NLPWESSEX - Natural Law Publishing

GM crops and food; the so called 'war on terror'; the global energy crisis; the emerging surveillance society; and solutions - changing the way we think

Origins

The Wessex region of England was once the realm of the ancient Anglo-Saxon Kings. It was later immortalised in the Victorian novels of Thomas Hardy.

Named after this region, NLPWessex was established during the 1990s as part of a response to an international initiative to bring a more holistic and innovative approach into the sphere of global politics.

In the event the political arena proved mainly unfertile ground, leading to a withdrawal from this area of activity in 2000. But not before engaging in some notable endeavours.

Amongst these was the part played in a global campaign to raise public awareness of the introduction of genetically modified foods into the world food chain in 1996.

In the UK the campaign produced the world's first leaflet to be distributed on a mass scale onto the streets of cities, towns, and villages, informing the general public of the emerging situation - one which official bodies had made no attempt to publicise.

A follow-on letter writing campaign resulted in the first supermarket chain in the world adopting a ban of GM ingredients in its its own brand products. Many more then followed.

NLPWessex was the first group to publicly call for the establishment of GM-free zones by local government (the call was initially covered by local media in September 1998). Since then thousands of GM free-zones have been declared across Europe, and more beyond.

The 'War On Terror' And The Energy Crisis

In the new millennium the focus also turned to alerting people to other global problems of similarly pressing importance, some deeply disturbing. These have included the largely hidden factors at play behind the so called 'war on terror', the emerging global energy crisis, and the fundamental relationship between the two.

In particular the pushing for a British parliamentary question in December 2002 concerning British citizen Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of the alleged organisers of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, touched on a subject which continues to raise vital and highly sensitive questions.

Those questions have been most prominently kept alive, though only flickeringly so, by three subsequent events.

Firstly, by a remarkable statement made by the President of Pakistan, General Musharraf, in September 2006. Musharraf claimed that during the 1990s Sheikh "was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6" who "sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad" (unlike the Iraq war most people remain blissfully unaware to this day of the equally large undercover crimes and frauds committed by Britain and the United States in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, including covert support for Islamic terrorists).

Previously former US federal prosecutor John Loftus had also claimed that MI6 had secretly used the British extremist group Al-Muhajiroun to recruit Muslim jihadis to fight in Kosovo. Michael Maloof, former senior Pentagon official under both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, has also since reported that after the cold war "the United States worked closely with Pakistan's predominantly Sunni Inter-Services Intelligence organization. Through ISI, the United States recruited Sunni mujahadeen by staging them in Chechnya to fight in Bosnia and later in Kosovo."

Secondly, the Omar Sheikh dimension to the so called 'war on terror' has been kept alive by a film about the murdered Wall St Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The film, 'A Mighty Heart', was released by Paramount in June 2007. Responsible for Pearl's kidnap Sheikh is a key figure in the story line. The full depth of Sheikh's geopolitical connections is not explored, however.

Beyond his role as an agent for MI6, Sheikh's connections to Pakistani intelligence (the 'ISI') were briefly and hesitatingly discussed by Pearl's widow, Mariane, in a web interview with Foreign Policy magazine in May 2007 conducted in anticipation of the launch of the film.

During the interview Mrs Pearl says, "I don’t know if I can talk about them publicly right now. Everything is related. Of course, there’s his relationship with the ISI, but there’s also his relationship with other organizations and other countries. It’s complicated and it’s murky."

In her book published in 2003, from which the film takes its name, Mariane Pearl specifically refers to Sheikh's alleged involvement with the head of Pakistani intelligence, Lt General Mahmoud, and the funding of 9/11 (Mahmoud is reported to have tasked Sheikh to wire $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta before 9/11).

Thirdly, in January 2008, former FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds told Britain's Sunday Times that she discovered that Lt General Mahmoud had led a corrupt scheme within the United States to acquire nuclear and other American state secrets. The scheme allegedly involved assistance from a top level US government official at the State Department.

In a legal deposition sworn under oath in August 2009 in connection with an American court case, Edmonds made a detailed statement concerning this official and other American public figures. The deposition alleged corruption and other criminal activities that had compromised US national security.

The official was also accused by Edmonds, according to the earlier Sunday Times report, of having protected a number of foreigners suspected by the FBI of being involved in 9/11.

Her August 2009 deposition, and an ensuing interview with Edmonds published in the November 2009 edition of 'The American Conservative' (a magazine established by Pat Buchanan, a former adviser to US President Richard Nixon), also highlights the role played by Turkey.

From a family of Turkish origin Edmonds was taken on by FBI immediately after 9/11 as a translator of Turkic languages. Part of her job was to review a backlog of untranslated documents and recordings of FBI telephone intercepts made prior to 9/11.

She tells The American Conservative about discussions that took place before 9/11 between Turkey and Bush administration officials concerning the invasion and potential carve up of Iraq.

Based on the FBI wire taps she reviewed Edmonds says, "They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region."

In her deposition Edmonds also describes the role played by Turkey as an intermediary in America's secret collaboration with Pakistan's ISI in bringing Mujahadeen into the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia after the fall of the Berlin wall.

According to Edmonds these operations were "implemented from mid-1990s at least until towards end of 2001 in Central Asia and Caucasus, and these operations and practices included Islamization of certain segments of those Turkic nations, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. There are so many of them in that -- in that area, and setting up madrasahs and bringing in, helping bringing -- at the time they were not referred to as al-Qaeda until 2001, September 11th. They were referred to as mujahideens from Afghanistan and Pakistan into Central Asia, then to Turkey to give them passports, and then funnel them in 1997, 1998 to certain Eastern European countries and the Balkans."

She says that this continued "at least until September 2001, and again, for those operations, they [the Turks] corroborated and worked with certain U.S. persons who were involved in these operations..... [and] that served the mujahideen groups starting from 1995, 1996. They were given Turkish passports. In some cases they were given Azerbaijani passports, and they -- Turkey played a very active and important role in taking these people and moving them into Europe and some of those people actually ended up in the United States...."

The released transcript of her verbal deposition records that "these Turkish people, and some of them are directly connected to Turkish intelligence and Turkish military in the United States, they played a very significant role in bringing in heroin from source from Afghanistan to Turkey, but from Turkey into both United States, but also directly to Belgium, large quantity, very, very large quantity of heroin.... what they have been doing since late 1990s is actually radical Islam and militizing these very, very young, from the age 14, 15, by commandoes they use, and this is both commandoes from Turkish military, commandoes from Pakistani ISI in Central Asia and Azerbaijan, and after that they bring them to Turkey, and from Turkey they send them through Europe, to European and elsewhere. "

But why would US government officials become involved in such activities, in which Edmonds says the other key players were Turkey and Pakistan's ISI?

Again, according to Edmond's sworn deposition, "they supported the Islamic movements... in the Central Asian countries in order to counter Russia as far as the energy sources are concerned in those countries.... [because this] is furthering the interests of the people who are interested in the energy sources in Central Asia, and that is the -- whether it's oil or whether it's natural gas, and basically it's a fight. The best way to describe it is Cold War is not over. It's a continuation of Cold War over those nations, and what we did in Afghanistan in early 1980s with mujahideen...."

This is a reference to the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea region, which had previously formed part of the Soviet Union. Although not spelt out by Edmonds, her reference to these activities also occuring in the Balkans and the Caucasus can be taken to relate to the securing of pipeline corridors across those regions to deliver these energy resources to western markets, as is reported by others elsewhere.

During the course of Yugoslavia's civil wars in the 1990s a huge massacre of Muslims by Bosnian Serbs took place in Srebrenica in 1995 The enclave in which they had become trapped was a supposed 'safe haven' supervised by Dutch troops seving under a UN mandate.

After these attrocities the Dutch government commissioned an investigation. Amongst other matters the investigation established that the United States had been secretly involved in illegal (there was a UN embargo against arms supplies to all parties in the conflict) munition supplies to Islamic fighters in Bosnia (and that the ensuing Bosnian Serb onslaught was in part a response to this).

The Dutch report concluded that the Hercules transport aircraft used for the American sponsored covert arms supply operation were probably Turkish. The munition drops were made at an airfield at Tuzla. One of these drops was inadvertenly encountered by a Norwegian Airforce pilot in 1995, with the transport aircraft covertly guided in by US F18 navy fighter aircraft at night, according to a BBC documentary ('Allies and Lies') broadcast in June 2001.

The Air Operations Coordination Center in Sarajevo, charged with controling Bosnian airspace following a UN resolution prohibiting unauthorized military flights, was manned by personnel from NATO. However, requests for close air support went to the Operational section in Tuzla and this section consisted almost entirely of Pakistanis, according to the Dutch report.

Sibel Edmonds is therefore not alone amongst those who would seem to have uncovered signs of the US-Turkey-Pakistan covert triangle.

A documentary of parts of Sibel Edmonds' story entitled 'Kill The Messenger' is available on Google Video and You Tube.

Meanwhile the release of 'A Mighty Heart' in 2007 had prompted fellow journalist Asra Nomani, with whom Pearl and his wife were staying at the time of his abduction on 23 January 2002, to make the following plea: "I hope audiences will walk away from the film with an important message: the story doesn't end with this film. I hope viewers will understand that we're still navigating through the confusing labyrinth of Danny's kidnapping and murder trying to understand what really happened. The mystery is still not solved.... Over the last five years since Danny's kidnapping, political subterfuge has defined the effort to understand what really happened to Danny and realize justice in his murder."

Why that may be has already been explored in a number of telling accounts published in Britain's Guardian newspaper. Those accounts reveal much about the real nature of our world at this troubled time in history. Omar Sheikh features prominently in them.

And Sheikh clearly remains a central figure in Nomani's own on-going journalistic investigations. Interviewed in July 2007 by an Indian magazine published in the US Nomani asks "Why did Omar Sheikh's name not come up at all when Danny went missing in spite of his having kidnapped Americans in the past? .... it's not good enough to just assume he had links to the ISI."

Following a more recent official investigation by Judge Marc Trevidic, an anti-terrorist judge in France, the French daily Le Parisien wrote in June 2012 that the implication of Pakistan's ISI in the murder of Daniel Pearl is "no longer in doubt".

A report from Nomani's 'Pearl Project', sponsored by Georgetown University and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists issued in January 2011, stated that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was unlikely to ever be tried for the murder of Daniel Pearl because that would complicate the case against him for 9/11.

A New York Times/CBS poll conducted in 2006 found that only 16% of Americans think the Bush Administration has told the truth about what it knew prior to the attacks on Washington and New York in September 2001.

There is little doubt that the full story of 9/11 is being kept from the public.

In December 2002 Senator Bob Graham, co-chairman of the official joint House and Senate investigation into 9/11, told TV viewers in the United States that the inquiry found evidence "that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States.... most of that information is classified .... at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing - although that was part of it - by a sovereign foreign government ..... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."

In 2013 Congressman Walter Jones (Republican, North Carolina) and Congressman Stephen Lynch (Democrat-Massachusetts) introduced House Resolution 428 demanding the declassification of 28 pages that have been redacted from the official congressional investigation into 9/11. Both men have seen the classified 28 pages but are unable to publicly disclose their contents without breaking federal law.

Congressman Jones said in August 2014 that the declassification of the text "would be embarrasing to the previous administration" and that "the American people have a right to know the truth and to know the relationship with the Saudis at the time of the Bush administration..... there will be no hope for America's future if the American people don't know the truth about a tragedy such as 9/11..... Senator Bob Graham has been to the Federal courts in Florida, trying to get this information declassified. Actually Lee Hamilton, who was on the 9/11 Commission, Democrat, and Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey on the 9/11 Commission, two weeks ago were in the press saying we need to declassify the 28 pages..... [In 2003] George Bush said: no, we don't want to release the 28 pages. I know why."

Resolution 428 states that "the Executive Branch's decision to maintain the classified status of these pages prevents the people of the United States from having access to information about the involvement of certain foreign governments in the terrorist attacks of September 2001."

In July 2016 the Obama administration finally declassified the 28 pages which pointed to multiple links between the 9/11 terrorists and associates of Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar, the former longtime ambassador to the United States.

Besides Saudi Arabia, partially leaked information held by the FBI would appear to indicate that one of the governments involved is that of Pakistan, a country with whom the United States has shared a long-standing goal of expanding geo-strategic reach into central Asia, including into Afghanistan and Iran.

The United States has pursued that goal especially vigorously since 9/11, including through covert support for the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK - People's Mujahadeen). Previously allied to Saddam Hussein, the MEK is a Marxist muslim group hostile to the government in Tehran and listed as a terrorist organisation by the US State Department until 2012.

Despite that designation the Bush administration trained members of the MEK in the Nevada Desert, USA, beginning in 2005 according to Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who exposed the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal following the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Bulletins And Solutions

The NLPWessex email news bulletin service provides periodic updates on these and other unfolding issues around the world. On this web site you can access links to some of the more notable bulletins and related information resources (see side bars).

From genetically modified foods to the so called 'war on terror', the core perspective presented by nlpwessex is that the challenges faced by humanity in the 21st Century are immense. They cannot realistically be addressed by continuing to pursue or embellish the failed and self-destructive 'solutions' of the past.

A major change in thinking at both an individual and collective level is urgently required. This change necessarily has to be of a consciousness-based type way beyond anything currently provided by the failing societal leadership so prominent around the world today.

If you would like to receive nlpwessex news/comment bulletins please submit an email with 'subscribe' in the subject line.

Gorbachev Says US Aggression Incentivises Nuclear Proliferation - Feb 2012

UK Referendum - 'Alternative Vote' System Does Not Mean Introduction Of Electronic Voting - May 11

Chinese Government Puts GM Crops On Backburner
- Feb 11

Wall St Journal Issues Surveillance Warning
About Smartphones - Dec 10

'Waking Up All Aspects Of The Brain': Developed World Education Falters As Low Cost South African Model Excels - Dec 10

British Farmer Returns From USA
To Launch Film On Realities Of GM Agriculture - Oct 10

New Food And Drink Research Finds More Problems
With Suspect Sugar Substitutes - July 2010

UK General Election: 'A Citizens Manifesto' - Parliament or A Museum? - April 10

UK General Election: Ten Steps To A Better Britain - What You Can Do - April 10

UK General Election: Party Positions On GM Crops - April 10

Britain's (And America's) Role In A Global Torture Network - Feb 10