Sunday, January 10 2010   -   Editorials

Obama's lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

by John Pilger
January 5, 2010
The New Statesman In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'."

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden". In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

 

Saturday, January 9 2010   -   Other Important News

January 08, 2010
by Paul Craig Roberts
Information ClearingHouse.info

What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida's expertise in pulling off 9/11.

If we are to believe the U.S. government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida "mastermind" behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies as well as those of all U.S. allies including Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times on one morning, and Dick Cheney, and with untrained and inexperienced pilots pulled off skilled piloting feats of crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers, and the Pentagon, where a battery of state of the art air defenses somehow failed to function.

After such amazing success, al-Qaida would have attracted the best minds in the business, but, instead, it has been reduced to amateur stunts.

The Underwear Bomb plot is being played to the hilt on the TV media and especially on Fox "news." After reading recently that The Washington Post allowed a lobbyist to write a news story that preached the lobbyist's interest, I wondered if the manufacturers of full body scanners were behind the heavy coverage of the Underwear Bomber, if not behind the plot itself. In America, everything is for sale. Integrity is gone with the wind.

 

Friday, January 8 2010   -   Other Important News

For Immediate Release
January 8, 2010

It is with utter disbelief that we listen to the unfolding details of the attempted December 25, 2009 terrorist attack of Delta Flight 253.

Let us remind you, on September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists managed to evade all security measures, hijack four commercial airliners, slam them into three buildings and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,976 innocent people, including our husbands.

We responded by strenuously lobbying for an independent investigation to find out how on earth so many agencies could have failed in their duties to protect us, and our loved ones, from such an attack. We asked that they find and fix the loopholes that existed, in order to safeguard our nation.

After the 18-month 9/11 Commission investigation, countless systemic and human failures were uncovered, including: failure to analyze data, failure to share information, human error, failure to follow up, antiquated computer systems, too much information in the system, not enough information in the system, not enough time or people to analyze data, failure to watch list, failure to properly coordinate the watch list with other lists and visa issuance and monitoring failures. Despite all of this, the 9/11 Commissioners simplistically announced that it was a "failure of imagination" that caused the agencies to falter and allowed 9/11 to happen. Additionally, we were told that those in positions to protect us "could never have imagined this type of attack" and that "everyone is at fault, so no one is at fault."

 

Friday, January 8 2010   -   9/11 Commission

January 5th, 2010
by Maidhc Ó Cathail
Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

All too often, official inquiries are conducted by the very people who should themselves be under investigation.

In this respect, Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war bears a distressing similarity to the 9/11 Commission.

In a remarkable symmetry, both inquiries involve a Jewish Zionist historian, who not only advised his country’s leader to go to war against Iraq, but actually provided the ideological justification for that unnecessary war.

Preemptive Wars

Perhaps Philip Zelikow was one of the few people who was not surprised by his appointment as executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. After all, the Professor of History at the University of Virginia had shown uncanny prescience in foreseeing an event such as 9/11 itself. In 1998, as project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism Group, Zelikow had written:

 

Thursday, January 7 2010   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

January 6, 2010
by Ray McGovern & Coleen Rowley
CommonDreams.org

Yesterday, a blogger with the PBS' NewsHour asked former CIA analyst Ray McGovern to respond to three questions regarding recent events involving the CIA, FBI, and the intelligence community in general.

Two other old intelligence hands were asked the identical questions, queries that are typical of what radio/TV and blogger interviewers usually think to be the right ones. So there is merit in trying to answer them directly, such as they are, and then broadening the response to address some of the core problems confronting U.S. counter-terror strategies.

After drafting his answers, McGovern asked former FBI attorney/special agent Coleen Rowley, a colleague in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to review his responses and add her own comments at the end. The Q & A is below:

 

Thursday, January 7 2010   -   Legal Response to 9/11

January 6, 2010
by Larry Neumeister, Associated Press Writer
LATimes

NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly completed settlements of two of the remaining three lawsuits brought by families of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks are likely to include language requiring evidence to be displayed at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, a lawyer said Wednesday.

Attorney Mary Schiavo said the public display of evidence collected for trial by lawyers in the case was important to the families.

She called the museum a fitting place for it and said the materials were likely to be put in the museum's reading room.

She commented outside a court hearing where lawyers announced they had settled 15 of 18 property damage cases stemming from the terrorism attacks for an undisclosed amount, including claims by the Windows on the World restaurant.

 

Wednesday, January 6 2010   -   Other Important News

January 6, 2010
DemocracyNow.org

In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration's foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. "I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism," Nairn says. "But once he became president...Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off...but he chose not to do so." He continues, "In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year."

 

Wednesday, January 6 2010   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

by James Ridgeway
Published Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by Mother Jones

Scan, baby, scan. That's the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be "underwear bomber" could have been stopped by airport security if he'd been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's groin.

Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the "big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer" was "Why isn't whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?" Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, "You've got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at. It's either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."

Since the alternative is being groped by airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images "are friendly enough to post in a preschool," though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous organizations have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work-and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.

Known by their opponents as "digital strip search" machines, the full-body scanners use one of two technologies-millimeter wave sensors or backscatter x-rays-to see through clothing, producing ghostly images of naked passengers. Yet critics say that these, too, are highly fallible, and are incapable of revealing explosives hidden in body cavities-an age-old method for smuggling contraband. If that's the case, a terrorist could hide the entire bomb works within his or her body, and breeze through the virtual strip search undetected. Yesterday, the London Independent reported on "authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against terrorist threats to aviation." A British defense-research firm reportedly found the machines unreliable in detecting "low-density" materials like plastics, chemicals, and liquids-precisely what the underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs.

 

Wednesday, January 6 2010   -   9/11 Consequences

By James Cogan
6 January 2010
World Socialist Web Site

American military personnel are continuing to take their own lives in unprecedented numbers, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wars drag on. By late November, at least 334 members of the armed forces had committed suicide in 2009, more than the 319 who were killed in Afghanistan or the 150 who died in Iraq. While a final figure is not available, the toll of military suicides last year was the worst since records began to be kept in 1980.

The Army, National Guard and Army Reserve lost at least 211 personnel to suicide. More than half of those who took their lives had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army suicide rate of 20.2 per 100,000 personnel is higher than that registered among males aged 19 to 29, the gender age bracket with the highest rate among the general population. Before 2001, the Army rarely suffered 10 suicides per 100,000 soldiers.

The Navy lost at least 47 active duty personnel in 2009, the Air Force 34 and the Marine Corp, which has been flung into some of the bloodiest fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, 42. The Marine suicide rate has soared since 2001 from 12 to at least 19.5 per 100,000.

For every death, at least five members of the armed forces were hospitalised for attempting to take their life. According to the Navy Times, 2 percent of Army; 2.3 percent of Marines and 3 percent of Navy respondents to the military's own survey of 28,536 members from all branches reported they had attempted suicide at some point. The "Defense Survey of Health-Related Behaviors" also found "dangerous levels" of alcohol abuse and the illicit use of drugs such as pain killers by 12 percent of personnel.

 

Wednesday, January 6 2010   -   Other Important News

Published at the DailyCensored.com; originally at wsws.org

New Year in America: A portrait of social misery By Tom Eley
5 January 2010

The new decade finds the US working class suffering a level of social misery not seen since the Great Depression. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, utility cutoffs, homelessness, foreclosures and bankruptcies have become common experiences for millions.

But unlike in the Great Depression, when limited reforms were put in place in response to the crisis, the Obama administration, Congress, and state and local governments are taking no serious measures to provide relief. On the contrary, the two parties of big business are exacerbating the crisis through budget cuts at the state and local level and the federal government is preparing new austerity measures.

Unemployment: At over 10 percent, the official US jobless rate reached in October and November was the highest since June of 1983. A broader measure of unemployment, taking into account those who have fallen out of the official workforce, reveals that something approaching one in five workers is unemployed or underemployed.

The economy has not added jobs since December 2007, and in that same time span has lost 7.2 million jobs overall. Coupling these losses with population growth—the economy must add about 150,000 jobs per month to break even—the net jobs deficit in the period is well over 10.5 million.

 

Monday, January 4 2010   -   Get Involved

December 31, 2009

Dear Friends and Fellow Advocates for Answers and Accountability,

As we look ahead to 2010, we at NYC CAN would like to offer our deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to a remarkable and historic campaign, and we would like to take a moment to celebrate the achievements that give us much to build upon in 2010.

2009 was a year of tremendous progress for our cause. Among a long list of successes, a peer-reviewed paper was published in a mainstream scientific journal documenting the discovery of active thermitic material in the World Trade Center dust; the petition of architects and engineers calling for a new investigation into the WTC destruction has leaped to nearly 1,000 signatories while founding member Richard Gage, AIA travels the world delivering his analysis of the buildings' demise to thousands of concerned citizens and leaders. The increasing strength and credibility of our message is evidenced by the ever greater frequency of media breakthroughs casting a positive light on the questions we pose.

Thanks to your support, NYC CAN is proud to consider the ballot initiative campaign in New York among the many victories that furthered our cause in 2009. 80,000 New Yorkers -- nearly 8% of the number who voted in the 2009 mayoral election in America's largest city -- signed a petition calling for a new 9/11 investigation. Just last week we learned one of those 80,000 signatories is a councilmember elect, intent upon helping us advance our cause with the local government once in office. A few hundred thousand more New Yorkers, while not prepared to take the leap of faith and sign the petition, were directly educated about the need for a new investigation. A dozen mainstream news outlets in the United States and Europe covered the campaign's success, and perhaps most importantly, a tectonic shift occurred -- after eight years of research and education, we have begun to collectively hone in on the endgame.