Opinion Maker

By Wayne Madsen

Jakarta:

In light of WMR's previous report on Mossad playing a substantial role in the devastating bombing of downtown Oslo, we have obtained an exclusive photograph of a suspected Israeli intelligence operative laughing it up with an Indonesian police officer on October 13, 2002, the morning after the deadly bombings of the night club district of Kuta in Bali at 11:05 pm on October 12. At least 202 and maybe as many as 400 people died in the twin explosions. Most of the dead were Australians on holiday. The attack spurred Australian Prime Minister John Howard into joining the U.S.-British war in Afghanistan and, later, in Iraq.

The western man pictured, the only westerner seen in the immediate vicinity of Bali's "Ground Zero," is standing at the police lines and looking toward the bombed and burned out debris of the Paddy Pub and the Sari Club, located across the street. While the civilian Balinese and Indonesian Marines, Army, police, and Special Forces were traumatized by what happened the night before, the suspected Israeli was noticeably happy at the somber scene of destruction. He was so happy, a journalist immediately dispatched to the scene from Jakarta decided to snap the man's photograph. The man's joviality at a scene where there were human intestines and other body parts strewn across exposed re-bar stripped of concrete and hideously burned bodies made him the subject of immediate suspicion.

Laughing it up at a horrific bombing scene on Bali in 2002. Israelis have a sordid history of relishing in terrorist bombings from New York and Beirut to Bali and Oslo.

The reaction of the unknown celebrator of the Bali bombing is similar to the celebration of five known Mossad agents witnessed celebrating the first impact of an aircraft into the World Trade Center on September 11. 2001, from a location at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, immediately across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan.

The following is WMR's report dated August 12, 2008, on the Bali bombing and its aftermath, including FBI spying on U.S. journalists:

Recently, FBI director Robert Mueller called New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. and apologized for the FBI improperly obtaining phone records on their Jakarta, Indonesia-based reporters in 2004 during a "national security investigation." FBI agents apparently by-passed judicial authorization in declaring that an emergency existed in their desire to discover with whom the reporters were communicating.

The reporters affected by the FBI surveillance were the Post's Ellen Nakashima and Natasha Tampubolon and the Times' Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez.

WMR has learned from another Jakarta-based journalist that the FBI was attempting to discover what information the journalists may have obtained on a false flag operation involving the deadly 2002 bombings in Bali that was blamed by the United States on Jemmah Islamiya, the Southeast Asian affiliate of "Al Qaeda."

On March 27, 2007, WMR reported on the subject of the FBI's interest in Jakarta-based correspondents: "Our Indonesian and American sources report that there was a significant U.S. and Israeli military-intelligence connection to the October 12, 2002 bombings of the Sari Club in Bali, Indonesia. A DeHavilland Dash-7 aircraft registered in Queensland, Australia, landed at Denpasar Airport in Bali only hours before a massive explosion ripped through the Sari Club, killing over 200 people, many of them vaporized.

Our sources claim that an Israeli military team arrived at Denpasar Hospital a after the explosion and claimed four bodies of white men in uniform and flew them out of Bali on the Dash 7. The plane took off an hour after the explosion. Our sources have revealed the plane was permitted to pass through Singapore for an unknown destination.

After the bombing and the plane’s departure, the tower logs were altered at Denpasar Airport to indicate the Dash 7 had not landed there. However, in a major oversight, the apron logs were not tampered with. Our sources have revealed the Dash 7 was Israeli-owned.

Several victims of the Sari Club bombing at Kuta Beach had flash burns on their bodies — something common with people exposed to a nuclear blast. Our sources also have revealed that a CIA contract agent — an Indonesian national — was at Kuta Beach the day before the terrorist bombing. He is also known to have been involved in other terrorist attacks on behalf of the CIA since 1998.

Our sources also indicate that the then-U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, who is now posted as ambassador to Thailand, was fully aware of U.S. intelligence pre-knowledge of the terrorist bombing in Bali. Boyce told the American managing editor of the Jakarta Post that it would be unhelpful if the paper pursued the U.S. angle in the Bali bombing."

The FBI appears to have been interested in the identities of the sources for a number of Jakarta-based journalists investigating the Bali bombings. However, the bureau only required authorization for surveillance of journalists defined as "U.S. persons" under intelligence collection statutes.

U.S. ambassador Boyce exerted tremendous pressure on Syafie Ma'arif, the head of Indonesia's second largest Muslim organization, Muhammadiyah, to ensure accused Bali and Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombing mastermind, the elderly Abu Bakar Bashir remained in prison. In 2003, Bashir was cleared on leading Jemmah Islamiyah but was not released from prison until 2004. Boyce was accused of manufacturing evidence against Bashir and wanting to keep him in prison to prevent the cleric from providing evidence linking U.S. intelligence to the bombings in Indonesia. The Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, many of them Australian, were portrayed as Australia's "9/11" in a propaganda ploy to convince Australia to commit troops to the Iraq war.

Even before the Bali bombings, the Bush administration attempted to get the government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri to secretly arrest Bashir and hand him over to the United States for extraordinary rendition. Megawati refused the request made in a meeting between Megawati and Boyce, National Security Council official Karen Drook, State Department interpreter Fred Burks, and an unidentified CIA agent. The CIA agent warned Megawati that there "would be a problem" if Bashir was not handed over to the United States. A month later, terrorist bombs ripped through the Bali tourist spots.

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UPDATE: WMR has also learned that the Australian government placed pressure on the Indonesian government to quickly remove the debris from the Bali bombing to barges brought in by Australia to Kuta port. The debris was then dumped in the ocean. Similarly, debris from the World Trade Center in New York was quickly transferred to Staten Island and eventually to India and China for smelting. In both the New York and Bali incidents, important forensics sites were compromised before a full investigation could be carried out. The decision to remove crime scene evidence came on orders from above.