Jim Marrs On The Rise Of The Fourth Reich

Last Sunday, Alex Jones did an extensive interview with Jim Marrs, journalist, historian, and author of "The Rise of the Fourth Reich".

Marrs, whose excellent book "Crossfire" provided the framework for Oliver Stone's seriously flawed film about the assassination of JFK, has been on my radar for a long time, and he's made some outrageous claims, most of which (as far as I can tell) have turned out to be quite correct.

According to his publisher, Harper-Collins:

While the United States helped defeat the Germans in World War II, we failed to defeat the Nazis. At the end of the war, ranking Nazis, along with their young and fanatical protégés, used the loot of Europe to create corporate front companies in many countries, including the United States of America. Utilizing their stolen wealth, men with Nazi backgrounds and mentalities wormed their way into corporate America, slowly buying up and consolidating companies into giant multinational conglomerates. Many thousands of other Nazis came to the United States under classified programs such as Project Paperclip. They brought with them miraculous weapon technology that helped win the space race but they also brought their insidious Nazi philosophy within our borders. This ideology based on the authoritarian premise that the end justifies the means—including unprovoked wars of aggression and curtailment of individual liberties—has gained an iron hold in the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

For the first time Jim Marrs has gathered compelling evidence that an effort has been underway for the past sixty years to bring a form of National Socialism to modern America, creating in essence a modern empire—or "Fourth Reich"!

There's a lot more to the story, of course. Here's a quick sample:

In the ‘30s the National Socialists gained the support of the middle class Germans and middle commercial Germans because they portrayed themselves as conservatives. And they got the bulk of the commercial people behind them, and then by the time these people figured out that these are not the people we want leading, it was too late. And I see the same thing happening today. [...]

[Bush is] destroying the checks and balances in the federal government, and bringing everything into the Executive, which of course is again following the Nazi methodology. This is what Hitler did. He signed emergency decrees, one after another, until finally he just took total power and anybody that tried to stand up against him then was a “terrorist” against the government. And that’s important for people to understand. What the Nazis did, when they killed dissidents, when they killed homosexuals, when they killed gypsies, when they killed trade unionists, when they killed the Jews, this was all under the color of law. [...]

[T]hey talk about the dumbing down of America. Well, it’s not that we’ve gotten dumber. It’s the fact that we have been drugged dumber. [...]

[O]ne of the big issues today that people are genuinely concerned about is the increase in teen suicides and school shootings. We’re all concerned about that. And yet if you go back, the only thing the mass media, the corporate media can talk about is gun control, take guns away. Well, hey, a lot of people listening here in Texas, if you’re over 40 or 50 you remember a time when we all had guns and nobody ever shot anybody. The problem is not the guns. The problem is the drugs, the Prozac, the Ritalin, the drugs [...]

I.G. Farben back in 1800 was actually marketing an antidepressant under the name heroin until finally enough people said, don’t do that. In the aftermath of WWII, a U.S. chemist named Charles Eliot Perkins was sent to Germany to try to reconstruct the I.G. Farben combine there, and he came back and wrote that the German chemist had worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass control that was submitted to and adopted by the German general staff. And this plan was to control the population of any given area through mass medication of the drinking water supplies, namely using sodium fluoride. So they put sodium fluoride in the drinking water of the concentration camps to keep the inmates passive and nonresistant.

Today two-thirds of the water supply in this country is now fluoridated. Think about this. One of the most over-prescribed drugs today is Prozac, which is 94 percent fluoride. [...]

[I]f you go back you’ll find virtually every school shooting involves someone who’s either on these psychotropic drugs or just coming off of them, which apparently is even worse. And yet the media will not talk about that. Why? Because in 2007 the pharmaceutical corporations that can be tracked back to IG Farben and the Nazis spent $3.7 BILLION dollars on consumer advertising.

I definitely think you should check out this interview.

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Double False Flags, Shifting Sands: Warrior Nominated For Peace Prize

If you dig into modern terrorism for a while, you will eventually begin to notice two different trends that are almost always happening simultaneously.

Often they are happening so subtly that if you keep digging for a while longer you can almost stop noticing them, as they become part of the background noise.

But you never quite get used to that noise, and sometimes it makes itself evident in jarring ways, as it has done recently for me.

Double False Flag Terror

One of these two subtle trends might be called "double false flagging". In a "single" false flag attack, the real perpetrators are disguised as somebody else. The object is to frame an enemy. This trick is as old as the hills.

The modern twist on the old trick calls for disguising both the perpetrators and victims. And we've seen quite a bit of it in our lifetimes -- almost enough to take it for granted.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, involved very specific and heavily symbolic targets: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon stood for American economic and military dominance over the world, and many Americans were proud to say so.

When they were attacked, it would have been easy to conclude that the attacks had targeted American global dominance and two very visible symbols thereof. But instead we were told incessantly that it was the civilized world itself that had been attacked. Did you believe that?

Whoever "gets to be the victim" of a terrorist attack can use the emotional power of the event for good (theoretically) or ill (as it always seems to happen). I've used quotes around the phrase "gets to be the victim" because, as we all know (or would know if we were thinking), the actual victims of actual terrorist attacks are already dead.

9/11 is a classic case of a double-lie about victims and perpetrators, as people who falsely call themselves the victims wage a seemingly endless war against other people whom they falsely call the perpetrators. How can this happen? When the "news" media are onside with the double-lie, the truth barely has a chance.

Last October 18th, a bomb blast (or two) ripped through a political procession in Karachi, Pakistan, killing more than 130 people. The leader of the procession, Benazir Bhutto, was not injured in the attack -- due to either a remarkable string of coincidences or (dare we say it?) foreknowledge.

I blogged extensively about this attack, and noted many very strange details. But one of the things that struck me most powerfully was the fact that within days, the uninjured Bhutto was referring to herself as the victim of the attack.

In fact, most of the victims had been members of her human shield, and they'd been paid (four pounds a day) to be there.

We saw another example of this cynical ploy last weekend after the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad.

Barack Obama showed unsurpassed skill at "getting to be the victim" when he said:

"Today’s attack demonstrates the grave and urgent threat that al Qaeda and its affiliates pose to the United States, to Pakistan, and to the security of all nations."

A bomb goes off in front of a hotel and that demonstrates "a grave and urgent threat" to "the security of all nations"?

He's good, isn't he? Scary good.

In the "good old days" of 9/11, only the civilized world was under attack. Now it's all nations, civilized or not. In Obama's world, we all get to be the victims. He's a uniter, not a divider. Barack Obama wants to embroil everyone in the morass...

Well, it turned out that al Qaeda didn't claim responsibility for the Marriott bombing, and another -- totally unknown -- group did. That group didn't have any terrorist history or any obvious affiliation with al Qaeda, but Obama's statement still stands, doesn't it? We're all under grave and imminent threat from ... whoever did it ... aren't we?

The Shifting Sands Of Time

The other parallel and complementary trend, which I call "the shifting sands of time", concerns the way that changes are made to the official stories of major terror attacks. The original story is almost always found wanting and replaced with another one, which turns out to be ludicrous and is replaced, and so on ... but nobody ever seems to draw the logical conclusion from all these changes.

That's not quite true, of course, because some people do notice the shifting stories. But the people who notice the shifts and talk about them are all but barred from public discourse. I've been watching this trend all my life.

In 1963, when JFK was assassinated, we were told the assassin was behind the president and that Kennedy has been shot in the front of the neck. But then people started asking the logical question: How could the president have been shot in the front, from behind?

The New York Times came along with a ready-made explanation: He was turning to wave to someone behind him when he was shot. Fair enough -- or not really?

Not really. JFK had been injured in World War II and he wore a heavy back brace. He could never have turned around and waved to the rear while sitting in a car seat. Or could he?

No, he couldn't! And the Zapruder film showed him being shot while facing forward. Oops! Now the sands had to shift again. The entrance wound in the President's neck became an exit wound, and the NYT's explanation was revealed as a flat-out lie. So that lie was buried under the shifting sands, and the nation moved on... Or did it?

Most did, but not all. One of the people who didn't was a New York attorney named Mark Lane. He made a collection of news clippings, such as the NYT piece I've mentioned, which showed just how much the sands in this case had been shifting ever since the President was shot. And Lane started doing public presentations based on his research.

Eventually he published a book, "Rush To Judgment", which devastated the official story. And for his efforts, his research, his presentations, and his book, Mark Lane was called a kook, a crank, an egomaniac, and a madman. The national "news" media poured scorn on him for years, and even many so-called "JFK researchers" joined in the character abuse -- none of which changed the fact that Mark Lane was right. JFK wasn't shot in the front from behind. He was shot in the front from the front.

The case of Rashid Rauf, the alleged ringleader of the so-called Liquid Bombers, provides another fine example of shifting sands. In August of 2006, when the Liquid Bombers were arrested, we were told that Rauf's arrest in Pakistan had triggered all the arrests in England which followed. But we didn't know much about Rashid Rauf himself.

At the time, furious Googling turned up his home page, and not much else about him. I can recall being frustrated about the scarcity of information, and I started paying close attention, watching for his name to appear on the net. In the past two years I have mirrored more than 300 newspaper articles about Rashid Rauf at my "other" blog, Winter Parking, and I've read more blog posts mentioning his name than I can count.

I've also written more than 30 extensively detailed articles about the plot and the aftermath of the arrests.

"So what?" you may say. And maybe it doesn't matter. But I'm very rarely surprised by anything I read about this man, or about this case -- unless it's false.

And one day I found a post at Long War Journal which called Rashid Rauf an "al Qaeda commander". I had never seen him described as such, so I did some more Googling and found two articles in which it was hinted that perhaps Rashid Rauf had met an al Qaeda commander. But nothing more substantial -- and it's a far cry from allegedly perhaps meeting an al Qaeda commander to becoming one yourself, so I revisited that post and left a comment.

My comment said: "How do you know that Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?" And I was pleasantly surprised that it was published without any delay for moderation. I was even hoping to learn something from the response. So I stopped by again the next day, and found that my comment had been deleted.

In my opinion, this is how we know whether or not Rashid Rauf is really an al Qaeda commander. It's also a reminder: inquiring minds are very dangerous to the shifters of sand, especially if they're connected to functional memory banks.

All Together, Now

When you see the shifting sands and the double false flags together, you know something special's going on. And that brings us back to Islamabad, where one of the questions that's been in the air lately runs: "Why was the Marriott Hotel attacked?"

Immediately after the attack, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik produced a fine combination of being the victim and shifting the sands, when he told the media the reason the terrorists had chosen the Marriott was because they were trying to kill the leaders of the government, who had planned to eat together at the hotel that evening.

But instead they'd decided to dine at the Prime Minister's residence, said Malik, in a manner which one scribe reported as sounding "as if they'd saved the entire country".

Given this background, it might have been embarrassing for Rehman Malik when the owner of the Marriott Hotel told the press he knew of no plans for the government leaders to visit his hotel on the fatal evening.

Can you imagine hundreds of the country's most important politicians planning to arrive together at a hotel for dinner, without giving the management advance notice? How could that happen? It wouldn't.

Instead, the sands needed to be shifted again. And on Wednesday the International Human Rights Commission nominated Rehman Malik for an International Peace Award for his role in the "War against Terrorism".

Rehman Malik is now in a magical realm, where he gets to be both "the victim" and "the hero".

According to Dawn,

The award is recognition of the services rendered by Rehman Malik in the area of fighting war against terrorism and extremism and for achieving the lasting peace in the country, strengthening the democratic institution after the establishment of newly elected government under the leadership of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Lasting peace? That's a bad joke. The war against militants in the mountains has already produced scores of thousands of refugees, and now "analysts" are saying they "fear" Pakistan may descend into civil war.

We shall soon see how much lasting peace Rehman Malik and his colleagues have brought to Pakistan. I will be surprised if there is any.

But what else can we expect, when warriors are getting nominated for peace prizes?

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Iranian President Says What TV Pundits Can't: American Empire Is Almost Over

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offended quite a few people with his pointed remarks at the UN, as CNN reports:

Ahmadinejad: 'American empire' nearing its end

"As long as the aggressors, because of their financial, political and propaganda powers, not only escape punishment, but even claim righteousness, and as long as wars are started and nations are enslaved in order to win votes in elections, not only will the problems of the global community remain unsolved, but they will be increasingly exacerbated," the Iranian leader said.

He accused the United States of oppressing Iraqis with six years of occupation, saying Americans were "still seeking to solidify their position in the political geography of the region and to dominate oil resources."

This is particularly offensive to American media and political types not just because it's true, but because it's verboten truth.

Nobody in American TV-land can say these things, even though they are obviously correct.

CNN continues:

Meanwhile, he said, Palestinians have undergone "60 years of carnage and invasion ... at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists."

He said Zionists in Israel "have forged a regime through collecting people from various parts of the world and bringing them to other people's land, by displacing, detaining and killing the true owners of that land."

The Security Council, he said, "cannot do anything, and sometimes under pressure from a few bullying powers, even paves the way for supporting these Zionist murders."

Unable to refute any of this, CNN defers to a famous lie:

He stopped short of calling for Israel to be politically wiped off the map as he has in the past.

The fact that he has never said anything of the sort is clearly of no consequence to CNN -- not when there's an opportunity to fan the flames of fiction.

In the fictional media account, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is dangerous because of fearsome weapons that he doesn't have, and threatening statements that he's never made.

But in reality, he's a dangerous man because he suggests things like:

"a free referendum in Palestine for determining and establishing the type of state in the entire Palestinian lands."

Such a referendum -- direct independent democracy at its finest -- can never be allowed to happen, of course, because that would be the end of Israel.

And that's why the [Jewish]

Anti-Defamation League released a statement saying the Iranian leader showed he "is deeply infected with anti-Semitism" and displayed "the true threat the Iranian regime poses to Israel, the United States and the West."

The ADL says this so often and it gets published so everywhere and so unquestioningly...

First and foremost, Ahmadinejad is an anti-Zionist. Zionism is a political philosophy. Ahmadinejad doesn't like it much. That's his prerogative. I don't like it much, either. That's my prerogative.

Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism. It's not even close. Only the deliberately, willfully ignorant -- and those who wish you were equally ignorant -- fail to see the distinction.

It's not the "anti-Semitism" that makes Ahmadinejad dangerous. That's only a cover story. The true threat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad poses -- to Israel, to the United States and to the West -- lies in his willingness to speak the verboten truth.

And that's a big problem for our "news" providers, because they can't just cancel his show.

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Execution In Iraq: Murder Charges Against Three Army Sergeants, None Against Those Who Sent Them There

The four men were handcuffed and blindfolded, then taken out and shot in the head. Two of the killers, acting on instructions from the third, removed the plastic handcuffs and the bloody blindfolds, and shoved the bodies into a canal. Then the three killers left the scene and rejoined their unit. Ho hum.

But now, the three men -- US Army Sgt. John Hatley, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph P. Mayo and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr. -- face charges of

premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and obstruction of justice

according to an Army statement released last week, as reported in a short AP dispatch carried by the Washington Post.

Paul Von Zielbauer of the New York Times had reported back in August that Hatley, Mayo and Leahy would probably be charged with murder. He also reported much more detail about this story, including the following:

The accounts of and confessions to the killings, by Sgt. First Class Joseph P. Mayo, the platoon sergeant, and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr., [...] senior medic and an acting squad leader, were made in January in signed statements to Army investigators in Schweinfurt, Germany.

In their statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy each described killing at least one of the Iraqi detainees on instructions from First Sgt. John E. Hatley, who the soldiers said killed two of the detainees with pistol shots to the back of their heads. [...]

In their sworn statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy described the events that preceded the shooting of the Iraqi men, who apparently were Shiite fighters linked to the Mahdi Army militia, which controlled the West Rashid area of southwest Baghdad.

After taking small-arms fire, the patrol chased some men into a building, arresting them and finding several automatic weapons, grenades and a sniper rifle, they said. On the way to their combat outpost, Sergeant Hatley’s convoy was informed by Army superiors that the evidence to detain the Iraqis was insufficient, Sergeant Leahy said in his statement. The unit was told to release the men, according to the statement.

“First Sergeant Hatley then made the call to take the detainees to a canal and kill them,” Sergeant Leahy said [...]

“So the patrol went to the canal, and [...] Mayo and I took the detainees out of the back of the Bradley, lined them up and shot them,” Sergeant Leahy said, referring to a Bradley fighting vehicle. “We then pushed the bodies into the canal and left.”

Assuming Von Zielbauer's account is correct, I have no argument with the Army's position that what Hatley and his men did to four disarmed and utterly defenseless men was murder, and that charges against the killers are appropriate.

But ... what's the difference between premeditated murder and premeditated mass murder? between conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit premeditated mass murder? between obstruction of justice and massive obstruction of justice?

The difference is one of scale, and scope, and power.

If John Hatley, Joseph Mayo and Michael Leahy, Jr. -- three platoon-level leaders -- go to the dock for murdering four defenseless victims, then who goes to the dock for what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and all their lying associates did to Iraq?

John Hatley, Joseph Mayo and Michael Leahy, Jr.

That's who.

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Late Breaking: Joe Biden Is A Maverick, Too!

One of the lines I was most eager to blog about when I read it -- but couldn't at the time -- came from Mary MacElveen, via Bob Parry's Consortium News.

While arguing that the national news media unfairly pay more attention to Elephant veep candidate Sarah Palin than to Donkey veep candidate Joe Biden [photo], MacElveen also argues that John McCain is not the only "maverick" in the race.

According to MacElveen:

Biden too showed he was a maverick in stating he would buck his own party to continue funding the troops when some opposed it.

He certainly doesn't appear to be the sort of maverick we need at the moment. But thanks for the insight, Mary.

From one point of view, Consortium News, with its 24/7 Obamathon, continues to be one of the hugest craters in the pockmarked landscape formerly known as independent American journalism.

But from another angle, it's remarkable how deeply and fully Bob Parry's site reveals the bankruptcy of American politics -- where even those pulling for the "opposition" are unabashedly despicable.

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Bush Tells UN To Unite Against Terrorism And Tyrrany

The twice-unelected president and smirking multi-front war criminal George W. Bush told the United Nations on Tuesday that the world must unite against terrorism and tyranny, according to the AP via MSNBC.

USA Today says Bush told the UN it must prevent terrorist attacks from happening.

Unfortunately, the world's top diplomats have already decided that Bush is a buffoon, and as usual they weren't paying any attention.

If they had been, Bush would have been led away from the podium in handcuffs, and taken straight to the guillotines.

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Because You'll Believe Anything: Unknown Terrorist Group Claims Responsibility For Marriott Bombing

In a phone call to an Islamabad TV station, "a group calling itself Fedayeen-i-Islam" has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, according to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.

Fedayeen-i-Islam is "a little-known group" according to Bloomberg. But just how little-known?

Dawn's report quotes "a senior [Pakistani] government official" as saying:

“We have not heard the name of the organisation but we are trying to locate its network.”

Amazing.

Ever since Saturday night's bombing the media have been wrestling with the big question: "Why did al Qaeda do this?"

But now they have to deal with a different question: "How is Fedayeen-i-Islam related to al Qaeda?"

It goes without saying that Fedayeen-i-Islam must be a violent radical Islamofascist group and that they must have bombed the hotel. And they must have been assisted, if not directed, by al Qaeda, and probably the Taliban as well. After all, who else but the world's most violent Islamic terrorists could make an anonymous phone call to a TV station?

It's nice to know the big questions are looked after. That gives us leeway -- here in the frozen corners of the blogosphere -- to ask meaningless little insignificant questions, like:

What were US Marines doing in the Marriott Hotel just before the attack?

According to Pakistan Daily, after the blast, a fire broke out on the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel.

Why these floors and not the others? The official explanation didn't make much sense. On the other hand, according to an eyewitness report from a member of Pakistan's Parliament, a group of US Marines had recently visited the hotel, while Admiral Mike Mullen was there.

According to the eyewitness, all access to the hotel was closed off while the Marines unloaded steel boxes from a white US Embassy truck, bypassed both Pakistani and hotel security, and took these boxes directly to the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel -- just where the fires mysteriously broke out.

Were the Marines loading the building with incendiaries? It certainly wouldn't be the first time a building was primed by insiders for a subsequent "terrorist attack".

I wasn't kidding in my prior post when I called the Marriott bombing "Pakistan's 9/11". But I didn't explain myself particularly well, either.

There's a long list of similarities between the two attacks, including the rush by both politicians and the media to cast the event as "an attack on democracy", when in both cases the attacks came at critical times for governments which falsely claimed to have been legitimately elected.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari can now claim to be in an all-out war against radical Islamic terrorists, and he may even be able to build up enough "political capital" to drag his nation in a direction in which it doesn't wish to go.

As usual, the attack has been followed by a barrage of media nonsense, such as a report from the Financial Times which says men with ties to al Qaeda have been arrested in Pakistan in connection with the Marriott bombing.

Pakistani investigators yesterday said they had found new evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement in the suicide truck bombing of Islamabad's Marriott hotel. Intelligence officials also reported the arrest of up to five militants in connection with planning attacks [...]

According to an intelligence official, two of the five arrested men "came with conclusive evidence of close links to al-Qaeda. Their connection to the militant group is beyond any doubt."

Let's see now: The police are arresting members of one group while another group claims responsibility. Does this not undermine the claims of the police?

If you were tripped up by this little bit of logic, you must be a Democrat, since according to the Republicans, the Democrats have failed to learn the lessons of September 11th, 2001.

And the primary lesson from September 11th, of course, is that logic, evidence, and science are all past their prime.

Therefore, we don't use forensic evidence to solve crimes anymore; we label the crimes acts of war, destroy the forensic evidence, and attack defenseless countries instead. For revenge. Or something.

If you believe that this massive bombing attack was perpetrated by a Pakistani terrorist group that the Pakistani government has never even heard of, then it's not much of a stretch to believe that this hitherto-unknown group must have hitherto-unknown ties to al Qaeda, as well.

As the AP reported (via the Toronto Star):

Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik said "all roads lead to FATA" in major Pakistani suicide attacks – referring to Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where U.S. officials fear Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda No.2 Ayman al-Zawahri are hiding.

And there you have it; it doesn't matter who did it; it doesn't matter who claimed responsibility; it doesn't matter why Marines were acting mysteriously (and evading security) in the building shortly before it was attacked; it doesn't matter what evidence is collected during the investigation; it doesn't even matter whether there is an investigation.

What matters is that the media and the politicians have already decided who's going to be blamed, and who's going to pay the price. And once again -- just like 9/11 -- it won't be the perpetrators.

~~~

UPDATE: The eyewitness referred to in the above account is denying a report published in The News which contains some of the same allegations described above, according to a comment posted on a thread where my piece is being discussed at Pak Links dot com.

Here's the disputed piece in full, from The News, for the record:

Was it an attack on US Marines?

By Ansar Abbasi | Sunday, September 21, 2008

ISLAMABAD: Was there a top secret and mysterious operation of the US Marines going on inside the Marriott when it was attacked on Saturday evening? No one will confirm it but circumstantial evidence is in abundance.

Witnessed by many, including a PPP MNA and his friends, a US embassy truckload of steel boxes was unloaded and shifted inside the Marriott Hotel on the same night when Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad.

Both the main gates (the entrance and the exit) of the hotel were closed while no one except the US Marines were either allowed to go near the truck or get the steel boxes unloaded or shift them inside the hotel. These steel boxes were not passed through the scanners installed at the entrance of the hotel lobby and were reportedly shifted to the fourth and fifth floors of the Marriott.

Besides several others, PPP MNA Mumtaz Alam Gilani and his two friends, Sajjad Chaudhry, a PPP leader, and one Bashir Nadeem, witnessed this mysterious activity to which no one other than the PPP MNA objected and protested.

A source present there told The News that after entertaining them with refreshments at the Nadia restaurant at midnight when Mumtaz Alam, along with his friends, was to leave the hotel, he found a white US embassy truck standing right in front of the hotel's main entrance.

Both the In-gate and the Out-gate of the hotel were closed while almost a dozen well-built US Marines in their usual fatigues were unloading the steel boxes from the truck. No one, including the hotel security men, was either allowed to go near the truck or touch the steel boxes, which were being shifted inside the hotel but without passing through the scanners.

Upon inquiry, one of the three PPP friends who was waiting for the main gates of the hotel to open to get his car in, was informed that the suspicious boxes were shifted to the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel. Mumtaz Alam was furious both at the US Marines and the hotel security not only for the delay caused to them but also for the security lapse he was witnessing.

On his protest, there was absolutely no response from the Marines and the security men he approached were found helpless. Mumtaz Alam told the hotel security official that they were going to endanger the hotel and its security. He was also heard telling his friends that he would never visit the hotel again. He also threatened to raise the issue in parliament.

One does not know whether the PPP MNA revisited the hotel after that mysterious midnight but his brother Imtiaz Alam, who is a senior journalist, was in the same hotel when the truck exploded at the main gate of the hotel. Imtiaz Alam had a lucky escape and found his way out of the hotel with great difficulty in pitch darkness.

One of the lifts he was using fell to the ground floor just after he forced the door open on the 4th floor and got out of it.

The comment, from Lycanthropy of Karachi, runs as follows [I've converted the URLs to links]:

Unfortunately, the MNA reported to be a witness of the US Marines incident, (Mumtaz Alam Gillani, National Assembly Member PPP), is not backing up the report, and is even threatening to sue Ansar Abbasi (the journalist who published this report quoting unknown eyewitnesses), if he does not debunk his article soon.

http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=17453
MNA threatens to sue journalist

http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=53599&It emid=2
Story on shifting US Steel boxes in Marriott Hotel a pack of lies: Mumtaz Gillani

http://paktribune.com/news/index.shtml?205998
MNA threatens to sue journalist: Ansar Abbasi says he never met MNA

http://pakistanpressfoundation.org/userMediaFilesDetails.asp?uid=14505
MNA threatens to sue journalist

it's even on his Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Mumtaz_Alam_Gillani
Syed Mumtaz Alam Gillani

The report might still be true, but maybe the MNA is not backing it up personally to avoid trouble for himself.

And the article mentioned in the comment runs as follows [I've added emphasis, space, and a few extra words, for clarity]:

MNA threatens to sue journalist

Ansar Abbasi says he never met MNA

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

ISLAMABAD: Mumtaz Alam Gillani, member [of the] national assembly (PPP) [Pakistan People's Party] on Monday strongly contradicted a news item appearing in a section of the press on September 21 that he was witness to a US embassy white truck carrying steel boxes, which were unloaded and shifted inside the Marriott hotel.

Mumtaz Alam Gillani told APP that this was just a conversation in a light mood with the reporter when he along with his friends was coming out of the hotel and some foreigners were going inside the hotel. “I had just roadside chit-chat in a friendly manner with the newsman and told him that Pakistan is a victim of terrorism”, Gillani clarified.

He further said he would be issuing a legal notice to the reporter of the newspaper whose story is based on “pack of lies” and contrary to all professional ethics.

“I have asked the reporter to contradict the news item and tender unconditional apology as he tried to belittle my image as member of parliament in the eyes of the people, particularly of my constituency”, Mumtaz Alam Gillani said.

The MNA further said that on expiry of 10-day notice if the apology is not tendered and contradiction not issued, he will sue the reporter and the newspapers in a Court of law. — APP [Associated Press of Pakistan]

~~~

Ansar Abbasi replies: The PPP MNA Mumtaz Alam Gillani has the right to go to the court of law but he needs to be corrected on the fact that I never spoke to him whether in a light mood or seriously. Rather we never had any interaction either on the night of September 16 or before; nor even after that, though I tried to contact him on the night of September 16 but his mobile phone did not respond.

The story in question was based on the eyewitness account of a source, [who] narrated the whole episode of what many witnessed that night. The source also quoted the PPP MNA objecting and protesting to the Marines’ activity. He was also shouting thus attracting the attention of several others.

The PPP MNA is also not mentioning the fact when he claims of talking to “reporter” and seeking contradiction of the story and unconditional apology. Nowhere in story the image of the MNA was belittled rather he was reported to have objected to the lapse of security that he witnessed when the Marines were shifting the steel cases inside the hotel.

Mr Gillani talks of “facts”, which are neither relevant to my story nor true. While Gillani “strongly contradicted” the story, one of his friends, accompanying him on the night of September 16 to Marriott, confirmed the facts as stated in The News story.

Meanwhile, the US embassy spokesman on Monday when asked about the September 16 activity did not deny this and said, “A team of support personnel often and routinely precede and/or accompany certain US government officials. They often carry communications and office equipment required to support large delegations, such as high-level administration officials and members of the US Congress. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would travel with communications equipment. It is quite possible that some saw this communications equipment moved into the hotel. This equipment would leave with the CJCS. If the equipment was transported in full public view then obviously there was no attempt made to conceal its movement.”

The News stands by the story.

And so do I.

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