France deploys 10,000 troops in search for attack accomplices

Associated Press

1/12/15

 

PARIS (AP) — France ordered 10,000 troops into the streets Monday to protect sensitive sites — nearly half of them to guard Jewish schools — as it hunted for accomplices to the Islamic militants who left 17 people dead as they terrorized the nation.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the search is urgent because “the threat is still present” after the attacks that began Wednesday with a massacre at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and ended when three attackers were killed Friday in two nearly simultaneous clashes with security forces around Paris.

By midday Monday, Paris’ Marais — one of the country’s oldest Jewish neighborhoods — was filled with police and soldiers. Some 4,700 of the security forces would be assigned to protect France’s 717 Jewish schools, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

“A little girl was telling me earlier that she wanted to live in peace and learn in peace in her school,” Cazeneuve as on a visit to a Paris Jewish classroom, where the walls were covered with children’s drawings of smiling faces.

“That’s what the government, that’s what the Republic, owes to all the children in France: security in all schools, especially in the schools that could be threatened,” he added.

The children listened and waved both Israeli and French flags.

Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the nationwide deployment of troops would be completed by Tuesday and would focus on the most sensitive locations.

“The work on these attacks, on these terrorist and barbaric acts continues … because we consider that there are most probably some possible accomplices,” Valls told BFM television.

It was not clear exactly how many accomplices French forces were hunting for in addition to Hayat Boumeddiene, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly, the Islamic State group attacker who killed four hostages Friday at a kosher grocery in Paris before being killed by security forces.

But several others possible suspects appeared on their radar. French police have said the Charlie Hebdo attacks that left 12 dead were carried out by three people, but only two of those attackers — brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi — have been found.

In addition, video emerged Sunday of Coulibaly explaining how the attacks in Paris would unfold. French police want to find the person or persons who shot and posted the video, which was edited after the attacks that ended with Coulibaly being killed Friday.

 

Boumeddiene herself was seen traveling through Turkey with a male companion before reportedly arriving in Syria with him on Jan. 8 — the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack and the same day Coulibaly began his murderous spree by shooting dead a Paris policewoman.

Security camera video footage shown Monday by Turkey’s Haberturk Television network showed Boumeddiene arriving at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport on Jan. 2 — five days before the first terror attack in Paris. A high ranking Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the woman on the video was Boumeddiene.

Turkish intelligence then tracked Boumeddiene from her arrival.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the state-run Anadolu Agency that she had stayed at a hotel in Istanbul with another person before crossing into Syria on Thursday. She and her traveling companion, a 23-year-old man, toured Istanbul, then left Jan. 4 for a town near the Turkish border, according to a Turkish intelligence official who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Her last phone signal was on Jan. 8 from the border town of Akcakale, where she crossed over apparently into Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria, the official said. Their Jan. 9 return plane tickets to Madrid went unused.

Survivors say the Charlie Hebdo attackers, two brothers from Paris, claimed they were being supported by al-Qaida in Yemen, the group the U.S. considers the most dangerous offshoot of that network. In his video and in comments to French media before he died, Coulibaly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, which has taken over large sections of Iraq and Syria.

Ties among the three attackers date back to at least 2005, when Coulibaly and Charlie Hebdo attacker Cherif Kouachi, 32, were jailed together. It later emerged that Cherif’s older brother, 34-year-old Said, the other Charlie Hebdo gunman, fought with or was trained by al-Qaida in Yemen.

Cherif Kouachi was also convicted in 2008 along with several others of belonging to a network that sent jihadis to fight American forces in Iraq.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday visited the Paris kosher grocery where four of the hostages were killed Friday. Volunteers, meanwhile, recited prayers over the bodies of some hostage victims as they were prepared for burial by the Jewish Burial Society in Paris.

___

Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson and John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris; Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; and Desmond O. Butler in Istanbul contributed.

Paris Shooting Suspects Under French Radar for YEARS

Image: Dead men don’t talk. French security agencies successfully liquidate
all suspects in the recent Paris shooting.

January 10, 2015 (Tony Cartalucci – LD)

landdestroyer.blogspot.com

The Paris shooting suspects were no strangers to the French government and its security and intelligence agencies. One suspect, Cherif Kouachi, was arrested by French police in 2005, tried and sentenced to 3 years in prison for “association with wrongdoers with the intention of committing a terrorist act,” but his sentence would later be suspended.

Slate Magazine would report in their article, “The Details of Paris Suspect Cherif Kouachi’s 2008 Terrorism Conviction,” that:

Kouachi was arrested in January 2005, accused of planning to join jihadists in Iraq. He was said to have fallen under the sway of Farid Benyettou, a young “self-taught preacher” who advocated violence, but had not actually yet traveled to Iraq or committed any acts of terror. Lawyers at the time said he had not received weapons training and “had begun having second thoughts,” going so far as to express “relief” that he’d been apprehended.

Strange then that Kourachi and his brother would then be reported to have traveled to the Middle East to receive training from Al Qaeda, then to have fought in Syria in a war backed in part by France, before returning home and carrying out this most recent terror attack, all while being tracked by French intelligence. If Kouachi could be arrested for “association with wrongdoers with the intention of committing a terrorist act,” why wasn’t he arrested immediately upon his return to France for having received and employed military training by a terrorist organization?

CNN would report in an article titled, “France tells U.S. Paris suspect trained with al Qaeda in Yemen,” that:

Western intelligence officials are scrambling to learn more about possible travel of the two Paris terror attack suspects, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, with new information suggesting one of the brothers recently spent time in Yemen associating with al Qaeda in that country, U.S. officials briefed on the matter told CNN. Additional information from a French source close to the French security services puts one of the brothers in Syria.

 

To explain how terrorists well-known to France’s legal system and intelligence community could simply “disappear,” the Wall Street Journal in an article titled, “Overburdened French Dropped Surveillance of Brothers,” would attempt to claim:

The terror attacks in Paris that have killed 17 people over three days this week represent one of the worst fears—and failures—of counterterrorist officials: a successful plot coordinated by people who had once been under surveillance but who were later dropped as a top priority. 

The U.S. provided France with intelligence showing that the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo massacre received training in Yemen in 2011, prompting French authorities to begin monitoring the two brothers, according to U.S. officials. But that surveillance of Said and Chérif Kouachi came to an end last spring, U.S. officials said, after several years of monitoring turned up nothing suspicious.

 

It is a narrative that begs to be believed – considering the brothers had already tangled with the law, already traveled to Yemen to receive training from Al Qaeda, and with evidence suggesting they were indeed still being tracked since it is now known they have recently returned from Syria. The Wall Street Journal would also claim that France depends heavily on US intelligence, contradicting US intelligence officials who have said their information came from their French counterparts.


France reportedly has over 1,000 citizens under surveillance who have recently traveled to Iraq and Syria, believed to have fought alongside terrorists France itself has been arming. In an NBC article titled, “French Intelligence Is Tracking 1,000 Who Have Been to Iraq, Syria: Expert,” it is reported that:

“French intelligence is mostly focused today on more than 1,000 French citizens that traveled to Syria and Iraq since 2012,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, the author of “Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda.” 

He added that one-fifth of them were being tracked around the clock. “This is a problem of resources,” he added. “We cannot follow everyone.” 

Brisard said the brothers had been “well known to French intelligence [for] several years now.”

 

Image: France helped NATO successfully hand Libya over to Al Qaeda
terrorists who – with NATO support – would use it as a springboard to attack
Syria. The ultimate goal is to use Al Qaeda terrorists to overrun Iran, then
southern Russia and western China. 
It is almost certain that the suspects were not only being tracked by French and US intelligence, but selected as prime candidates for pulling off the provocative attack in Paris last week – as part of a greater agenda of manipulating public perception to further crush civil liberties at home and expand hegemonic wars overseas. France is already occupying several of its former colonies in Africa, had participated in the destruction of Libya and its subsequent handover to Al Qaeda terrorist, who with NATO backing, used it as a springboard to attack Syria.
In fact, it is now confirmed that France had provided weapons to terrorists fighting the Syrian government since 2011. France 24 would report last year in an article titled, “France delivered arms to Syrian rebels, Hollande confirms,” that:

President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that France had delivered weapons to rebels battling the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad “a few months ago.”

It is likely that if the Paris shooters were indeed in Syria, they may likely have been holding French-supplied weapons as they honed their skills later to be used to spill French blood in Paris.

Three Possibilities – All Damning  
There are really only three possibilities left for France, NATO, and the greater Western World. First, the attacks were known to be impending and were willfully allowed to be carried out with an insidious agenda lined up to fully exploit the public hysteria to follow. Second, the attacks were prodded along by French, US, or other Western or Western-aligned intelligence agencies. Or third, the global spanning surveillance state the West is erecting with the promise of making the world safe at the expense of our freedom has left us both unsafe, and without our freedom.

Determining the degree to which this attack was influenced or engineered by Western intelligence agencies will be difficult to establish. However, considering that NATO itself has been exposed in the past to have used extremist groups to carry out deadly terrorist attacks almost identical to the recent Paris shooting, means that Western intelligence agencies should be prime suspects until otherwise ruled out.

The shooters were well known to Western intelligence, were part of a Western proxy war in Syria, were under surveillance, most likely handled before and perhaps even during the attack last week, and were all subsequently “liquidated,” just as was done amid a wave of NATO-sponsored  terror attacks against Western Europe during the Cold War, now known as “Operation Gladio.”

Al Qaeda is NATO’s Mercenary Foreign Legion 
Even if these attacks were organized by “Al Qaeda,” the fact still remains that Al Qaeda was intentionally selected, armed, funded, and to this day backed in nations like Syria by the West, including France, in an effort to overthrow Damascus by proxy.

As exposed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 article,  “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” it was stated explicitly that (emphasis added):

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda

Since 2007, it is clear that the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) and various franchises of Al Qaeda operating in Syria are harbored in NATO-member Turkey, with convoys originating from Turkish territory supplying terrorists operating in Syria with an unending torrent of supplies. So even as the US feigns to be striking at the source of ISIS power – allegedly seized Syrian oil fields – in reality, the US, along with its stalwart Persian Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar – are at the same time supplying this proxy terrorist army with billions in aid year to year – aid that is immune to US airstrikes.

NATO Extremism

Image: ISIS is supposedly an independent terror organization living off the
lands it has supposedly conquered. In reality, it is clear it is instead an
invasion originating from NATO-member Turkey, with the aid not of oil
money from seized Syrian fields, but rather cash and weapons supplied by
NATO and the Persian Gulf autocracies.

However one attempts to examine the recent Paris shooting – it is clear it is not an issue of “free speech,” “Islamic extremism,” or a need to show “tolerance,” but rather an issue involving NATO sponsorship of terrorism worldwide, and the complicity or failure of invasive surveillance networks and intelligence agencies that either helped carry out the operation, willfully allowed it to be carried out, or missed it entirely indicating unforgivable incompetence requiring punitive action against those occupying the highest offices in the French government.

Whatever the case may be, what follows will be a shameless attempt to exploit the hysteria prevailing across much of Europe. The most immediate threat is the West not backing off from its sponsorship of terrorists fighting the government of Syria, but the doubling down of the very policy that produced the killers involved in the Paris shooting. Indeed, even as Western politicians wring their hands over the loss of life in Paris this week, the Military Times would report, astoundingly, that the US is going ahead with a plan to train, arm, equip, and back a new “rebel army.” In an article titled, “Syria rebel training could start in early spring,” it states:

The long-awaited coalition program to train the Syrian moderate opposition could begin by early spring, and officials are beginning to identify individual fighters who could participate, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Apparently, despite so-called “moderate Syrian rebels” being revealed as simply Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates, with many literally turning their US, French, British and other NATO-supplied weapons over to terrorist groups, the US desires to send yet more weapons, cash, and training – in what one could only call a deliberate attempt to feign opposition to Al Qaeda while willfully expanding their ranks and armories, as well as both their tactical and strategic capabilities.

It is no wonder then, why the Western media has attempted to focus so diligently on “Islamic extremism” as the cause of the recent Paris shootings. Should the emotional raw nerves of the European people not be manipulated, and were people simply to follow the money, they would realize NATO extremism was to blame. They would also realize that the backlash in the wake of the Paris shooting was not to help stem such extremism, but to only embolden it further.

French warned travelers to avoid Ferguson, MO area

Advisory for northern St. Louis issued at least 1 year ago

Police in Ferguson, Missouri, during a fourth night of violence after the police shooting of a black teen.
Police in Ferguson, Missouri, during a fourth night of violence after the police shooting of a black teen.

NEW YORK – For the past year, a French government website has warned French travelers to avoid visiting the area north of downtown St. Louis were the police shooting of a black teen Saturday sparked violent, racial tensions that now are being addressed by the White House.

The French government website “France Diplomatie” carries a security warning for St. Louis, that reads in French: “St. Louis: Eviter le quartier nord entre l’aéroport et le centre-ville, mais la navette reliant l’aéroport est sûre.”

It translates to: “St. Louis: Avoid the northern area between the airport and the city center, but the airport shuttle is safe.”

Noticing the French government travel warning last November, KMOX-TV in St. Louis posted an article that began: “It was 250 years ago that Frenchmen Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau founded the fur trading post that would become St. Louis. Now the French government has some warnings for travelers coming here.”

KMOX reported at the time that the mayor of St. Louis was not amused.

“The French government can do what it wants, but in the end, you know, we’re still going to have people come in and enjoy our city,” Mayor Francis Slay explained to the television station.

KMOX also reported North St. Louis Alderman Antonio French objected that the travel warnings were unfair.

“If you actually think about it, it’s actually not bad of a list to be on,” Slay said. “Almost every major city in America is on the list, including St. Louis, of course. If a Frenchman were to decide to avoid or be discouraged from visiting cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, their visit to the United States would be a lot less fun, a lot less enjoyable.”

The French government website warns French tourists that when arriving in an American city, “it is advisable to learn about the neighborhoods to avoid.”

Obama, calling for “peace and calm on the streets” of Ferguson, said Thursday there is “never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting.”

But he also chastised police.

“There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights,” he said, taking time from his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

The executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police was unhappy with the president’s remarks, The Hill reported.

“I would contend that discussing police tactics from Martha’s Vineyard is not helpful to ultimately calming the situation,” Director Jim Pasco said in an interview with Capitol Hill daily.

“I think what he has to do as president and as a constitutional lawyer is remember that there is a process in the United States, and the process is being followed, for good or for ill, by the police and by the county and by the city and by the prosecutors’ office,” Pasco said.