Political analysts claim that beneath the surface, a grand strategy is being reactivated – originally conceived by the neoconservatives in the 1990s – to reshape the Middle East in the image of America and Israel. However, this time, the stakes are much higher: the future of a multipolar world order, the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRICS bloc, and China’s access to vital energy routes.
A Clean Break Revisited
In 1996, a strategy paper titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm laid out a blueprint for destabilising and redrawing the Middle East. Authored by American neocons for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the plan called for the weakening or destruction of powerful regional states.
Syria, Iraq, and Iran were marked for “rollback,” with Israel positioned as the dominant force in a new regional order. Israel would “secure the realm” after its adversaries accepted their diminished role in this Netanyahu-crafted Middle East.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map depicting the “New Middle East” when he addressed the 78th session of the UN General Assembly in Sept 2023.
In 2006, US General Wesley Clarke famously received a classified memo outlining a new military strategy of toppling seven countries over five years – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. The Syrian regime of Bashar Al Assad fell in December 2024, Col. Muammar Qadhafi’s Libya was destroyed in 2011, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein was taken out in 2003.
During the years of the US invasion of Iraq, a popular saying circulated in neocon circles, reportedly first uttered by a senior British official: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
As Hussein Askary of the Schiller Institute observes, Netanyahu is now “making sure that the original plan handed over to him more than 20 years ago – called ‘A Clean Break’ and ‘Securing the Realm’ – is followed, to ensure that there is no other power in the region… other than Israel.”
That vision is now reemerging with terrifying clarity, facilitated by what analysts describe as a revived neocon coalition operating under the guise of national security, counter-terrorism, and anti-nuclear proliferation.
Their ultimate aim, as journalist and geopolitical expert Pepe Escobar bluntly states, is regime change in Tehran: “That is the Holy Grail, dreamed of since the late 1990s… the ultimate dream of the neocons, the ziocons, and the wider Zionist axis.”
Turning Points
Even nonpartisan US think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution, have outlined how regime change in Iran might be orchestrated. In 2009, Brookings published Which Path to Persia?, explicitly exploring military strikes, covert operations, and exploiting Israel’s position as a US “proxy” to neutralise Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
That option is no longer theoretical. As Israeli airspace domination increased after the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime, a secure corridor through Syria and Iraq opened up for strikes on Iran. Washington strategists, previously cautious, were emboldened.
Roberto Iannuzzi, an independent analyst of international affairs, pinpoints the moment when hesitation in Washington gave way to bold escalation.
“The turning point that helped dispel the doubts of many American strategists and several members of the Biden administration,” he writes, “was the stunning operation carried out by the Israeli army in Lebanon on September 27, 2024, which led to the elimination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, and the decapitation of the group’s entire leadership.”
That strike – “built upon a chilling level of intelligence penetration that allowed Israel to reconstruct with extreme precision the movements of the main leaders of the Lebanese movement, and to strike at the decisive moment with devastating results” – shocked Washington into action.
From that point forward, Iannuzzi observes, US policymakers increasingly viewed Israel as a viable “battering ram” to dismantle the “Axis of Resistance,” piece by piece.
With Syria now under a new Western-approved regime, Hezbollah’s leadership decapitated, and Iraq’s skies routinely breached by Israeli warplanes with impunity, the strategic corridor to Tehran stands exposed.
Geoeconomics: IMEC vs BRI
The geopolitical map is not the only battlefield. The current war is also an economic war – specifically, a war over corridors, infrastructure, and the future shape of global trade.
In 2023, the Biden administration revived US plans to return to the Middle East by announcing the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) – a thinly veiled attempt to undermine China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The corridor aimed to stitch together India, Gulf states, Israel, and Europe into a new trading bloc, excluding Iran entirely.
But as Iannuzzi observed, “An economic corridor could never take shape in a region wracked by conflict,” adding that the genocide in Gaza made Arab-Israeli normalisation – especially with Saudi Arabia – “unthinkable.”
Hussein Askary argues the IMEC is “political fiction,” a “fraud” without substance, devised to derail real infrastructure already being laid by China and its partners. Iran, critically, is a keystone of that infrastructure. It links China’s overland BRI to Central Asia, the Gulf, the Caucasus, Turkey, and Europe through both rail and maritime routes. As Askary points out, “Iran is a key element of the BRI,” not just geographically, but strategically – connecting East and West through the International North–South Transport Corridor.
Just weeks before the Israeli strikes on Iran, a direct freight train from Xi’an in China arrived at a logistics hub in northern Iran on May 25. The new rail link integrates Iran into the trillion-dollar BRI and lays the groundwork for deeper political and economic ties. As Pepe Escobar reported, this route bypasses “every US-controlled chokepoint… Hormuz, Malacca, the Suez Canal.” In effect, the train symbolised the success of emerging multipolarity on the Eurasian landmass.
Iran’s Integration with Eurasia
Iran is no longer an isolated theocracy under siege. It is a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, and BRICS, which recently expanded to 11 countries. In 2023, Beijing brokered the normalisation of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In truth, Iran is a pariah only in the eyes of the West; across much of the Global South, it remains a legitimate state actor and strategic partner.
Michael Hudson, the veteran economist, sees the recent US-Israeli attack on Iran as part of a broader American effort to prevent the emergence of an independent Eurasian trade bloc.
“What we have seen… is the culmination of the long strategy that America has had ever since World War II, to take complete control of the Near Eastern oil lands and make them proxies of the United States,” Hudson told Scheerpost.
If Iran falls, it will sever the link between China, Russia, and India. Hudson adds: “If the United States could put a client regime in Iran… you have boxed in Russia, you have boxed in China, and you have managed to isolate them.”
Hormuz: The Chokepoint of Civilisation
Over one-third of China’s oil and natural gas imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz – a narrow bottleneck that Iran controls. US General Erik Kurilla of US CENTCOM testified before Congress in 2023 that this made China dependent and exposed. “That makes them vulnerable,” he emphasised.
Indeed, a former Deep State source confirmed to Pepe Escobar that “the CIA advised the Trump administration that China was resolutely against the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz, so Trump went ahead with the bombing.”
If the Strait were closed – whether by open war, covert sabotage, or a false flag – China would be severed from its primary energy artery. The fallout, some analysts warn, could be catastrophic: oil prices could spike uncontrollably, and the fragile $2 quadrillion global derivatives bubble might implode, triggering a chain reaction that plunges the world into economic depression.
The Bernard Lewis Plan: Divide and Dismember
Plans to redraw the Middle East are older than IMEC or even A Clean Break. The Bernard Lewis Plan – a Cold War-era concept still echoed in neocon think tanks – proposed fragmenting the Middle East along ethnic lines. Iran would be broken into Baloch, Kurdish, Azeri, Arab, and Persian states.
Askary believes this strategy has been revived: “The plan is to achieve regime change in Iran… and implement long-standing plans like the Bernard Lewis Plan, which envisions dividing countries like Iran into multiple ethnic entities.”
From there, the same strategy could be applied to Pakistan, Central Asia, and even Russia itself. The final goal? As Askary plainly states: “The ultimate goal is regime change in China.”
All roads now lead east. The attack on Iran has little to do with nuclear weapons or ‘human rights’ – it’s about shattering the backbone of Eurasian integration and halting China’s ascent before the shift to a multipolar world becomes unstoppable.
As Pepe Escobar puts it, this would be “a decisive trifecta strike… to three top BRICS – Iran, Russia, China; to Eurasia integration; and to the drive towards a multi-nodal, multipolar system of international relations.”
Escobar describes Iran as the “privileged guardian” of West Asia – a civilisational state fulfilling its historic role at a pivotal moment. For BRICS, he asserts, “Iran must not be allowed to fall.” The stakes, he implies, are nothing less than the balance of power in the emerging world order.
Despite the escalation, momentum is shifting. At summits in Kuala Lumpur, St. Petersburg, and Rio de Janeiro (where they convened on July 6–7), BRICS and Global South leaders are beginning to forge a unified front. Discussions are moving beyond polite communiqués – there is now open talk of forging real mechanisms for collective defence and mutual strategic deterrence.
As Escobar notes, “It’s unlikely – under the Brazilian presidency – but BRICS sooner or later will have to make the strategic transition… to become the unbreakable spine of the Global South.”
As bombs fall and propaganda intensifies, one truth cuts through the noise: the war on Iran is not truly about Tehran. It’s a proxy assault on Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi – and on the very idea of a post-Western, multipolar world.
Whether this new world survives depends on what happens next – on the battlefields of West Asia, behind the closed doors of high-stakes diplomacy, and in the hybrid war over rail lines, ports, and pipelines.
History may remember this moment not as the fall of Iran – if the neocons have their way – but as the crucible from which a new Eurasian order rises, signalling the end of Western dominance and the start of a multipolar world.
In 2020, just as the first term of his presidency was ending, Donald Trump mandated the release of classified UFO documents from US intelligence agencies. Despite numerous witness hearings held in the US Congress and the establishment in 2022 of AARO, the US government’s All-Domain Anomaly Research Office, the public has yet to learn anything new. The question the world needs to ask is: why haven’t those documents been made available?
AARO is not the USA’s first official UFO investigation body. That honour belongs to ‘Project Saucer’, established by the US Air Force in 1948 to deal with the surge of sightings that followed Kenneth Arnold’s infamous ‘flying saucer’ sighting in June 1947 and the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, also in 1947. One year later, ‘Project Saucer’ morphed into ‘Project Sign’, which was tasked with determining whether some UFOs could be spaceships from another world.
It is often said that the modern era of Ufology began when Arnold reported his seminal sighting. UFOs were, of course, reported much earlier, but those sightings were easier for authorities to ignore. By 1947, when UFOs started crashing and when the media had attained a global reach, the authorities realised that something undesirable was occurring and that action needed to be taken. 1947 should have marked the start of an exciting chapter in UFO research; instead, it signified the beginning of the cover-up – or what others might refer to as the UFO conspiracy.
Initially, at least, the team at Project Sign was of the opinion that some UFOs were “real aircraft” of “unfamiliar configuration,” and delivered a report titled ‘Estimate of the Situation’ that included the statement that “based on the evidence…UFOs were alien spacecraft,” and “if there is an extraterrestrial civilisation which can make such objects… then it is most probable that its development is far in advance of ours. This argument can be supported on probability alone, without recourse to astronomical hypothesis.”
Despite these initial and somewhat promising findings, in 1948, a fly named General Hoyt Vandenburg landed in the ointment. Vandenburg removed UFOs from the public domain by declaring that UFOs were a military problem, a change in classification that led to the wholesale withholding of information from the public and initiated the active dissemination of disinformation. Vandenburg also instituted a policy that “the interplanetary hypothesis” was to be excluded from consideration.
In 1949, Project Sign concluded and Project Grudge began, announcing that the US Air Force “had solved all UFO sightings.” This pronouncement was patently premature, as UFOs continued to be reported, indicating that the issue had clearly not been resolved. Grudge subsequently evolved into Project Blue Book, which became the public face of US Air Force UFO research.
Project Blue Book commenced in 1952 and continued until January 1970. Blue Book was the longest (as far as we know) government UFO research project in the United States, and its status remained top secret for decades. At its beginning, Blue Book was led by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was known to be open-minded about the subject. The famous Dr. J. Allen Hynek was appointed as Blue Book’s technical advisor. Although he had also served as an advisor on Projects Grudge and Sign and was notoriously sceptical at first, a number of inexplicable UFO sightings changed Hynek’s mind. He went on to develop the “close encounter” system (CE 1-3), and Ruppelt later wrote a book called The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. The report was completed in 1953, but wasn’t made available to government agencies until May 1955. It was declassified for release to the public 50 years later, in July 2005.
These were the best years of Blue Book’s life according to reports because the personnel pursued the topic with open minds. Despite this open-mindedness, Blue Book was hampered in its research from day one. Vandenburg’s earlier rejection of the ‘interplanetary hypothesis’ during Project Sign meant that an undercurrent of hostility towards the subject permeated all levels of the Air Force, and it is contended that not all UFO reports or data were made available to Blue Book for study. It is almost certain that they had no physical evidence to work with, despite the purported UFO crash at Roswell and a second crash at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948.
Using the limited sightings data they had access to (not enough, according to Hynek, to come to any kind of conclusion), in 1955 Project Blue Book announced in their “Special Report No. 14” that the “majority of [UFO] reports could be accounted for as misinterpretations of known objects, a few as the result of mild hysteria, and a very few as the result of unfamiliar meteorological phenomena and light aberrations. However, a significant number of reports by reliable observers remained unexplained.”
This UFO was reported by “an employee in the supersonic laboratory of an aeronautical laboratory and some other employees of the lab” in May 1949. The object was observed during daylight hours through binoculars and appeared to be of ‘metallic construction’. The object accelerated away after three minutes of observation. It was reliable reports like these that could not be explained away as swamp gas that gave Blue Book so many headaches. Image: ‘Blue Book Special Report No. 14’, page 96.
After establishing a sightings categorisation system that included all the usual suspects – balloons, clouds, stars, ball lightning, swamp gas, and ‘psychological manifestations’ (which included such things as religious fanaticism, over-active imaginations, and mental aberrations) – the Air Force found that the category of unknowns accounted for 9% of sightings, which was far too many for comfort. They therefore decided that better reporting skills were required, which resulted in the development of new investigation tools and the delegation of UFO investigations to just one squadron. This strategy concentrated the responsibility for UFO research into the hands of a tiny group of people and reduced the field of ‘unknowns’ to a minuscule 3%, after which the USAF confidently declared it was “improbable that [UFOs] represent observations of technological developments outside the range of present-day scientific knowledge.”
Despite the declared “improbability” of UFOs being outside the range of 1950s scientific knowledge (oh, the ego!), the 3% of unknowns weighed heavily on Blue Book’s minds. To combat this, it was decided to develop categories for the unknowns in an attempt to construct a “model of a flying saucer.” This proved entirely impossible, because out of the 3% of sightings deemed ‘unknown’, the variety of reported UFO shapes and sizes – boomerangs, saucers, spheres, cross and cigar shapes – foiled the attempt and led to the conclusion that this wide variety represented “observations of not one but several classes of objects that might have been flying saucers.” [Emphasis added.]
Artist’s recreation of the ‘flying saucers’ – actually a flotilla of crescent-shaped UFOs travelling an estimated 1,900 kilometres an hour – reported by pilot Kenneth Arnold over Mt Rainer, Washington, in 1947. Arnold’s sighting made global headlines, sparked public imagination, and inadvertently kicked off the UFO cover-up. Image: Merikanto, Wikimedia Commons.
Enter the CIA
In 1952, while Blue Book’s Special Report No. 14 was still in progress, a discussion paper titled “Flying Saucers” was being distributed at the CIA. This discussion paper dismissed civilian UFO sightings as “temperature inversions” and “ionised clouds,” while also highlighting the most sensational military UFO encounters of the time – the death of Captain Thomas F. Mantell and the “Fargo dog fight.”
Mantell died when his aircraft crashed while attempting to intercept a UFO out of Godman Field, Kentucky, in January 1948. The Fargo dogfight occurred over Fargo, North Dakota, also in 1948, when a moving light was pursued for over 20 minutes by a Lieutenant Gorman at 17,000 feet. At that time, USAF pilots had been ordered to intercept UFOs with a mandate not to shoot. In 1953, it actually became “a crime for military personnel to discuss classified UFO reports with unauthorised persons. Violations faced up to two years in prison and/or fines of up to $10,000.”
The CIA discussion paper categorised the types of UFOs commonly reported during the late 1940s and very early 1950s. Mirroring exactly the types of UFOs still seen today, the paper described daytime sightings of spherical and elliptical objects with ‘bright metallic’ lustres, “some small (2 or 3 feet across), most estimated at 100 feet in diameter, and a few 1000 feet wide.” They went on to describe variants in this group such as “torpedos, triangles, pencils, [and] even mattress shapes.”
Even the night-time UFOs haven’t changed over the years, and the CIA reported lights “of various luminosities, such as green, flaming-red or blue-white fire balls, moving points of lights and luminous streamers.” Speed and manoeuvrability remain unchanged from present-day sightings, with “three general levels of speed” listed – “hovering; moderate; …and stupendous, up to 18,000 miles per hour. Violent manoeuvring was reported… and accelerations have been given as high as 20 g’s.”
Compared to the information found in the Blue Book report, the CIA either knew more about UFOs than the Air Force did or was simply more forthcoming with its information. An Intelligence Directive from the National Security Council that accompanied the CIA discussion paper authorised the CIA Director “to carry out a program of research to solve the problem of instant positive identification of UFOs” and “to coordinate this directive with the Department of Defense and the Psychological Strategy Board.”
The main sticking point seemed to be the inability of military authorities to adequately discern “hardware from phantom.” It was 1952, during the Cold War, and Russian tensions were mounting. The ability to identify a real threat (the Russians) from a non-threat (UFOs) was becoming an increasing concern. But even worse than this threat was the one represented by the general public, as the CIA believed that a “fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible,” and this could lead to the “touching-off of mass hysteria and panic.” To combat this, the CIA recommended that a “national policy should be established as to what should be told the public.” The CIA requested that the National Security Council commence its own research into the UFO problem, again with the input of the “Psychological Strategy Board.” This last measure was taken because the CIA had determined that “flying saucers pose two elements of danger which have national security implications. The first involves mass psychological implications, and the second concerns the vulnerability of the United States to air attack.”
The Robertson Panel
The conflation of mass psychology with national security continued into 1953, when a January memo from the CIA documented an advisory meeting to discuss its proposed strategy. This was the infamous Robertson Panel, which included Howard P. Robertson (Director of the Weapons Evaluation Group) as the chair, along with CIA officers, astrophysicists, nuclear weapons experts, and Professor J. Allen Hynek, who had been a consultant to Blue Book. External consultants included J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.
Dr J. Allen Hynek (left), technical advisor for Project Blue Book and the Robertson Panel, with famous UFO investigator Jacques Vallee (right). Hynek developed the Close Encounter (CE 1-3) classification system, with categories that included CE 1 – Close Encounters of the First Kind (visual sighting of a UFO); CE 2 – Close Encounters of the Second Kind (a physical effect caused by a UFO, such as paralysis, electrical interference or ground traces); and CE 3 – Close Encounters of the Third Kind (encounters with UFO occupants). In the 1980s Jacques Vallee added CE 4 – Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (human abduction by UFO occupants), and CE 5 – Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (human-initiated contact with extraterrestrial beings). CE 6 – Close Encounters of the Sixth Kind (a sexual encounter between a human and an extraterrestrial) was added some time later.
This esteemed panel made several unusual suggestions for addressing the UFO “problem.” They announced that “there was no single explanation for a majority of the things seen” and “no evidence of a direct threat to national security.” However, they believed they should not encourage any public interest in UFOs as it was “possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in ‘nocturnal meandering lights’.”
To this end, the Scientific Advisory Panel recommended the establishment of an ‘Educational Program’ that “should have two major aims: training and debunking,” which “would result in reduction in public interest” in UFOs. Or, in their own words, “reduce the current gullibility of the public in ‘flying saucers’ which today evokes a strong psychological reaction.” Somewhat insidiously, this debunking would be achieved via “mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.”
The Panel “felt strongly” that “psychologists familiar with mass psychology should advise on the nature and extent of the program,” and UFO research organisations were also in the crosshairs, as it was believed that “such organisations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur.”
The Never-Ending Story
Back in 1953, this ‘education program’ was given an estimated timeframe of effectiveness of 1.5 to 2 years, by which time the CIA and USAF believed it would have figured out flying saucers and solved the problem. However, as we have seen, the ‘program’ has been in effect every year ever since, the ‘problem’ has not gone away, and to this day UFO research has been hampered by 70 years of media-driven ‘education’ imposed upon the citizens of the Western world by the combined forces of the USA’s intelligence organisations. These insidious measures were instituted by a group of select individuals who somehow managed to marshal the forces of authority, along with the unconscious forces of the human psyche, as weapons of mass manipulation.
‘Earth versus the Flying Saucers’ (1956), ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men’ (1957) and ‘It – the Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Harmless cinematic fun, or part of the CIA’s ‘education and debunking’ program?
Aside from the existence of an actual policy put in place to debunk UFOs, one could argue that ‘operant conditioning’ has also been at play. Operant conditioning is defined as “a process of changing behaviour by rewarding or punishing a subject each time an action is performed until the subject associates the action with pleasure or distress.” Regarding UFOs, there has thus far been no associated pleasure at all, but the apportioning of distress is unparalleled. As we have seen, members of the military have historically been threatened with hefty fines or jail time if they discussed classified material such as UFOs, and in more recent years, they have been threatened with losing their status and positions. For members of the general public, ridicule and social isolation have been the primary punishments, along with a decline in social status if they dared to speak too enthusiastically about their interests.
For the most egregious transgressors, erasure from history is the punishment of choice. Witness the recent case of Harald Malmgren, a former presidential advisor who made a deathbed confession that he had not only handled UFO material but that extraterrestrial beings – “biologics” – had survived the Roswell crash. For this transgression, his Wikipedia page has been maliciously ‘updated’ and all references to his historical role on Capitol Hill have been erased.
Even the staff at Project Blue Book were not immune to this conditioning – victims, ironically, of their own hype. Blue Book continued for another 15 years after it published ‘Special Report No. 14’, but its rotating roster of commanding officers became increasingly hostile towards UFO research and showed every indication they had succumbed to their own educational program by dismissing the UFO phenomenon while actively researching it.
The UFO cover-up has been a meticulously planned strategy, born during the Cold War when the unchecked power of the newly formed arms of the US intelligence community discovered that mass media, combined with predictive psychology, could serve as a powerful tool for societal control. When Blue Book ceased operations in January 1970, the ‘education program’ had done its job, and the populace had become dismissive of flying saucers and little green men. But while Blue Book was dead, it seems that somewhere at the CIA, the dream lived on.
The Conspiracy Continues
Two years after President Trump’s 2020 mandate to release all classified UFO information, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established. A small selection of AARO’s stated duties includes surveillance, analysis, governance, mitigation, and defeat. Is that mitigation and defeat of UFOs or mitigation and defeat of the public’s belief in UFOs? As if in answer to that question, in February 2025 AARO released a document that claimed to have resolved the mystery of the unidentified object filmed by the US Navy in the ‘Go Fast’ video.
The ‘Go Fast’ video, filmed in 2015 but not released to the public until 2020, made great waves when it first hit social media, as it came on the heels of the infamous ‘Tic-Tac’ video. Filmed by a US Navy F/A-18 aircraft travelling at an altitude of 13,000 feet off the coast of Florida, the ‘Go Fast’ video showed a spherical object travelling at an estimated 252 knots (2466 kilometres) per hour in the crosshairs of a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) camera.
Analysis by AARO utilising complex trigonometry and the effects of parallax (an optical effect caused by the position of an object when viewed along differing lines of sight) resulted in the declaration that the ‘Go Fast’ UFO was not going fast at all, “did not demonstrate anomalous performance characteristics,” and was instead travelling a mere 8 to 148 kilometres per hour with a boost from the wind that might have pushed it as fast as 259 kilometres per hour. And despite being unable to accurately measure the size of the object due to the poor resolution of the footage, AARO decreed that the object was a mere “one metre or less in size – comparable to a small drone or bird.”
This peculiarly confident conclusion, which involved counting pixels to estimate the object’s size, reconstructing winds from 10-year-old weather data, and disregarding the ability of professional military pilots to gauge the speeds of other aerial objects, absurdly fails to consider the fact that just because a UFO is not flying fast does not mean it is not a UFO!
This tactic is straight out of Blue Book – not so much dredged out of the 1950s, but rather lovingly maintained for generation after generation. And if drones had been around in 1952, you can bet your bottom dollar Blue Book would have been using them as scapegoats, much like authorities are using them today. Unfortunately, the AARO report suggests that despite its stated objective to openly and honestly investigate UFOs, AARO plans to continue on the well-worn path of obfuscation (where possible) and outright denial (as a last resort) in order to maintain UFO secrecy. And if all that fails, they will bamboozle us with science and swamp gas.
UFOs are Boring
As an aside, Blue Book’s ‘Special Report No. 14’ highlighted a unique type of ennui that set in during their flying saucer investigation. After reviewing reams of reports, they described how “the feeling that ‘saucers’ are real fades, and is replaced by a feeling of scepticism regarding their existence. The reader eventually reaches a point of saturation, after which the reports contain no new information and are no longer of any interest. This feeling of surfeit was universal among the personnel who worked on this project.”
This effect could already be in play within the AARO team and may also affect the public at large. It might also explain the sudden loss of interest in the recent ‘drone’ phenomena on behalf of the public and perhaps even on the part of the authorities.
Towards the end of November 2024, footage of objects that appeared variously as drones, bright lights, orbs, jellyfish, triangles, and dark UFOs began to circulate on social media. Initially reported from a town in New Jersey, sightings from all over the USA and other parts of the world started to flood the internet. Despite some clear footage showing anomalous UFO activity, the censorship machine kicked into high gear, and the government, military, and mainstream media issued consistent messaging reminiscent of the CIA’s ‘education program’. They maintained that the ‘drones’ posed no danger to the public, asserting that these mysterious objects were merely planes, helicopters, or misidentified stars and planets. Shortly after, all discussion of the mystery drones abruptly stopped, even though they continued to be seen and reported by a confused public.
The combined forces of US intelligence agencies have evolved into adept media manipulators, enacting PSYOPS (psychological operations) on populations while disseminating misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy ‘theories’, and outright lies. The US military-industrial complex has eagerly climbed aboard this train and has been concealing its new and nascent technologies behind the cloak of UFOs, using ridicule to further obscure the topic. This situation has not changed despite the establishment of AARO, which seems to have been given a copy of the Air Force playbook and is now happily regurgitating the same old strategies. Despite recent attempts by US Senators to introduce a UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA), it has failed to materialise due to political manoeuvring behind the scenes, along with the machinations of influential players in the military-industrial complex who will do anything to maintain the current status quo.
The sad reality is that despite 70 years of research, we still don’t know anything about UFOs. After generations of assiduous psychological assault, operant conditioning, and outright gaslighting, the besieged and bewildered public can be forgiven for retreating behind a wall of dismissal and disinterest. This disinterest is global in nature, and we see it playing out daily in numerous arenas – health, politics, finance, and education, to name a few. As long as the government tells us everything is okay, we have nothing to worry about, right? …Errr… right?
18. All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office U.S. Department of Defense Case: “Go Fast” Case Resolution, February 6, 2025. aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/ AARO_GoFast_Case_Resolution_Card_Methodology_Final.pdf
19. Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, archive.org/details/project-blue-book-special-report/page/n1/mode/2up
But to live outside the law, you must be honest I know you always say that you agree. – Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie, 1966
Whispered scenes of an inaccessible mountain pass filled with a Garden that resembles Paradise as described in the Quran. Drugged adolescent boys who were secretly carried there while unconscious awake to find themselves lying on golden couches, surrounded by streams of honey, clear water, and wine, with succulent fruits for the taking. And then the beautiful houris, those with lovely eyes, sensuously dancing, young women skilled in the arts of love initiating these young men in the true joys of Heaven. No virgins these, they are trained for pleasure. After four to five days in their company, the boys are drugged again with opium and hashish and carried back to the palace of the Old Man of the Mountain. Awakening in his presence, they describe to the court their experience and await their Master’s command. At the promise of return to that Garden, they will be willing to sacrifice themselves to his political plan.
Imaginative portrait of Hasan-i-Sabah created by an unknown 19th-century artist.
And so the myth of Hasan-i-Sabah has been told for 700 years, brought to its perfection by the Venetian traveller Marco Polo. An earlier writer described the Master handing his disciple a golden dagger and identifying its target. While neither is certainly true, they are so tantalising as to be irresistible. I and many others were seduced by these stories into my lifelong interest in the Assassins. William S. Burroughs and Mick Jagger are two others who have been fascinated with this account, and the Assassins are mentioned in the writings of both Bocaccio and Nietzsche. (I give Marco Polo’s complete tale in an appendix to my book Hasan-i-Sabah: Assassin Master, along with numerous citations from the Quran describing that very Garden.)
Who was the real Hasan-i-Sabah and why does he matter? Curiously, while he died almost exactly 900 years ago (1124), his story encapsulates so much of today. The details of his political conflicts seem torn from this morning’s headlines, while his religious ambitions are practised in the daily spiritual life of countless people who may never have heard his name.
This is so because of the contact Hasan’s disciples had with the European Crusaders. The Crusades lasted from 1095 to 1291 and helped to intertwine the cultures of Christianity and Islam. The Knights Templar and the Syrian Assassins had a long series of documented historical interactions. The two groups of religious warriors had many similarities in their structure and the nature of their beliefs and values. Their common creeds of service to a higher truth, the righteousness of their cause, their shared appreciation of courage, discipline and loyalty were often more important than the apparent differences of their faiths. Abraham’s monotheism, after all, worships a God who is essentially the same in the three related religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Manuscript illustration (1410) from The Travels of Marco Polo shows the Old Man of the Mountain in the Garden observing his young disciples (fidais) at play with their love mates.
The name ‘Assassin’ spread fear among contemporary rulers from China to England, especially in Muslim lands. Academics who preached against the sect were terrorised, as were clergy, generals, governors, mayors, and influential politicians and court advisors whose policies targeted the group. And there were many who did because the Assassins stood outside the political and religious order of their day. While the murder of individual enemies may be a distasteful thought, it is certainly a morehumane way to conduct a war for survival than killing mass numbers of uninvolved civilians or soldiers who bear no policy responsibility. Unlike the behaviour of modern indiscriminate terrorists who kill fellow Muslims daily, Hasan-i-Sabah’s assassinations were few and laser-focused on policymakers only.
Hasan-i-Sabah was a rebel. He was the founder of the world’s most successful secret society, and he may truly be said to be characterised as a mystery wrapped in an enigma. He carved out an independent space for himself and his followers in the high Persian mountains. The Nizari Ismailis or Assassins defended and expanded their territory for 166 years. Their descendants today are led by their Imam, the Aga Khan, and are one of the most advanced and sophisticated Muslim sects on the planet – competently-led, broadminded, educated, and self-sufficient. They no longer practice the political policies of their medieval forefathers, instead substituting education, publishing, modern institution-building, cultural preservation, medical care, encouraging general prosperity, and offering social programs for their faithful.
Hasan himself was born to a well-to-do Shiite family in the northern Persian city of Rayy, near modern Tehran, a lively commercial hub of its day. It was a crossroads city of east and west, with a long, exotic, and interesting history. Travellers and merchants from India, China and Central Asia met Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Shamans, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Pagans of every stripe, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and others passed through Rayy, trading and sharing their wares, practices and ideas.
Hasan felt the call of the spirit in adolescence and was introduced through friends to a minority Shiite offshoot group of schismatics called the Ismailis. They were estranged from the majority of Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites. They were a breakaway sect whose beliefs in a spiritual leader called the Imam were primary. And they were considered heretical because the Ismailis had split on the identity of the seventh Shiite Imam and actually posited a Prophet beyond Muhammad, an absolute travesty according to orthodox Islam, whether Sunni or Shiite.
After being personally recruited by various representatives (dais) of the Ismaili faith for some time, Hasan’s resistance was worn down and he accepted their teachings, swore the oath of allegiance, and was soon promoted to a position of responsibility. This exposed him to what we might call the Mystery Traditions of antiquity. The Gnostic Ismailis believed in a Neoplatonic celestial hierarchy ruling life on earth and taught practices designed to allow the initiate to rise into higher consciousness and commune with such cosmic energies. It was a very different kind of faith and practice than the Arab tribal version of Islam that had conquered Persia some 400 years before Hasan’s birth.
Hassan Sabah’s castle, located in northeastern Gazor Khan Village near Mo’alem Kalayeh in Roudbar of Alamout, is a historical fortress perched atop a 220-meter cliff, sitting 2163 meters above sea level on the southwestern slopes of the Houdkan Mountain range, part of the larger Alborz Mountains. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_in_Iran)
Shiism and Ismailism were spread by conversion. And conversion involves dialogue, a mutual sharing of ideas and beliefs. This theme of transformation through give-and-take is crucial to an understanding of Hasan. Ideas totally foreign to either the Arab people or Islam itself become incorporated into Persian Ismailism by its contact with alien cultures. Mesopotamia is the cradle of Western civilisation and its rich spiritual beliefs were a key part of the Persian culture in which Hasan and Ismailism were active. The Zoroastrian Persians had no problem with the concept of semi-divine higher beings like the Imam, any more than the Egyptians of old would have questioned the divine status of the pharaoh, or Jews concerned with the elevated status of a prophet like Moses who spoke directly with God. Shiite doctrines like the sacred blood of the Prophet, transferred through Ali (his nephew) and Fatima (his sole surviving child and wife of Ali) to their descendants, echoed similar ideas of the House of David among Christians and Jews. Jesus carried the messianic legacy of the bloodline of David, the poet-warrior king of Israel. All historians discuss the input of Greek Hermetic ideas into Shiism and later Ismailism.
The third- through fifth-century writings of Greek Neoplatonic philosophers had been carried to Persia by fleeing monks after the sixth-century campaigns of Justinian had closed the pagan monasteries and outlawed religions other than Christianity. The Sasanian king Khosrow I welcomed them. Zoroastrianism was not incompatible with the concepts of a supreme, transcendent, and incomprehensible Deity – opening itself gradually through a refined descent through the levels of Being, that its essence could be better communicated with mankind. Though the Hermetic writings were lost to the West for a thousand years, Renaissance scholars like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola gained access to them from Eastern sources and brought about a rebirth of esoteric wisdom in Europe.
Meanwhile in the East, Illuminist doctrines from various earlier heresies so altered mainstream Islamic beliefs that the resulting spiritual paths were nearly unrecognisable to orthodox Arab Muslims. These included tales of miracle-working Imams and other holy men. The eclectic doctrines that grew among the various Shiite/Ismaili groups included: belief in reincarnation and metempsychosis; deification of Imams and sometimes dais; intense speculations on the nature of God; attention to divination and prophesy; doctrines concerning the nature of the soul, death, the afterlife, and immortality; teachings on the cyclical nature of time and history; qabalistic investigations of the esoteric significance of letters and numbers; and occasionally, the overthrowing of traditional Islamic behavioural restrictions on sexuality, the use of intoxicants, and dietary limitations.
The Shia/Ismaili concept of the living Imam allowed for an emotional connection between the aspirant and his or her master that was not available to the more straitlaced Sunni acolyte. The ability to direct the disciple’s love of God through the spiritual master is an ancient practice. The teacher serves as the physical manifestation of the divine principle. Meanwhile, the anticipated redeemer or Mahdi awaits the divinely ordained moment for His appearance, silently guiding the Imam in his duty to shepherd humankind through the dark hours in which we must all spend our material existence. These hidden and speaking Imams are the personification of the metaphysical soul of the universe. They are wise enough to guide us all toward Truth. The Imam is sometimes referred to as the “speaking Quran,” for he alone can be trusted to separate the outer, exoteric teachings, or zahir, of the written text from its inner esoteric meaning, or batin, its essence.
Hasan-i-Sabah would learn from his Ismaili instructors that they had carried this reverence and appreciation of the Imam to the highest level of any Shiite sect; that the Imam enjoys the greatest amount of ilm or Gnosis, and that he can communicate this to the community. He would also have learned that the Ismailis analysed creation in vast cycles composed of incomprehensibly mysterious and profound cosmological eras, and of the energies operative in each. Ismailis viewed seven prophets (natiqs) as being charged with the guidance of humanity. The first six were Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. But Ismailis added a seventh, Ismail or his son Muhammad ibn Ismail, to this rarified group of world teachers. Hasan would have understood that accepting a prophet after Muhammad was an unforgivable blasphemy to orthodox Islam. His own capacity for independent thought must have been stimulated by this.
Each of the Prophets brought a code of behaviour, the sharia, to rein in the harmful tendencies and mischief normally associated with mankind. Sharia was not an example of success. Rather it was an admission that the higher message of the Prophet had reached its limit and rule-making became necessary.The Imam is a successor to the Prophet. He is charged with conveying the original message of the Prophet and with revealing reality (haqiqa) through the teaching. While the Prophet appears only periodically, the Imam is always present, otherwise the world would collapse.
Hasan would have been taught about the Final Judgment when the unredeemed and the ignorant are separated from those who had dared to perfect themselves and become the worthy companions of the Imam and his Truth. Hasan also understood that these teachings on the nature of the Ismaili beliefs needed to be conducted in silence and accompanied by ritualised personal pledges. How else could the Ismaili dais have been protected? How else could they know who to trust? How else could Hasan be expected to reach out to others and spread a fundamental heresy without some kind of oath-taking?
Several years after his initiation and initial training, Hasan was instructed to travel to Egypt where he strengthened his faith. The head of the Ismaili sect was the Fatimid Imam/Caliph al-Mustansir. This spiritual teacher was unique, chosen by God and inspired with the special wisdom and insight so that he could interpret complex doctrinal issues. Hasan attended a university for Ismaili missionaries for 18 months. Having some problems with the military dictator who had usurped the Imam’s power, Hasan left Egypt and returned to the Mideast. He travelled as a missionary through Syria, Israel, Iraq, and Iran for ten years and finally took possession of a mountainous castle/fortress known as Alamut in the year 1090. Strategically apportioned as a defensive structure, he improved it in such a manner that it long served his community and functioned as the headquarters for Ismaili offshoots in Syria, Afghanistan, and India. Hasan-i-Sabah was the original Old Man of the Mountain.
Several of the esoteric themes that are explored in my new biography of the Old Man include the concept of the Assassins as an initiatory society of graded spiritual ascent. Something secret, mysterious, and progressive took place in the conversion and initiation process administered by the Ismaili dais, and in the training program by which the dais were educated. This is undisputed by modern scholars, including the most orthodox and those most inclined to treat the Ismailis with the greatest deference and respect. We know that the Ismaili and Nizari mysteries included increasing revelations of the inner doctrine. We know they had a system of oaths to assure secrecy. As one who has spent his adult life studying and participating in hierarchical secret societies, I believe there is much to be said for the private, teacher-to-student communications about the nature of Truth. The idea of looking for esoteric meaning within scripture, exploring the higher reaches of philosophy to understand Truth, exploring numerology, Qabalah, and thaumaturgy, asking questions of commonly accepted ideas, seems a more than acceptable way for people to creatively expand their intelligence.
The Qiyama doctrine is another topic I explore in some depth. I believe it may have been one of the most profound and revolutionary concepts ever uttered and embraced by a religious community. The Qiyama declared the immanence of the “Inner Imam,” what Aleister Crowley called the “True Will” some 700 years later. The inner essence of an individual’s spiritual reality and personal source of guidance was asserted to be superior to any rule-making or forced adherence to outer forms of behaviour. This revelation was proclaimed by the fourth Lord of Alamut in 1164, some forty years after Hasan’s passing.
I also devote attention in Hasan-i-Sabah: Assassin Master to the drug issue and the derivation of the name Assassins from Hashish. Although forbidden in Islam, images of hashish and wine are shared by Sufis and countless others in the Mystery Traditions. Intoxication is a symbol or metaphor for the ecstatic experience of Divine Union. It is such an overpowering and disorienting phenomenon that it is often compared in the language of mysticism with drunkenness.
In closing, I would like to state that the primary thesis of my new book is Gnosis, the aspirant’s direct personal experience of God while within the human body. The knowledge of God transcends all the doctrinal rigours and hierarchies of all the established religions of the world through time. The celebrated Sufi mystic Mansur al-Hallaj (ca. 858–921) was suspected of being an Ismaili. He had acquired great influence among certain members of the Sunni royal family, and jealous enemies arranged his murder. He experienced a Gnostic union with God during which he was known to cry out Ana’l-Haqq, “I am the Truth.” His disciples went on to found a number of Sufi orders.
Hasan-i-Sabah: Assassin Master also includes the first English translation of Rashid al-Din’s 1310 version of the text of The Biography of Our Master. Mentioned and quoted repeatedly by all reliable authors on the Assassins, how it had not been translated before was a mystery that is now solved. There is also a translation of a purported letter exchange between Hasan and the Seljuk Sultan Malikshah in 1091. The book includes some 900 footnotes and nine detailed maps of the regions discussed in the text. With an extensive glossary of names and terms, a timeline, along with a comprehensive bibliography and index, one hopes it will prove a useful study guide for the interested reader.
James Wasserman’s Hasan-i-Sabah: Assassin Master, with a foreword by Tobias Churton, is available from all good bookstores.
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In the book Devil’s Game, Robert Dreyfuss documents how the US and Britain have created, organised, and enabled terrorist networks, most of them purporting to be Islamic, for over a century. The aims are to crush domestic dissidents, use the groups as proxies to fight enemies, and outrage Western audiences with terrorism to get them to support wars for oil in the Middle East.
Today, we may ask: Whatever happened to the ‘war on terror’, which seems to have disappeared when COVID came along? We are left with a legacy of ‘war on terror’ legislation.
MANUFACTURING TERRORISM
Michael German testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2022.
A few years ago, former FBI agent Michael German said that the agency was “manufacturing terrorism cases” to justify its existence. The FBI does this, says German, by taking vulnerable Arab Americans and other Americans from ethnic and religious minorities, and guiding them via agents (called handlers) to commit terrorism. Often, just before the given act of terror occurs, the FBI steps in to save the day. Journalist and author Trevor Aaronson says:
more than 150 people… caught in sting operations never had the means and, in some cases, never had the idea for the terrorism plot… [I]t was the FBI that provided them with everything – the bomb, the transportation, everything they needed to move forward in a terrorism plot that on their own, they never would have been able to do. And certainly evidence suggests that in most of these cases, they never had any specific connections to terrorism.
In 2011, the University of California-Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program teamed up with Mother Jones magazine to report on criminal prosecution statistics involving terrorism and other charges. They found that by that year, of the 508 defendants brought to court by the FBI, 48% were targeted by informants, 31% were arrested in sting operations and 10% were provoked by a handler/informant. Amazingly, 41% were not connected to a terrorist group, raising questions about how and why they came to allegedly want to commit terrorism. Only 21% were linked to ‘al-Qaeda’. Twenty-nine per cent were linked to other Islamic groups, and 9% to non-Islamic groups.
Likewise, in the UK, by 2013, 18% of British terrorism cases were connected to the group al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants), according to the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). The HJS doesn’t bother reporting that al-Muhajiroun’s co-founder, Omar Bakri, was an MI5 informant. Bakri’s partner was Anjem Choudary. By August 2016, 850 Britons were fighting for the Islamic State in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Commander Dean Haydon, head of the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism unit, confirmed to the media that Choudary had recruited Britons for the Islamic State. Choudary, who was jailed, was connected to 500 of the 850 jihadis.
For years, the Metropolitan Police were prevented from acting against Choudary by MI5. A source told the Telegraph: “While the police might have had lots of evidence they were pulled back by the security service because he [Choudary] was one of the people they were monitoring. It was very frustrating and did cause some tension but we were told we had to consider the bigger picture.” The ‘bigger picture’ was that the secret services wanted to create a jihadi network in Libya and Syria to overthrow the regimes of Muammar Qadhafi and Bashar al-Assad, respectively, as they had in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight the Soviets beginning 1978.
Back in 2002 after the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration’s Defense Science Board recommended establishing a $100m per year sub-agency called the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG). Under the heading “Aggressive Proactive, Preemptive Operations,” the report describes influence warfare and information operations (‘IW/IO’), “Covert action,” “Cover & Deception,” psychological operations (‘PSYOPS’) and the use of special operations forces (‘SOF’). The doctrine “[i]mproves information collection by stimulating reactions,” i.e., provoking terrorists and setting traps, as the FBI has done for decades. It recommends: “Vest responsibility and accountability for the P20G to a ‘Special Operations Executive’ in the NSC [National Security Council].”
North Africa specialist and hostage negotiator Professor Jeremy Keenan writes:
The first P2OG operation was in the Algerian Sahara in 2003, when Algeria’s security and intelligence service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), now working with the Pentagon and US intelligence services, kidnapped and took hostage 32 European tourists. Although the operation was managed by a DRS agent, the Bush administration was able to proclaim that the kidnap had been carried out by “Bin Laden’s man in the Sahara,” justifying the US’s launch in 2004 of a second front or Sahara-Sahel front in the GWOT [global ‘war on terror’].
CASE STUDY
In May 2017, 22 people were reportedly murdered when one, Salman Abedi, allegedly detonated a suicide bomb in the foyer of the Manchester Arena as people were leaving a pop concert. Abedi’s father, Ramadan, was a paid MI6 operative who was allowed to live in the UK under successive governments, including under then-Home Secretary Theresa May, who was PM when the bombing occurred. He left the UK in 2011, the same year that MI6 had helped organise a terrorist takeover of Libya.
In 1994, after fighting in Afghanistan, one Abd al-Baset Azzouz left Libya, his home country, to live in London, where the British government protected him. In 1995, MI6 learned of a coup plot against Libya’s leader, Muammar Qadhafi. The plot appears to have been readied for February 1996 and devised by secular colonels within Qadhafi’s military circle. A leaked MI6 report says: “It would begin with attacks on a number of military and security installations including the military installation at Tarhuna. There would also be orchestrated civil unrest in Benghazi, Misratah and Tripoli.” The report notes that “[c]oup plotters are not associated with Islamic fundamentalists,” like Azzouz, “who were fermenting unrest in Benghazi.” However, the coup plotters “had had some limited contact with the fundamentalists, whom [MI6 informant ‘Tunworth’] described as a mix of Libya veterans who served in Afghanistan,” i.e., old CIA-MI6 contacts, “and Libyan students.”
There were two coup plots: a secular one led by Qadhafi’s inner circle and an Islamic one led by extremists in Benghazi. The MI6 report on the 1996 coup said that the plotters wanted to see Libya decentralised and federally run.
Richard Bartlett and David Watson were MI6 agents involved in the operations. Watson worked with the Libya contact, ‘Tunworth’, who provided information from within the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the organisation referred to in the MI6 report as the Benghazi-based extremist group. Manchester bomber Abedi’s father was associated with the LIFG. In 1995, MI6 chose to work with the extremists in Benghazi, who had close connections with Osama bin Laden through their leaders, Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq (a.k.a. Belhaj) and Anas al-Liby. The British government protected al-Liby, who is described by the US Congress as “the builder of al-Qaeda’s network in Libya.”In 1992, al-Liby trained with a CIA operative, Ali Mohamed, in Osama bin Laden’s house in Hyatabad, Pakistan. In 1996, MI6 financed the anti-Qadhafi LIFG to the tune of £100,000.
In 2013, Salman Abedi – the 2017 Manchester bomber – travelled to Libya and met the Islamic State-linked Katibat al-Battar al-Libi. The KBL was indirectly getting money from MI5 via informants. It quickly emerged that Abedi was Ramadan’s son. It later transpired that British police did not believe he acted alone; America’s FBI had warned the UK about Abedi; that Abedi had been on a MI5 watch list as he travelled from Manchester to Libya and back; and that police very quickly dropped investigations into co-conspirators.
SOCIAL CONTROL
After 9/11, the Bush administration imposed upon Americans the Patriot Act 2001. The Act criminalises providing “material support” to terrorists, including “expert advice or assistance.” Section 215 made it easier for agencies (notably the FBI) to gather internet users’ metadata in a boon to the hi-tech industry which won more contracts. Patriot made it easier for the FBI to break into suspects’ homes and copy their computer files and take DNA samples. Section 411 allows the government to expel or refuse entry to non-citizens on the grounds of their use of prominence “to endorse or espouse terrorist activity” or persuade others to do so. Dr Tariq Ramadan’s teaching visa was revoked under the Act, despite him being a well-known moderate. Presumably, the aim was to silence other prominent Muslims living in America from criticising the “war on terror.”
Britain’s Labour government (1997-2010) was one of the worst offenders when it came to using counterterror legislation to control society. The Terrorism Act 2000 made it an offence to supply material to individuals accused of property damage. When then-82-year-old German-Jewish Labour supporter and later National Executive Committee-member, Walter Wolfgang, heckled the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the party conference in Brighton (2005), Wolfgang was forcibly removed by security guards and prevented from re-entering under the Terrorism Act. Section 44 ballooned the number of arbitrary stops and searches by police of innocent citizens (many of them ethnic minorities, of course). Lord Carlile’s annual review concluded that Section 44 actions “could be cut by at least 50 per cent without significant risk to the public or detriment to policing.” In 2003, peace protestors were prevented from demonstrating under the Act against an arms fair in London.
The post-9/11 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 sought to allow for extended detention of non-citizens in the country. The Law Lords declared it unlawful, with Lord Hoffmann telling media: “The real threat to the life of the nation… comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.” The Terrorism Bill sought to extend detention from 14 to 90 days. It was rejected by MPs. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 banned political protest within 1km of Parliament. Max Hill QC is the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. Following the vehicle rammings in Barcelona in 2017, Hill warned against “thought crime” and said that many counterterrorism laws were “unnecessary.”
Under General Franco, Spain was a terror state. When the country transitioned to parliamentary representation, degrees of freedom were won. However, terrorist groups including GRAPO (First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, inactive since 2007) and ETA (Basque Homeland Liberty, now disarmed,) led to antiterrorism measures being included in the Penal Code. Controversially, Article 18.1 potentially criminalises “apology” for terrorism, which could include anything from giving legal advice to terrorists to making satirical observations. As of 2007, “apology” was criminalised only after a judge deemed the offence to constitute “direct incitement.”
Organic Law No. 7/2000 penalised “glorification of terrorism,” which includes actions “to discredit, demean or humiliate the victims of terrorist offences or their families.” This is important because genuine efforts to determine if a given attack was a false flag by the state or a simulated event that the media believe to be real could be punished as glorifying terrorism.
Even more important than persecuting people who believe in false flags and hoaxes, the Spanish government has suppressed freedom of thought and expression and, ultimately, criticism of government policy. Amnesty International writes of Spain: “An exponential increase in the number of people falling foul of [the] draconian law banning the ‘glorification of terrorism’ or ‘humiliating victims of terrorism’ is part of a sustained attack on freedom of expression.” Under Article 578, the definitions were broadened to the point where charges jumped from three in 2011 to 38 in 2017. Terror attacks in one country, like the Hebdo killings in Paris in 2015, have knock-on effects in that Spain, in this case, responded by further broadening the definitions of incitement. Musicians César Strawberry (of Def Con Dos) and Valtonyc (a rapper) were sentenced under Article 578: Strawberry for tweeting a joke about a cake bomb and Valtonyc for insulting the crown, threatening a politician and glorifying violence.
In addition to attacking freedom, the Spanish government has bolstered its cyber security and budget and aided the hi-tech security sector with programmes like the Spider Operations, which were a series of arrests of social media users, many of them had simply tweeted bad-taste jokes. For example, the niece of a man who died in a terror attack defended the woman tried for making a sick joke about her late uncle, but astonishingly the court ruled that the law is effective regardless of what alleged victims think!
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Footnotes
1. Eric Lichtblau (2016), ‘F.B.I. steps up use of stings in ISIS cases’, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html?_r=0
2. Quoted in Heather Maher (2013), ‘How the FBI helps terrorists succeed’, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-fbi-helps-terrorists-succeed/273537
3. Mother Jones (2011), ‘Terror trials by the numbers’, www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/terror-trials-numbers
4. Tom Whitehead (2013), ‘Woolwich attack: Al Muhajiroun linked to one in five terrorist convictions’, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10079827/Woolwich-attack-Al-Muhajiroun-linked-to-one-in-five-terrorist-convictions.html
7. Federation of American Scientists (2002), ‘DOD examines “preemptive” intelligence operations’, Secrecy News, Issue 107, https://fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2002/10/102802.html
8. Defense Science Board (2002), DSB Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism, p. 21, https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsbbrief.ppt
9. Jeremy H. Keenan (2017), ‘Review: T. J. Coles, Britain’s Secret Wars… ’, State Crime 6(2): 286-94. See also Jeremy H. Keenan (2009), The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa, Pluto Press
10. Sam Webb (2014), ‘Al-Qaeda leader in Libya was detained by British police on suspicion of ter-ror offences – but later released and fled the UK to train bombers’, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2772495/Al-Qaeda-leader-Libya-detained-British-police-suspicion-terror-offences-later-released-fled-UK-train-bombers.html. See also ‘Freed UK prisoner is al-Qaeda ringleader’, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11125944/Freed-UK-prisoner-is-al-Qaeda-ringleader.html
12. Martin Bright (2002), ‘MI6 “halted bid to arrest bin Laden”’, www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/nov/10/uk.davidshayler. See also, Annie Machon, ‘“Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers” – The Gaddafi Plot Chapters’, http://anniemachon.ch/spies-lies-and-whistleblowers-the-gaddafi-plot-chapters
16. Ben Kentish (2017), ‘FBI “warned MI5 in January that Salman Abedi was planning terror attack in UK”’, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fbi-warned-mi5-january-manchester-attack-bomber-salman-abedi-manchester-arena-a7760756.html
17. Samuel Osborne (2017), ‘Salman Abedi: Manchester suicide bomber was known to MI5 but not under active investigation’, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/salman-abedi-manchester-suicide-bomber-known-to-mi5-not-under-active-investigation-latest-updates-a7761156.html
20. Michael Saward (2016), ‘The State and Civil Liberties in the Post-9/11 World’, Open University, http://oro.open.ac.uk/16198/1/StateAndCivil.pdf
21. Philip Johnston (2005), ‘The police must end their abuse of anti-terror legislation’, www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3620110/The-police-must-end-their-abuse-of-anti-terror-legislation.html
In the West, there’s a common misconception that ‘all Muslims are the same’. In reality, Islam comprises distinct branches, primarily Sunni and Shi’a, each with unique theological and eschatological beliefs. These eschatological views, which relate to end times and final events, significantly influence global politics and conflicts, despite often being overlooked.
The differing Sunni and Shi’a conceptions of a messiah, or saviour figure, often provoke anxiety among Jewish and Christian Messianists, as well as their more secular counterparts in the armed forces and governments of Israel and the USA. Regardless of whether these beliefs are taken literally, the perception of them plays a crucial role in international relations.
Historically, colonial powers faced fierce opposition from those who believed they were under divine protection, often manifesting as a belief in invincibility in battle. For example, the Sudanese Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, led a successful revolt against the British in the late 19th century, claiming divine support and inspiring his followers to believe they were invincible. Similarly, during the South Asian resistance to Western colonialism, various leaders and groups invoked religious and messianic beliefs to bolster their opposition to British rule, fostering a sense of divine mission and protection among their followers.
The signs of the times in which we live have prompted many in the Islamic world to wonder if al-Mahdi will arrive soon.
In Islam, there is an expectation of the coming of the Mahdi, a descendant of Muhammad, who will appear at the end times to eradicate evil. This event is anticipated to occur just before the return of Jesus, esteemed in Islam as a Prophet. The Mahdi is expected to lead Muslims in establishing a righteous world order. Christianity and Judaism have analogous figures in the militant, conquering Jesus of Revelations and the Jewish melekh mashiach, respectively. The Mahdi is referenced in Sunni hadith literature, with the first mention dating back to the 7th century.
Judaism has had multiple messianic claimants over the centuries. Historical figures such as Simon bar Kokhba and Sabbatai Zevi have had significant followings. While bar Kokhba’s revolt against the Romans ended in failure, Zevi’s legacy persisted through his followers, despite his eventual conversion to Islam. Zevi’s influence continued through his successor Jacob Frank, who led the Frankist movement in 18th-century Europe, promoting a syncretic blend of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Additionally, the Donmeh, a group of crypto-Jews in Turkey who outwardly practice Islam while maintaining Judaic beliefs in secret, trace their origins to Zevi’s followers. Various esoteric sects keep Sabbatean ideas alive, blending them with mysticism and other spiritual practices. In contemporary times, the Chabad Lubavitch movement venerates the seventh Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson (d. 1994), with some adherents believing he will resurrect as the long-awaited Messiah.
In Shi’a Islam, the Mahdi, also known as al-Qa’im (Arabic, meaning ‘he who will rise’), is synonymous with the personage of the ‘Hidden Imam’, who is the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdi. According to Shi’a belief, this Imam entered occultation (ghayba) in the 9th century to escape persecution. Despite being hidden, he is believed to continue guiding and protecting the faithful.
Shi’a doctrine holds that the Hidden Imam will reappear as the Mahdi in the end times to usher in an era of justice and peace. This belief underscores the importance of continuous, divinely guided leadership in Shi’a Islam. In contrast, Sunni Islam also acknowledges the Mahdi but does not emphasise occultation and generally believes the Mahdi has not yet been born. Sunni views on the Mahdi’s lineage and role vary, and he is not as central a figure as in Shi’a Islam.
They Seek Him Here, They Seek Him There…
The search for the Mahdi, specifically the Hidden Imam of Shi’ite tradition, has taken on an intriguing dimension involving espionage and international politics. According to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, American academics conducted detailed studies in 2015 to locate this elusive figure. Ahmadinejad claimed these efforts were part of a broader plan by US intelligence to prepare a case for the Mahdi’s arrest.1
Mojtaba Zolnour
In 2009, Ahmadinejad made similar claims, echoed the following year by Mojtaba Zolnour, deputy representative of Iran’s supreme leader in the Revolutionary Guard. Zolnour stated, according to Radio Free Europe: “Zionists have security plans for Muslim sites including Mecca, Karbala, and other sites where he said it was likely that the Hidden Imam could appear. The Hidden Imam or the Promised Mahdi is the 12th Imam of Shi’ite Islam, who [Shia] Muslims believe will appear to bring peace and justice on Earth and put an end to tyranny. ‘They’ve told their soldiers to kill immediately whomever they see with the characteristics [of the Hidden Imam] and not even take the risk to arrest him because he is a very awesome and dangerous person’.”2
Reports from Middle Eastern sources indicate that Muslim prisoners held by the US military had been subjected to harsh interrogation methods in an effort to find the Mahdi. The Shi’a News Association reported in 2015 that: “During the US occupation of Iraq, it was routine to torture Iraqis in prisons like Abu Ghraib whose prison guards were using tactics learnt in Israeli training camps as Robert Fisk pointed out in ‘Abu Ghraib torture trail leads to Israel’; one of the most baffling questions asked during interrogation was ‘Where is the man called Imam Mahdi, where is he hiding?’”3
The intense focus on locating a figure central to Shi’ite eschatology underscores the complex interplay between Messianic beliefs and geopolitical strategies.
High-Level Analysis of Mahdism in Iran
Is this Muslim conspiracism run amok? Numerous reports highlight the Mahdi’s influence on Iran. The long-running think tank, the Middle East Institute, issued a report prepared by two senior analysts at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change about the growth of Mahdism among the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The think tank states that “one fundamental aspect of [Iran’s] ideology that until now has been overlooked is the doctrine of Mahdism.”4
“There are signs today that the preparations for the return of the 12th divinely ordained Shi’a imam are becoming of pivotal importance to the IRGC’s lens on the world. The rise of a militaristic Mahdist cult among the senior ranks of the IRGC is now not inconceivable and the repercussions far-reaching.”
“Mahdism in the IRGC remains a complete blind spot for Western policymakers and experts, and yet its implications could have major consequences.”
The official website of Ayatollah Khamenei has a special page devoted to answering questions about “Imam Mahdi” and displays this collage representing people from all sectors of Iranian society with the Ayatollah in the centre.
An entire section of the report is entitled “What is Mahdism?” The report explains that: “As a Shi’a Islamist force, the IRGC’s worldview hinges on Mahdism: the return of the 12th divinely ordained Shi’a imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi (or the Hidden Imam), whom Shi’a Muslims believe was withdrawn into a miraculous state of occultation (hiddenness) by God in 874 CE. The concept of Mahdism is rooted in the belief that Imam Mahdi will one day return to rid the world of evil and injustice. His coming will bring about ‘one final apocalyptic battle’ between two armies, in which Shi’as believe that Mahdi and his forces will prevail over evil.”
Since 1990, Iran is said to have become a “society based on Mahdism.” The Iranian government declares that it is in a caretaker role until the return of the Mahdi. Ahmadinejad, elected president in 2005, is quoted as stating: “We have a mission – to turn Iran into the country of the Hidden Imam.” The report adds: “Ahmadinejad would give special importance to the Jamkaran Mosque, which hosts the Well of Jamkaran, where some Shi’a Muslims believe the 12th Imam will return. Ahmadinejad’s administration would allocate $17 million in state funds to Jamkaran Mosque as well as expand its facilities, transforming it from a small mosque to a multimillion-dollar shrine.”
The Revolutionary Guard is accorded a special mission, according to the report, to prepare the way for the Mahdi. In 2012, Hojatoleslam Ali Saeedi, the supreme leader’s representative to the IRGC, asserted: “The IRGC is one of the tools for paving the way for the emergence of the Imam of the Age (Mahdi) in the field of a regional and international awakening.” Saeedi is cited as stating that the continuing US presence in Iraq is an impediment to the appearance of the Mahdi.
Support for the Houthis in Yemen is regarded as significant in preparing for the Mahdi, as is the fight against not only Zionism but also against the Wahhabist Islam of terrorist organisations such as ISIS, which serve the USA’s and Israel’s interests. Consequently, many Iranians fought against ISIS in Syria. Iran also sees Russia’s fight with Ukraine in terms of the end times that prelude the Mahdi’s return, Iran taking a pro-Russian position.
The blend of Messianic beliefs and geopolitical strategies in Iran, particularly regarding the return of the Mahdi, shows how deeply ‘End Times’ prophecies and today’s politics can intertwine. Although controversial, Ahmadinejad’s claims reveal the significant role Messianic ideas can play in shaping national and international policies. Preparing for the Mahdi’s return has become a key focus for some Iranian leaders.
While Ahmadinejad was criticised by the Western media for not citing specific examples of the alleged US intelligence reports on the Mahdi, these reports are readily locatable. For instance, Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Crytzer’s publication, “Mahdi and the Iranian Nuclear Threat” by the US Army War College in 2007, questions: “Is the Iranian Government attempting to set conditions for the return of the 12th Imam in accordance with Shi’ite beliefs? If so, what threats are associated with these actions and how can the West counter these threats?”5
The fusion of Mahdist beliefs and Iran’s political manoeuvres is a captivating blend of geopolitics and eschatology. As Iran positions itself as a nation in waiting for the Mahdi, it’s crucial to understand the deep spiritual and political layers of this issue. This unique mix of prophecy and power offers fresh insights into Iran’s bold actions on the global stage. The way these ancient beliefs drive modern strategies could reshape international relations in ways no one ever imagined. Prepare for a world where ‘End Times’ prophecy and politics are intertwined like never before.
Additional material for the above was contributed by New Dawn editors.
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Footnotes
1. Toi Staff, Ahmadinejad: US is after Hidden Imam, Times of Israel, June 23, 2015
2. Golnaz Esfandiari, Zionists Waiting to Kill Hidden Imam, Says Iranian Cleric, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 1, 2010
3. Are the Mossad and Western powers looking for Imam Mahdi?, Shia News Association, June 3, 2015
4. Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Rising Cult of Mahdism: Missiles and Militias for the Apocalypse, Middle East Institute, May 2022
5. Lieutenant Colonel Kurt S. Crytzer, Mahdi and the Iranian Nuclear Threat, Strategy Research Project, U.S. Army War College, March 2007
