’s richest man moves into world’s largest home]

“Governments are encouraging these iconic buildings in order to give a very clear message to the outside world: Please pay attention to our city,” said Dennis Poon, managing principal of Thornton Tomasetti, the Shanghai Tower’s structural engineers. The New York-based firm also is working on the 115-story Ping An International Finance Center in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, and other Chinese projects.

China has four of the 10 tallest buildings under construction, versus two for the United States, and work on one of those, the 2,000-foot (610-meter) Chicago Spire, has stopped.

The Shanghai Tower will be China’s tallest office tower, surpassing the neighboring Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong. The 2-year-old WFC passed the Jinmao Tower, also in Pudong, for the title.

China accounts for 65 percent of Gensler’s worldwide revenues from projects that involve buildings 35 to 40 stories and above, according to Winey.

The firm is working on some 50 projects in China that total 80 million square feet (8 million square meters), the equivalent of San Francisco’s entire stock of commercial office space, he said. China revenues are rising by 30 to 35 percent a year and its staff of 140 people in offices in Beijing and Shanghai should expand to 500 in the next seven years.

The boom has drawn a Who’s Who of star architects and given Chinese firms their first shot at designing a skyscraper.

[Related: China’s 300mph bullet train breaks record] [JdN: yes, with GERMAN  tech!]

Shenzhen’s Ping An tower was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox; the New York firm’s other projects include the 116-story East Tower of the Chow Tai Fook Center in Guangzhou, also near Hong Kong. Chicago-based Skidmore Owings & Merrill designed Beijing’s tallest building, the 75-story China World Tower III, and the 76-story Tianjin World Financial Center in Tianjin east of Beijing, due to be completed next year. Jiangyin’s Hanging Village of Huaxi was designed by China’s A+E Design.

Tianjin, a port and oil-refining center with ambitions to be a finance and tech hub, is building four towers of at least 75 stories. One of them, the Goldin Finance 117, will be 117 stories and nearly 2,000 feet (600 meters) tall.

Instead of Western-style single-use office or apartment towers, many developers diversify their revenue sources by making buildings a mix of hotel and office space, with a shopping mall in the base and luxury apartments at the top.

The new space is hitting the market just as Beijing tries to cool a boom in construction of luxury housing and shopping malls. Regulators warn that a supply glut could leave lenders with unpaid loans if developers default.

But demand for high-end office space is so strong that the skyscraper market should face no such problems, said Danny Ma, director of China research for real estate consulting firm CB Richard Ellis. He said the new buildings should fill up quickly because many are the first in their cities to offer high-quality facilities required by foreign and major Chinese companies that are expanding there.

“More and more tenants are keen to move to such buildings,” Ma said. He said developers are signing up tenants in advance for 50 to 60 percent of the space in new projects, enough in many cases to make them profitable.

China is helping to propel development of skyscraper design and urban planning as developers face government pressure to make buildings environmentally friendly and integrate them into busy cities.

The Shanghai Tower will have a double-layer glass exterior to insulate it and cut heating and cooling costs, an advanced feature that might be rejected as too costly in the U.S. or other Western markets, Winey said.

“You can do a lot more experimentation here,” he said. “It’s an amazing place to be, because you can do things here that you can’t do anywhere else in the world.”

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Online:

Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats: http://www.ctbuh.org

Thornton Tomasetti: http://www.thorntontomasetti.com

Gensler: http://www.gensler.com