From ths at psalience.org  Mon Sep 12 13:22:42 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:22:42 +0200
Subject: [THS] Paul Balles: House of Horrors
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110912132046.05d83e78@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29089.htm

House of Horrors

By Paul Balles

September 10, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --- Assassinations, kidnappings, torture - the actions of uncivilised pirates, barbaric criminals and rogue governments.

The entire litany of vicious crimes against humanity, fitting for horrid, inhuman terrorist groups or third world mongrels, now belongs to America.

Every day another violation of human dignity is exposed in the medium of the Internet and ignored by most mainstream media.

The leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney exemplifies the brutish attitude of leading Americans.

"American strength is the only guarantee of liberty, American strength turned the Cuban missiles around, American strength caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, American strength yanked Saddam out of his spider hole," he said.

William Blum, writing in the Information Clearing House refers to the US, Nato and the European Union as "The Holy triumvirate" who share the self-righteous attitudes that blithely ignore any right of others to live in peace.

Blum says: "It recognises no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like 'humanitarian'."

The idea of "strike from the skies but keep Western boots off the ground, [as a way of] doing the right thing and ridding the world of a horrible dictator," voiced by Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian informs the favour seen in the use of drones.

The object of homespun hate might be able to shoot down an expensive aircraft, but that's only money; and, after all, it's China's money.

The perceived enemy only has to endure collateral damage, which translates into the missile murders of women, children and elderly who have nothing to do with ongoing political adventures.

On August 31 Ian Cobain and Ben Quinn, writing in the Guardian, revealed that US firms profited from torture flights.

In a rendition programme, America hired private firms who "flew terrorism suspects to locations around the world, where they were often tortured", the article reports.

Nadeem Sarwar, writing for Monsters and Critics, Islamabad, records how "Beatings, deprivation of food and sleep and cultural shocks were part of the daily routine for Ghairat Bahir during six years spent in US detention centres in Afghanistan".

Truthout editor William Rivers Pitt refers to "the rancid reality of a free and un-convicted Dick Cheney appearing in the public eye once again" following the publication of Cheney's memoirs.

"If there were any justice to be found in this deranged country, Dick Cheney would have penned his pestiferous, self-serving little memoir by the light of a bare bulb inside the cell of a federal prison," he said.

According to Pitt, Cheney's "actions directly caused deaths and injuries that number in the hundreds of thousands. The deaths he is responsible for are ongoing to this day...."

In several appearances at televised interviews, Cheney consistently attempted to defend his actions while in office, including the use of torture in interrogations.

In these interviews, Cheney proudly admitted that he authorised torture, secret prisons and illegal wiretapping. All are crimes under US and international law.

Observes Robert Kaiser in the Washington Post, the memoir attempts "to make clear how right Cheney always was and how wrongheaded were his critics and bureaucratic rivals".

More than once Cheney tells us he would do again exactly what he did the first time "in a heartbeat".

He acknowledges no serious regrets about anything.

Under any universally acceptable code of justice, narcissists who serve nothing but themselves, deserve to be arrested and prosecuted for their crimes.

Failure to do so makes the public complicit in their crimes.


From ths at psalience.org  Mon Sep 12 13:25:32 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:25:32 +0200
Subject: [THS] Ray McGovern: Bird-Dogging Torturers in NYC
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110912132314.05d83be8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29096.htm

Bird-Dogging Torturers in NYC

By Ray McGovern

September 10, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, many ex-Bush administration officials who approved torture in the ?war on terror? and botched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are back in the spotlight taking bows from appreciative audiences in tightly controlled settings.

Back in my native New York on Thursday afternoon, I was bolstered by a scene of what I call real New Yorkers (along with tourists and honking cab drivers) joining in a protest of the adulation bestowed on torture lawyer John Yoo at the swank University Club off Fifth Avenue.

What became gradually and reassuringly clear is that New York continues to be a tale of two cities. And those whom my grandmother used to call ?the swells? remain a loud but increasingly transparent minority.

The hoi aristoi arrived at the club quite decked out in wide silk ties and pricey shoes to honor Yoo, the Bush administration lawyer who drafted some of the most objectionable rationalizations for torturing detainees in the ?war on terror.? (He is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.)

My chatting with the hoi polloi on the street, who were supporting the protest, brought a welcome reminder that the self-important ?meritocracy? of the University Club ? ?the suits and the shoes? as we call them ? hardly represent New York City.

That realization also generated some helpful adrenalin for later, when I traveled over to the 92nd Street Y for a panel discussion on ?9/11 a Decade Later: Lessons Learned and Future Challenges,? featuring former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and George W. Bush?s press spokesman Ari Fleischer. The event, sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center, was moderated by neoconservative talk show host Michael Medved.

I found myself in the banal belly of the beast. To say I felt out of place would be an understatement. My discomfort grew as Medved?s introductory remarks included a rant about radical, fundamentalist, Islamist terrorists.

Welcoming Dissent ? NOT

But those weren?t the only enemies to be feared. The event?s ?ushers? threw out a handful of folks because they were on the Jewish Policy Center?s equivalent of a ?no-fly list.? They were preemptively and roughly removed before the event even got started.

I wore a new ?Veterans for Peace? T-shirt (since the blood drawn when I protested at Hillary Clinton?s speech last February would not wash out of the old one). [See: Ex-CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Beaten, Arrested for Silent Protest at Clinton Speech, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/18/ex_cia_analyst_ray_mcgovern_beaten ]

This time, standing in the front row of the large theater in silent witness against Rumsfeld and his apologists on the panel and in the audience got me unceremoniously thrown out after a mere two minutes.

In coming to the Rumsfeld/Mukasey/Fleischer/Medved whitewash of the incompetence before 9/11 and then the aggressive wars and torture afterwards, I did not expect to be able to resume the four-minute impromptu debate I had lucked into with Rumsfeld on live TV on May 4, 2006, in Atlanta. [See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FTmuhynaw ]

However, this discussion turned out to be so boring, with an occasional dash of disingenuousness thrown in about how ?they? hate our democracy, that it was almost a relief not to have to sit, or stand, through it much longer ? waiting for the off-chance to debate Rumsfeld again.

A sympathetic policeman, when ordered to remove a young woman who stood up in protest later, commented sotto voce, ?I just don?t understand how you could have sat there for as long as you did!?

No Q&A This Time

It also was no surprise that no one was permitted to come to a mike to ask a question. This time questions had to be written on index cards and thoroughly vetted before being given to the speakers. Still less of a surprise was it that the question I dutifully wrote on my index card did not make the cut. I wrote:

?Mr. Rumsfeld, why did you in November 2002 tell Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers to abort the armed service-and-intelligence-wide inquiry he had ordered his chief legal counsel, Navy Captain Jane Dalton to commission into methods of interrogation to which the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force had strongly objected??

Background: After over a year of study, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued on Dec. 11, 2008, a unanimous report (?Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody?), exposing in sordid detail the circumstances surrounding Rumsfeld?s order to quash an inquiry into the legality of torture methods. (Much of the detail adduced below comes from the Senate report.)

The Senate Committee found that Rumsfeld in November 2002 had nipped in the bud an in-depth legal review of interrogation techniques at precisely the time when all interested parties were eager for an authoritative ruling as to their lawfulness.

Rumsfeld?s order was conveyed to Myers by William ?Jim? Haynes II, then the Defense Department counsel, who told Myers to cease and desist. Assured of Myers? and Dalton?s cooperation (Dalton was later promoted to Admiral), and relying on the uniformed JAGs not to risk speaking out, Rumsfeld was able to stop the inquiry cold.

The summer of 2002 had brought to interrogators at Guantanamo new techniques adopted from the Korean War practices of Chinese Communist and North Korean interrogators who extracted false confessions from captured American soldiers.

And, as Bush famously told a TV interviewer, ?The lawyer said it was legal.? Sadly, hired-hand, malleable lawyers were not lacking. On Aug. 1, a memo drafted by John Yoo and signed by the head of the Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee (who was then John Yoo?s boss and is now a federal judge), stated that for an act to qualify as ?torture?:

    * ?Physical pain 
 must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.
       
    * ?Purely mental pain or suffering 
 must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.?

In other words, Bybee was loosening the definition of torture to permit a wide range of abuses that the United States had previously regarded as torture, especially when inflicted on Americans.

Adapting/Adopting Chinese Torture Techniques

During the week of Sept. 16, 2002, a group of interrogators from Guantanamo flew to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for training in the use of these SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, & Escape) techniques, which were originally designed to help downed pilots withstand the regimen of torture employed by China and North Korea.

Now, SERE techniques were being ?reverse engineered? and placed in the toolkit of U.S. military and CIA interrogators.

As soon as the Guantanamo interrogators returned from Fort Bragg, senior administration lawyers, including the Pentagon?s Haynes, John Rizzo of CIA, and David Addington (counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney) visited Guantanamo to underscore that top administration lawyers were all on board.

And, just to make quite sure there was no doubt about the new license given to interrogators, Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to CIA?s Counterterrorist Center, arrived and gathered the Guantanamo staff together on Oct. 2, 2002, to resolve any lingering questions regarding unfamiliar aggressive interrogation techniques, like the sensation of drowning induced by water-boarding.

Fredman stressed that ?the language of the [torture] statutes is written vaguely.? He repeated Bybee?s Aug. 1 guidance and summed up the legalities in this way: ?It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you?re doing it wrong.?

More Authoritative Guidance Sought

Small wonder that on Oct. 11, 2002, Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander at Guantanamo, saw fit to double check with his superior, SOUTHCOM commander Gen. James Hill and request formal authorization to use aggressive interrogation techniques, including water-boarding.

On Oct. 25, 2002, Hill forwarded the request to Gen. Myers and Secretary Rumsfeld, commenting that, while lawyers were saying the techniques could be used, ?I want a legal review of it, and I want you to tell me that, policy-wise, it?s the right way to do business.?

Hill later told the Army Inspector General that he (Hill) thought the request ?was important enough that there ought to be a high-level look at it 
 [there] ought to be a major policy discussion of this and everybody ought to be involved.? Gen. Myers, in turn, solicited the views of the military services on the Dunlavey/Hill request.

The Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force all expressed serious concerns about the legality of the techniques and called for a comprehensive legal review. The Marine Corps, for example, wrote, ?Several of the techniques arguably violate federal law, and would expose our service members to possible prosecution.?

The Defense Department?s Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) at Guantanamo joined the services in expressing grave misgivings. Reflecting the tenor of the four services? concerns, CITF?s chief legal advisor wrote that the ?legality of applying certain techniques? for which authorization was requested was ?questionable.?

He added that he could not ?advocate any action, interrogation or otherwise, that is predicated upon the principle that all is well if the ends justify the means and others are not aware of how we conduct our business.?

Myers?s Legal Counsel, Captain Jane Dalton, had her own concerns (and has testified that she made Gen. Myers aware of them), together with those expressed in writing by the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. Dalton directed her staff to initiate a thorough legal and policy review of the proposed techniques.

The review got off to a quick start. As a first step, Dalton ordered a secure video teleconference including Guantanamo, SOUTHCOM, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army?s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca. Dalton said she wanted to find out more information about the techniques in the request and to begin discussing the legal issues to see if her office could do its own independent legal analysis.

Rumsfeld?s Lawyer Says Stop

Under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Captain Dalton testified that, after she and her staff had begun their analysis, Gen. Myers directed her in November 2002 to stop the review.

She explained that Myers returned from a meeting and ?advised me that Mr. Haynes wanted me 
 to cancel the video teleconference and to stop the review? because of concerns that ?people were going to see? the Guantanamo request and the military services? analysis of it. Haynes (i.e., Rumsfeld) ?wanted to keep it much more close-hold,? Dalton said.

Dalton ordered her staff to stop the legal analysis. She testified that this was the only time that she had ever been asked to stop analyzing a request that came to her for review.

Haynes told the Senate committee, ?There was a sense by DoD leadership that this decision was taking too long.?

On Nov. 27, 2002, shortly after Haynes told Myers to order Dalton to stop her review ? and despite the serious legal concerns of the military services ? Haynes sent Rumsfeld a one-page memo recommending that he approve all but three of the 18 techniques in the correspondence from Guantanamo.

Techniques like stress positions, forced nudity, exploitation of phobias (like fear of dogs), deprivation of light and auditory stimuli were all recommended by Haynes for approval.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld signed Haynes?s recommendation, adding a handwritten note referring to the use of stress positions: ?I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours??

In Line with the President

Rumsfeld?s approval of these techniques, over the objections of the top legal officers of all of the armed services, was in line with, and fleshed out, the ?smoking gun? two-page executive memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002. The Senate Committee concluded that Bush?s memo ?opened the door? to subsequent abuse in interrogation.

In his memo, the President tried his best to square a circle. He declared that Geneva did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees, but that they would nonetheless be treated ?humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.?

?Conclusion 1? of the Senate committee report stated:

?On Feb. 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees.

?Following the President?s determination, techniques such as water boarding, nudity, and stress positions 
 were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.?

Much later, when Gen. Myers came to Washington to peddle his memoir, I had a chance to quiz him personally in public on May 12, 2009. [See: ?Impertinent Questions for Gen. Myers? http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/051309c.html

?Gen. Myers,? I began, ?you were one of eight addressees for the President?s directive of Feb. 7, 2002. What did you do when you learned of the President?s decision about exempting al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the protections of Geneva??

Myers said he had fought the good fight before the President?s decision. The sense was, if the President wanted to dismiss Geneva, what was a mere four-star general to do?

And yet, in his book Myers claims, ?Showing respect for the Geneva Conventions was important to all of us in uniform.? Right. What seems clear is that Myers was well chosen by Rumsfeld as a tall good-looking blue air force suit not likely to stand on principle. Sadly, none of the uniformed suits summoned the courage to speak out.

On Thursday evening, what Rumsfeld, Mukasey, Fleischer, and Medved seemed to be saying, in effect, was, ?Principle. C?mon! Haven?t you heard? 9/11 changed everything.?

I can say that in preparation for attending the session, I subjected myself to a different sort of torture, reading Rumsfeld?s banal memoir on the train to New York. In case you were wondering, he apparently forgot to include in his book any mention of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

An earlier version of this article appeared first on www.Consortiumnews.com 


From ths at psalience.org  Mon Sep 12 13:39:15 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:39:15 +0200
Subject: [THS] !!!! Ellsberg Says that the Govt Has ORDERED the Media Not to
 Cover 9/11
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110912133624.0577e890@mail.messagingengine.com>

From June 14:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/pentagon-papers-whistleblower-daniel-ellsberg-says-that-the-government-has-ordered-the-media-not-to-cover-911.html

 

Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg Says that the Government Has ORDERED the Media Not to Cover 9/11

It?s big news that the Pentagon Papers have finally been released by the government.

But the statements from Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg about 9/11 have not been covered by the corporate media.

As Fire Dog Lake?s Jeff Kaye writes today:

The entire 9/11 field of inquiry has been vilified, poisoned over the years by ridicule, sometimes fantastic conspiracy mongering, and fearfulness by journalists of approaching the material, lest they be branded as irresponsible or some kind of conspiracy freak. As a result, little work has been done to investigate, except by a small group of people, some of whom have raised some real questions 


Similarly, Air Force Colonel and key Pentagon official Karen Kwiatkowski ? who blew the whistle on the Bush administration?s efforts to concoct false intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ? wrote (page 26):

I have been told by reporters that they will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life. To be charged with questioning these foundations is far more serious than being labeled a disgruntled conspiracy nut or anti-government traitor, or even being sidelined or marginalized within an academic, government service, or literary career. To question the official 9/11 story is simply and fundamentally revolutionary. In this way, of course, questioning the official story is also simply and fundamentally American.

Several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing ?a form of self-censorship?:

There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples? necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions
. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism. 

What we are talking about here ? whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not ? is a form of self-censorship.

The head of CNN agreed: 

There was ?almost a patriotism police? after 9/11 and when the network showed [things critical of the administration's policies] it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and ?big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ?You?re being anti-American here.?

Keith Olbermann said:

You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble 
. You cannot say: By the way, there?s something wrong with our 
. system. 

Former Washington Post ? and now Huffington Post ? columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .

There?s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There?s the fear of being labeled partisan if one?s bullshit-calling isn?t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don?t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy ? if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter ? whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship ? or whatever it is ? out of the way.

The Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, Seymour Hersh, said:

?All of the institutions we thought would protect us ? particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress ? they have failed. The courts . . . the jury?s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn?t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that?s the most glaring
. 

Q: What can be done to fix the (media) situation?

[Long pause] You?d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives. You?d actually have to start promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn?t think you could control. And they?re not going to do that.?

Veteran reporter Bill Moyers criticized the corporate media for parroting the obviously false link between 9/11 and Iraq (and the false claims that Iraq possessed WMDs) which the administration made in the run up to the Iraq war, and concluded that the false information was not challenged because:

?the [mainstream] media had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President ? no questions asked.?

Of course, the corporate media is always pro-war. Since 9/11 provided a justification for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere, the mainstream media doesn?t want to question the government?s version of events. 

As Tom Brokaw notes:

All wars are based on propaganda.

What Does Ellsberg Say?

Ellsberg says that the government has ordered the media not to cover 9/11:

Ellsberg seemed hardly surprised that today?s American mainstream broadcast media has so far failed to take [former FBI translator and 9/11 whistleblower Sibel] Edmonds up on her offer, despite the blockbuster nature of her allegations [which Ellsberg calls "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers"]. 

As Edmonds has also alluded, Ellsberg pointed to the New York Times, who ?sat on the NSA spying story for over a year? when they ?could have put it out before the 2004 election, which might have changed the outcome.?

?There will be phone calls going out to the media saying ?don?t even think of touching it, you will be prosecuted for violating national security,?? he told us.

* * *

?I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to ?How do we deal with Sibel??? contends Ellsberg. ?The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn?t get into the media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to to the government and they would be told ?don?t touch this . . . .??

He supports a new 9/11 investigation.

He says that the case of a certain 9/11 whistleblower is ?far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers?. (Here?s some of what that whistleblower says.) He also said that the government is ordering the media to cover up her allegations about 9/11. 

And he says that some of the claims concerning government involvement in 9/11 are credible, that ?very serious questions have been raised about what they [U.S. government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there might have been?, that engineering 9/11 would not be humanly or psychologically beyond the scope of those in office, and that there?s enough evidence to justify a new, ?hard-hitting? investigation into 9/11 with subpoenas and testimony taken under oath (see this and this).

Alternative Media Is Not Much Better

It is not just the corporate media.

I have had the owners of highly-regarded alternative media companies confide in me privately that they don?t believe the government?s version of 9/11, but that are scared of discussing it publicly because they don?t want to be tarred-and-feathered for discussing ?conspiracy theories?.

Even writers like Glenn Greenwald ? who are good on so many issues ? won?t touch it.

Of course ? as Ellsberg points out ? ?Secrets 
 can be kept reliably 
 for decades 
 even though they are known to thousands of insiders?. Indeed, the whole label ?conspiracy theory? is just an attempt to diffuse criticism of the powerful.

People used to understand this. As the quintessential American writer Mark Twain said in a more rational age:

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public. 

Of course, as thousands of top American military officers, counter-terrorism officials, intelligence officers, congressmen, structural engineers, and others have publicly said, the government?s story about 9/11 makes absolutely no sense. See this, this, this and this. And family members of people who died on 9/11 ? and many New Yorkers ? want a new investigation.

But you?ll never hear that in the corporate media.


From ths at psalience.org  Mon Sep 12 13:44:24 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:44:24 +0200
Subject: [THS] Sibel Edmonds: Bin Laden worked for US till 9/11
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110912134405.054abed8@mail.messagingengine.com>

Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 05:01 AM PDT

Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for US till 9/11

by lukery

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11."

These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies.

As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from 'actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia') as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

Control of Central Asia 
The goals of the American 'statesmen' directing these activities included control of Central Asia's vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.

The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.

In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)

Accordingto Sibel: 

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam. 

Uighurs 
Sibel was recently askedto write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that "our fingerprint is all over it."

Of course, Sibel isn't the first or only person to recognize any of this.  Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001: 

"were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China." 

And also that: 

"Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia." 

In a separate interview, Margolis said: 

"That illustrates Henry Kissinger's bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America's enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.

The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden's collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this." 

Rogues Gallery 
Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she publishedeighteen photos, titled "Sibel Edmonds? State Secrets Privilege Gallery," of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called 'President-in-exile' of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called 'government-in-exile' was 'established' on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.

Also featured in Sibel's Rogues Gallery was 'former' spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani's 'government-in-exile' of  East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his "Xinjiang Project" for Rand Corp is apparentlythe blueprint for Turani's government-in-exile. Sibel has openly statedher contempt for Mr. Fuller.

Susurluk 
The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.

Sibel states that "a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered 'certain' aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs)."

One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chiefof Counter-Terrorism for Turkey's intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel's Rogues Gallery. Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel's gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman's underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel into the spying ring.

The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.

Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo 
Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel's gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated$25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.

US interests also convergedwith those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.

Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.

State Secrets 
Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony. In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting " 'sensitive diplomatic relations,' protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia..." This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.

As Sibel says in the interview: 

I have information about things that our government has lied to us about... those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11. 

Summary 
The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.

It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.

The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.

----- 
Cross-posted at Against All Enemies

Originally posted to lukery on Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 05:01 AM PDT.


From ths at psalience.org  Mon Sep 12 13:52:11 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:52:11 +0200
Subject: [THS] Chris Hedges: A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110912134745.0432b680@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/nationalism_in_the_aftermath_of_9_11_20110910/

A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
Posted on Sep 10, 2011

By Chris Hedges

I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter?s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan. 

I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies?a foot in a woman?s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso?lay scattered amid the wreckage. 

Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact. 

The images of the ?jumpers? proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

The ?jumpers? did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the ?jumpers? said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The ?jumpers? illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The ?jumpers? reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live.  And we can die before we physically expire.

The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair. 

Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since. We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that ?our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. 
 Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.? 

I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief. 

There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.

?The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,? I told him.

The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state?s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs. Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, ?for suicide bombers.? 

Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran?although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children?was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.

What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clich?s about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo?s ghost. 

?It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,? wrote Elias Canetti. ?It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.?

We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.

We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden?s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip. 

As Wordsworth wrote:

    Action is transitory?a step, a blow,
    The motion of a muscle?this way or that?
    ?Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
    We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
    Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
    And has the nature of infinity.

 
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement?s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

AP / Richard Drew

A person falls from the north tower of New York?s World Trade Center after terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the 110-story twin buildings on Sept. 11, 2001. 


From ths at psalience.org  Mon Sep 12 14:03:52 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:03:52 +0200
Subject: [THS] On this 10th anniversary of 9/11,
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110912140329.05ba9f60@mail.messagingengine.com>

This message is available online at http://www.WantToKnow.info/911/911_anniversary_news

Bookmark and Share 


On this 10th anniversary of 9/11, our hearts go out to those killed in this tragic event and their families. In their honor, let us open to learning more about what happened on that fateful day. Below are key excerpts from 20 of the most revealing and astonishing major media articles on 9/11 ever published. Links to the full articles on their media websites are provided for easy verification. This vital information is presented as an opportunity for you to educate yourself, and to inspire us to work together to strengthen democracy and build a brighter future for us all. For how you can make a difference with the knowledge you've gained, see the "What you can do" box at the bottom.



[9/11] Hijack 'suspects' alive and well
2001-09-23, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well. The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt. Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities. He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year [and] became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines. Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects ... says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver. Meanwhile ... a London-based Arabic daily says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi. He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive. FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt. 

Note: Yet these four are all later listed in the 9/11 Commission report as the hijackers. Click here and scroll down a little over half way to see their photos in the official report. For more on this, click here. For an abundance of reliable information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here. 




Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained At U.S. Bases
2001-09-14, Newsweek Magazine
http://www.newsweek.com/2001/09/14/alleged-hijackers-may-have-trained-at-u-s-...

U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in [9/11] terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. -- known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source. Another of the alleged hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., said another high-ranking Pentagon official. The fifth man may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the United States, according to the Pentagon source. The five men were on a list of 19 people identified as hijackers by the FBI on [September 14]. The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly commandeered United Airlines Flight 93. That flight [ended in] rural Pennsylvania. The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped highjack United Airlines Flight 75, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. Military records show that the three used as their address 10 Radford Boulevard, a base roadway on which residences for foreign-military flight trainees are located.

Note: For more on this vitally important news, see the Washington Post article available here and the Los Angeles Times article here. Several of the alleged hijackers also contacted US media shortly after 9/11 to report that they were alive and were not on the hijacked planes. See the BBC News and Times of London articles on this. Yet the 9/11 Commission Report lists these men as the official hijackers at this link. So what's really going on here? For our reliable 9/11 Information Center, click here.




A New Look at the 9-11 Commission
2009-09-11, Time magazine
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1921659,00.html

Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, tasked with investigating the government response to the attacks. His new book, The Ground Truth, picks up where the commission left off ? taking a deeper look at the government's ... response to the attacks and exposing officials determined to hide their failings from the inquiry. Farmer uses newly released transcripts and recordings to cast doubt on the official version of events. He spoke with TIME. [Time:] Why do you think officials tried to obscure [the truth about 9/11]? [Farmer:] It's almost a culture of concealment. You have someone like Sandy Berger ... taking rather extreme measures to remove documents from the National Archives and hide them at a construction site where he could retrieve them later and destroy them. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened. If what the government is telling you isn't true, then the truth could be anything. I think there is evidence that the truth wasn't told and that at least some of that was deliberate.

Note: Many respected scholars, officials and professionals have questioned the 9/11 Commission's report. Click here and here to read some of their statements. For lots more reliable, verifiable information from the major media questioning the 9/11 Commission's report, click here and here.




9/11 Commission Heads: We Still Don't Know the Whole Truth of 9/11
2006-08-09, CNN News
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0608/09/ldt.01.html

A shocking new book by the 9/11 Commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton says Americans still don't know the whole truth about their government's initial response to those terrorist attacks that day. [The book] outlines repeated misstatements by the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration. Fog of war ... could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue. Untrue -- the military's original timeline of United Flight 93. Equally untrue, the government's timeline for American Flight 77 and details about fighter jets scrambled to intercept it. DOD did not accurately report to the 9/11 Commission on the response to the September 11, 2001 hijackings. So far, government investigators stopped short of calling all of these inaccuracies lies. If all of the after-action reports are untrue, for whatever reason, that's a lie. Incompetence and ineptitude on the part of this government ... in the weeks leading up to 9/11 are established. The fact that the government would permit deception ... the fact that they would continue and perpetuate the lie suggests that we need a full investigation of what is going on and what is demonstrably an incompetent and at worst deceitful federal government. 




Sept. 11 panel considered Pentagon probe 
2006-08-05, MSNBC/Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14191255/

The Sept. 11 commission was so frustrated with repeated misstatements by the Pentagon and FAA about their response to the 2001 terror attacks that it considered an investigation into possible deception, the panel's chairmen say in a new book. Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton also say in "Without Precedent" that their panel was too soft in questioning former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and that the 20-month investigation may have suffered for it. The book...recounts obstacles the authors say were thrown up by the Bush administration, internal disputes over President Bush's use of the attacks as a reason for invading Iraq, and the way the final report avoided questioning whether U.S. policy in the Middle East may have contributed to the attacks. "Fog of war...could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue," the book states. The questioning of Giuliani was considered by Kean and Hamilton "a low point" in the commission's examination of witnesses during public hearings. "We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record." In their book, which goes on sale Aug. 15, Kean and Hamilton recap obstacles they say the panel faced in putting out a credible report in a presidential election year, including fights for access to government documents and an effort to reach unanimity. 




FAA Received Alert About 9/11 Hijacker
2006-01-07, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91659&page=2

Federal aviation authorities were alerted in early 2001 that an Arizona flight school believed one of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers lacked the English and flying skills necessary for the commercial pilot's license he already held. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector even sat next to the hijacker, Hani Hanjour, in one of the Arizona classes, checked records to ensure Hanjour's 1999 pilot's license was legitimate but concluded no other action was warranted. Hanjour is believed to have piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. The operations manager for the now-defunct JetTech flight school in Phoenix said she called the FAA inspector that oversaw her school three times in January and February 2001 to express her concerns about Hanjour. "I couldn't believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had," said Peggy Chevrette, the JetTech manager. She also has been interviewed by the FBI. Marilyn Ladner, a vice president for the Pan Am International Flight Academy that owned JetTech before it closed in the aftermath of Sept. 11, said the flight school expressed its concerns and believes the FAA official observed Hanjour's weaknesses firsthand. The Arizona school's alert is the latest revelation about the extent of information the government possessed before Sept. 11 

Note: This article fails to mention the key fact the Hanjour is officially listed as the hijacker pilot who executed an extremely sophisticated 330-degree diving turn to crash the plane into the Pentagon (see official report at this link). Yet this article claims his flight instructor said his skills were so poor she couldn't believe he had any pilot's license. How can that be? For more information suggesting Hanjour was assisted by U.S. authorities in obtaining his license, click here. And why has the Pentagon only released a few of the many dozens of security camera videos they have of the 9/11 Pentagon crash? And these few show nothing conclusive. For lots more reliable information questioning what really happened on 9/11, click here.




U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba
2001-05-01, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban ?migr?s, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's ... Fidel Castro. America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years. The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof 
 that the fault lies with the Communists." The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after.

Note: Why was ABC the only major news source to report on this highly revealing story? To read the shocking declassified documents on Operation Northwoods, click here. Many military and political leaders look at the world as a chess board. Sacrificing pawns (innocent civilians) is sometimes necessary to capture the queen. Could it be that 9/11 was either facilitated or allowed to happen to justify two highly profitable wars?




Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
2005-01-11, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/11/opinion/oe-scheer11

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" ... argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned ... around the world." Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dirty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people? Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when British and U.S. military forces later found no such thing? The film ... directly challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian neoconservatives, has seized upon the false image of a unified international terrorist threat to replace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a political agenda. "The nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy."

Note: If above link fails, click here. This highly revealing film by one of Britain's most respected documentary makers is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link and lots more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here. For an excellent review of the film in one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers, click here.




The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket
2004-10-19, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/19/opinion/oe-scheer19

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me. [The] release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief. The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible." By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation. The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain. And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For other reliable information on the 9/11 cover-up, click here. 




Connections And Then Some
2003-03-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A25...

The Carlyle Group [is] an investment house famous as one of the most well-connected companies anywhere. Former president George H.W. Bush is a Carlyle adviser. Former British prime minister John Major heads its European arm. Former secretary of state James Baker is senior counselor, former White House budget chief Richard Darman is a partner, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is senior adviser -- the list goes on. Those associations have brought Carlyle enormous success. The Washington-based merchant bank controls nearly $14 billion in investments, making it the largest private equity manager in the world. It buys and sells whole companies the way some firms trade shares of stock. But the connections also have cost Carlyle. It has developed a reputation as the CIA of the business world -- omnipresent, powerful, a little sinister. Media outlets from the Village Voice to BusinessWeek have depicted Carlyle as manipulating the levers of government from shadowy back rooms. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) even suggested that Carlyle's and Bush's ties to the Middle East made them somehow complicitous in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It didn't help that as the World Trade Center burned on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden. Former president Bush, a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day. Bush['s] primary function is to give speeches for Carlyle that attract wealthy foreigners in places where the former president is especially revered, such as Asia. The company has rewarded its faithful with a 36 percent average annual rate of return.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. To understand the amazingly powerful role of this low-profile, yet extremely wealthy and influential group, click here to view free a 48-minute documentary shown on Dutch national TV which clearly depicts the depths of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of government. You will be thankful that you watched this highly educational film. 




Defence redefined means securing cheap energy
2002-12-26, Sydney Morning Herald (One of Australia's leading newspapers)
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/25/1040511092926.html

As troops and equipment pour into the Gulf for a looming war with Iraq, United States military thinkers admit that "defence" means protecting ... cheap oil. As far back as 1975, Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, said America was prepared to wage war over oil. Separate plans advocating US conquest of Saudi oilfields were published in the '70s. So it should come as little surprise that ... four months before the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York - a battle plan for Afghanistan was already being reviewed by the US Command that would carry it out after September 11. Military strategists were highlighting the energy wealth of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia and its importance to America's "security". The Indian media and Jane's Intelligence Review reported that the US was fighting covert battles against the Taliban, months before the "war on terrorism" was declared. Over several months beginning in April last year a series of military and governmental policy documents was released that sought to legitimise the use of US military force in the pursuit of oil and gas. A spring 2001 article by Jeffrey Record in the War College's journal, Parameters, argued the legitimacy of "shooting in the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas prices". Mr Record [is] a former staff member of the Senate armed services committee (and an apparent favourite of the Council on Foreign Relations). [He] advocated the acceptability of presidential subterfuge in the promotion of a conflict. Mr Record explicitly urged painting over the US's actual reasons for warfare with a nobly high-minded veneer, seeing such as a necessity for mobilising public support for a conflict.

Note: This highly revealing report on the military planning of wars for oil is well worth reading in its entirety, at the link above. For lots more on major deception and manipulation around the event of 9/11, click here. 




Pipeline politics taint U.S. war
2002-03-18, Chicago Tribune
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-18/news/0203180046_1_caspian-talib...

Outside this country, there is a widespread belief that U.S. military deployments in Central Asia mostly are about oil. An article in the Guardian of London headlined, ?A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil,? foreshadowed the kind of skeptical coverage the U.S. war now receives in many countries. Author George Monbiot ... wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea." Unocal pulled out of the deal after the 1998 terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were linked to terrorists based in Afghanistan. The terrorist acts of Sept. 11, though tragic, provided the Bush administration a [pretext] to invade Afghanistan, oust the recalcitrant Taliban and, coincidentally, smooth the way for the pipeline. To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration?s Afghanistan envoy. [Uri] Averny, a former member of the Israeli Knesset ... argues that the war on terrorism provides a perfect pretext for America?s imperial interests. ?If one looks at the map of the big American bases created for the war, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.? No wonder the rest of the world is a bit skeptical about our war on evildoers. 

Note: Why do so few people know that these two top officials of Afghanistan were once paid by an American oil company? For important reports from major media sources on the realities of the "war on terror," click here.




Experts Urging Broader Inquiry In Towers' Fall
2001-12-25, New York Times
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40A11FB3E550C768EDDAB0994D94...

Saying that the current investigation into how and why the twin towers fell on Sept. 11 is inadequate, some of the nation's leading structural engineers and fire-safety experts are calling for a new, independent and better-financed inquiry that could produce the kinds of conclusions vital for skyscrapers and future buildings nationwide. Experts critical of the current effort ... point out that the current team of 20 or so investigators has no subpoena power and little staff support and has even been unable to obtain basic information like detailed blueprints of the buildings that collapsed. Some structural engineers have said that one serious mistake has already been made ... the decision to rapidly recycle the steel columns, beams and trusses that held up the buildings. Interviews with a handful of members of the team, which includes some of the nation's most respected engineers, also uncovered complaints that they had at various times been shackled with bureaucratic restrictions that prevented them from interviewing witnesses, examining the disaster site and requesting crucial information like recorded distress calls to the police and fire departments. Members have been threatened with dismissal for speaking to the press.

Note: Our website has over 30 full articles posted from the New York Times. This is the only article for which the Times threatened to sue us if we didn't remove it. We were allowed to replace it with this short summary. For more on this, click here. For more reliable news articles suggesting a major cover-up of 9/11, click here. 




Obama Says 'Justice Has Been Done': Bin Laden Scholar Says No
2011-05-06, CNBC News (NBC's Business News Channel)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/42929478/

President Obama, speaking of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, said: "Justice has been done." It has been widely assumed that, if bin Laden is now dead, the person most responsible for the 9/11 attacks has been brought to justice. But the US government has never provided evidence that the attacks were carried out by bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. In September 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to provide this evidence, but the next day recanted, saying "most of [the evidence] is classified." In October, Prime Minister Tony Blair provided evidence that bin Laden and al-Qaeda planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. But he added: "This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law." The FBI's acts that made bin Laden a "Most Wanted Terrorist" do not include the 9/11 attacks. The FBI's chief of investigative publicity explained: "The FBI has seen no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Could al-Qaeda have carried out the attacks? Scientists for 9/11 Truth views the rapid, symmetrical, straight-down collapses of the Towers and nearby WTC 7 as consistent only with controlled demolition. And 1500 members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth agree: The 9/11 attacks were not the work of al-Qaeda.

Note: CNBC removed this article not long after posting it. To read this critically important press release by WantToKnow.info team member and Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Ray Griffin in its entirety, click here. Dr. Griffin's 2009 book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? presented compelling evidence that bin Laden died in December 2001 -- prompting a BBC documentary of the same name. Griffin was named among the New Statesman's "50 People Who Matter Today". For an abundance of reliable news articles, videos, and more showing major deception on 9/11, click here. 




Architect Richard Gage Explains His 9/11 Theory
2011-04-19, WJBK Fox 2 (Detroit Affiliate of Fox News)
http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/architect-richard-gage-explains-hi...

It is a day of infamy ? 9/11. The official investigation concluded that intense heat from the crash and the jet fuel melted the support beams causing the [WTC] towers to collapse. But architect Richard Gage doesn't believe that. He is the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. [Gage:] There is evidence to suggest that explosive demolitions have brought down all three World Trade Center skyscrapers. We have now 1,500 architects and engineers calling for a new investigation based on this evidence, including the third skyscraper that most people know nothing about. This is a 47-story skyscraper that collapses at free fall acceleration, straight down ... into its own footprint just like a controlled demolition. This is extraordinary evidence, along with the chemical evidence of high-tech nanothermite composite explosives or incendiaries found in the all the World Trade Center dust. The architects and engineers are highlighting the specific evidence in these three skyscrapers, because its so clear that they're explosive demolitions. We have [found] in all of this massive quantity of dust ... iron microspheres the size of the diameter of a human hair. Billions of them ... are found. These contain the evidence of ignited thermite. There is no other explanation for them. What the 1,500 architects and engineers that I represent are calling for is an investigation that is thorough that uses the scientific method [and] analyzes all of the evidence. Once this evidence is all analyzed, we'll let the chips fall where they may. We don't have conspiracy theories. What we want is a real investigation. 

Note: The text above is taken from the video news report at the Fox News link above. To watch the symmetrical fall of the third World Trade Center building, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable information questioning the 9/11 official story, see our 9/11 Information Center. 




9/11 third tower mystery 'solved'
2008-07-04, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7485331.stm

The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers. Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse. Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition. Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane. The National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] ... is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse. That would make it the first and only steel skyscraper in the world to collapse because of fire. [NIST's] lead investigator, Dr Shyam Sunder, spoke to BBC Two's "The Conspiracy Files": "Our working hypothesis now actually suggests that it was normal building fires that were growing and spreading throughout the multiple floors that may have caused the ultimate collapse of the buildings." However, a group of architects, engineers and scientists say the official explanation that fires caused the collapse is impossible. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth argue there must have been a controlled demolition. The founder of the group, Richard Gage, says the collapse of the third tower is an obvious example of a controlled demolition using explosives. "Building Seven is the smoking gun of 9/11. A sixth grader can look at this building falling at virtually freefall speed, symmetrically and smoothly, and see that it is not a natural process. Buildings that fall in natural processes fall to the path of least resistance", says Gage, "they don't go straight down through themselves."

Note: To watch a one-minute clip of the fall of WTC 7 from a PBS documentary, click here. For a two-page summary of some unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here. To learn about over 1,000 architects and engineers who claim a major cover-up around 9/11 click here.




Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto: Osama bin Laden is Dead
2007-11-02, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7070000/newsid_7075800/7075843.stm

David Frost: Does anyone know exactly who was responsible for this assassination attempt? There is one report that said that you arranged to send President Musharraf a letter ... in the event of your death by assassination, urging him to investigate certain individuals in his government. Is that true? Benazir Bhutto: Yes it is true that I wrote to General Musharraf. I feel these are the forces that really want to stop not just me, but the democratic process and the will of the people [from] triumphing. David Frost: In terms of these three people you mentioned where they members of or associated with the government? Benazir Bhutto: One of them is a very key figure in security. He is a former military officer. He is someone who has had dealings with Jaish-e-Mohammad, one of the band [of] groups of Maulana Masood Azhar, who was in an Indian jail for decapitating three British tourists and three American tourists. And he also had dealings with Omar Shiekh, who murdered Osama bin Laden. 

Note: The key statement on bin Laden's murder happens at minute five in the video at the above link. If the link fails, click here. For a Jan. 9, 2010 BBC article also suggesting bin Laden may already have been dead years earlier and that his death had been covered up, click here. Bhutto was assassinated not long after this interview on Dec. 27, 2007.




The Disbelievers
2006-09-08, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR20060907016...

A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 percent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on its hands. Sixteen percent believe explosives brought down the towers. A Zogby International poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed the government "consciously failed to act." The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the government. The academic wing is led by [Prof. David Ray] Griffin, who founded the Center for a Postmodern World at Claremont University; James Fetzer, a tenured philosopher at the University of Minnesota; and Daniel Orr, the retired chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois. The movement's de facto minister of engineering is Steven Jones, a tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University, who's ... concluded that the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition. Catherine Austin Fitts served as assistant secretary of housing in the first President Bush's administration. [Robert] Bowman was chief of advanced space programs under presidents Ford and Carter. Fitts and Bowman agree that the "most unbelievable conspiracy" theory is the one retailed by the government. It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why ... military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded. Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor" ... never reviewed in a major U.S. newspaper, sold more than 100,000 copies and became a movement founding stone.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. 




Why I Resigned From the CIA
2004-12-05, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-scheuer5dec05,1,471321...

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, wrote "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." Between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in charge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to this small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden ? either by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gathering work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted. I was never charged with deciding whether to act against Bin Laden. That decision properly belongs solely to senior White House officials. However, as a now-private American citizen, it is my right to question their judgment; I am entitled to know why the protection of Americans ? most selfishly, my own children and grandchildren ? was not the top priority of the senior officials who refused to act on the opportunities to attack Bin Laden provided by the clandestine service. Each of these officials have publicly argued that the intelligence was not "good enough" to act, but they almost always neglect to say that they were repeatedly advised that the intelligence was not going to get better and that Bin Laden was going to kill thousands of Americans if he was not stopped. 

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For many other serious questions around the 9/11 attacks, click here. 




Write More About Skull And Bones
2004-10-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/10/27/notes102704.DTL

I get this a lot: Hey Mark ... why don't you quit toeing the typical blas? journalism line ... and instead write about the real truths? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones. And why, furthermore, don't you talk about the real truths of 9/11? Haven't you seen that amazing [9/11] video on that Web site? And what about Building 7? Why did that 47-story tower adjacent to the WTC collapse when it had no fire and no plane crash? Why isn't the media reporting any of this? Does this make you laugh? Scoff? It is, after all, incredibly easy to dismiss conspiracy theories. But you know what? It's not that easy. These people ... have a point. They are indeed onto something quite large and ominous and it very much has to do with the media toeing the line of "safe" information. There is indeed ample evidence that the U.S. government, long before 9/11, had already discussed the quite plausible possibilities and strategic benefits of unleashing a "Pearl Harbor"-type event on America. There are plenty of strangely unanswered questions about 9/11, about the stunning inaction of NORAD and Bush's stupefying nonreaction upon hearing of the attack, not to mention his administration's incredible attempts to halt any independent 9/11 investigations. Of course, no one in any major media will touch this stuff. It is professional suicide to dare suggest an alternate truth to the one supplied by the Pentagon and regurgitated by the media. And the truth is, we don't really want such unstable questions answered. We simply cannot tolerate to have our world, our leaders, our foundations so questioned. We prefer stasis to growth, security to true knowledge. 


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Sep 13 12:21:43 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:21:43 +0200
Subject: [THS] Paul Craig Roberts: Does 9/11 Truth Have A Chance?
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110913121558.04645180@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29103.htm

Does 9/11 Truth Have A Chance?

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 11, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- -- In the US on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with ?A Day of Remembrance,? a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Canada, at Ryerson University the four-day International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, came to a close at 5pm.

During the four days of hearings, distinguished scientists and scholars and professional architects and engineers presented the results of years of their independent research into all aspects of 9/11 to a distinguished panel consisting of the honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court who was an investigative judge who presided over terrorism cases and three distinguished scholars of high renown and judgment. The distinguished panel?s task is to produce a report with their judgment of the evidence presented by the expert witnesses.

The Toronto Hearings were streamed live over the Internet. I was able to watch many of the presentations over the four days. I was impressed that the extremely high level of intelligence and scientific competence of the witnesses was matched by a high level of integrity, a quality rare in US politics and totally absent in the American media.

As I stressed in my recent interview about 9/11 with Jim Corbett and Global Research, I am a reporter, not an independent researcher into 9/11. I pay attention when the fact-based community finds problems with the official propaganda. Perhaps this reflects my age. My generation was raised to believe in evidence and the scientific method. George Orwell and other writers warned us of the consequence of succumbing to government propaganda as a result of disinterest in the truth or government manipulation of one?s patriotism.

My ability to serve as a reporter of scientific evidence is enhanced by my having a Bachelor of Science from Georgia Tech, a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and post-graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University, where my professor was the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi. In the 1960s, I was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, in order to provide together with Polanyi to the science students at Berkeley a course in Polanyi?s unique contributions to knowledge. Polanyi?s illness prevented the course from happening and condemned me to being a mere economist.

This does not mean that I am infallible or that my reporting is correct. If my reporting stimulates you, go to the presentations, which I believe will continue to be available online, and if not, some edited CD will be available. Try http://www.ustream.tv/channel/thetorontohearings

As one whose own contributions to economics, now belatedly recognized, are ?outside the box,? I am responsive to those who can escape peer pressure in order to advance truth. Here are some of the important things I learned from the Toronto Hearings.

The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency) reports on the twin towers and building 7 are fraudulent. Witnesses at the Toronto Hearings proved that building 7 was a standard controlled demolition and that incendiaries and explosives brought down the twin towers. There is no doubt whatsoever about this. Anyone who declares the contrary has no scientific basis upon which to stand. Those who defend the official story believe in miracles that defy the laws of physics.

A nano-chemist from the University of Copenhagen, who together with a scientific team spent 18 months investigating the chemical and physical properties of dust from the towers, found evidence of nano-thermite in the dust and quantities of particles not naturally formed by office or normal building fires that indicate another explosive was also present.

These findings explain the extreme high temperatures that produced the molten steel for which indisputable evidence exists. In the orchestrated cover-up, NIST denies that molten steel is present as its presence is inconsistent with the low temperatures that NIST acknowledges building fires can produce.

Physicist David Chandler proved beyond all doubt that building 7 fell over its visible part (other buildings obscure the bottom floors) at free fall speed, an unambiguous indication that explosives had removed all supporting columns simultaneously. There is no possibility whatsoever according to the laws of physics that building 7 fell for the reasons NIST provides. The NIST account is a total denial of known laws of physics.

Many other powerful points were made at the conference that I will not report, at least not at this time, because the revelation of malevolence is so powerful that most readers will find it a challenge to their emotional and mental strength.

Psychologists explained that there are two kinds of authority to which people submit. One is to the authority of people in high positions in the government. The belief that ?our government wouldn?t lie to us? is pervasive, especially among patriots. The other source of authority is experts. However, to believe experts a person has to be educated and open-minded and to trust scientific, professional, and scholarly integrity.

In recent years in America, scientific and scholarly authority has come into disrepute among Christian evangelicals who object to evolution and among anti-intellectual Tea Party adherents who object to ?elitists,? that is, objection to knowledge-based persons whose knowledge does not support Tea Party emotions.

In other words, qualified, knowledgeable people who tell people what they do not want to hear are dismissed as ?the enemy.? Much of the American population is set up to believe government propaganda. Without an independent media, which the US no longer has, people are taught that only ?conspiracy kooks? challenge the government?s story. Even on the Internet, this is a main theme on Antiwar.com and on CounterPunch.org, two sites that protest America?s wars but accept the 9/11 propaganda that justifies the wars.

This is the reason that I think that the US is moving into an era where the emotional needs of the population produced by government propaganda overwhelms science, evidence, and facts. It means the abolition of accountable government and the rule of law, because protection from terrorists is more important.

The fact-based world in which ?we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead? is being displaced by dogma. Anyone who doubts ?our government? is an anti-American, Muslim-loving, pinko-liberal commie, who should be arrested and waterboarded until the culprit confesses that he is a terrorist.

The event of 9/11 is now outside the realm of fact, science, and evidence. It is a dogma that justifies the Bush/Cheney/Obama war crimes against Muslims and their countries.

Obama regime appointee Cass Sunstein, a Chicago and Harvard Law School professor, thinks the 9/11 movement, for challenging the official ?truth?, should be infiltrated by US intelligence agents in order to shut down the fact-based doubters of government propaganda.

When a law professor at our two most prestigious law schools wants to suppress scientific evidence that challenges government veracity, we know that in America respect for truth is dead.

The notion that a country in which truth is dead is a ?light unto the world? is an absurdity.


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Sep 13 12:29:53 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:29:53 +0200
Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Karen_Kwiatkowski=3A_How_I=92ll_Remember_9-1?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?1__This_Year?=
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110913122909.06895320@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29093.htm

How I?ll Remember 9-11 This Year

By Karen Kwiatkowski

September 10, 2011 -- It?s been a decade since the attacks of 9-11. Since that time, the cost of the American government has more than doubled while American economic output has drastically slowed. Communication and public speech has suffered under the weight of the Patriot Act, and today, most Americans understand that their government tracks them and spies upon them. Travel across this beautiful land has been made more expensive, as fuel and food costs have skyrocketed. The new and wholly un-American Department of Homeland Security has settled in for the long war, apparently against the American people and American traditions of liberty.

A recent Frontline television program outlined the research effort by two reporters at the Washington Post in describing a "Top Secret" America. The real federal jobs program in the last decade has been in surveillance, monitoring, and intelligence-development ? of Americans on American soil.

In the decade after 9-11, Washington, D.C. launched repeated land wars, government takeovers, and nation-building, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and later in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and now Libya. None of these wars, all sold as "wars against terrorism" were granted any public congressional debate, and none entailed a Congressional declaration of war.

In terms of truly discovering the facts of the events of 9-11, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, we saw a government reluctance to delve deeply, and a government desire to pack up the "stories" as quickly as possible. President Bush opposed and worked to delay the official 9-11 Commission, and its published results were then later partially disavowed by the very political appointees who led it. The FBI?s investigation into the Amerithrax case also followed a well-worn path. Select a culprit, publicize the name of the suspect, and harass that individual until they confess. The first FBI target was no coward, nor was he guilty. He successfully sued the federal government and was later awarded millions of tax-payer dollars for the FBI?s miscalculation and arrogance. A second FBI target was named and harassed until he committed suicide, and the case was immediately closed.

Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades.

Trillions of dollars have been wasted, more trillions in value have evaporated, and many thousands of lives have been needlessly sacrificed, all in the name of a post-9-11 era. The Founders believed that the Creator granted all men the right to a government that they themselves owned, and could hold accountable. The Founders believed that the people had the duty to dissolve that government when it no longer followed the law or conducted itself morally, in the best interest of the people. The Founders believed we could withdraw our consent. Today, you can?t even decline to be physically assaulted by a government agent in order to fly on a commercial aircraft using a ticket you bought with your own money.

The federal response to the attacks of 9-11 reflected a real government fear. Not of more attacks, but rather, a fear of average Americans who would begin to see the truth about their government in the 21st century. The truth is that this government does not exist to serve us, and it will not and cannot protect us.

I believe our government ? outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution, and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name ? cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law, and liberty.

That?s why on 9-11, I will not be celebrating America?s undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks ten years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law, and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God?s intent for America.

On this ten-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I?ll be in Charlottesville, Virginia, learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I?ll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won?t allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the 9-11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.

The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state?s veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity, and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities.

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia's 6th district.

Copyright ? 2011 Karen Kwiatkowski


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Sep 13 12:32:45 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:32:45 +0200
Subject: [THS] Could Turkey and Israel Go to War?:
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110913123233.0461c1c0@mail.messagingengine.com>

Netanyahu's office distances itself from Lieberman's planned measures against Turkey: 

 
Foreign Ministry recommends assisting the PKK terror group in retaliation to Turkey's expulsion of Israeli diplomats and suspension of military ties.
http://bit.ly/odyjMg

 

===

 

Could Turkey and Israel Go to War?: 

 
For the first time, the two major states of the Eastern Mediterranean are aligning against Israel. This is the most important shift in Levantine politics since Camp David or even since 1949 when Turkey recognized Israel.
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC06.php?CID=1711


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Sep 13 12:33:50 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:33:50 +0200
Subject: [THS] Insurers sue Saudi Arabia seeking 9/11 reimbursements:
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110913123339.0461ed98@mail.messagingengine.com>

Insurers sue Saudi Arabia seeking 9/11 reimbursements: 

 
A subsidiary of the British insurer Lloyd's of London Thursday sued the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, several of its government agencies and banks, and a handful of prominent individuals in U.S. District Court in Johnstown, saying they are liable for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11252/1173372-100.stm

 


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Sep 13 12:40:01 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:40:01 +0200
Subject: [THS] DoD Watchdog Covered Up Work Tracking 9/11 Terrorists
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110913123740.04614d88@mail.messagingengine.com>

New Documents Suggest 
DoD Watchdog Covered Up Intelligence Unit's Work Tracking 9/11 Terrorists

Sunday 11 September 2011 
by: Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report 

Senior Pentagon officials scrubbed key details about a top-secret military intelligence unit's efforts in tracking Osama bin Laden and suspected al-Qaeda terrorists from official reports they prepared for a Congressional committee probing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, new documents [3] obtained by Truthout reveal.

Moreover, in what appears to be an attempt to cover up the military unit's intelligence work, a September 2008 Defense Department (DoD) Inspector General's (IG) report [4] that probed complaints lodged by the former deputy chief of the military unit in question, the Asymmetrical Threats Division of Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), also known as DO5, about the crucial information withheld from Congress, claimed "the tracking of Usama Bin Ladin did not fall within JFIC's mission."

But the IG's assertion is untrue, according to the documents obtained by Truthout, undercutting the official narrative about who knew what and when in the months leading up to 9/11.

Much of JFIC's work on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden remains shrouded in secrecy and has not been cited in media reports revolving around pre-9/11 intelligence, which has focused heavily over the past decade on CIA and FBI "intelligence failures." Only a few details about the military intelligence unit have surfaced since then, notably in two previous reports [5] published recently by Truthout.

JFIC was the intelligence component of United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). In 2005, it was renamed the Joint Intelligence Command for Intelligence. Last month, JFCOM was shuttered [6], reportedly due to Pentagon budget cuts, and as a subcommand, JFIC was believed to have been disbanded along with it.

Click here to watch Jeffrey Kaye discuss this report on The Real News [7]

Truthout had previously reported [8] that the deputy chief of JFIC's Asymmetrical Threats Division, who is identified in government documents by the code name "Iron Man," had produced "numerous original reports, with original imagery, measurements & signatures intelligence, or electronic intelligence, identifying probably [sic] and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar." The intelligence included "bin Ladin's likely residence in Qandahar ... evidently the house in which Khalid Shaykh Muhammed planned the 9/11 attacks."

However, Iron Man, whose unit also developed original intelligence on al-Qaeda targets, which included the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the documents show, claimed JFIC was told to stop tracking [9] Bin Laden, suspected al-Qaeda terrorists, and members of the Taliban some months prior to 9/11.

Iron Man further alleged that the orders his unit received, as well as the work it conducted, was knowingly withheld from investigators working for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who were tasked with probing the circumstances behind the 9/11 attacks.

When the DoD's watchdog prepared its report following an investigation into Iron Man's complaints, the IG concluded Iron Man's most explosive allegations related to the withholding of intelligence from Congress was  unfounded. But a close look at the report reveals it is rife with numerous factual errors.

The appendices in the IG's report shows significant changes were made to JFIC's original responses to Congressional investigators about its pre-9/11 intelligence work on al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Bin Laden. The information regarding the military unit's work turned over to Congress described a substantially attenuated picture of JFIC's operations.

The report determined "operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission" about Asymmetrical Threats Division had not been withheld. Yet, Iron Man had charged the information was withheld from Congressional investigators probing the 9/11 attacks, not the independent 9/11 commission. The IG's report repeatedly confused the two investigative bodies.

Additionally, while the IG did confirm that Asymmetrical Threats Division analysts were told to stop tracking Bin Laden, suspected al-Qaeda terrorists and members of the Taliban, the watchdog determined that the Asymmetrical Threat Division had "not completed original intelligence reporting" and that "JFIC did not" specifically have a "mission to track Usama bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets." (Emphasis added.)

In attempting to refute Iron Man's claims about JFIC's work, the IG's report stated, "the 9/11 Commission questions were very specific and asked for information which involved the 'imminent attack' or 'hijackers involved.' Evidence indicated that the JFIC did not have knowledge regarding imminent domestic targets prior to 9/11 or specific 9/11 hijacker operations."

But Truthout has learned that the definition of "hijackers," as perceived by the military intelligence unit, was overly restrictive. The definition of "hijackers" only referred to the hijackers in the planes and not the alleged planners, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or Bin Laden, which the intelligence unit considered to be part of the team of hijackers.

Messages left for Gary Comerford, a spokesman for the Inspector General, were not returned. Officials who helped prepare the report referred questions to Comerford's office.

Revealing New Documents

Iron Man, who requested anonymity in order to protect his family's privacy, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2006 seeking a copy of the complaint he filed with the IG, which was marked classified, and other secret documents pertaining to JFIC's duties. He received a copy of his complaint in April, just a few weeks prior to the death of Bin Laden. That document, as well as the IG's findings, formed the basis of Truthout's two previous reports on JFIC's activities.

Over the past month, Iron Man provided Truthout with other documents he received in response to his FOIA request, which shed additional light on JFIC's work and calls into question the veracity of the IG's investigation and conclusions into the charges Iron Man had leveled.

Iron Man provided Truthout with copies of a slide presentation that was used for a briefing held for the head of counterintelligence and counterterrorism at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The date of the meeting could not be confirmed.

However, in summer 2000, the Asymmetrical Threats Division briefed "a DIA senior intelligence officer" on "The Search (for UBL Usama Bin Ladin]) - A CINC [Commander-in-chief] Level View." According to Iron Man's letter to the IG, "The briefing provided numerous examples and suggestions of how UBL was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the IC [intelligence community]."

Iron Man would not provide the names of the individuals that the Asymmetrical Threats Division briefed because that information is classified. But the personnel included intelligence officials from CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NCIS, NSA and high-level command officials at JFIC. The most senior official who was present at the briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander-in-chief of Joint Forces Command.

Vice Adm. Meyer is the military official who told [10] Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States North American Aerospace Defense Command Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that "their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, 'If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn't be a threat from Osama bin Laden.'"

Since Meyer was one of the individuals JFIC briefed on al-Qaeda's interest in attacking targets in the United States it is difficult to comprehend why he would dismiss the threats.

What is clear, however, is that the slides Truthout obtained from Iron Man show that the military intelligence unit he was a part of actively pursued Bin Laden, contradicting the IG report's conclusions.

Indeed, one of the slides explicitly states, "JFIC routinely supplements national agencies with original intelligence on UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and Afghanistan." (Emphasis added.)

Another slide, "NCIS Support to Joint Forces Intelligence Command and NCIS Field Office, Norfolk," contains a description of Iron Man's responsibilities as deputy chief of JFIC's Asymmetric Threat Division.

The slide presentation further notes that the Asymmetrical Threats Division has "primary division focus" on both counterterrorism and military "force protection." Moreover, the briefing slides state that JFIC's "Primary CT/force protection concerns" as "UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and associated terrorist groups," adding that its goal was to determine when Bin Laden and other terrorists would strike, "How they will strike" and "Where they will strike."

According to the documents, Asymmetrical Threats Division personnel monitored open-source intelligence, national imagery data and sensitive compartmented intelligence, as well as worldwide counterterrorism and counterintelligence communications, including communications and electronic intelligence databases from the National Security Agency (NSA).

The information from the briefing backs up what Iron Man previously told Truthout: that Asymmetrical Threats Division "worked closely" with the counterterrorism office at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which collects, analyzes and distributes geospatial intelligence [11]related to national security, or that, "upon request," it provided information on terrorist movements to the CIA.

The Asymmetrical Threats Division had what is known as "gamma" security clearance, one of the slides noted, indicating analysts had access to extremely sensitive classified information, according to a description of the classification level by Matthew Aid in an unrelated New York Times report [12].

Another document Iron Man turned over to Truthout is a January 2001 confidential "Point Paper" that describes the Asymmetrical Threats Division as having "prepared numerous assessments of those cities most likely to be targeted by international and domestic terrorists," confirming Iron Man's claims that part of his unit's work did consist of producing intelligence on domestic targets by terrorists.

Significant Changes Made to JFIC's Official Response

Perhaps the most salient issue with the IG's report is that it completely conceals the information that was withheld from Congressional investigators.

According to the report, on March 11, 2002, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson tasked JFCOM to provide it with information concerning its activities "in support of the 9/11 Commission." As the IG's report points out, the public law creating the 9/11 Commission was not effective until November 2002, so Vice Admiral Wilson can only be responding to a request from the Congressional joint inquiry and not the 9/11 Commission.

The IG's report indicates JFCOM sent a "tasker" to JFIC two days later, indicating it was an urgent matter and the 13 items "derived from the original DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] tasker" were due by March 22.

A "JFIC senior naval officer," the report states, gathered the information from the different departments within the military unit. The responses were then returned to JFCOM, where the Intelligence Director "reviewed the JFIC's input prior to release" to the DIA Congressional Affairs Office on March 25, 2002.

The original JFIC response was scanned and printed as Appendix B of the IG report. According to the IG, the "original questions and answers to 13 questions that USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command] forwarded" to the Defense Intelligence Agency were also scanned and are printed as the report's Appendix C. The scanned questions and answers that ultimately were sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Congressional Affairs Office and presumably on to Congressional investigators, are preceded by ten pages of superfluous material relating to JFIC actions taken after 9/11.

But the original questions and answers JFIC officials produced prior to March 22 (Appendix B) are not the same as the edited version that was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency and Congress (Appendix C). Four questions and answers from Appendix C were deleted and one subsection and some of the other responses were scrubbed.

The IG report failed to highlight the difference and, indeed, the report still maintains the JFCOM version has "13 questions," though four questions were omitted after another "review."

There is no indication the scanned documents were redacted, which would have helped explain the omission, since the original material that was deleted and/or rewritten shows up unredacted in Appendix B.

According to the executive summary of the IG's report, JFIC's replies "were accurate and substantiated by our extensive review of available documentation and our 14 personnel interviews at all levels of Joint Forces Intelligence Command. We concluded that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command provided a timely and accurate reply in response to the 9/11 Commission. The United States Joint Forces Command forwarded the response to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Congressional Affairs Office."

JFlC's original responses "were forwarded to the USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command]. The USJFCOM Intelligence Director reviewed the JFIC's input prior to release to the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]."

The report, however, fails to note that the JFCOM review removed substantial portions of JFIC's replies to Congress.

What Was Missing

The missing portions largely relate to aspects of JFIC's mission that had to do with the breadth and depth of its anti-terrorism work. For instance, in item one, JFCOM deleted the original JFIC reply that it conducted "in depth discussions about potential terrorist attacks since Dec. 00."

The second item in the inquiry asked whether JFIC had information prior to 9/11 about "international terrorist cells operating in the United States." While JFIC answered this question in the negative, in their original response JFIC indicated they maintained "global situational awareness for areas such as CONUS [Continental United States] outside of the USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command] AOR [area of responsibility.]" They briefed pertinent information" at morning briefings, "but we did not track it." JFIC indicated the information "generally consisted of CIA and NSA reports."

In the altered version of the response sent to Congress, the words "such as CONUS" are deleted, as is the reference to CIA and NSA reports. The edited version completely eliminates the fact that JFIC was keeping track of NSA and CIA reports of terrorist activity as it related to the United States. Indeed, later in the report, the fact that JFIC also maintained a "24-hour watch floor," whose responsibility included monitoring of "worldwide events and terrorist issues," was also deleted.

According to the original JFIC response, after 9/11, it officially did take on responsibility for tracking "potential threats to CONUS." "As far as we know," the JFIC original responses state, "JFIC is one of the few DoD entities attempting to track potential terrorist activities within CONUS."

One of the missing items in the version of the JFIC answers sent to Congress concerned the names and positions of JFIC counterterror personnel. This was not redacted for classification purposes, as they appear in the IG report, Appendix B. Instead, back in 2002, the lack of any such names meant there was no one identifiable from JFIC to call as a witness.

At other points in the edited version of the JFIC responses, descriptions of the unit's analytic work, in particular aspects that seem pertinent to Asymmetrical Threats Division's work, are left out. It is noteworthy that even in the original JFIC response to the questionnaire, the mission Joint Forces Command was given was distorted.

According to the original inquiry response (and left out of the final version), "Prior to Sept. 11, JFIC did not have a robust counter-terrorism mission. We did do some analysis, but since it did not directly support Joint Forces Command's AOR [area of responsibility], the analysts were directed to stop. As a result of this and normal military rotation, we did not have a large counter-terrorism analysis base to build on" after 9/11. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, in another portion of the original JFIC response and also deleted in the final version of the response, JFIC discusses its "process." According to JFIC, while they do "not conduct unilateral collection" of intelligence in the United States, nor liaison with "foreign counterparts," they do receive reports from "other agencies." "JFIC's process is to fuse all of the information that we have visibility on into one all-source threat picture," the questionnaire stated, noting JFIC reviewed 2,275 messages daily from intelligence and military sources.

Subsequently, JFIC personnel decide what to do with this information, noting that sometimes they may "try to do further analysis (connect the dots, possibly produces a special analytic product), or ... follow-up with the reporting agency."

In a section erased from the JFIC response to Question 12 from Congressional investigators, JFIC describes their process as one of fusing "all of the information that we have visibility on into one all-source threat picture." This is similar to Iron Man's description of the Asymmetrical Threats Division in his complaint to the IG, when he described his former unit as "a forerunner of current all-source fusion centers.... able to develop and use all-source, original analysis in a manner probably then unprecedented within the intelligence community."

If the report's narrative sequence can be trusted, the JFCOM director either directly, or under his or her supervision, significantly altered the reply to Congressional Joint Inquiry investigators. Furthermore, due to the fact that items 7, 9, 11 and 13 are missing from the final document sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency it would have had to be apparent to the individual(s) reading that a chunk of information was missing.

While Congressional investigators were not provided with this intelligence on JFIC's work, there were still other opportunities to pass the information along. In Spring 2002, a colleague informed Iron Man that none of the documents that could verify Asymmetrical Threats Division's work was being sent to Congress.

The former deputy chief and later "Acting Chief" of Asymmetrical Threats Division contacted the Defense Intelligence Agency's Congressional Affairs Office himself and offered to personally send the documentation, including the slides and "point paper."

Those materials were instead sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Whether it made its way to Congress is unknown. The December 2002 unclassified Congressional Joint Inquiry report never mentions US Joint Forces Command, JFIC, or Asymmetrical Threats Division or their work, nor does the 9/11 Commission Report published several years later.

Current and former lawmakers who worked on the Congressional committees probing the 9/11 attacks, including former Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment about whether they received any briefings about the military intelligence unit's counterterrorism work pertaining to al-Qaeda, Bin Laden, and the Taliban.

Iron Man told Truthout, however, that he and his colleagues would "damn sure comment" on JFIC's work if given the opportunity to speak with lawmakers.

But, Iron Man said, "the only manner in which any former DO5 [another name for JFIC] personnel could probably comment would be if requested by Congress/Congressional staff and permitted by DoD."
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License [13]. 
Jason Leopold [15]
News 

Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/new-documents-suggest-defense-department-watchdog-covered-intelligence/1315580290

Links:
[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/6179
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/6179
[3] http://truthout.org/sites/default/files/IronManSlides.pdf
[4] http://www.scribd.com/doc/28486103/FOIA-Review-of-Joint-Forces-Responce-911
[5] http://www.truth-out.org/new-documents-claim-intelligence-bin-laden-al-qaeda-targets-withheld-Congress-911-probe/1307986777
[6] http://hamptonroads.com/2011/08/dignitaries-brass-officially-dissolve-jfcom-today
[7] http://www.truth-out.org/real-news-speaks-truthout-contributor-jeffrey-kaye-about-military-units-pre-911-intelligence/1315511
[8] http://www.truth-out.org/new-documents-claim-intelligence-bin-laden-al-qaeda-targets-withheld-congress-911-probe/1307986777
[9] http://www.truthout.org/report-intelligence-unit-told-911-stop-tracking-bin-laden/1306159803
[10] http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=martin_mayer_1
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOINT
[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/06leak.html?pagewanted=all
[13] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
[14] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[15] http://www.truth-out.org/content/jason-leopold
[16] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[17] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[18] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=report-intelligence-unit-told-911-stop-tracking-bin-laden/1306159803
[19] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=new-documents-claim-intelligence-bin-laden-al-qaeda-targets-withheld-congress-911-probe/1307986777
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


http://www.opinion-maker.org/2011/01/british-intelligence-reports/

British Intelligence Reports




.

Posted on 27. Jan, 2011 by Raja Mujtaba in Hot Topics
[Translate]

Mossad ran 9/11 Arab "hijacker" terrorist operation

By Wayne Madsen

British intelligence reported in February 2002 that the Israeli Mossad ran the Arab hijacker cells that were later blamed by the U.S. government's 9/11 Commission for carrying out the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. WMR has received details of the British intelligence report which was suppressed by the government of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A Mossad unit consisting of six Egyptian- and Yemeni-born Jews infiltrated "Al Qaeda" cells in Hamburg (the Atta-Mamoun Darkanzali cell), south Florida, and Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in the months before 9/11. The Mossad not only infiltrated cells but began to run them and give them specific orders that would eventually culminate in their being on board four regularly-scheduled flights originating in Boston, Washington Dulles, and Newark, New Jersey on 9/11.

The Mossad infiltration team comprised six Israelis, comprising two cells of three agents, who all received special training at a Mossad base in the Negev Desert in their future control and handling of the "Al Qaeda" cells. One Mossad cell traveled to Amsterdam where they submitted to the operational control of the Mossad's Europe Station, which operates from the El Al complex at Schiphol International Airport. The three-man Mossad unit then traveled to Hamburg where it made contact with Mohammed Atta, who believed they were sent by Osama Bin Laden. In fact, they were sent by Ephraim Halevy, the chief of Mossad.

The second three-man Mossad team flew to New York and then to southern Florida where they began to direct the "Al Qaeda" cells operating from Hollywood, Miami, Vero Beach,  Delray Beach, and West Palm Beach. Israeli "art students," already under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration for casing the offices and homes of federal law enforcement officers, had been living among and conducting surveillance of the activities, including flight school training, of the future Arab "hijacker" cells, particularly in Hollywood and Vero Beach.

In August 2001, the first Mossad team flew with Atta and other Hamburg "Al Qaeda" members to Boston. Logan International Airport's security was contracted to Huntleigh USA, a firm owned by an Israeli airport security firm closely connected to Mossad ? International Consultants on Targeted Security ? ICTS. ICTS's owners were politically connected to the Likud Party, particularly the Netanyahu faction and then-Jerusalem mayor and future Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was Olmert who personally interceded with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to have released from prison five Urban Moving Systems employees, identified by the CIA and FBI agents as Mossad agents. The Israelis were the only suspects arrested anywhere in the United States on 9/11 who were thought to have been involved in the 9/11 attacks.

The two Mossad teams sent regular coded reports on the progress of the 9/11 operation to Tel Aviv via the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. WMR has learned from a Pentagon source that leading Americans tied to the media effort to pin 9/11 on Arab hijackers, Osama Bin Laden, and the Taliban were present in the Israeli embassy on September 10, 2001, to coordinate their media blitz for the subsequent days and weeks following the attacks. It is more than likely that FBI counter-intelligence agents who conduct surveillance of the Israeli embassy have proof on the presence of the Americans present at the embassy on September 10. Some of the Americans are well-known to U.S. cable news television audiences.

In mid-August, the Mossad team running the Hamburg cell in Boston reported to Tel Aviv that the final plans for 9/11 were set. The Florida-based Mossad cell reported that the documented "presence" of the Arab cell members at Florida flight schools had been established.

The two Mossad cells studiously avoided any mention of the World Trade Center or targets in Washington, DC in their coded messages to Tel Aviv. Halevy covered his tracks by reporting to the CIA of a "general threat" by an attack by Arab terrorists on a nuclear plant somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. CIA director George Tenet dismissed the Halevy warning as "too non-specific." The FBI, under soon-to-be-departed director Louis Freeh, received the "non-specific" warning about an attack on a nuclear power plant and sent out the information in its routine bulletins to field agents but no high alert was ordered.

The lack of a paper trail pointing to "Al Qaeda" as the masterminds on 9/11, which could then be linked to Al Qaeda's Mossad handlers, threw off the FBI. On April 19, 2002, FBI director Robert Mueller, in a speech to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, stated: "In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper ? either here in the United States, or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere ? that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot."

  The two Mossad "Al Qaeda" infiltration and control teams had also helped set up safe houses for the quick exfiltration of Mossad agents from the United States. Last March, WMR reported: "WMR has learned from two El Al sources who worked for the Israeli airline at New York?s John F. Kennedy airport that on 9/11, hours after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all civilian domestic and international incoming and outgoing flights to and from the United States, a full El Al Boeing 747 took off from JFK bound for Tel Aviv?s Ben Gurion International Airport. The two El Al employee sources are not Israeli nationals but legal immigrants from Ecuador who were working in the United States for the airline. The flight departed JFK at 4:11 pm and its departure was, according to the El Al sources, authorized by the direct intervention of the U.S. Department of Defense. U.S. military officials were on the scene at JFK and were personally involved with the airport and air traffic control authorities to clear the flight for take-off. According to the 9/11 Commission report, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta ordered all civilian flights to be grounded at 9:45 am on September 11." WMR has learned from British intelligence sources that the six-man Mossad team was listed on the El Al flight manifest as El Al employees.

WMR previously reported that the Mossad cell operating in the Jersey City-Weehawken area of New Jersey through Urban Moving Systems was suspected by some in the FBI and CIA of being involved in moving explosives into the World Trade Center as well as staging "false flag" demonstrations at least two locations in north Jersey: Liberty State Park and an apartment complex in Jersey City as the first plane hit the World Trade Center's North Tower. One team of Urban Moving Systems Mossad agents was arrested later on September 11 and jailed for five months at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Some of their names turned up in a joint CIA-FBI database as known Mossad agents, along with the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, whose name also appeared on a "Law Enforcement Sensitive" FBI 9/11 suspects list, along with the names of key "hijackers," including Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour, as well as the so-called "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui.

Suter was allowed to escape the United States after the FBI made initial contact with him at the Urban Moving Systems warehouse in Weehawken, New Jersey, following the 9/11 attacks. Suter was later permitted to return to the United States where he was involved in the aircraft parts supply business in southern Florida, according to an informe3d source who contacted WMR. Suter later filed for bankruptcy in Florida for Urban Moving Systems and other businesses he operated: Suburban Moving & Storage Inc.; Max Movers, Inc.; Invsupport; Woodflooring Warehouse Corp.; One Stop Cleaning LLC; and City Carpet Upholstery, Inc. At the time of the bankruptcy filing in Florida, Suter listed his address as 1867 Fox Court, Wellington, FL 33414, with a phone number of 561 204-2359.

>From the list of creditors  it can be determined that Suter had been operating in the United States since 1993, the year of the first attack on the World Trade Center. In 1993, Suter began racking up American Express credit card charges totaling $21,913.97. Suter also maintained credit card accounts with HSBC Bank and Orchard Bank c/o HSBC Card Services of Salinas, California, among other banks. Suter also did business with the Jewish Community Center of Greater Palm Beach in Florida and Ryder Trucks in Miami. Miami and southern Florida were major operating areas for cells of Israeli Mossad agents masquerading as "art students," who were living and working near some of the identified future Arab "hijackers" in the months preceding 9/11.

ABC's 20/20 correspondent John Miller ensured that the Israeli connection to "Al Qaeda's" Arab hijackers was buried in an "investigation" of the movers' activities on 9/11. Anchor Barbara Walters helped Miller in putting a lid on the story about the movers and Suter aired on June 21, 2002. Miller then went on to become the FBI public affairs spokesman to ensure that Mueller and other FBI officials kept to the "Al Qaeda" script as determined by the Bush administration and the future 9/11 Commission. But former CIA chief of counter-terrorism Vince Cannistraro let slip to ABC an important clue to the operations of the Mossad movers in New Jersey when he stated that the Mossad agents "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area." The "intelligence operation" turned out to have been the actual 9/11 attacks. And it was no coincidence that it was ABC's John Miller who conducted a May 1998 rare interview of Osama Bin Laden at his camp in Afghanistan. Bin Laden played his part well for future scenes in the fictional "made-for-TV" drama known as 9/11.

WMR has also learned from Italian intelligence sources that Mossad's running of "Al Qaeda" operatives did not end with running the "hijacking" teams in the United States and Hamburg. Other Arab "Al Qaeda" operatives, run by Mossad, were infiltrated into Syria but arrested by Syrian intelligence. Syria was unsuccessful in turning them to participate in intelligence operations in Lebanon. Detailed information on Bin Laden's support team was offered to the Bush administration, up to days prior to 9/11, by Gutbi al-Mahdi, the head of the Sudanese Mukhabarat intelligence service. The intelligence was rejected by the Biush White House. It was later reported that Sudanese members of "Al Qaeda's" support network were double agents for Mossad who had also established close contacts with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and operated in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Eritrea, as well as Sudan. The Mossad connection to Al Qaeda in Sudan was likely known by the Sudanese Mukhabarat, a reason for the rejection of its intelligence on "Al Qaeda" by the thoroughly-Mossad penetrated Bush White House. Yemen had also identified "Al Qaeda" members who were also Mossad agents. A former chief of Mossad revealed to this editor in 2002 that Yemeni-born Mossad "deep insertion" commandos spotted Bin Laden in the Hadhramaut region of eastern Yemen after his escape from Tora Bora in Afghanistan, following the U.S. invasion.

French intelligence determined that other Egyptian- and Yemeni-born Jewish Mossad agents were infiltrated into Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates as radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, the "Muslim Brotherhood" agents actually were involved in providing covert Israeli funding for "Al Qaeda" activities. On February 21, 2006, WMR reported on the U.S. Treasury Secretary's firing by President Bush over information discovered on the shady "Al Qaeda" accounts in the United Arab Emirates: "Banking insiders in Dubai report that in March 2002, U.S. Secretary of Treasury Paul O?Neill visited Dubai and asked for documents on a $109,500 money transfer from Dubai to a joint account held by hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi at Sun Trust Bank in Florida. O?Neill also asked UAE authorities to close down accounts used by Al Qaeda .  . . . The UAE complained about O?Neill?s demands to the Bush administration. O?Neill?s pressure on the UAE and Saudis contributed to Bush firing him as Treasury Secretary in December 2002 " O'Neill may have also stumbled on the "Muslim Brotherhood" Mossad operatives operating in the emirates who were directing funds to "Al Qaeda."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Sharjah's ruler, Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, who survived a palace coup attempt in 1987, opened his potentate to Russian businessmen like Viktor Bout, as well as to financiers of radical Muslim groups, including the Taliban and "Al Qaeda."

Moreover, this Israeli support for "Al Qaeda" was fully known to Saudi intelligence, which approved of it in order to avoid compromising Riyadh. The joint Israeli-Saudi support for "Al Qaeda" was well-known to the Sharjah and Ras al Khaimah-based aviation network of the now-imprisoned Russian, Viktor Bout, jailed in New York on terrorism charges. The presence of Bout in New York, a hotbed of Israeli intelligence control of U.S. federal prosecutors, judges, as well as the news media, is no accident: Bout knows enough about the Mossad activities in Sharjah in support of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where Bout also had aviation and logistics contracts, to expose Mossad as the actual mastermind behind 9/11. Bout's aviation empire also extended to Miami and Dallas, two areas that were nexuses for the Mossad control operations for the "Al Qaeda" flight training operations of the Arab cell members in the months prior to 9/11.

 Bout's path also crossed with "Al Qaeda's" support network at the same bank in Sharjah, HSBC. Mossad's phony Muslim Brotherhood members from Egypt and Yemen controlled financing for "Al Qaeda" through the HSBC accounts in Sharjah. Mossad's Dominik Suter also dealt with HSBC in the United States. The FBI's chief counter-terrorism agent investigating Al Qaeda, John O'Neill, became aware of the "unique" funding mechanisms for Al Qaeda. It was no mistake that O'Neill was given the job as director of security for the World Trade Center on the eve of the attack. O'Neill perished in the collapse of the complex.Mossad uses a number of Jews born in Arab countries to masquerade as Arabs. They often carry forged or stolen passports from Arab countries or nations in Europe that have large Arab immigrant populations, particularly Germany, France, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

For Mossad, the successful 9/11 terrorist "false flag" operation was a success beyond expectations. The Bush administration, backed by the Blair government, attacked and occupied Iraq, deposing Saddam Hussein, and turned up pressure on Israel's other adversaries, including Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Hamas, and Lebanese Hezbollah. The Israelis also saw the U.S., Britain, and the UN begin to crack down on the Lebanese Shi'a diamond business in Democratic Republic of Congo and West Africa, and with it, the logistics support provided by Bout's aviation companies, which resulted in a free hand for Tel Aviv to move in on Lebanese diamond deals in central and west Africa.

Then-Israeli Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented on the 9/11 attacks on U.S. television shortly after they occurred. Netanyahu said: "It is very good!" It now appears that Netanyahu, in his zeal, blew Mossad's cover as the masterminds of 9/11.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for several renowned papers and blogs.

Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O?Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government.

As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.

Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO), and the National Press Club. He is a regular contributor to Opinion Maker.


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:03:58 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:03:58 +0200
Subject: [THS] !!!!!!! Paul Craig Roberts: The Critics of 9/11 Truth: Do
 They Have A Case?
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914135557.06ad82b0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29114.htm

The Critics of 9/11 Truth: Do They Have A Case?

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 13, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --  The short answer to the question in the title is no.

The 9/11 truth critics have nothing but ad hominem arguments.

Let?s examine the case against the truthers presented by Ted Rall, Ann Barnhardt, and Alexander Cockburn.

But first let?s define who the truthers are.

The Internet has made it possible for anyone to have a web site and to rant and speculate to their heart?s content. There are a large number of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. 

Many on both sides of the issue are equally ignorant. Neither side has any shame about demonstrating ignorance.

Both sides of the issue have conspiracy theories. 9/11 was a conspiracy whether a person believes that it was an inside job or that a handful of Arabs outwitted the entire intelligence apparatus of the Western world and the operational response of NORAD and the US Air Force.

For one side to call the other conspiracy theorists is the pot calling the kettle black.

The question turns not on name-calling but on evidence.

The 9/11 Truth movement was not created by bloggers ranting on their web sites. It was created by professional architects and engineers some of whom are known for having designed steel high rise buildings. It was created by distinguished scientists, such as University of Copenhagen nano-Chemist Niels Harrit who has 60 scientific papers to his credit and physicist Steven Jones. It was created by US Air Force pilots and commercial airline pilots who are expert at flying airplanes. It was created by firefighters who were in the twin towers and who personally heard and experienced numerous explosions including explosions in the sub-basements. It was created by members of 9/11 families who desire to know how such an improbable event as 9/11 could possibly occur.

The professionals and the scientists are speaking from the basis of years of experience and expert knowledge. Moreover, the scientists are speaking from the basis of careful research into the evidence that exists. When an international research team of scientists spends 18 months studying the components in the dust from the towers and the fused pieces of concrete and steel, they know what they are doing. When they announce that they have definite evidence of incendiaries and explosives, you can bet your life that that have the evidence.

When a physicist proves that Building 7 (the stories not obscured by other buildings) fell at free fall speed and NIST has to acknowledge that he is correct, you can bet your life that the physicist is correct.

When fire department captains and clean-up teams report molten steel--and their testimony is backed up with photographs--in the debris of the ruins weeks and months after the buildings? destruction, you can bet your life the molten steel was there. When the same authorities report pumping fire suppressants and huge quantities of water with no effect on the molten steel, you can bet your life that the temperature long after the buildings? destruction remained extremely high, far higher than any building fire can reach.

When the architects, engineers, and scientists speak, they offer no theory of who is responsible for 9/11. They state that the known evidence supports neither the NIST reports nor the 9/11 Commission Report. They say that the explanation that the government has provided is demonstrably wrong and that an investigation is required if we are to discover the truth about the event.

It is not a conspiracy theory to examine the evidence and to state that the evidence does not support the explanation that has been given.

That is the position of the 9/11 Truth movement.

What is the position of the movement?s critics? Ted Rall says: ?Everything I?ve read and watched on Truther sites is easily dismissed by anyone with a basic knowledge of physics and architecture. (I spent three years in engineering school.) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29113.htm

Wow! What powerful credentials. Has Rall ever designed a high rise steel building? Could Rall engage in a debate with a professor of nano-chemistry? Could he refute Newton?s laws in a debate with university physicists? Does Rall know anything about maneuvering airplanes? Does he have an explanation why 100 firefighters, janitors, and police report hearing and experiencing explosions that they did not hear or experience?

Clearly, Ted Rall has no qualifications whatsoever to make any judgment about the judgments of experts whose knowledge exceeds his meager understanding by a large amount.

Ann Barnhardt writes: ?I gotta tell you, I?ve just about had it with these 9/11 truthers. If there is one phenomenon in our sick, sick culture that sums up how far gone and utterly damaged we are as a people, it is 9/11 trutherism. It pretty much covers everything: self-loathing, antisemitism, zero knowledge of rudimentary physics and a general inability to think logically.? She goes down hill from here. http://barnhardt.biz/

Amazing, isn?t she? Physics professors have ?zero knowledge of rudimentary physics.?
Internationally recognized logicians have ?a general inability to think logically.? People trained in the scientific method who use it to seek truth are ?self-loathing.? If you doubt the government?s account you are antisemitic. Barnhardt then provides her readers with a lesson in physics, structural architecture and engineering, and the behavior of steel under heat and stress that is the most absolute nonsense imaginable.

Obviously, Barnhardt knows nothing whatsoever about what she is talking about, but overflowing with hubris she dismisses real scientists and professionals with ad hominem arguments. She adds to her luster with a video of herself tearing out pages of the Koran, which she has marked with slices of bacon, and burning the pages.

Now we come to Alex Cockburn. He is certainly not stupid. I know him. He is pleasant company. He provides interesting intellectual conversation. I like him. Yet, he also arrogantly dismisses highly qualified experts who provide evidence contrary to the official government story of 9/11.

Alex avoids evidence presented by credentialed experts and relies on parody. He writes that the conspiracists claim that the twin towers ?pancaked because Dick Cheney?s agents--scores of them--methodically planted demolition charges.? http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/the-911-conspiracists-vindicated-after-all-these-years/

Little doubt but there are bloggers somewhere in the vast Internet world who say this. But this is not what the professionals are saying who have provided evidence that the official account is not correct. The experts are simply saying that the evidence does not support the official explanation. More recently, an international team of scientists has reported finding unequivocal evidence of incendiaries and explosives. They have not said anything about who planted them. Indeed, they have said that other scientists should test their conclusions by repeating the research. After calling experts ?conspiracy kooks,? Alex then damns them for not putting forward ?a scenario of the alleged conspiracy.?

Moreover, not a single one of the experts believes the towers ?pancaked.? This was an early explanation that, I believe, was tentatively put forward by NIST, but it had to be abandoned because of the speed with which the buildings came down and due to other problems.

Unlike Rall and Barnhardt, Alex does refer to evidence, but it is second or third-hand hearsay evidence that is nonsensical on its face. For example, Alex writes that Chuck Spinney ?tells me that ?there ARE pictures taken of the 757 plane hitting Pentagon--they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon?s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen them both--stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows.??

If there were pictures or videos of an airliner hitting the Pentagon, they would have been released years ago. They would have been supplied to the 9/11 Commission. Why would the government refuse for 10 years to release pictures that prove its case? The FBI confiscated all film from all surveillance cameras. No one has seen them, much less a Pentagon critic such as Spinney.

I have to say that the van driver must have better eyes than an eagle if he could see expressions on passenger faces through those small airliner portholes in a plane traveling around 500 mph. Try it sometimes. Sit on your front steps and try to discern the expressions of automobile passengers through much larger and clearer windows traveling down your street in a vehicle moving 30 mph. Then kick the speed up 16.7 times to 500 mph and report if you see anything but a blur.

Alex?s other evidence that 9/11 truthers are kooks is a letter that Herman Soifer, who claims to be a retired structural engineer, wrote to him summarizing ?the collapse of Buildings 1 and 2 succinctly.? This is what Soifer, who ?had followed the plans and engineering of the Towers during construction? wrote to Alex: ?The towers were basically tubes, essentially hollow.? This canard was disposed of years ago. If Alex had merely googled the plans of the buildings, he would have discovered that there were no thin-walled hollow tubes, but a very large number of massively thick steel beams.

Alex?s willingness to dismiss as kooks numerous acknowledged experts on the basis of a claim that a van driver saw terrified faces of passengers moving at 500 mph and a totally erroneous description in a letter from a person who knew nothing whatsoever about the structural integrity of the buildings means that he is a much braver person than I.

Before I call architects kooks whose careers were spent building steel high rises, I would want to know a lot more about the subject than I do. Before I poke fun at nano-chemists and physicists, I would want to at least be able to read their papers and find the scientific flaws in their arguments.

Yet, none of the people who ridicule 9/11 skeptics are capable of this. How, for example, can Rall, Barnhardt, or Cockburn pass judgment on a nano-chemist with 40 years of experience and 60 scientific publications to his credit?

They cannot, but nevertheless do. They don?t hesitate to pass judgment on issues about which they have no knowledge or understanding. This is an interesting psychological phenomenon worthy of study and analysis.

Another interesting phenomenon is the strong emotional reactions that many have to 9/11, an event about which they have little information. Even the lead members of the 9/11 Commission itself have said that information was withheld from them and the commission was set up to fail. People who rush to the defense of NIST do not even know what they are defending as NIST refuses to release the details of the simulation upon which NIST bases its conclusion.

There is no 9/11 debate. On the one hand there are credentialed experts who demonstrate problems in the official account, and on the other hand there are non-experts who denounce the experts as conspiracy kooks. The experts are cautious and careful about what they say, and their detractors have thrown caution and care to the wind. That is the state of the debate.
 


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:05:50 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:05:50 +0200
Subject: [THS] Robert Reich Debunks 6 Big GOP Lies About The Economy
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914140525.06ad8020@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29122.htm

Robert Reich Debunks 6 Big GOP Lies About The Economy

Video at url above

Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme as Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry claims? Noted author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich debunks that claim and five other lies the right-wing tells about taxes, government and the economy.


The lies Reich debunks:
1) Tax cuts to the rich and corporations trickle down to the rest of us.
2) If you shrink government you create jobs.
3) High taxes on the rich hurts the economy.
4) Debt is to be avoided and it is mostly caused by Medicare.
5) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme
6) We need to tax the poor.
Reich was speaking at the "Summit For A Fair Economy" in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 10, 2011.


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:08:22 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:08:22 +0200
Subject: [THS] Tea Party Crowd Cheers Letting Uninsured Die
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914140710.06ad7d08@mail.messagingengine.com>


Tea Party Crowd Cheers Letting Uninsured Die

Video

In Tampa, Florida at the CNN/Tea Party Express debate Monday night, the tea party-filled audience literally cheered aloud for the uninsured to be allowed to die. 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29118.htm

===


Record Poverty Last Year as Household Income Dips

By Ruth Mantell

The 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010 was the largest group for the 52 years that estimates have been published. 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29119.htm


===


Noam Chomsky on US Economic Crisis:

Interview With Democracy Now!

Noam Chomsky, says "huge military spending, a very low taxes by the rich [and corporations] ... those fundamental problems have to be dealt with if there is going to be anything like successful economic and social development in the United States. 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29123.htm


===


America is Collapsing
Mr. President, We Need a 10-Year Plan

By Lawrence Summers

Shovel-ready projects won't cut it, says Lawrence Summers, former treasury secretary. 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29121.htm


===


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:10:58 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:10:58 +0200
Subject: [THS] Erdogan supports Palestinian statehood, criticizes Israel:
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914141041.06ad7a78@mail.messagingengine.com>

Report: Turkish warplanes now able to fire at Israeli targets: 

Ankara's Star Gazete says country's new F-16 radar system modified to recategorize Israeli targets as hostile. Order said to come directly from PM Erdogan's office; naval, submarine radar systems to be changed next
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4121642,00.html


===


Turkey: Israel, West's spoiled child: 

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Israel is "the West's spoiled child" that has always disregarded decisions made by the international community.
http://presstv.com/detail/198946.html


===


Erdogan supports Palestinian statehood, criticizes Israel: 

'We should be one hand with the Palestinians. The Palestinian flag must be raised at the United Nations,' he told a meeting of the 22-member Arab League.
http://bit.ly/rg0j59


===


Erdogan slams Obama for silence on Israel's Gaza flotilla raid: 

Turkish premier reiterates Ankara's intent to refer legality of Israel's blockade on Gaza to The Hague, saying the world will see 'who is standing alongside the victims'.
http://bit.ly/qEQ67v


===


Obama is not pro-Israel enough for U.S. advocacy group: 

Emergency Committee for Israel launches billboard and media campaign claiming Obama pressures Israel to 'apologize to terrorists' and 'attacks Israel at the UN' in run-up to UN vote on Palestinian statehood.
http://bit.ly/okxj4T


===


New PIPA Poll Shows Drop in Support for Israel : 

66 percent of all respondents said they believed that "U.S. power and influence in the world" has decreased over the past decade
http://www.lobelog.com/new-pipa-poll-shows-drop-in-support-for-israel/


===


Lubavitch school says no black Jews.: 

"We don't take in Ethiopian children. We don't think you match our lifestyle and we're not sure about your Jewishness either." This is what five young girls of Ethiopian descent were told when they arrived with their parents at the "Or Chaya" school in Petah Tikva.
http://yourjewishnews.com/10903.aspx


===


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:18:20 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:18:20 +0200
Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?=91Fast_and_Furious=92_scandal_has_Obama__ad?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?ministration_in_full_cover-up_mode?=
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914141658.06ad7558@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/12/fast-and-furious-scandal-has-obama-administration-in-full-cover-up-mode/

?Fast and Furious? scandal has Obama administration in full cover-up mode
Published: 12:47 PM 09/12/2011 | Updated: 12:55 PM 09/12/2011
By Chris Cox

Chris W. Cox is executive director of the National Rifle Association?s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization?s chief lobbyist.


The more we learn about the ?Fast and Furious? scandal ? in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) illegally facilitated the transfer of thousands of guns to violent drug cartels in Mexico ? the more apparent it is that we are witnessing a large-scale cover-up of epic proportions.

In fact, it?s getting difficult to keep up with all of the shuffling of key agency personnel who were involved in the deadly scandal. Here is a brief run-down of what transpired over the past two weeks:

* BATFE director Kenneth Melson was reassigned by Attorney General Eric Holder?s Justice Department to a new senior advisor role at the agency?s headquarters in Washington.

* Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona, resigned from his post.

* Thanks to the tenacious investigations being led by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-IA), it is now apparent that the lead prosecutor in the U.S. attorney?s office in Arizona, Emory Hurley, initially sought to cover up the fact that at least two illegal ?Fast and Furious? guns were found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The Justice Department recently transferred Hurley out of its criminal division to its civil division.

* We now know that White House officials knew more about the deadly ?Fast and Furious? operation than they previously disclosed. Three White House officials ? Kevin O?Reilly, Dan Restrepo and Greg Gatjanis ? all received back-channel communications about ?Fast and Furious? from BATFE?s then-special agent in charge of Phoenix, Bill Newell. Newell, as you might recall, was recently reassigned to a new job at Justice Department headquarters.

The Obama administration?s continued stonewalling and seemingly orchestrated cover-up of the ?Fast and Furious? scandal is only adding to the overall tragedy of this situation.

It?s tragic that this harebrained scheme cost people their lives, including a brave American Border Patrol agent. It?s also tragic that at the same time the Obama administration was purposefully arming Mexican drug lords, Obama, Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were blaming American gun owners and our Second Amendment rights for violent crime in Mexico.

But as White House officials continue to hide details related to this scandal, they are now doing serious damage to the rule of law upon which our republic was built.

The longer this drags on, the more lasting the damage will be ? not only to our overall institution of government but also to the ability of future leaders to hold federal agencies accountable and protect the sanctity of our freedoms.

For this reason, it?s time for an independent prosecutor to be assigned to this case. Only then will we have any chance of learning the truth so we can fix the problem.

Chris W. Cox is the Executive Director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization?s chief lobbyist.


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:19:06 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:19:06 +0200
Subject: [THS] Massive default is best way to fix the economy:
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914141852.06ad72c8@mail.messagingengine.com>

'EU splitting amid financial crisis': 

Max Keiser, financial journalist, tells us that Germany is to take control of the European economy and become the sole superpower in the European continent.
http://presstv.com/detail/198970.html


===


Massive default is best way to fix the economy: 

Clearing away the debt is the only way forward
http://bit.ly/oGnS1E


===


IMF: Austerity boosts unemployment, lowers paychecks: 

In a new paper for the International Monetary Fund, Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh and Prakash Loungani look at 173 episodes of fiscal austerity over the past 30 years. Their verdict? Austerity "lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment."
http://wapo.st/pCjzzP


===


Median Male Worker Makes Less Now Than 43 Years Ago: 

While the fact that a record number of Americans are living in poverty should not surprise anyone at this point, what should surprise many is that according to Table P-5 of the Census report of (Lack of) Income, the median male is now worse on a gross, inflation adjusted basis, than he was in... 1968!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/median-male-worker-makes-less-now-43-years-ago


===


Mortgage rates lowest in decades, but few qualify: 

Mortgage rates have reached their lowest levels in six decades, making this the best time in most Americans' lives to buy or refinance a home. Yet most people can't take advantage.
http://bit.ly/qD2ZFI


===


Thousands jailed in the US for being poor: 

In what might seem like an un-American plot twist from a Charles Dickens' novel, advocates for the poor say, some parents are wrongly being locked away without any regard for their ability to pay child support - sometimes without the benefit of legal representation. 
http://on.msnbc.com/prA8ft

===


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:15:47 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:15:47 +0200
Subject: [THS] The Fate of Europe, nearing the point of decision
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914141530.06ad77e8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/27796/

The Fate of Europe, nearing the point of decision
13 September 2011
tags: europe, european economic and monetary union
by Fabius Maximus

Summary:  Will Europe become a collection of pawns?  Or unify into a great nation?  The time of decision approaches.   Our news media ignore key aspects of the situation, making the actions of Europe?s leaders look foolish.  They?re not.  Here we will look at the challenges that lie ahead, and what?s at stake for Europe.

In July 2008 I asked  Can the European Monetary Union survive the next recession?  My answer was ?probably not?.  So far that forecast has proven wrong.  What comes next?

Contents

   1. The challenges ahead
   2. Why unify?
   3. The path ahead divides:  unify or divorce
   4. What will they do?

(1)  The challenges ahead

Germany?s Federal Constitutional Court ruled on February 7 that ?Constitutional complaints lodged against aid measures for Greece and against the euro rescue package {are} unsuccessful; no violation of the Bundestag?s budget autonomy?  (see the ruling here).  This ended the current phase of unification, during which the Federal Cabinet made decisions for Germany ? creeping federalism, incremental steps unifying Europe.  Opinions differ on the implications of the ruling for the future; it certainly made future bailouts more difficult by requiring Bundestag involvement.

The European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) probably enters the endgame during the next year, as one of the following emerges suddenly and unexpectedly ? every week a challenge.  Greece is the firebreak; once through Greece the fire probably quickly spreads to the other PIIGS.

   1. Any member of the EMU can abort the process, not just Greece and Germany (e.g., Netherland?s and Finland?s demand for collateral on future loans to Greece).
   2. This becomes more likely as public support continues to decline in both creditor and debtor nations. Hence partisan maneuvering, legislative votes, and  elections can have outsize effects ? or even spark the endgame. Like Berlin State election on 18 September, or the September 29 Bundestag vote on the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF).  A trial vote did not go well (see Reuters).
   3. The ECB and IMF might impose such tight conditions that Greece bolts (They are unlikely on their own to end the bailouts).
   4. An economic slowdown or recession in Europe probably destroys the enthusiasm for bailout and austerity programs.
   5. A loss of confidence by bank investors might spark a run on Europe?s banks (EU banks are weak; a slow run has been happening in Greece; perhaps one starting in France), by sovereign bond investors might destabilize government finances.
   6. Speculators? hot money might destabilize the situation (much as its driven the Swiss Franc to crazy levels).  So far they?re pushing down the Euro, boosting Europe?s exports.
   7. The high-growth emerging nations fighting inflation (e.g., China) are depressing global growth, hurting Europe?s exports.  Ditto for the slowing America and Japanese economies.

Updates:

    * Many decisions lie ahead for Europe, with complex and often misunderstood consequences.  For instance, a Greek default does not guarantee its expulsion (or departure) from the EMU.  And vice versa (although it seems VERY likely that default follows expulsion).
    * After they decide, much depends on governments? executions of new policies. Skillful or clumsy?
    * Government defaults come in many forms, from soft to hard.  For details see Governments cannot go bankrupt.

(2)  Why unify?

US conservatives often describe Europe?s unification as quixotic or a leftist plot.  It?s neither, but something America refuses to do:  prepare for the 21st century.

Europe`s leaders have worked to unify Europe since WWII (Of course, that?s an over-simplification.  They are not a unitary element, and many oppose unification).  Success would bring a host of economic benefits.  Failure would make them small powers kicked around by the 21st century?s great powers (e.g., USA, China, Russia, Brazil).  Germany, France, and Britain have done it to others for centuries; they do not want it done to them.  But e pluribus unum takes time, effort, and often war.

Due to our long English heritage, we often forget the short history of Europe`s nations.  Belgium began in 1839 (on weakly together even today); Germany and Italy a few decades later.  Going from young nations to a supra-national state so quickly has few or no historical precedents.

Nor was it easy.  Italy and Germany unified smoothly in the 19th century ? compared to some.  America and France overcome regional differences far smaller than across Europe, in nations already unified, only through wars (Napoleonic and Civil).  America?s regions despised one another until the late 1800's, forged into a strong union by the Civil War.  Only about 1 of 8 Frenchman spoke proper French in 1800; most spoke somewhat mutually incomprehensible regional dialects.

Europe?s leaders slowly brought Europe together after 1945.  Then they gambled, attempting a currency union before political union.  Success will bring applause from future historians for their boldness; failure will bring mockery at their foolishness. It might have worked if they had more time before a recession induced massive strains in the EMU fabric.  But the recession arrived, and revealed the primary failure in the project:  Europe?s peoples do not support it.

Europe has come so far, and I`ll bet they will join together. Eventually.  But the current phase of the process looks likely to end badly, setting it back decades or generations.

(3)  The path ahead divides:  unify or divorce

What happens if Greece leaves the EMU? Nobody knows the political or economic consequences. Experts disagree, and guesses remain guesses no matter how confidently stated.  What happens if they decide to remain together, taking the next steps to unification?  Ditto, more unknowns.  Starting the endgame (e.g., Greece defaulting) does not answer these questions:  it initiates a series of decsisions with unpredictable effects, both immediate and long-term.

The one certain-to-fail choice:  failure to choose.  A tree lies ahead in the intersection.  As they dither the tree grows larger in the windscreen.

This series of crises helps (forces) Europe?s peoples adapt to change.  Each crisis forces them to adjust and prepare.  Eventually they accept the need to change, which initiates the endgame.  That point appears close, as seen here:  ?German Finance Minister Prepares for Possible Greek Bankruptcy?, Der Spiegel, 10 September 2011 ? Excerpt:

    German Finance Minister Wolfgang Sch?uble, who is reportedly doubtful that the country can be saved from bankruptcy, is preparing for the possibility of Greek insolvency. Officials in his ministry are currently reviewing scenarios for handling such a situation, exploring what it might mean for the rest of the euro zone. Under the first scenario for a Greek bankruptcy, the country would remain in the euro zone. Under the other, Athens would abandon the common currency and reintroduce the drachma.

(4)  What happens next?

Amidst the clatter of delusionally confident predictions about the unknowable, all we can only say that Europe?s leaders have successfully held the EMU together during four years of the worst recession since the 1930's.  Quite an accomplishment.

Despite the critics, Europe does not face now economic failure, as the core EMU nations have the capacity to easily support the PIIGS through the restructuring process.  And the PIIGS are restructuring ? and fast.  The Greeks, Spaniards, and Portuguese have accepted the EU-imposed depression better than many expected (me, too), showing a remarkably high level of social cohesion. I wonder if America could do so well.

This is not just a European event.  Chaos there will echo around the world.  Coordination among governments in Europe and globally will be essential to minimize the shocks, but might prove impossible to achieve.

There are no easy solutions.  Both paths have high costs.  There are two widespread views about the endgame.

    * The costs of unification are too high to pay; the public support too low for success.  Breakup is certain.
    * The costs (and complexity) of breakup are too high to suffer; the benefits of unification are too great to lose.  The cost in the first year might be 25% of GDP for Germany (and the other creditor nations), and 50% of GDP for Greece (and the other creditor nations).   Unification is likely.

The first ignores Europe?s history since WWII, the need to unify, and the determination of its leaders to unify.  The second represents the Norman Angell theory of history.  His 1909 book, The Great Illusion, showed that Europe?s economic integration made war illogical. People interpreted that to mean that war was unlikely or impossible.  In 1914 Europe acted illogically.  Europe might do so again soon.

We cannot see waty lies ahead because Europe?s people have not yet chosen which path to take.  We cannot see beyond choices not yet made.

Other posts about Europe on the FM website

   1. Can the European Monetary Union survive the next recession?, 11 July 2008
   2. The periphery of Europe ? a flashpoint to the global economy, 8 February 2010
   3. Our government?s finances are broken. How do we compare with our peers?, 8 April 2010
   4. Governments cannot go bankrupt, 2 April 2010
   5. The EU does Kabuki for Greece. Is it the next domino to fall?, 14 April 2010
   6. Former Central Bank Head Karl Otto P?hl says bailout plan is all about ?rescuing banks and rich Greeks?, 20 May 2010

For other posts about the events taking place today see the FM Reference Page about the End of the post-WWII geopolitical regime.


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:21:58 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:21:58 +0200
Subject: [THS] Ray McGovern and Jason Leopold: 9/11 Not an "Intelligence
 Failure"
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914142040.0409d888@mail.messagingengine.com>

9/11 Not an "Intelligence Failure" 

Watch interview here:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRTb1glOzTM&feature=player_embedded

Uploaded by TheRealNews on Sep 11, 2011 

Ray McGovern and Jason Leopold: The intelligence agencies had the information, the question is why didn't they use it.

http://www.truth-out.org/truthouts-jason-leopold-911-not-intelligence-failure/1315766031?q=former-counterterrorism-czar-accuses-tenet-other-cia-officials-cover/1313071564

Published on Truthout (http://www.truth-out.org)

Home > Former Counterterrorism Czar Accuses Tenet, Other CIA Officials of Cover-Up


Former Counterterrorism Czar Accuses Tenet, Other CIA Officials of Cover-Up

Thursday 11 August 2011 
by: Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report 
 

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, speaks to filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski about crucial intelligence involving two 9/11 hijackers he believes ex-CIA Director George Tenet and others concealed.

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 just a month away, the intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have started to attract fresh scrutiny from former counterterrorism officials, who have called into question the veracity of the various government probes that concluded who knew what and when.

Indeed, an exclusive report [3] recently published by Truthout based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official showed how a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's movements prior to 9/11.

And now, in a stunning new interview scheduled to air [4] on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado tonight, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, for the first time, levels explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials - George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee - accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the Bush and Clinton White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks.

Clarke also accused the former CIA officials of engaging in a cover-up failing to disclose to Congress and the 9/11 Commission key details about the two hijackers.

Tenet, Black and Blee have "been able to get through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11 Commission and this has never come out," Clarke said in the interview, an advance copy of which was provided to Truthout. "They got away with it."

Clarke, who now runs the security firm Good Harbor Consulting [5], was the chief counterterrorism adviser for the Clinton and Bush administrations. He famously testified before the 9/11 Commission probing the terrorist attacks that "your government failed you."

In October 2009, Clarke spoke to John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, who have been working on a documentary about Blee and the secrecy surrounding his role in the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, which is set to air on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

Duffy and  Nowosielski, whose previous film, "Press For Truth [6]," followed four 9/11 widows as they lobbied the Bush White House to convene an independent commission to probe the attacks, have also launched a new transparency web site, SecrecyKills.com [7], set to go live this evening with a campaign aimed at further unmasking Blee.

Clarke acknowledges that he does not have any evidence to back up his claims about the former CIA officials. He did not respond to questions about whether he still stood behind the comments he made about Tenet, Black, and Blee nearly two years ago. But Nowosielski told Truthout he spoke to Clarke last week to inform him that Tenet, Black and Blee had issued a joint statement that was harshly critical of his charges, and Clarke told  Nowosielski he has not changed his position.

Clarke asserts in the 13-minute interview that Tenet, the former CIA director; Black, who headed the agency's Counterterrorist Center; and Blee [8], a top aide to Tenet who led the CIA's Bin Laden Issues Station, also known as Alec Station, whose true identity was revealed for the first time [9] two years ago, are responsible for the government's failure to capture Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with three other terrorists and flew the jetliner directly into the Pentagon killing 189 people.

"George Tenet followed all of the information about al-Qaeda in microscopic detail," Clarke told Duffy and  Nowosielski. "He read raw intelligence reports before analysts in the counterterrorism center did and he would pick up the phone and call me at 7:30 in the morning and talk about them."

But Tenet, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2004, did not share what Clarke says he knew about the al-Hazmi and the al-Mihdhar case.

In early January 2000, CIA analysts were informed by the National Security Agency that al-Hamzi and al-Mihdhar were heading to a meeting of other al-Qaeda associates in Malaysia, their travel arranged by Osama bin Laden's Yemen operations center. The CIA surveilled the meeting and obtained photographs of the men from Malaysian intelligence.

>From Malaysia, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar and Khallad bin Attash, the alleged mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing, traveled to Thailand, which the CIA reported in a cable sent to Alec Station. The CIA had claimed, according to the 9/11 Commission report, that they lost track of all three men after they arrived at an airport in Thailand.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar then boarded a flight bound for Los Angeles, arriving in the city on January 15, 2000, and later met up with retired English professor Abdussattar Shaikh, who was secretly working as an FBI informant [10].

Still, despite being aware that al-Mihdhar held a multiple-entry US visa, the CIA failed to notify the FBI and State Department for inclusion on the latter's terrorist watch list. Remarkably, Mihdhar left Southern California for Yemen in late 2000 and, using a new passport, returned to the US undetected on July 4, 2001.

Clarke suggests that if the CIA had shared intelligence about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with him, the FBI, and others, then perhaps the attack on the Pentagon could have been thwarted.

As he noted in his book, "Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters [11]," the 9/11 Commission never fleshed out the rationale behind the CIA's failure to share crucial intelligence information about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with other officials and government agencies.

"As jaded and cynical as I am about government failures, I still find this one mind-boggling and inexplicable," Clarke wrote. "The 9/11 Commission report does not tell us very much about how or why it happened and their explanations, while they could be correct, strain credulity and leave many questions unanswered."

But the FBI also bears some responsibility for the intelligence breakdown. An agent assigned to Alec Station discovered in January 2000 al-Mihdhar had a US visa and drafted a memo [12] intended to alert the FBI's Bin Laden Unit. But a CIA officer prohibited the agent from sending it. Moreover, Shaikh's FBI case agent was aware [10] that two Saudi Arabian men had moved into his San Diego apartment in 2000, but never bothered to inquire about the identities of the individuals. Had the case agent done so, he would have discovered that his informant's houseguests were al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

"Failure to Communicate"

One of the CIA officials who had been monitoring the Malaysia meeting was a young al-Qaeda analyst named Jennifer Matthews, who had been working with the Bin Laden Issues Station since its inception in 1996. Another analyst, who worked closely with Matthews, was a red-headed woman who, in recent years, has been at the center of a scandal involving the torture and wrongful rendition of at least one detainee. She has since been promoted and continues to work for the CIA on al-Qaeda-related issues. An agency spokesman requested that Truthout not print her name because her identity is classified.

In his recently published book, "Triple Agent [13]," Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick wrote that former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson probed "CIA missteps that had allowed" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar "to enter the United States undetected."

"Helgerson concluded that the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had failed to respond to a series of cabled warnings in 2000 about" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar "who later became part of the September 11 plot ...," Warrick wrote. "The cables were seen by as many as sixty CIA employees, yet the two operatives' names were never passed along to the FBI, which might have assigned agents to track them down or shared with the State Department, which could have flagged their named on its watch list. In theory, the arrest of the either man could have led investigators to the other hijackers and the eventual unraveling of the 9/11 plot.

"Helgerson's report named individual managers who it said bore the greatest responsibility for failing to ensure that vital information was passed to the FBI. The report, never released in full, also recommended that some of the managers be reviewed for possible disciplinary action ... Jennifer Matthews was on that list."

Matthews, who Warrick also says led the agency's search for the first high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah, and who was also present at the CIA black site prison in Thailand when Zubaydah was waterboarded after he was captured in March 2002, was among seven CIA officers killed in Khost, Afghanistan, in a December 2009 suicide bombing  at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan, which Matthews was chief of.

"A High-Level Decision"

Although Helgerson's report recommended Matthews be disciplined, Clarke does not believe she or the dozens of other CIA analysts bear the ultimate responsibility for failing to inform the US government for 18 months that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US.

"It's not as I originally thought, which was that one lonely CIA analyst got this information and didn't somehow recognize the significance of it," Clarke said during the interview. "No, fifty, 5-0, CIA personnel knew about this. Among the fifty people in CIA who knew these guys were in the country was the CIA director."

Still, Clarke said his position as National Coordinator for Security and Information meant he should have received a briefing from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, explaining "unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution I would automatically get it."

"For me to this day, it is inexplicable why when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism that the director didn't tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn't tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months ... We therefore conclude that there was a high-level decision inside CIA ordering people not to share that information," Clarke said.

How high level?

"I would think it would have to be made by the director," Clarke said. "You gotta understand my relationship with [Tenet], we were close friends, he called me several times a day, we shared the most trivial of information with each other, there was not a lack of information sharing, [CIA] told us everything except this."

CIA Tried to "Flip" Hijackers?

So, what happened? Why did the CIA fail to share its intelligence about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with Clarke and other government officials? Clarke believes the CIA may have attempted to "flip" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, but ultimately failed.

That's an allegation that surfaced in Lawrence Wright's groundbreaking book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11 [14]." Wright, who interviewed Clarke for his book, said a team of FBI investigators and federal prosecutors known as Squad I-49 [15] came to believe that the CIA "was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them"

"The CIA was desperate for a source inside al-Qaeda; it had completely failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place a willing partner in the training camps, which were largely open to anyone who showed up," Wright wrote. "Mihdhar and Hazmi must have seemed like attractive opportunities however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI. The CIA had no legal authority to operate inside the country ... It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence in order to get around that restriction ... These are only theories about the CIA's failures to communicate vital information to the bureau ... Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well."

"This is the view of some very bitter FBI investigators, who wonder why they were never informed of the existence of al-Qaeda operatives inside America. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived nineteen months before 9/11. The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA had failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them."

The 9/11 Commission was unable to substantiate claims that the CIA tried to recruit al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and Clarke never disclosed this theory to the panel during his testimony as it was a conclusion he said he reached years later.

"Reckless and Profoundly Wrong"

In response to Clarke's charges, Tenet, Black and Blee issued a joint statement to Duffy and Nowosielski last week upon learning that Clarke's interview was scheduled for broadcast. The former CIA officials admonished their former colleague, stating his comments were "reckless and profoundly wrong." Blee's inclusion in the joint statement marks the first time he has spoken publicly about the events leading up to 9/11.

"Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000," the former CIA officials said. "It was not. He wildly speculates that it must have been the CIA Director who could have ordered the information withheld. There was no such order. In fact, the record shows that the Director and other senior CIA officials were unaware of the information until after 9/11."

"In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time ... Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate - which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination - that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation. We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't know. We stand by that testimony."

"We Would Have Found Those Assholes"

But Clarke says even as early as July 2001 - two months before the terrorist attacks - when Tenet and Blee called an urgent meeting with President Bush at the White House, they had an opportunity to disclose the fact that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were somewhere in the US, but failed to disclose what they knew.

The CIA waited until late August to inform lower-level FBI agents that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US and were likely planning an attack inside the US. Yet, the CIA continued to conceal the intelligence from senior FBI and Bush administration officials a week prior to the attacks.

Clarke said there's a "very obvious answer" as to why the CIA continued, as early as September 4, 2001, in a meeting attended by Clarke and other senior Bush administration officials, to withhold intelligence about the two hijackers: to protect the agency from scrutiny.

"I know how all this stuff works I've been working it for 30 years," Clarke said. "You can't snowball me on this stuff. If they announce on September 4 in the Principals meeting that these guys are in the United States and they told the FBI a few weeks ago I'm going to say 'wait, time out. How long have you known this? Why haven't you reported it at the daily threat meetings? Why isn't it in the daily threat matrix?' We would have begun an investigation that day into CIA malfeasance and misfeasance that's why we're not informed."

Clarke added that even if the CIA had disclosed what it knew about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar as late as September 4, 2001, he believes the FBI could have captured the men and dismantled their plans to attack the Pentagon.

"We would have conducted a massive sweep," Clarke said. "We would have conducted publicly. We would have found those assholes. There's no doubt in my mind. Even with only a week left."

Truthout contributor Jeffrey Kaye contributed to this report.
[16] 

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License [16]. 
Jason Leopold [18]
News 

Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/former-counterterrorism-czar-accuses-tenet-other-cia-officials-cover/1313071564

Links:
[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/4999
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/4999
[3] http://www.truth-out.org/new-documents-claim-intelligence-bin-laden-al-qaeda-targets-withheld-congress-911-probe/1307986777
[4] http://cpt12.org/
[5] http://www.goodharbor.net/
[6] http://www.911pressfortruth.com/
[7] http://www.secrecykills.com
[8] http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=rich_b._1
[9] http://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/identity-of-cia-officer-responsible-for-pre-911-failures-tora-bora-escape-rendition-to-torture-revealed/
[10] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/09/attack/main521223.shtml
[11] http://www.amazon.com/Your-Government-Failed-You-Disasters/dp/B003JTHSR2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1313006263&amp;sr=8-1
[12] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a010400ciamislead#a010400ciamislead
[13] http://www.amazon.com/Triple-Agent-al-Qaeda-Mole-Infiltrated/dp/0385534183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1313006239&amp;sr=8-1
[14] http://www.amazon.com/Looming-Tower-Al-Qaeda-Road-11/dp/1400030846/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1313073430&amp;sr=8-1
[15] http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=i-49_1
[16] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
[17] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[18] http://www.truth-out.org/content/jason-leopold
[19] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[20] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[21] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=new-documents-claim-intelligence-bin-laden-al-qaeda-targets-withheld-congress-911-probe/1307986777



From ths at psalience.org  Wed Sep 14 14:29:59 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:29:59 +0200
Subject: [THS] Colombian Supreme Court rules on drugs
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110914142920.06ab1628@mail.messagingengine.com>

On 24 August the Colombian Supreme Court ruled that a prison sentence
for drug possession for personal use violated "personal freedoms."
The ruling came in the case of a teenager sentenced to five years in
prison after being caught with 80 grams of cannabis. Colombia has
some of the most repressive drug laws in the region. (Source: Drug
War Chronicle of 6 September 2011


From ths at psalience.org  Thu Sep 15 14:29:52 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:29:52 +0200
Subject: [THS] Bankruptcy of the bypass diplomacy
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110915142859.06bd9ca8@mail.messagingengine.com>

Saturday, September 10, 2011


Bankruptcy of the bypass diplomacy 

ADAM KELLER THEOTHERISRAEL

http://adam-keller2.blogspot.com/2011/09/bankruptcy-of-bypass-diplomacy.html



About a century ago the Zionist movement - established in order to settle in an ancestral land and establish a Jewish state - met with increasing resistance from the inhabitants, who also regarded  it as their ancestral country. Already then it occurred to the Zionist leaders that it might be possible to overcome this resistance by creating bypasses and finding allies across the region who would counter-balance and cancel the local Arab resistance in Mandatory Palestine.

The first to be assigned such was the Hashemite Dynasty, which during the First World War led the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule, and who later became Emirs of Transjordan, still later the Kings of Jordan.

Already in 1921 Chaim Weizmann - the future President of Israel ? met with the Emir Feisal, founder of the dynasty, and got from him a statement rather sympathetic towards Zionism and its goals. The only problem was the Arab Palestinians, in whose country Zionism strove to establish the Jewish State, had not really authorized the Emir Feisal, nor his descendants, to make concessions on their behalf. And for decades the unofficial alliance with the Hashemites continued, and even when they found themselves at war in 1948 the secret contacts continued, and after the war the new State of Israel tacitly encouraged the Kingdom of Jordan to annex what is known since then as "The West Bank" and wipe the name of "Palestine" off the map. But it turned out that the Palestinians have not disappeared, were just swept under the carpet, emerging into the spotlight after another war in 1967. And after more struggles and intifadas "The Jordanian Option" (once Shimon Peres' favorite) was once and for all removed from the agenda.

But in the meantime there continued a feverish creative effort to find tortuous new diplomatic detours. In the fifties it was David Ben Gurion, Founding Father and first Prime Minister of Israel, who came up with what seemed a brilliant idea - "The Alliance of the Periphery", designed to bypass the entire Arab World and form a strategic alliance with the non-Arabs Muslim countries of the region, i.e. Iran to the east and Turkey to the north.

Indeed, for decades this covenant thrived. The Shah of Iran was a close and loyal ally to Israel, which among other things helped him to lay the groundwork for an ambitious nuclear research program in his country. And also the Shabak, Israel's security service, helped greatly in  establishing and building up the Shah's own Security Service, which became notorious under the name Savak (the similarity of names is perhaps not entirely coincidental). But it so happened that in 1979 the Shah fell and in Iran emerged a new regime, many of whose leaders were graduates of the torture chambers of the Savak, which did not increase their sympathy for the State of Israel.  (It also did not deter  them from establishing torture chambers of their own, but that's another issue...). And thus, Israel's close ally Iran became its bitter enemy ? far more bitter, in fact, than countries which had never been Israel's allies.

Israel's strategic alliance with Turkey lasted longer, until quite recently ? extensive military contacts, and flourishing bilateral trade, and tourism packages highly popular with less than affluent Israelis. But then came the dramatic chain of events of the past three years. There was the hearty visit of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Ankara in December 2008, when he requested the help of Prime Minister Erdogan to mediate between Israel and Syria and neglected to mention that within three days he was about to embark upon massive bombings in Gaza in which over a thousand and three hundred Palestinians would be killed, and it happened that Erdogan took this rather personally. And then the incident of the Turkish Ambassador being made to sit on a low chair, the unique contribution of Foreign Minister Lieberman and his deputy Danny Ayalon to Israeli relations with Turkey. And then of course the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza and the flotilla which was trying to break this blockade and the Israeli Naval Commandos who encountered resistance on board  the "Marmara" and overcame this resistance within minutes and then went further to the extent of confirming the kill of Turkish citizens by means of bullets shot point blank at their head.  And then many months of secret and public discussions and attempts to reach a compromise formula and the absolute refusal of the Government of Israel to utter the word "apology" and the scrupulous preservation of Israeli National Honor. And ultimately Israel remained with its National Honor intact and with a a strategic ally irrevocably lost, and now it is not longer a complete fantasy to envisage a naval battle in Gazan waters between the Israeli Navy gunboats and the Turkish warships which might escort the next Gaza-bound flotilla.

And meanwhile Egypt, and the wild crowds bursting into the Israeli embassy despite Egyptian security forces shooting dead three of their number. One should again go back - back to the days of euphoria in November 1977 and the courageous Egyptian President who abruptly landed in Israel and spoke in the Knesset and opened a horizon of hope and peace and sought to break and shatter the psychological walls separating the two peoples. And it must be mentioned that it was never the purpose or intent of Anwar a-Sadat to sign a separate peace treaty with Israel and leave the Palestinians to their fate. But certainly that was the precise intention of Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, and he did achieve it, above and beyond all expectations. The peace agreement between Israel and Egypt has become a part of reality, and in order to strengthen it was taken the decision that Egypt would receive annually two billion dollars from the U.S. taxpayer, with the generous assistance of the influential Israeli lobby on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, the negotiations conducted with regard to the Palestinians moved not a single inch, and dozens of new settlements mushroomed throughout the Occupied territories, and the IDF invaded Lebanon and bombed and killed thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, and Israel's allies carried out the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, and then came the time of the intifada and the daily killing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And throughout all this the peace with Egypt remained steady, and the Egyptian Army remained camped on the other side of the Suez Canal and the IDF could safely transfer forces to other fronts. But the spirit of peace between Israel and Egypt was murdered with every IDF bullet  and bomb, with every house built in a settlement, and the psychological walls which Sadat had sought to break down rose up again, higher than ever. And the bitterness and hatred accumulated, and already for many years Israel-Egypt peace was considered a Cold Peace, cold as ice, and some called it a Cold War. All that was needed was a revolution to topple the dictatorial regime in Egypt in order to blow the lid off the bubbling pot. And another diplomatic bypass road designed to avoid dealing with the Palestinians seems to have come to its end.

Only once in its history did the State of Israel seriously try to stop circumventing the real problem, to come face to face with the Palestinians ? its closest neighbors, co-inhabitants of the land where the founders of Zionism chose to create the state of the Jews. In September 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin met with Yasser Arafat, Head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and they shook hands and signed an agreement under which the State of Palestine should have come into being by May 1999. And as one of the results, the long-established relations between the State of Israel and the Jordanian Hashemites could come out of the closet and become an official peace treaty, and the possibility was opened of peace with the entire Arab and Muslim world, an official peace initiative adopted by the Arab League - not a peace leaving the Palestinians behind, but the fitting and rational complementary to a peace between Israel and Palestine.

What would have happened if the assassin's three bullets had not been  fired behind the Tel Aviv Town Hall on November 4, 1995? Had Yitzhak Rabin remained alive, and remained Prime Minister for another term, would he have completed what he started? That we will never know for sure. In history as it actually happened, Rabin was assassinated, and management of what was still called "the peace process" fell into the hands of Binyamin Netanyahu, and the devastation left by Netanyahu was completed by Ehud Barak proposing "generous offers" which were not that generous, and the bloody wilderness through which Israel was led by Sharon and Olmert and Netanyahu again.

So, on this day, the tenth of September of 2011, the State of Israel is at the brink of a moment of truth which had been avoided for years and decades: the bankruptcy of bypass diplomacy, the end of the  Turkish bypass as well as the Egyptian one - and in ten days, facing at the UN the Palestinians' firm demand for an independent state based on the 1967 borders, a demand which for Palestinians is the very bare minimum as it effectively entails accepting the finality of what they lost in 1948.

Apparently, this is the last possibility for Israel to gain recognition and acceptance as a legitimate part of the region in which the Zionist founders chose to establish it. As it now seems, the Government of Israel is about to reject that possibility furiously and out of hand, to respond with physical violence on the ground and diplomatic violence at the UN. A complete reliance on the largest and only remaining detour, Capitol Hill and the rule of AIPAC in American politics. The State of Israel would live by the sword, holding to the mantle of a sinking empire - wagering its entire future on the willingness and ability of the United States to maintain a pariah, isolated enclave in the heart of the turbulent Middle East.

Will the Palestinians be able to influence the international diplomatic arena by conducting a determined mass struggle in the Occupied Territories, without being drawn into the kind of violence which would take away the sympathy of the world? Would the International Community be able to force the State of Israel to turn to a sane path, even without the participation of the US? Would the United States be able to shake off the stranglehold of the Government of Israeli on its internal politics? Could the young people of Israel, who in the past two months waged such an  impressive and encouraging struggle in the past two months, turn their energies also to an issue which so far they have carefully avoided? I wish I could see a convincing reason to end this article on an optimistic note. 


From ths at psalience.org  Thu Sep 15 14:53:42 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:53:42 +0200
Subject: [THS] Libya - Developments
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110915145322.045c1528@mail.messagingengine.com>


12 killed as Libyan rebels attack each other : 

 
At least 12 people have been killed and many more wounded when two groups of fighters opposed to Muammar Gaddafi turned on each other in Libya's west, two officials say.
http://bit.ly/n0FqsX

 

===

 

Initial assault on Gaddafi stronghold falters:

 
Missiles fired from Bani Walid repulse first attack on town where ex-leader is rumoured to be hiding
http://ind.pn/oK3l33

 

===

 

Former U.S. Congressman: Feared Dead in Libya, Returns Home-Guess Who He Saw Doing the Killing: 

 
The noted civil rights leader, told the Afro that he watched French and Danish troops storm small villages late at night beheading, maiming and killing rebels and loyalists to show them who was in control.
http://www.afro.com/sections/news/national/story.htm?storyid=72369

 

===

 

How UK put Libyan dissidents under house arrest at Gaddafi's behest following Blair's 'deal in the desert': 

 
Top-secret documents discovered abandoned in ambassador's residence by the Mail on Sunday reveal Blair government's double-dealing
http://bit.ly/pDpAbn

 

===

 

Former UK minister asked Saif Gaddafi for ?1m : 

 
Lord Trefgarne, a former Conservative minister, asked Muammar Gaddafi's fugitive son Saif al-Islam to help him recover almost ?1 million in fees for his efforts to free the Lockerbie bomber, it is claimed.
http://tgr.ph/rlJjKl

 


From ths at psalience.org  Thu Sep 15 21:51:44 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:51:44 +0200
Subject: [THS] One-Eyed Men In The World Of The Blind
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110915215007.0407a970@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29105.htm

One-Eyed Men In The World Of The Blind

By Lawrence Davidson

September 12, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -  There is an interesting phenomenon which we can call ?the political retiree?s confession.? I don?t mean all those hyped memoirs, ghost written for all manner of high ranking ex-officials. Here I refer to statements by important political leaders and bureaucrats, either out of office or about to vacate their positions, publically describing what really needs to be done. For instance, what really needs to be done to obtain peace, or accurately pointing fingers at those obstructing peace. These statements can be shocking in their honesty, but curiously enough, are never made, much less acted upon, while the truth sayer is in a position of power. They come to us only with retirement or pending retirement.

For example, take former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert was Prime Minister from 2006 (replacing Ariel Sharon who had suffered a debilitating stroke) till early 2009. A few months before leaving office Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that, in the end, Israel would have to return ?almost all? of the West Bank to the Palestinians, including East Jerusalem. There was no other way to achieve peace with the Arab world. Olmert went on, ?the decision we are going to have to make is the decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed
.The time has come to say these things. The time has come to put them on the table.? Of course ?the time? oddly coincided with a period when the Prime Minister could not move this insight from theory into practice.

Now we have another example of this strange phenomenon. This time from the United States. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, the national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, ?in a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held shortly before his retirement this summer [2011]? gave his expert opinion that the Israeli government was ungrateful for United States assistance. That despite all the Obama administration had done for Jerusalem, ?access to top-quality weapons, assistance developing missile defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing
.the U.S. has received nothing in return.? On top of that, in Gates?s estimation Prime Minister Netanyahu is ?endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel?s growing isolation
? No one at the high level meeting disagreed with this analysis.

Gates?s publically revealed anger is nice to hear about but, like Olmert?s epiphany, it means little in practice. Netanyahu has been rude, duplicitous and downright nasty to President Obama in what was actually a replay of the behavior of Menachem Begin toward Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Carter?s National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski learned to distrust the Israeli leadership and would later, after he was no longer in office, advocate an increasing hard line toward Jerusalem. Indeed, he once suggested military confrontation with Israel if that country?s leaders risked a regional war by attacking Iranian nuclear development sites (he suggested the U.S. Air Force shoot down the Israeli planes). This was a reasonable suggestion given the stakes but, of course, it was made when Brzezinski had no position of influence.

Getting back to the article on Gates?s negative opinion of Netanyahu and his government, Jeffrey Goldberg writes, that the former Defense Secretary actually ?articulated bluntly what so many people in the administration seem to believe.? OK. So what are they doing about this? Absolutely nothing. They will all wait until they no longer have positions of influence to come out and vent. The situation is disgusting. And it is disgusting because in both the U.S. and Israel (and no doubt in many other countries as well) there are leaders and advisers who know what needs to be done in Israel-Palestine to make the world more secure and stable, and yet they stand by and twiddle their thumbs.

Why do these leaders do nothing about matters of such importance? Here are two interconnected reasons:

1. In his book Victims of Groupthink (1972) Irving L. Janis shows how governing political elites create self-reinforcing decision making circles that insulate themselves from serious challenge. It is rare that anyone within these circles ?thinks outside the box.? However, it turns out that the ?box? must always be able to accommodate the demands and interests of other groups whose money and power support the ?circle?s? political viability. This is a system that must produce frustration and sense of powerlessness among (the rare) officials who can see even a little more clearly than their peers. By the way it is not a problem unique to political elites. It surely exists in most organizational structures. It is just that when it comes to government the stakes are so much higher for all of us.

2. Enmeshed as they are in a system of national interest group politics that dictate the fate of their various political parties and their own careers, those who might suspect a world outside the box will stay silent. The narrow fate of party and career is, apparently, worth more than world peace. It is worth more than the lives of millions of doomed civilians and soldiers. It is worth more than justice for nations and peoples. Only when free of this debilitating system do some of these people find their tongues. But by then all they have are impotent words. This is what we are seeing in the belated surfacing of rational criticism and analysis from unexpected sources such as Olmert and Gates.

Conclusion

How often do we read about individuals and groups who, witnessing an accident or a crime just stand by and do nothing? These people do not want to ?get involved.? Afterwards, such folks are usually very quiet and meek. They don?t want their neighbors to know that they stood by and did nothing. But the position of these confessing political retirees is quite different. They were already involved. And now, after the fact, these one-eyed men in the world of the blind want us all to know they have seen the light. Great. Now you tell us!

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic work is focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He also teaches courses in the history of science and modern European intellectual history. http://www.tothepointanalyses.com/
 


From ths at psalience.org  Thu Sep 15 21:54:42 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:54:42 +0200
Subject: [THS] Yahoo Warns Against Information Clearing House Newsletter
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110915215337.0407a6e0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29106.htm

Yahoo Warns Against Information Clearing House Newsletter

America's Moment in the Sun Has Come and Gone.

By An Information Clearing House Reader

September 12, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --  When trying to open the emails I receive from you each day, I always get a warning that they are dangerous as a scam and that I shouldn't open them.

When I do try and then click on the individual stories I get the same warning.

Now I have discovered that no matter how many ways I try I cannot post/add anything from ICH to my Facebook page. This certainly proves the power that what you offer us bears. Someone is so frightened by it that that have succeeded in preventing Facebook from presenting it on there website.

Also the fact that Yahoo email warns we-the-people against opening your mail means that anyone I forward it to is likely to delete it without seeing what it offers.

America is becoming more and more like Communist Russia which our Government used to scare us with for years. Our Nation is no longer ours, it is ruled by tyrants similar to Nazi Germany and when one considers that what we are doing in other countries and by backing Israel, that would have to include Genocide. If I were a young man with a healthy body I would immigrate to South America where people know far more of Democracy and are willing to fight for it.

The American People are no longer interested in anyone other than themselves. They only care when they become the victims and then no one is willing to help them which is all that they deserve. I am afraid that America's moment in the Sun has come and gone.

The once bright star of hope for humanity is fizzling out, a glorious firework display that is leaving nothing but ash on the ground to remember it by. A mess to be cleaned up by the once middle class but now serfs as per their masters (the lords and ladies of Wall Street) bidding for a pittance. None-the-less as long as I manage to stay alive I will continue to support you as best I can.

Sincerely

Philip 


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Sep 18 23:54:08 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:54:08 +0200
Subject: [THS] Gilad Atzmon: Obama,
 the Palestinian State & Zionist  Schizophrenia
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110918235349.05ad01d8@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29150.htm

Obama, the Palestinian State & Zionist Schizophrenia

By Gilad Atzmon

September 17, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -  - Those who monitor the Hebrew press and understand the Jewish State may be slightly puzzled to find out that while in the Hebrew press there is only just a little and insignificant attention to the current Palestinian leaders' drive for statehood, the Israeli English media outlets are saturated with news about the prospect of a pro-Palestinian resolution in the UN next week.

If you want to understand this clear discrepancy between the Jewish Hebrew press and English outlets, then here it is--we are dealing here with a clear split within the Jewish collective psyche.

I guess that some may be surprised to learn that Israel and most Israelis actually want the Palestinian initiative to go ahead and to succeed. They want a Palestinian State because this is the only solution that would save the ?Jews only State? from a demographic meltdown.

Recent polls in Israel prove that the majority of Israelis are very excited about the ?Two State Solution?. Not only are the Israelis not threatened by the idea of a Palestinian State, they actually love it, for It would settle their reality within a framework of international law. Also, you may want to bear in mind that Kadima party, that won the last two elections in Israel, has been and still is,  devoted to ?disengagement?, a clear separation between the ?Jews? and the Palestinians by means of Israeli unilateral withdraw. In other words, a Palestinian statehood achieves the exact same goal; it removes Israelis from any responsibility to territories it once occupied and destroyed.  It is obvious that some elements in Israel oppose the Palestinian UN initiative: I guess that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is not too happy about it. West Bank settlers may also be very angry   but for some reason, even they are relatively quiet these days.

And yet, the Jewish Lobby around the world totally opposes the Palestinian UN initiative: it clearly holds a very simplistic image of an expansionist Jewish State from the ?river to the sea?. And as it seems, it is not going to give up on its dream very soon.

What we see here in practice is a clear identity crisis or even a schizophrenic counter flow of aspirations between the Israeli and the Diaspora Zionist.  While the Israelis are reverting to the old Jewish Ghetto attitude, they prefer to shrink, stay together and surround themselves with vast and impenetrable concrete walls, the Diaspora Zionist Jewish narrative is confrontational, belligerent, hawkish militant and expansionist. They want it all, with the Palestinians or without them.

Once again we notice that Israel and Zionism have evolved into two separate and opposing discourses. While Israel is seeking to maintain its racially oriented identity through politics of segregation, the Diaspora Zionist discourse is still insisting on solving the Jewish Question by the means of a conflict with no end.

But let us for a moment look at America; let?s try to understand how the world?s ?single supper power? is handling this Judeo-centric schizophrenic apparatus. 

President Obama and his administration are obviously very confused. On the one hand, they are subject to some relentless pressure inflicted by the Jewish lobby. The Lobby doesn?t leave the American administration with much room to manoeuvre. But on the other hand, both American administration and Israeli Government do realise that, as far as Israel and its ?security? are concerned, the Palestinian UN initiative is not such a bad idea at all.  In fact, Israel cannot pray for more than that.

It is clear by now that President Obama is not going to be saved by any of the so- called ?America?s best friends?. For AIPAC and the Lobby, Obama is an instrument. By now the Lobby is used to regarding American politicians as their subservient puppets. Israel, on the other hand, is not going to save America either. It is two suspicious of the current administration. Israel is basically tired of the current American Administration. It will be happy to see Obama beaten.

Consequently, the American Administration is heading towards an inevitable humiliation in the UN. It will have to veto a decision voted for by many of America?s allies.  This is clearly a disaster for Obama. And yet, one man can save America from its doomed fate. This man is no other than the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Only Abbas and the PA can let America off the hook.

But the meaning of it all is also very embarrassing. It means that the Palestinian President Abbas (who is a relatively weak figure in Palestinian politics as well as in international diplomacy) is the only person who can save our world?s ?single supper power? from a   diplomatic fiasco.  

I cannot make up my mind whether this is funny or sad, but let me tell you, it is certainly volatile.

The time is certainly right for America, Britain and the West to find the strength to oppose Zionist Lobbying and the power of Jerusalem. 

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel in 1963, Atzmon's essays are widely published. His novels 'Guide to the perplexed' and 'My One And Only Love' have been translated into 24 languages. Gilad's latest book, The Wandering Who? is a study of Jewish Identity political identity. It will be published in English in October 2011. http://www.gilad.co.uk 


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Sep 18 23:59:14 2011
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:59:14 +0200
Subject: [THS] !!!! Why We Left The United States
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110918235609.05acfd70@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29154.htm

Why We Left The United States:

By Bob Alexander

September 17, 2011 "TVNewsLies" --  Because on December 12, 2000, the United States Supreme Court nullified the results of a national election and installed George W. Bush as president. And then I saw millions of my fellow Americans deliriously happy the Rule of Law was broken by the Supreme Court of the Land so ?their guy? could 
 ?win.?

That?s when I knew partisanship had ultimately won out over reality. More Americans believe in angels than election fraud. If millions of Americans could turn a blind eye to a stolen election, simply because their side stole it, and then have that coup legitimized by not only the Supreme Court 
 but by all of MainStreamMedia 
 then I knew the country I lived in was not the land of my birth.

I can?t emphasize this enough. Millions of Americans were ecstatic that George W. Bush won regardless of how he won. Unquestioning blind partisanship was more important than the law to these people. But more ominous was Main Stream Media ratifying the coup. At that moment Corporate Media proved they were committed to the destruction of our democratic republic.

That was pretty scary to witness. We?ve all heard of similar ham-fisted tactics used in banana republics south of the border 
 but this was happening 
 here.

That?s when I began formulating my Crazy Stupid People Theorem. Whoever thought the Supreme Court?s decision was part and parcel with a ?Normal Transfer of Power? was either Stupid, Crazy, or 
 Evil. Americans who didn?t know it was essentially a coup were either Stupid, or Crazy, or a little bit of both. If anyone knew it was an outright theft of Americans? votes 
 and they were perfectly ok with that 
 well 
 what else could you call it other than Evil? The subversion of our right to choose our elected representatives strikes at the heart of our country?s founding principles. But again, and this is what continues to confound me, millions of Americans thought it was just fine and dandy.

Along with millions of sane Americans 
 I didn?t ?Move On.? I could not understand why it was so important the institutions Americans trusted most to protect its freedoms and principles had crammed George W. Bush down our throat.

Then 234 days into Bush?s first term as president 
 the attacks of September 11th 2001. And from that day on 
 everything the Bush/Cheney regime did to distort and transform the United States of America into something 
 unrecognizable 
 was because of 9/11. It all came down to 9/11 
 period. The buck stopped there.

And as we were all walking around in a daze, coated with the ash of human beings and pulverized concrete, we were spun into the Ultimate War Crime; wars of aggression. As Chris Hedges wrote, ? 
 We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens, and soon hundreds, and then thousands, and later tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people.?

Then the dawning realization 
 the 9/11 trigger mechanism that caused Hell on Earth for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq 
 was a grotesque lie. This was the ultimate Horror piled upon horror.

Hundreds upon hundreds of statements from members of the Senior Military and Intelligence Services, Law Enforcement, Government Officials, Engineers, Architects, Pilots and Aviation Professionals, Professors, 9/11 Survivors and Family Members, Artists, Entertainers, and Media Professionals, are on record saying the Official Account of 9/11 is: "False", ?Impossible?, ?A Bunch of Hogwash?, ?Total B.S.?, ?Ludicrous?, ?A Well-Organized Cover-up?, ?A White-Washed Farce?, ?Absurd?, "Fatally Flawed", "Not Possible.?

The lies the Bush/Cheney Regime told us that led our country into The Ultimate War Crime were predicated upon the lies the government previously told us about the attacks of 9/11.

As Ralph Lopez wrote, ?The biggest problem with the 9/11 Truth Movement is where it leads: a place dark and evil beyond imagination. 
 when hundreds of American military officers, pilots, engineers, and CIA veterans stepped forward to say they believed the official story to be a monstrous lie, I was shaken to the core. 
 The conspiracies led to the deep dark hole that we are ruled by criminal psychopaths.

This is about as bad as it gets. We knew the government covered up how and why 3,000 people died on 9/11, and then went on to use the attacks as an excuse to do everything we find reprehensible today. And again 
 corporate media ran cover for the government.

If we can?t believe the government?s cover-up, we?re left with three options:

Conclusion One: They Made It Happen.
Conclusion Two: They allowed it to happen.
Or 

Conclusion Three: The attacks of 9/11 were possible because of massive incompetence on the part of the Bush/Cheney Regime.

If Incompetence is the least offensive rationale to explain the actions of the Bush/Cheney regime, then 
 why has there been no accountability?

Involuntary manslaughter is an unintentional killing that happens during the commission of a misdemeanor or because of gross negligence or carelessness. According to Federal sentencing guidelines, Involuntary Manslaughter is punishable by 6 years in prison.

Shouldn?t someone (or a lot of someones) from the Bush/Cheney Regime be prosecuted for the gross negligence that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people? Not in post-9/11 America.

But while we struggled to map out just exactly what a post-9/11 America looked like 
 another stolen presidential election knocked us to our knees.

We knew it was stolen in Ohio. We knew how it was stolen. And once again the corporate media buried the truth by ignoring it. And the blind partisan Crazy Stupid People rejoiced in the prospect of ?Four More Years? of the Bush/Cheney Regime.

Throughout it all the majority of Sane Americans made the same strategic blunder over and over and over again. We were used to signing petitions and having protest marches. We treated these people like they were politicians. But the Bush/Cheney gang were not politicians. They were Gangsters and Thugs. Politicians periodically bend to the will of the people. Thugs. Don?t. Care. These people wipe their ass with petitions. When Dick Cheney was told that two-thirds of Americans said the war in Iraq was not worth it, Cheney replied, "So?"

That?s who we were dealing with. Gangsters who completely ignored the will of the people. We could write all we want, and call all we want, and demonstrate all we want 
 but by following their rules 
 we had the unlimited freedom to be ineffectual.

The Republican Machine, aided and abetted by Corporate Media, stole the presidency of the United States twice. Together they started two wars and have killed over a million people. How could we think they would back off and play nice because we all wrote scathing e-mails or marched in protests? They were Thugs. We were supposed to arrest Thugs, put them on trial, and if guilty, put them in jail. But we didn?t do that.

We decided to hope instead. We hoped the Bush/Cheney Regime wouldn?t completely destroy the country before 2008. We hoped the same corrupt voting systems that delivered us George W. Bush would magically allow us the autonomy to elect someone to save us from ?the Evil-doers.? We hoped a Constitutional law professor would restore the Constitution. But most of all we hoped, for the first time in living memory, that a politician would deliver on his campaign promises.

The policies of the Bush/Cheney Regime are still in place under the Obama administration. We still have the wars of aggression and occupation. Innocent people are still killed every day. We still hold prisoners in Guantanamo Bay who after almost ten years have yet to be charged or tried for any crime. The Bush/Cheney/Obama Regimes have given away trillions of dollars to people who engineered the largest financial swindle in recorded history. And they, along with our honest-to-god war criminals, continue to walk free, unindicted, unaccountable, and above the law.

As Michael in NY wrote you in October 2009, ? 
 my belief is that the American system has lost its capacity for reform.? I?ll take that to the next step 
 the American system has lost its capacity to govern. Corporate interests under the guise of Partisanship ?ber alles.

And as By Paul Craig Roberts wrote the other day, ?Obama regime appointee Cass Sunstein, a Chicago and Harvard Law School professor, thinks the 9/11 movement, for challenging the official ?truth?, should be infiltrated by US intelligence agents in order to shut down the fact-based doubters of government propaganda. When a law professor at our two most prestigious law schools wants to suppress scientific evidence that challenges government veracity, we know that in America respect for truth is dead. The notion that a country in which truth is dead is a ?light unto the world? is an absurdity.?

I find that nothing short of terrifying. And real solutions are nonexistent.

And so 
 after 10 long years, and finally having enough money 
 we left. It may be completely illusory, but it feels like we have a future here. It feels more substantial than 
 hope. It feels like we finally have come home.

Regards,

Bob Alexander

Founder of Superbeans.com