Thursday, March 18 2010   -   9/11 Commission

March 16, 2010
WashingtonsBlog.com

FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley was interviewed by Scott Horton, professor at Columbia Law School and Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine.

Rowley said that in her testimony to the Joint Intelligence Committee regarding 9/11, she was "minded". Specifically, she said that "FBI minders" listened to her every word, to trail her and make sure that she didn't tell government personnel with top secret clearance even higher than her own anything which the FBI did not want to be told.

While this might sound fantastic, it is nothing new.

Rowley said the same had happened to Daniel Ellsberg went to members of Congress with the Pentagon papers.

As I wrote a year ago:

9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean points out that if "minders" had been present during the Commission's investigation, that would have been intimidation, which would have stemmed the flow of testimony from the witnesses:

I think the commission feels unanimously that it's some intimidation to have somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency. You might get less testimony than you would.

read more

 

Tuesday, March 16 2010   -   Anthrax

March 15, 2010
WashingtonsBlog.com

In a bizarre, Soviet-style move, the White House has threatened to veto the intelligence budget unless everyone accepts the FBI frame up of Dr. Bruce Ivins.

As Bloomberg writes:

President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, an administration official said.

A proposed probe by the intelligence agencies' inspector general "would undermine public confidence" in an FBI probe of the attacks "and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions," Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

Given that an FBI investigation into a specific crime has nothing to do with the budget or any of OMB's other core responsibilities, it seems that Orszag simply drew the short straw for this little assignment.

 

Monday, March 15 2010   -   Research/Evidence

by James Corbett
The Corbett Report
15 March, 2010

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds joined The Corbett Report last Friday to discuss the deplorable state of whistleblower "protections" in the United States, including S.372, a bill making its way through the Senate that would allow the FBI and other "national security" agencies to dismiss whistleblowers' claims without any form of oversight.

Click here to download an mp3 of the conversation or watch the YouTube video in the player below:

 

Monday, March 15 2010   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

by Marc Ambinder
March 5 2010
TheAtlantic.com

Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump.

According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons--visa holders or citizens--and non-U.S. persons.)

 

Monday, March 15 2010   -   Truth Movement News

March 14, 2010
Posted at 911blogger.com - Watch this blog for more.

On the 8th of March 2010 Cynthia McKinney (a former US Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential nominee) and Dr. Nafeez Ahmed (best selling author and political scientist) address a meeting of Members of Parliament on the subject of the need for an independent investigation into the events of September 11th 2001.

Click 'Read More' for video and a press release from Reinvestigate911.org which hosted Rep. McKinney and Dr. Ahmed.

 

Monday, March 15 2010   -   Other Important News

By Philip Messing
March 14, 2010
New York Post

On Nov. 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a bland, seemingly innocuous 42-year-old government scientist, plunged to his death from room 1018A in New York’s Statler Hotel, landing on a Seventh Avenue sidewalk just opposite Penn Station.

Olson’s ignominious end was written off as an unremarkable suicide of a depressed government bureaucrat who came to New York City seeking psychiatric treatment, so it attracted scant attention at the time.

But 22 years later, the Rockefeller Commission report was released, detailing a litany of domestic abuses committed by the CIA. The ugly truth emerged: Olson’s death was the result of his having been surreptitiously dosed with LSD days earlier by his colleagues.

The shocking disclosure led to President Gerald Ford’s apology to Olson’s widow and his three children, who accepted a $750,000 civil payment for his wrongful death.

 

Monday, March 15 2010   -   Open Letters

March 14, 2010
As many of you may already know, Cindy Sheehan and Jon Gold are in Washington protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They, along with many other anti-war activists, are camping out at the Washington Monument.

It surely is not easy to “keep the flame of protest’ when the media and special interest groups fight us at every juncture. But, as Cindy and I both know all too well, life is precious and we have lost too, too many young lives already.

Cindy and Jon, I cannot be with you, but I am truly there in spirit. May God keep you safe.

Bob McIlvaine
Father of Bobby McIlvaine

[Read More to continue with Jon's letter]

 

Saturday, March 13 2010   -   First Responders/Health Effects

By Mireya Navarro
March 12, 2010
New York Times

Sgt. Dawn Sorrento says she looks on the years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a blur of doctor's visits, ambushes by illnesses she had never heard of and growing resentment toward the city that challenged her injury claims.

Yet on Friday, Sergeant Sorrento, a police officer who is among some 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers at ground zero who sued the city for health damages, felt a grim sort of satisfaction. She had expected her case to be among the first to go to trial this spring; instead, both sides announced a legal settlement of up to $657.5 million Thursday night.

"It's nice that someone took responsibility, finally," said Sergeant Sorrento, 43, who helped coordinate the movement of cranes, dignitaries and cadaver-hunting dogs in and out of ground zero in September 2001. "The city finally acknowledges that 9/11 diseases do exist and that people are suffering."

Officials cast the settlement as righting a historic wrong on Friday and predicted that it would assure speedy and just compensation to the workers, who have waited more than six years for a legal resolution. But significant hurdles remain.

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, of the United States District Court in Manhattan, has made clear that he intends to play a role in assuring that individuals are compensated fairly.

 

Saturday, March 13 2010   -   In the Media

By Muriel Kane
March 12, 2010
RawStory.com

Former Minnesota governor and one-time professional wrestler Jesse Ventura has run afoul of the Huffington Post's no-conspiracy-theory policy, and he's not happy about it.

"I can't believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship," Ventura says in astonishment. "I've got news for them. ... I won't ever write for 'em again."

Ventura had posted an item on Tuesday which took note of a recent conference at which "more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11." He also quoted a few paragraphs from his new book, American Conspiracies, to explain why some of those experts see signs of controlled demolition.

The item was featured on the front page of Huffington Post when it first went up, but after a few hours it vanished. All that appears now at its original location is an editor's note saying, "The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post."

The note is followed by three pages of comments, enthusiastically arguing the pros and cons of controlled demolition and other 9/11 theories, that were posted during the couple of hours before the entry was deleted and comments were closed.

 

Saturday, March 13 2010   -   Legal Response to 9/11

9 May 2010:

A Note on a Major Event in the Worldwide Movement to Arrest the Organized Crime of War Profiteers
Teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zzFTI0xzfU
from Anthony Hall

Hello friends, associates and supporters.

Hello, as well, to those who are new to the case of Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush.

I have no hesitation in asserting that the brilliant content of these videos will be transformative for multitudes of global viewers. These videos contain poetry in You Tube. They offer sophisticated political analysis of the kind that should strike fear in the heart of the criminal class who are currently running the global apparatus of so-called national security. These presentations are studies of effective communication. They embody joy, love and skilled articulation combining classical motifs of ballet-like performance with the free form creativity of hip hop. They highlight two individuals at the top of their form who are leading an accelerating global revolt against the lawless war machine's broadening onslaught. More than any other force, the organized crime of the war machine threatens all humanity-- indeed, all life forms-- with imminent oblivion. Please take the time to study this set of amazing videos and disseminate them far and wide.

The event took place on March 9 only hours after the premature termination of Splitting The Sky's Calgary trial. As the trial was being hurriedly shut down by the state, the legendary Cynthia McKinney arrived in Calgary from London to show solidarity with the veteran Mohawk activist. In an event hosted by my own academic unit, Globalization Studies, and by the University of Calgary's Peace Consortium, STS and Ms. McKinney met for the first time. As they shared stories and joined forces, they came to personify the best spirit of defiance rooted in many generations of resistance towards the forces of colonization, enslavement and resource theft. Together STS and the martyred but still-strong former US Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, reflect on what humanity must do now that the heritages of slavery in America and the militarized dispossession of Indigenous peoples have been globalized in the name of the fraudulent Global War on Terror.

 

Friday, March 12 2010   -   Truth Movement News

March 12, 2010

Fellow Advocates For Answers and Accountability:

On March 9, 2010 voters in the town of Richmond, New Hampshire became the second town in the United States to pass a resolution calling upon Congress to open a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001. The first resolution of this kind was passed by the voters of Lincoln, Vermont in 2007.

This is very exciting news, but before giving a full read out on the results from the Vote For Answers New Hampshire campaign, we would like to bring your attention to a very important message from Bob McIlvaine. Please click on the link below right now to watch this short minute-and-a-half video of Bob urging all of us to join NYC CAN's forthcoming campaign: "Building What?!"