What is the Truth? How Do We Know If It Is Or Isn't So?
Blog date: 19/08/06 Did anyone take notice of the blog written by http://www.blognow.com.au/cockeyedbob which was posted on Thursday, if you didnt it had a link which was a report of a US reporter being arrested and beaten by US police in Chicago? The article was very interesting and worrying. I have copied parts of the article for this blog, the entire article can be viewed at: http://www.rbnlive.com/Bollyn.html This and other reports/incidents have lead me to ask the question What is truth and how do we know what is and isnt so? Are we being fed just a lot of propaganda by our media and our governments? CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN ARRESTED IN CHICAGO RBN talk show host and AFP reporter Christopher Bollyn was arrested last night in Chicago in his front yard. See below, and be sure to read his article at the bottom of this page about the
ZionistMedia/Israel/Lebanon connection. He also has been doing a deep investigation of the British/IsraelMossad/US ties to 911. He has been investigating 9/11 since it happened and looked into the many unanswered questions of the terror attacks. He discovered last year that he had had at least two FBI informants crawling around his house for years. This is the main reason he does not feel safe in the United States. It is also why he spends much of the time in Europe or at safe houses in the US, with fellow 9/11 researchers like Ellen Mariani and Eric Hufschmid. Chris and his wife have two small children. He had only been at his old home in Hoffman Estates Chicago for a couple of weeks, mainly because his road-weary children dearly love this old red house, which is the only home they have ever known. It is just a simple suburban Chicago tract home that Chriss late parents bought in 1957, but its home. Chris has also lived in Israel for a while and has been in the Middle East. His wife Helje is from Estonia. On the day of his arrest he was working on two rather big stories and had made a lot of phone calls to the Embassy of Israel, the S.E.C., the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and to an old Israeli living in New York who he has suspicions may be a key player in 9/11. All of his calls were about 9/11 related, except for the calls to the Embassy and local consulate of Israel. These were standard journalistic inquiries about IsraelLebanon. He wanted to know about the number of dead and wounded and if 60 Merkava tanks had been taken out, as Hezbollah claims. Then he also asked where
casualties and losses in exactly the two Israeli soldiers had been abducted. He told them that there were at least 15 newswire stories that said the soldiers had been captured in the Lebanese village of AitaaLebanon. al-Shaab - inside After finishing his calls from home he stepped outside and saw a threatening dark car full of obvious agents of some sort. Something was not right, he said to himself, he called 911 and told them that a strange car with armed men is driving around his neighborhood for no apparent reason. He was told that a police car would be at his house in 20 minutes. Not long after that the very same suspicious car stopped in front of his house and three armor-clad men stood on his driveway. His wife and 8-year old daughter were there and he asked these men who they were and why they were harassing his street. Why are you driving around with this unmarked car around my house, he asked? Who are you, anyway? They were not at all willing to identify themselves and were very confrontational. The three of them then tackled him and shocked him with some sort of stun-gun. The three men then sat on him and pushed his face in the dirt, handcuffed him and put him in their car. There were at least 5 squad cars and at least 10 officers in his front yard within one minute of his being beaten up on the lawn. He was then physically and verbally abused all the way to the police station and even more once he reached the station. When he asked why he was being detained they told him that he had resisted arrest and threatened the police with his fists, apparently two complete lies. At midnight, an officer came to his cell and asked if he could pay $100 to get out. What I am being charged with, he asked? But he didnt receive an answer. His older brother posted bail and shortly after midnight, he was then pushed out onto the street with a good two-mile walk home.
Christopher has said I am shocked at how I was treated, because although my journalism gets me into trouble with police in many places, I have never been treated so brutally in my life. I honestly believe this brutal treatment is connected to my 9/11 research. I intend to seek asylum in Norway or Switzerland. I can read the writing on the wall. Investigative journalists are not safe in Iraq - or the United States. CHRISTOPHER'S RECENT AFP ARTICLE ZIONIST MEDIA LIES CONCEAL HIDDEN AGENDA BEHIND ISRAELI INVASION OF LEBANON Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press As Israel kicked its war of aggression in Lebanon into high gear, the pro-Israel controlled media in the United States bombarded the U.S. population with carefully crafted lies designed to provide support for Israel's illegal aggression and conceal the hidden agenda behind it. Wherever an American might look for news about the on-going Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, one is bound to be hit by a host of carefully crafted media lies that pass for truth. Across the spectrum of the U.S.-based mass media, from the Internet to network television news to talk radio and Christian radio programs, there is a series of oft-repeated bold-faced Zionist lies about Israel's ongoing military campaigns. These lies are designed to garner U.S. public opinion in support of the Israeli aggression in Lebanon, which is clearly illegal and disproportionate. In order to keep U.S. public opinion in line, the Zionist planners use their controlled media outlets to spread and repeat bold-faced lies. Because these falsehoods are constantly repeated as truth, without any scrutiny or analysis in the Zionist-controlled media in the United States, it is necessary to point out the falseness of the fundamental lies upon which the Israeli aggression is based. Zionist Lie No. 1: Two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped in Israel. The first lie, the initial falsehood, which has been used as an acceptable casus belli, is that Hezbollah "kidnapped" two Israeli soldiers from Israeli territory on July 12.
Based on this lie, Hezbollah, branded as a "terrorist" group by Israel, Canada and the United States, stands accused of having started the war. Unfortunately, both Zionist claims are bold-faced lies. The Israeli version, however, which lacks any factual basis to support it, has been trumpeted by every media outlet, including the well-respected journalist Robert Fisk of The Independent (UK). In an article about the recent Israeli massacre of scores of Lebanese women and children sleeping in the basement of a building in Cana of Galilee (Qana, Lebanon), Fisk inserted both Zionist lies as fact: "Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made," he wrote, "and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border."
(No wonder he got beaten up in Afghanistan.) Initial news reports from international wire services, based on a Lebanese police report, however, clearly indicate that the two Israeli soldiers were not kidnapped at all, but captured - inside Lebanon - after having crossed the border and infiltrated the Lebanese village of Aitaahave not been retracted or proven false. al-Chaab. Furthermore, these first reports Indeed, the story that the Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon was reported by a number of leading international press services, including the German news agency (DPA), AFP from France, AP and UPI. This version of events, however, is never mentioned by the Zionist-controlled mass media outlets in the U.S.Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA), for example, had 10 articles on this matter on July 12-13, 2006. All of them reported that the Israelis had been captured in Lebanon. On July 12, for example, DPA reported from Beirut: "The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. "Implementing our promise to release the Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured at 9:05 am (0605 GMT) two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon," a statement by Hezbollah said. "Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they 'infiltrated' into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border," DPA reported."
"There was no immediate confirmation of the Hezbollah claims from any official Israeli source," the German wire service reported. "An Israeli army spokeswoman however said there was 'concern' over the fate of the two soldiers." If the soldiers had truly been kidnapped while "on patrol" on the Israeli side of the border, this is hardly the response the Israeli army would be putting out. After more than two weeks of intense Israeli bombing and shelling of Lebanon, the nation's economic infrastructure was reduced to rubble and some 800,000 Lebanese refugees roamed the region looking from shelter. In many cases the refugees' homes and villages of south Lebanon have been completely destroyed. Where will they live? PRE-PLANNED INVASION "Israel's military response by air, land and sea" to the provocation was "unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago," Matthew Kalman wrote in a July 21 article in San Francisco Chronicle. "More than a year ago," Kalman wrote from Jerusalem about the Lebanon campaign, "a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. To set the stage, Ehud Olmert, the new Israeli prime minister, commenced his term with extremely violent and relentless terror attacks against the people of the Gaza Strip, which culminated in the fatal artillery strike that destroyed a Palestinian family on the beach. Duraid Al Baik, foreign editor of Gulf News, described the first two months of Olmert's term "the bloodiest, deadliest and the most criminal period of the 58-year old state of Israel." Incidents of Israeli state terror, however, are generally not reported as such in U.S. news networks. Even obvious terror attacks committed by Israel, such as the murder of the family on the Gaza beach, are simply not reported as terror and, adding insult to injury, Israel's nonsensical excuses for such actions are accepted without question by the media. Lie No. 2: The massacre of Cana was caused by Hizbollah, which had fired missiles from the area. On July 30, Israel bombed a 4 story residential building in Cana, which collapsed on top of several dozen people, who had taken shelter in thebasement. Most of the victims were the children and women of two extended families. The Israelis and controlled media quickly defended the action saying that Hezbollah had fired missiles from the area. This also turns out to have been a lie. "There were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike," Ha'aretz (Israel) reported two days after the bombing. "As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident," Ha'aretz reported. "It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time. "The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version," Ha'aretz wrote, "�there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike." A WAR CRIME Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of committing a war crime in Cana and treating southern Lebanon as a "free-fire zone." It said the failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants is a war crime and asked the United Nations to investigate Israel's serious violations of international law. "The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game for attack," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW. "Such consistent failure to distinguish combatants and civilians is a war crime." Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that Israel's shelling of cities was an "unacceptable targeting of civilians," and stressed that international law demands accountability. Roth said responsibility for Cana "Just because the Israeli military warned the civilians of Cana to leave does not give it carte blanche to blindly attack," Roth said. "It still must make every possible effort to target only genuine combatants." rested "squarely with the Israeli military." Lie No. 3: Israel does not target civilians or ambulances. The fact that some 800 Lebanese civilians were killed during the first three weeks of the Israeli onslaught and that some 20,000 were killed in Israel's previous invasion in 1982 exposes the falsity of this shameless lie. There are specific well-known incidents, such as the targeting of Red Cross ambulances, which expose this bold-faced Zionist lie. That Israel targets ambulances is obvious from the images seen on television news reports showing Lebanese ambulances pierced by Israeli missiles exactly in the center of the red cross painted on the roof. As Fisk noted in a recent article, "Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross on the roof of each ambulance." "All the crews were injured," Fisk wrote, asking the obvious: "Did the pilots use the cross as their aiming point?" Lie No. 4: "Israel would never target a UN force." After Israeli bombs struck the UN observation station at Khiam in Lebanon, killing four international observers, Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni denied that the bombing had been deliberate as the UN Secretary General suggested. "Israel would never target a UN force," Livni said. "It is not part of our policies; it is not part of our values." Livni's statement is another bold-faced lie. Israel has often targeted UN bases, including several in the days before the station at Khiam was hit. Apart from the recent murder of 4 UN observers, the most egregious Israeli atrocity committed against a UN base occurred on April 18, 1996, during the Israeli "Grapes of Wrath" aggression against Lebanon, when prime minister Shimon Peres (now vice premier) ordered the precision-guided artillery shelling of the FIJIBATT UN base at Cana, in which hundreds of Lebanese had sought shelter. More than 106 Lebanese civilians, most of them children, were killed in this earlier deliberate Israeli attack on a UN base. "Israel's slaughter of civilians" during the 1996 Israeli offensive in Lebanon was "so cavalier, so ferocious," Fisk wrote at the time, "that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre." Lie No. 5: Hezbollah is a terrorist organization which Israel is fighting in the "war on terror." Only three nations, Israel, the United States and Canada, consider Hezbollah, an Islamic resistance group that was created during the first Israeli occupation of Lebanon, to be a terrorist organization. The group's leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has vehemently denied that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. In Lebanon, Europe, Russia, China and across the Arab and Islamic world, Hezbollah is regarded as a legitimate resistance organization.
The U.S. government and the Zionist-controlled media use the "terrorist" label in order to de-legitimize popular resistance movements, such as Hezbollah, to Zionist terrorism, expansionism, and hegemony in the region. End of report. ---------------------
Today we are seeing conflicting reports regarding Israeli Air Craft over Eastern Lebanon.
One report has stated: BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli aircraft fired several rockets at a target in a Hizbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon early on Saturday morning, a Lebanese security source said. It was not immediately clear what the Israeli aircraft were firing at in the village of Bodai. It was the first Israeli aerial attack since a U.N. truce ended 34 days of fighting between Israeli forces and Hizbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&story ID=2006-08-19T013258Z_01_L194905_RTRUKOC_0_US-MIDEAST- LEBANON-ATTACK.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsHome-C1-topNews-3 Another report: Israel continued fighter jet over flights, and there were contradictory reports of an Israeli air raid late Friday. Lebanese authorities said the jets fired two missiles in an area near Yamouneh, but UN sources said Israel denied launching an attack while Hizbollah's al-Nour radio reported they were mock raids. Earlier, Israeli jets flew at low altitude over areas of northeastern Beirut, including mainly Christian areas in Byblos, Aoun al Siman and the Kesrowan areas, the police said. http://www.bangkokpost.com/breaking_news/breakingnews.php?id=112313 And another Report: The Israeli army has denied its warplanes have launched air strikes in Lebanon, after police there reported warplanes targeted an uninhabited area near Baalbek in the east of the country. Lebanese police had earlier reported that helicopters and drones flew at low altitude over the Bekaa valley, 22 kilometres north-east of Baalbek, and fired four missiles. They say unidentified guns then fired at the aircraft. A Reuters reporter says military jets, helicopters and drones had circled over the area, 60 kilometres east of Beirut, and had come under anti-aircraft fire, but had not been hit and had not opened fire themselves, as was reported. An Israeli army spokesman said no attack had taken place. http://www.optusnet.com.au/news/story/abc/20060819/08/international/1718905.inp And here is another report: IAF drones and warplanes were crisscrossing the skies above Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley on Friday night, near the Hizbullah stronghold of Baalbek, security officials said. The IDF confirmed the flights but stressed that the planes did not open fire and in turn had not violated the cease-fire put into action on Monday. The French news agency reported that IAF planes attacked an uninhabited area next to the city of Baalbek. According to their report, low-flying IAF helicopters shot four missiles in the area. Police in Lebanon claimed that anti-aircraft fire chased away the IAF aircraft, but that to their knowledge there had been no IAF missile attack. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525902304&pagename=JPost%2 FJPArticle%2FShowFull So my question is what do we believe?
We cant believe what we are told via the news and the government, as they have their own hidden agendas.
We cant even believe photos audio or video images of events because they could have been altered.
Can we even believe what we see with our own eyes? After all if you have five witnesses to a crime they will each give a different description of the circumstances and the perpetrators. We unconsciously distort things based on previous experiences, biases and knowledge.
I like to have factual opinions about events, but I am reluctant to give an opinion in these times because I dont know if I am basing it on a truth or a lie. We now have access to news coverage 24 hours a day via networks such as CNN and via the internet but are we any closer to knowing the real truth????
If there is anyone out there that knows of a reliable news service please let me know. As for the IAF over East Lebanon, I think I will go with the report from http://english.aljazeera.net it sounds pretty fair to me. As for the other reports above, I will let you be the judge, but I think I have a pretty good idea of where the truth lies. Israeli jets fly over Lebanon Saturday 19 August 2006, 0:43 Makka Time, 21:43 GMT Israeli warplanes have flown over Lebanon's Bekaa valley and the north of the country but did not launch an attack, according to a security source in the area. The source said that the Israeli jets and drones had come under anti-aircraft fire but had not been hit and had not opened fire themselves. An Israeli army spokesman said no attack had taken place: "We haven't attacked in Lebanon since the start of the ceasefire." 
Quick Facts About Lebanon and How You Can Help
Blog date: 18/08/06
Lebanon Did You Know, Some Facts in a Nutshell
Most Palestinian refugees have lived over 50 years in Lebanese camps.
Two million refugees live across Lebanon.
The average monthly Lebanese income is US$500 of which US$300 pays the rent.
Nearly 30% of the official Lebanese population lives below the poverty line.
There is a camp of Christian Palestinian refugees.
There are over 12 million Lebanese living outside Lebanon. 3.6 million stayed behind.
There are over 360,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
There are 18 officially recognised religious groups in Lebanon.
Lebanon experienced civil war for 25 years.
World Vision has been working in Lebanon since 1975. These facts were prior to the latest conflict - http://meero.worldvision.org/dyn.php If you wish to help, donations can be made to the Middle East Crisis Appeal at http://www.worldvision.com.au/appeals/middleeastcrisis 
Aya and her family have fled their home in search of safety. Thousands of children and families in Lebanon and Gaza urgently need help.
Helping each other through hard times: opening the doors of Debayeh Refugee Camp Debayeh Palestinian Refugee Camp is the only Christian Palestinian camp in | 