12 Dead in Daytime Paris Attack at Satirical Magazine

[Magda Hassan]

No idea about source Seems to be an Indian publication. And may well have nothing to do with Paris event but just a burn out policeman. Just putting it out there.

Paris, FranceLimoges: Suicide of a Police Commissioner

Helric Fredoun the courageous policemen
Just over a year after Helric Fredoun discovered the lifeless body of the third ranking police officer SRPJ of Limoges, the second ranking service officer has committed suicide yesterday at his workplace with his service weapon.
We learned this morning, a Commissioner Helric Fredoun SRPJ Limoges has committed suicide last night in his office with his service weapon .
Information confirmed by his superiors. It is unknown at this time the reasons for his actions. He would have killed himself that night or in the early hours of the morning.
The Commissioner Helric Fredou aged 45 years was from Limoges began his career in 1997 as a police officer at the regional office the judicial police of Versailles, before returning to Limoges. He was deputy director of the regional police service since 2012. His father was a former police officer, his mother was a nurse in the emergency context CHU Limoges. He was single and had no children.
According to the police union, Commissioner was depressed and experiencing burnout.
In November 2013, the Commissioner Fredou had discovered the lifeless body of his colleague, the 3rd ranking police officer of SRPJ Limoges, who had also committed suicide with his service weapon in his office. He was also 44 years old.
The Commissioner Fredou, like all agents SRPJ worked yesterday on the case of the massacre at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo .
In particular, he surveyed the family of one of the victims.
He killed himself before completing its report.
A psychological cell was set up in the police station.
http://www.medhajnews.com/article.php

[Magda Hassan]

Wither Freedom of Expression? French cartoonist Sinet trial on charges of anti-Semitism over Sarkozy jibe

2015-01-09 15:06:57

---

Paris, FranceA Left-wing cartoonist is to go on trial on Tuesday on charges of anti-Semitism for suggesting Jean Sarkozy, the son of the French president, was converting to Judaism for financial reasons.
Maurice Sinet, 80, who works under the pen name Sine, faces charges of "inciting racial hatred" for a column he wrote last July in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The piece sparked a summer slanging match among the Parisian intelligentsia and ended in his dismissal from the magazine.
"L'affaire Sine" followed the engagement of Mr Sarkozy, 22, to Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, the Jewish heiress of an electronic goods chain. Commenting on an unfounded rumour that the president's son planned to convert to Judaism, Sine quipped: "He'll go a long way in life, that little lad."
A high-profile political commentator slammed the column as linking prejudice about Jews and social success. Charlie Hebdo's editor, Philippe Val, asked Sinet to apologise but he refused, exclaiming: "I'd rather cut my balls off."
Mr Val's decision to fire Sine was backed by a group of eminent intellectuals, including the philosopher Bernard-Henry Lévy, but parts of the libertarian Left defended him, citing the right to free speech.
Last week, the anti-capitalist, anti-clerical Sine, who recently founded his own weekly magazine, Sine Hebdo, took Claude Askolovitch, the journalist who first accused him of anti-Semitism, to court for slander in a separate case.
"When I heard that I was being treated as anti-Semitic, my blood ran cold," he said during the trial, adding that if Mr Askolovitch had turned up in person, "it is not a trial he would have had but a head butt."
Sine is the defendant in Tuesday's court case in Lyon, southern France. The plaintiff is the anti-racism and anti-Semitism group, Licra.
The issue of anti-Semitism, already sensitive in a country still marked by the Alfred Dreyfus affair - the Jewish army captain wrongly accused of spying in the 19th century has become even more charged in recent weeks due to Israel's Gaza offensive; France was hit by a series of anti-Semitic acts, including firebomb attacks on synagogues.
The young Mr Sarkozy, who is now the leader of his father's party in the president's old fiefdom, the chic Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, has since married. He has denied converting to Judaism.

http://www.medhajnews.com/article.php?id=NTM0MA==

[Magda Hassan]

Robert Fisk


Friday 9 January 2015

Charlie Hebdo: Paris attack brothers' campaign of terror can be traced back to Algeria in 1954

Algeria is the post-colonial wound that still bleeds in France

Algeria. Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi I muttered the word "Algeria" to myself. As soon as I heard the names and saw the faces, I said the word "Algeria" again. And then the French police said the two men were of "Algerian origin".

For Algeria remains the most painful wound within the body politic of the Republic save, perhaps, for its continuing self-examination of Nazi occupation and provides a fearful context for every act of Arab violence against France. The six-year Algerian war for independence, in which perhaps a million and a half Arab Muslims and many thousands of French men and women died, remains an unending and unresolved agony for both peoples. Just over half a century ago, it almost started a French civil war.

Read more: Paris shooting - live blog
How the hostage crises ended
Hostages and gunman dead in grocery siege

Maybe all newspaper and television reports should carry a "history corner", a little reminder that nothing absolutely zilch happens without a past. Massacres, bloodletting, fury, sorrow, police hunts ("widening" or "narrowing" as sub-editors wish) take the headlines. Always it's the "who" and the "how" but rarely the "why". Take the crime against humanity in Paris this week the words "atrocity" and "barbarity" somehow diminish the savagery of this act and its immediate aftermath.
We know the victims: journalists, cartoonists, cops. And how they were killed. Masked gunmen, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, ruthless, almost professional nonchalance. And the answer to "why" was helpfully supplied by the murderers. They wanted to avenge "the Prophet" for Charlie Hebdo's irreverent and (for Muslims) highly offensive cartoons. And of course, we must all repeat the rubric: nothing nothing ever could justify these cruel acts of mass murder. And no, the killers cannot call on history to justify their crimes.

In pictures: Charlie Hebdo suspects siege




But there's an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week, the "history corner" that many Frenchmen as well as Algerians prefer to ignore: the bloody 1954-62 struggle of an entire people for freedom against a brutal imperial regime, a prolonged war which remains the foundational quarrel of Arabs and French to this day.
The desperate and permanent crisis in Algerian-French relations, like the refusal of a divorced couple to accept an agreed narrative of their sorrow, poisons the cohabitation of these two peoples in France. However Cherif and Said Kouachi excused their actions, they were born at a time when Algeria had been invisibly mutilated by 132 years of occupation. Perhaps five million of France's six and a half million Muslims are Algerian. Most are poor, many regard themselves as second-class citizens in the land of equality.

READ MORE
Norway's Christians didn't have to apologise for Anders Breivik, and it's the same for Muslims now

Like all tragedies, Algeria's eludes the one-paragraph explanation of news agency dispatches, even the shorter histories written by both sides after the French abandoned Algeria in 1962.
For unlike other important French dependencies or colonies, Algeria was regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France, sending representatives to the French parliament in Paris, even providing Charles de Gaulle and the Allies with a French "capital" from which to invade Nazi-occupied north Africa and Sicily.
More than 100 years earlier, France had invaded Algeria itself, subjugating its native Muslim population, building small French towns and chateaux across the countryside, even in an early 19th-century Catholic renaissance which was supposed to "re-Christianise" northern Africa converting mosques into churches.
The Algerian response to what today appears to be a monstrous historical anachronism varied over the decades between lassitude, collaboration and insurrection. A demonstration for independence in the Muslim-majority and nationalist town of Sétif on VE Day when the Allies had liberated the captive countries of Europe resulted in the killing of 103 European civilians. French government revenge was ruthless; up to 700 Muslim civilians perhaps far more were killed by infuriated French "colons" and in bombardment of surrounding villages by French aircraft and a naval cruiser. The world paid little attention.
But when a full-scale insurrection broke out in 1954 at first, of course, ambushes with few French lives lost and then attacks on the French army the sombre war of Algerian liberation was almost preordained. Beaten in that classic post-war anti-colonial battle at Dien Bien Phu, the French army, after its debacle in 1940, seemed vulnerable to the more romantic Algerian nationalists who noted France's further humiliation at Suez in 1956.
French military police drive through Algiers during the insurrection (Keystone/Getty Images)

READ MORE
Abu Hamza gets life and is linked to Charlie Hebdo killers
The fatwa against Salman Rushdie failed, and so will the extremists who killed in Paris

What the historian Alistair Horne rightly described in his magnificent history of the Algerian struggle as "a savage war of peace" took the lives of hundreds of thousands. Bombs, booby traps, massacres by government forces and National Liberation Front guerrillas in the "bled" the countryside south of the Mediterranean led to the brutal suppression of Muslim sectors of Algiers, the assassination, torture and execution of guerrilla leaders by French paratroopers, soldiers, Foreign Legion operatives including German ex-Nazis and paramilitary police. Even white French sympathisers of the Algerians were "disappeared". Albert Camus spoke out against torture and French civil servants were sickened by the brutality employed to keep Algeria French.
A crowd of Algerian demonstrators outside Government House, carrying Charles de Gaulle posters during the Algerian war of independence in 1985 (Getty Images)
De Gaulle appeared to support the white population and said as much in Algiers "Je vous ai compris," he told them and then proceeded to negotiate with FLN representatives in France. Algerians had long provided the majority of France's Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week's slaughter which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.
Algerians were beaten to death in police barracks or thrown into the Seine. The police chief who supervised security operations and who apparently directed the 1961 massacre was none other than Maurice Papon who was, almost 40 years later, convicted for crimes against humanity under Petain's Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation.
The Algerian conflict finished in a bloodbath. White "pied noir" French colonists refused to accept France's withdrawal, supported the secret OAS in attacking Algerian Muslims and encouraged French military units to mutiny. At one point, De Gaulle feared that French paratroopers would try to take over Paris.
When the end came, despite FLN promises to protect French citizens who chose to stay in Algeria, there were mass killings in Oran. Up to a million and a half white French men, women and children faced with a choice of "the coffin or the suitcase" left for France, along with thousands of loyal Algerian "harki" fighters who fought with the army but were then largely abandoned to their terrible fate by De Gaulle. Some were forced to swallow their own French military medals and thrown into mass graves.
Algerian rebels training to use weapons in 1958 (Getty Images)
But the former French colonists, who still regarded Algeria as French along with an exhausted FLN dictatorship which took over the independent country instituted a cold peace in which Algeria's residual anger, in France as well as in the homeland, settled into long-standing resentment. In Algeria, the new nationalist elite embarked on a hopeless Soviet-style industrialisation of their country. Former French citizens demanded massive reparations; indeed, for decades, the French kept all the drainage maps of major Algerian cities so that the new owners of Algeria had to dig up square miles of city streets every time a water main burst.
And when the Algerian civil war of the 1980s commenced after the Algerian army cancelled a second round of elections which Islamists were sure to win the corrupt FLN "pouvoir" and the Muslim rebels embarked on a conflict every bit as gruesome as the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s and 1960s. Torture, disappearances, village massacres all resumed. France discreetly supported a dictatorship whose military leaders salted away millions of dollars in Swiss banks.
Algerian Muslims returning from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan joined the Islamists in the mountains, killing some of the few remaining French citizens in Algeria. And many subsequently left to fight in the Islamist wars, in Iraq and later Syria.
Enter here the Kouachi brothers, especially Chérif, who was imprisoned for taking Frenchmen to fight against the Americans in Iraq. And the United States, with French support, now backs the FLN regime in its continuing battle against Islamists in Algeria's deserts and mountain forests, arming a military which tortured and murdered thousands of men in the 1990s.
As an American diplomat said just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States "has much to learn" from the Algerian authorities. You can see why some Algerians went to fight for the Iraqi resistance. And found a new cause…

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comm...69184.html

[Magda Hassan]

[David Guyatt]

The strategy of tension in the 21st century.

Faceless and nameless killers and 24 hour news channels with their scripts and cinematics all in place ala sandy hook.

As always you have to ask Cui Bono? That's deep political science student basics.

When you see there hasn't been an attack on Europe in a while, France's deal with Russia for the warboats, the reluctance to back more Russian sanctions and the recognition of Palestine.

The picture becomes clearer

France is being punished by them.

And at the same time the public perception gets another big push towards restlessness at the "bloody muslims".

Even though the vodka drinking, strip club attending mercenaries of ISIS aren't anything resembling a genuine muslim.

I concur with this analysis.

I'm not convinced. Further, I would caution against seeing EVERY event as part of a grand conspiracy, especially for critical thinking skills as well as how it reflects on the research/monitoring community, such as this Forum. Yes, MANY events are false-flag and staged - not what they seem to be - however, NOT ALL are, and I think one must critically analyze which are and which are not using detailed critical thinking, not a reflex to seeing all as part of a grand conspiracy. It is easy in our gloom over the MANY to go overboard and see ALL as such. Not every plane crash, not every suicide, not every mass murder is the work of the hidden hands of secret governments, intelligence and Gladio-like organizations, even if I would agree that all too many have been. I think we loose our validity in the eyes of most if we are seen to view everything as a grand conspiracy.....again, even if many to more than not may well be. Each needs to be dissected and analyzed on its own merits and demerits, IMHO. To me, this seems to be more what it was presented as - even if I see elements of the Police lying about some things [such as who started the final firefight first]. The phone calls to journalists just before they died would not IMO be done by false-flag operatives. These men were reacting, if irrationally by most standards, to the many assaults on the Middle East and the Muslim world, generally. By NO means do I agree with the 'West's' analysis and reaction to events such as this. Yes, it plays into the hands of those leading the war OF terror - but once such 'wars' are set in motion [often with false flag ops and wars, etc.] things can take on a momentum of their own and not all actions and all persons acting are directly actors working for or controlled by those forces that set this situation in motion. While those in power will misuse this incident, at this time, I don't see it as a Gladio-type action. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, if the evidence warrants. Many other operations I do see as provocations cooked up by elements of the ostensible 'targets', but not yet with this one. Boston bombing - most likely; 911 - definitely..etc..but here it seem to me most likely to be 'blowback' from earlier false-flag operations and wars, not one in and of itself [with the information we now have - this could change if, for example, I found out that French or other intelligence were baiting or leading on these men]. It is complex, as many in power thought they say this is their worst nightmare, really treasure such events to more quickly bring on their police state and greater political and economic control of their own and all societies. That said, some people and some actions are done for other reasons, even if they benefit those who on the surface, and to most unwary observers, are the targets. I may agree on 'who benefits' here...but that is a tool - not an acid test of who was the instigator. In the final analysis, I think there is a problem of over-simplifyication in the deep political community, as there is in our nemesis' propaganda. ::drwho::

I'm not convinced either. But there are elements to the event that remain suspicious, I think, and therefore worth deeper consideration.

The two shooters filmed outside the Charlie Hedbo offices were clearly trained and their identity concealed behind balaclavas. They obviously didn't want to be identified. And yet one of them was stupid enough to leave his ID card - no less - in their abandoned getaway car. They also had petrol in the car and police concluded this way to make a bomb. But it seems just as likely that it might have been intended to burn the car to destroy all forensic traces that might identify them, which is standard practise, even by petty criminals, who steal cars. However, almost everything else about their getaway was very sloppy, including holding up the petrol station in Picardy for petrol and food. Doh! Did they really have no deeper or resilient plan for escaping after such a high profile attack? And yet the attack itself seemed to be precision itself. Precision and intelligence versus Homer Simpson like post event planning. Maybe they wanted to be found, I don't know. But if so why the balaclavas?

For me this is wholly incongruous.

[Peter Lemkin]

There are MANY very suspicious elements. The left ID card, the well planned attack and poorly planned escape. Topping the list of those facts I know now is this doozie...if true. The BBC interviewed the neighbor of one of the brothers [don't know which one] and the woman was terrified to talk [this was before they were killed, but after the attack]. She said her husband and she [and other locals] had long been suspicious of them and the husband had secretly entered the apartment and found a huge cache of weapons. When asked if the French Police had yet come, they said 'No'! Amazing, if true. Look, I think Al Qaeda and many other such groups were originally formed, trained and funded by Western intelligence and military, but once they are 'launched', even if a few inside remain 'assets' of the West, such things often take on a life of their own and can become 'Frankenstein' monsters no longer under external control. Some other groups seem to me to be under direct external control. Even if the leadership is sometimes partly under control, individual members or cells may not be. Muslims have a lot to be angry about, even if I condemn killing on their part as much as on the part of the Western meddlers and interventionists. Time will tell. I guess it is a difference of approach if one immediately drinks the cool-aide of the MSM media and intelligence propaganda, or rather assumes the opposite of what they say is most likely true. I think at times things are in between and 'gray' pending more information. I myself strongly lean toward, and have concluded that the 'official' version is most often wrong and misleading on most events...but not on all.

[Magda Hassan]

What I find interesting is the stage management of the witnesses. In the recent Lindt cafe in Sydney hostage event I heard that all the surviving hostages and witnesses are not allowed to talk to the media. Under whose authority I don't know. But there are usually many personal interest stories about victims of crimes or even their friends and neighbours but there is nothing. I also understand that not everyone wants to talk to the media and that they are just ordinary people and not 'celebrities'. But there is nothing. They've had the burials, had the vigil, had the #illridewithyou hash tag, all the boquets have been collected and everyone has gone home and we all live happily ever after. Never to be mentioned again except in the past tense as some thing that once happened. We don't know the names of the other hostages or how they are doing how their injuries are healing. We don't know who shot whom. No ballistics. No reports. Nothing. Same in the French case. We know there were 12 killed - 2 policemen - 4 cartoonists/journalists. We don't know who the other 6 people are. I've seen a couple of short interviews with family members of the dead. That is all. So much media and so little information. Just the same video clips played over and over and the same talking points by the talking heads.

[David Guyatt]

On middle eastern matters I think Thierry Meyssan has an edge. The following is his view based on all available facts. Note the link at the very bottom of the article: "According to McClatchy, Mohammed Mehra and the Kouachi brothers are linked to the French secret services."

Interesting that, these outrages and those tagged as responsible always do seem to be linked to the intelligence services. It's like a signature fact, in actual fact.

A FRENCH SEPTEMBER 11TH?
Who ordered the attack against Charlie Hebdo?

by Thierry Meyssan

While many French react to the attack against Charlie Hebdo denouncing Islam and demonstrating in the streets, Thierry Meyssan points out that the jihadist interpretation is impossible. While it would be tempting for him to see it as an Al Qaeda or Daesh operation, he envisages another, much more dangerous hypothesis.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 10 JANUARY 2015

In this report, France 24 edited the video so that we do not see the attackers execute a fallen police officer.On January 7, 2015, commandos erupted in Paris, in the premises of Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people. 4 more victims are still in serious condition.On the videos, the attackers are heard shouting "Allah Akbar! and "avenge Muhammad". One witness, a Coco designer, said they proclaimed affiliation with al-Qaeda. That's all it took for many French to denounce it as an Islamist attack.However, this assumption is illogical.The mission of this commando had no connection with jihadist ideology

Indeed, members or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda or Daesh would not be content to just kill atheist cartoonists; they would have first destroyed the archives of the newspaper on site, following the model of all their actions in North Africa and the Levant. For jihadists, the first duty is to destroy the objects that they believe offend God, and to punish the "enemies of God."Similarly, they would not have immediately retreated, fleeing the police, without completing their mission. They would rather have completed their mission, were they to die on the spot.In addition, videos and some evidence shows that the attackers are professionals. They wielded their weapons expertly and fired advisedly. They were not dressed in the fashion of the jihadists, but as military commandos.How they dispatched a wounded policeman who posed no danger to them, certifies that their mission was not to "avenge Muhammad" because of the crass humor of Charlie Hebdo.The video censored by French TVThis aims to create the beginning of a civil war

The fact that the assailants speak French well and are probably French does not necessarily indicate that this attack is a Franco-French episode. Rather, the fact that they are professional forces one to distinguish them from possible sponsors. And there is no evidence that these are French.It is a normal reflex, but intellectually wrong to consider, when one is a victim of an attack, that one knows his attackers. This is most logical when it comes to normal crimes, but it's wrong when it comes to international politics.Sponsors for the attack knew it would cause a divide between French Muslims and French non-Muslims. Charlie Hebdo had specialized in anti-Muslim provocation and most Muslims in France have been directly or indirectly their victims. Though the Muslims of France will surely condemn this attack, it will be difficult for them to experience as much pain for the victims as felt by the readers of the newspaper. This will be seen by some as complicity with the murderers.Therefore, rather than seeing this as an extremely deadly Islamist attack of revenge against the newspaper that published the Mohammed cartoons and multiplied front page anti-Muslim headlines, it would be more logical to consider that it is the first episode of a process to trigger a civil war.The strategy of "the clash of civilizations" was designed in Tel Aviv and Washington

The ideology and strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and Daesh does not advocate the creation of civil war in the 'West', but on the contrary to create it in the "East" and hermetically separate the two worlds. Never has Sayyid Qutb, nor any of his successors, called to provoke confrontation between Muslims and non-Muslims in the territories of the latter.On the contrary, the strategy of the "clash of civilizations" was formulated by Bernard Lewis for the US National Security Council then popularized by Samuel Huntington not as a strategy of conquest, but as a predictable situation. [1] It aimed to persuade NATO member group populations of the inevitability of confrontation that preventively assumed the form of the "war on terrorism".It is not in Cairo, Riyadh or Kabul that one advocates the "clash of civilizations", but in Washington and Tel Aviv.The sponsors of the attack against Charlie Hebdo did not seek to satisfy jihadists or the Taliban, but neo-conservatives or liberal hawks.Let's not forget the historical precedents

We must remember that in recent years we have seen the US or NATO special services:
Testing the devastating effects of certain drugs on the civilian population in France [2];
Supporting the OAS to try to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle [3];
Carrying out false flag attacks against civilians in several NATO member states . [4]We must remember that since the break-up of Yugoslavia, the US joint chiefs of staff practiced and honed its "dog fight" strategy in many countries This consists of killing members of the majority community, and also members of minorities, then placing the blame on each of them back-to-back until everyone is sure they are in mortal danger. This is the way Washington caused the civil war in Yugoslavia as well as recently in Ukraine. [5]The French would do well to remember also that it is not they who took the initiative in the fight against the jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. To date, moreover, none of them has committed any attack in France, where the case of Mehdi Nemmouche is not that of a lone terrorist, but of an agent tasked with executing two Mossad agents in Brussels [6] [7]. It was Washington who, on February 6, 2014, convened the interior ministers of Germany, the US, France (Mr. Valls was represented), Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom in order to make the return of European jihadists a matter of national security. [8] It was only after this meeting that the French press addressed this issue, and that the authorities began to react.John Kerry spoke in French for the first time to send a message to the French. He denounced an attack against freedom of expression (while his country since 1995 has continued to bomb and destroy the television stations that were dissing him in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya) and celebrated the struggle against obscurantism.We do not know who sponsored this professional operation against Charlie Hebdo, but we should not allow ourselves to be swept up. We should consider all assumptions and admit that at this stage, its most likely purpose is to divide us; and its sponsors are most likely in Washington.

On the same subject, read: "According to McClatchy, Mohammed Mehra and the Kouachi brothers are linked to the French secret services", Voltaire Network, January 9, 2015.

I have used Google to translate the French language content of the above link about Mehra and the Kouachi bothers being linked to the French secret services via David Drugeon. The translation rendered is below.

According to McClatchy, Mohammed Mehra and Kouachi brothers would be linked to the French secret services
VOLTAIRE NETWORK INTERNATIONAL | January 9, 2015

The US newspaper McClatchy announced that Kouachi and Mohammed Mehra brothers were recruited by Artificer subgroup Khorasan Al Qaeda.

Last year, the same newspaper had revealed the existence of the French Drugeon David (pictured) and his role in al Qaeda in Syria. He claimed that the young man was a member of the French secret services. Then, the Pentagon confirmed consider it as a priority target. The French Ministry of Defence was then strongly reversed Drugeon that ever worked for him.

On 6 November 2014, Fox News announced that David Drugeon had been killed by a US drone Sarmada (Syria). The chain reiterated the charge that he was working for the French secret service.

In an article by its correspondent in Iraq, Mitchell Prothero, McClatchy analyzes the images and videos of the killing of Charlie Hebdo. It concluded that Kouachi Brothers probably had a war experience or at least have received military training. The article reiterates the charge of belonging to David Drugeon to the French secret services. He suggests a possible liability of the French secret services in Mehra and Kouachi business.

This article appeared in the internal Pentagon press review, dated January 8.

So, the following is the McClatchey report referred to by Meyssan:

]Videos show Paris gunmen were calm as they executed police officer, fled scene

BY MITCHELL PROTHERO
McClatchy Foreign StaffJanuary 7, 2015

IRBIL, IRAQ The gunmen who attacked the Paris editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday appeared to be focused professionals who'd carefully prepared the assault.
Video showing two of the assailants suggests they were well trained, striking their target during its weekly editorial meeting, when most of the publication's journalists would be gathered in one place.
Other evidence suggests they could be linked to a top French al Qaida operative, David Drugeon, who's been the target at least twice of U.S. airstrikes in Syria over the last four months.
Witnesses inside the magazine's offices told the French newspaper L'Humanité that both attackers spoke perfect French and claimed to be members of al Qaida.
Drugeon, who many experts believe was a French intelligence asset before defecting to al Qaida, is alleged to have masterminded a 2012 "lone wolf" attack on French soldiers and Jewish targets in the southern French city of Toulouse. That attack killed seven people before the perpetrator, a French citizen named Mohammed Merah, who French intelligence believes had been trained by Drugeon, was killed by a police sniper after a long, violent standoff with security forces.
Wednesday's attack killed at least 10 journalists and two policemen, who'd apparently been assigned to guard the magazine because of previous threats made against the publication, including a firebombing in 2011.

Deadly Charlie Hebdo attack caught in video (HD)

NY Daily News




The gunmen escaped and were still at large hours after the attack. French authorities said they were seeking three people in the attack.
Witnesses speaking to French television reporters described the attackers as calmly entering the editorial offices of the magazine during its weekly editorial meeting, shooting the victims before declaring "Allahu Akbar" and "We have avenged the prophet," before quickly and calmly departing the scene before police could respond.
In three videos of the aftermath posted on the Internet by witnesses, two masked gunmen can be seen exiting the building with military efficiency, making coordinated and precise movements indicative of extensive experience and training. Commonly referred to by military professionals as "muscle memory," the movements reflect the kind of repetitive training that allows someone to efficiently execute tactical movements and maintain fire discipline and accurate marksmanship under the stress of combat.
In one series of photographs, a French police vehicle can be seen with its windshield riddled with bullets in a fairly tight cluster, a pattern that would be nearly impossible for a casually trained beginner to produce with the assault rifles the gunmen were carrying. Though simple to use, the rifles, a variant of the Russian AK-47, tend to be difficult to control when fired on full automatic. But the impact pattern on the police vehicle indicates not just a familiarity with the weapon, but at least a competent degree of marksmanship.
Another video underscores the likelihood that the two were experienced fighters. In it, two gunmen exit the building to board a waiting hatchback sedan when they notice a policeman down the block attempting to engage them as they escape. Without hesitation, the two gunmen shoot the officer, then calmly close on the wounded man as he lies in the street before one of the shooters fires a round into his head from pointblank range.
Again, the calm manner in which the wounded man is murdered before the pair return to the car suggests combat experience or at least extensive training. Both men move quickly but in a very controlled manner. At one point, the lead gunman appears to use a common infantry hand signal to summon his accomplice to his side.
The pair then drive away from the scene, but not before one of the gunmen picks up an object possibly a shoe that had fallen from the car as the door opened.
Prothero is a McClatchy special correspondent based in Irbil, Iraq. Email: mprothero@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @mitchprothero

[David Guyatt]

What I find interesting is the stage management of the witnesses. In the recent Lindt cafe in Sydney hostage event I heard that all the surviving hostages and witnesses are not allowed to talk to the media. Under whose authority I don't know. But there are usually many personal interest stories about victims of crimes or even their friends and neighbours but there is nothing. I also understand that not everyone wants to talk to the media and that they are just ordinary people and not 'celebrities'. But there is nothing. They've had the burials, had the vigil, had the #illridewithyou hash tag, all the boquets have been collected and everyone has gone home and we all live happily ever after. Never to be mentioned again except in the past tense as some thing that once happened. We don't know the names of the other hostages or how they are doing how their injuries are healing. We don't know who shot whom. No ballistics. No reports. Nothing. Same in the French case. We know there were 12 killed - 2 policemen - 4 cartoonists/journalists. We don't know who the other 6 people are. I've seen a couple of short interviews with family members of the dead. That is all. So much media and so little information. Just the same video clips played over and over and the same talking points by the talking heads.

Witnesses being warned not to talk was also a feature of the Boston bombing if my memory serves.

Personally, and I suppose it will sound ghoulish, and I don't mean it that way, but I want to know the name of the policeman shot dead outside the Charlie building, where and when he will be buried, with police honours etc -- just to know that this was true, as I tend to distrust what might arguably be seen as staged video clips.

For my sins I harbour a little doubt - a teensy weeny one - that the two gunmen outside the offices of Charlie Hedbo - may not be the same of the two Kouachi brothers. I say this only because we only have the authorities word for it that they are one and the same, and the disparity in the military professionalism in the attack itself followed by the complete clumsiness in the scape continues to niggle at me.

Yours in cynicism.

[David Guyatt]

The devil's in the detail...

I think the Yemen al-Qaida connection to be really quite tenuous. As it presently stands, a just court would not regard it as conclusive evidence were it to be submitted as such.

It is not an American intelligence fact, but a supposition: "...the elder Kouachi had travelled to Yemen although it was unclear whether he was there to work for extremist groups such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based there," said senior US official on Thursday. Unclear, right. Maybe he went there to buy discounted cous-cous to import?

However, a French security official speaking on condition of anonymity (no surprises there) claimed that "American authorities had shared intelligence indicating that Said Kouachi had travelled to Yemen several years ago for training..."

What the fuck? Travelled for training? Just that? Nothing more telling than that? Perhaps he really did want to become a cous-cous importer? We don't know because no one is saying - because they don't seem to know. Consequently disparate facts are woven into a highly suspect tapestry.

But at least "French authorities [are] seeking to verify the accuracy of the intelligence." Thank God for that, anyway. I would hate for them just to accept that he travelled to Yemen for training as a bald assertion-cum-media fact.

And so far as I can ascertain, the two gunman shouting "tell the media it's al-Qaida in Yemen" is only according to just one witness, identified as Cedric Le Bechec, writing on Twitter. I have no way of knowing if this is fact or fantasy. Does anyone?

So with that preamble, here is the Stars and Stripes article:

1 of 2 brothers wanted in Paris terror attack may have trained in Yemen

• 
  
• Charlie Hebdo shootings Europe's latest deadly terror attack
  
  A gun assault on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday was the deadliest terrorist attack in France's recent history. Some other terror attacks in Western Europe:
  
  

PARIS Police SWAT teams backed by helicopters tracked two heavily armed brothers with al-Qaida sympathies suspected in the newsroom massacre of a satirical French weekly that spoofed Islam, honing in Thursday on a region north of Paris as the nation mourned the dozen slain.
Authorities fear a second strike by the suspects, who U.S. counterterrorism officials said were both on the U.S. no-fly list, and distributed their portraits with the notice "armed and dangerous." More than 88,000 security forces were deployed on the streets of France.
They also extended France's maximum terror alert from Paris to the northern Picardie region, focusing on several towns that might be possible safe havens for the two Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34.
A senior U.S. official said Thursday the elder Kouachi had traveled to Yemen, although it was unclear whether he was there to work with extremist groups such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based there. Witnesses said the attackers claimed allegiance to al-Qaida in Yemen during the bloody attack Wednesday.
Both were also on the U.S. no fly list, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said.
A French security official said American authorities had shared intelligence indicating that Said Kouachi had traveled to Yemen several years ago for training and French authorities were seeking to verify the accuracy of the intelligence. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The worst spasm of terror violence in more than a half-century stunned France. The lights of the Eiffel Tower went out Thursday night in a tribute to the dead from the elegant iron lady that symbolizes France to the world. At noon, the Paris Metro came to a standstill and a crowd fell silent near the Notre Dame Cathedral.
French President Francois Hollande joined by residents, tourists and Muslim leaders called for tolerance after the country's worst terrorist attack in decades.
"France has been struck directly in the heart of its capital, in a place where the spirit of liberty and thus of resistance breathed freely," Hollande said.
Nine people, members of the brothers' entourage, have been detained for questioning in several regions. In all, 90 people, many of them witnesses to the grisly assault on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, were questioned for information on the attackers, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a statement.
The minister confirmed reports the men were identified by the elder brother's ID card, left in an abandoned getaway car, a slip that contrasted with the seeming professionalism of the attack.
A third suspect, 18-year-old Mourad Hamyd, surrendered at a police station Wednesday evening after hearing his name linked to the attacks. His relationship to the Kouachi brothers was unclear.
The Kouachi brothers the Paris-born offspring of Algerian parents were well known to French counterterrorism authorities. Cherif Kouachi, a former pizza deliveryman, had appeared in a 2005 French TV documentary on Islamic extremism and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for trying to join up with fighters battling in Iraq.
Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed in the attack and 11 people were wounded, four of them critically. The publication had long drawn threats for its depictions of Islam, although it also satirized other religions and political figures.
Charlie Hebdo had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, and a caricature of Islamic State's leader was the last tweet sent out by the irreverent newspaper, minutes before the attack. Its feed has since gone silent.
Charlie Hebdo planned a special edition next week, housed in the offices of another paper.
"The paper will continue because they haven't won," Patrick Pelloux, a Charlie Hebdo columnist said tearfully to iTele TV.
Editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, who was among those slain, "symbolized secularism ... the combat against fundamentalism," his companion, Jeannette Bougrab, said on BFM-TV.
"He was ready to die for his ideas," she said.
Witnesses to the massacre have said the attackers claimed allegiance to al-Qaida in Yemen, and on videos they were heard saying they were avenging the prophet. "Tell the media that it's al-Qaida in Yemen," the two shouted as they were fleeing, one witness, Cedric Le Bechec, wrote on Facebook.
The governor of a southern province in Yemen told The Associated Press on Thursday that four French citizens had been deported from Yemen in the last four months. Gov. Ahmed Abdullah al-Majidi said he didn't have their names and there was no confirmed link between those deportations and the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Jarring France further, two mosques in France were firebombed Thursday and a police officer was killed in Montrouge, on the southern edge of Paris. However, Cazeneuve told reporters there was no known link between that killing and the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Police searched apartment in Reims, in the Champagne region, where the interior minister said Said Kouachi lived, with technicians gathering samples.
The hunt moved further north after a report that two men resembling the suspects robbed a gas station in Villers-Cotterets early Thursday. The focus then enlarged to Crepy-en-Valois, where heavily armed security forces with air cover and a giant black rapid intervention truck moved through rural streets and among old stone buildings.
Authorities around Europe have warned of the threat posed by the return of Western jihadis trained in warfare. France counts at least 1,200 citizens in the war zone, headed there, returned or dead, and officials have said France is a preferred target. Both the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have issued threats to France home to Western Europe's largest Muslim population.
France is taking part in airstrikes in Iraq in a bid to defeat the Islamic State group, and intervened to rout out al-Qaida extremists from northern Mali, a former French colony.
The French suspect in a deadly 2014 attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in southern France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, received paramilitary training in Pakistan.
A journalist who took refuge on the building roof during the attack said that when he went into Charlie Hebdo's offices he was confronted with life and death.
"On the one side the living and the other the dead," Edouard Periin told iTele. The dead and dying, he said, were on the left.
Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet in Paris, Ahmed Al-Haj in Sanaa, Yemen, Chris van den Hond in Crepy-en-Valois and Michel Spingler in Villers-Cotterets contributed to this report.