Monday, September 5 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

By Bryan Sacks

So now, horribly, we know what it takes to stir disgust and outrage directed at the federal government, in the hearts of the corporate press corps. It takes a catastrophe of biblical proportions unfolding right before their eyes, right here in America, right in front of their cameras and camera crews, amid the stench of rotting corpses and a heaving mass of literally thousands of sick and dying...

 

Monday, September 5 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

By Les Jamiesen

Who would have ever thought that conditions normally seen in Sudan or Calcutta would surface here? Although the Army Corp of Engineers had begged for the funding to complete the levees that would protect New Orleans in the event of a serious hurricane, it was denied...

 

Monday, September 5 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

This no-holds-barred article by Paul Craig Roberts summarizes the devastation caused by the "crazy claque of neoconservatives" that is the Bush administration. Last week's deadly flooding of New Orleans, just like 9/11, had been preceded by multiple warnings that "New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen." And just like 9/11, the Bush administration didn't want to hear about it and, in fact, cut funding for desperately needed levee updates that could have saved thousands of lives. Now the administration is prohibiting desperately needed aid to reach the victims--just like 9/11 (www.wtceo.org). Roberts asks the question we're all grappling with right now: "What will it take for Americans to reestablish accountability in their government?" Indeed . . . what will it take?

 

Saturday, August 27 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

A program to monitor the health of thousands of federal workers who answered the call of 9/11 has "been lost for more than two years," the New York Daily News reports. It "vanished during the bureaucratic shuffle creating the Department of Homeland Security" ...

 

Wednesday, August 24 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

During the last four years, the profiteers of war and terror have been so busy plundering the American treasury (and now the Iraqi treasury) that it is easy to lose track. A July 22 story reveals how $12 billion in one-hundred dollar bills were shipped to Bagdad and handed out to contractors, including Halliburton. And it's worth digging up a 2004 piece that reveals how yet another close Bush relative profited from the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" scam. We're not Republicans or Democrats, but we know a crime family when we see one...

 

Saturday, July 23 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

Halliburton Shares Soar 10% After It Posts Second Quarter Profit

While nervous nellies continue to fret that the 9/11-justified Iraq war is destroying our nation's social programs, credibility and security, we should also recall its silver lining for great American institutions like Halliburton (and VP Cheney who still holds 433,333 stock options). Witness the dramatic growth curve here since July 23, 2002, the exact date of the Downing Street Memo. It may perhaps be lamented that what is good for Halliburton and Cheney now seems to doom the country, but it's obviously just another one of those amazing unfortunate coincidences that 9/11 students know so well. - Ed.

HOUSTON (AP) -- Oilfield services firm Halliburton Co.'s shares soared 10 percent Friday after it reported that an influx of new government contracts at its KBR and energy services units drove it to a second-quarter profit...

Three years ago, on July 23, 2002, Halliburton shares closed at $9.10. It was the lowest the company's stock price has been in a decade. Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said the company has experienced a 488 percent rebound in three years since...

Halliburton chief executive David Lesar said... "There are good reasons for all of us to feel proud and good about what we have accomplished."

 

Thursday, June 23 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

by Kristen Breitweiser
The Huffington Post
June 23, 2005

For morbid fascination, you can hardly top the neocons' relentless cynical exploitation of their 9/11 myth. Not content with their initial trifecta win -- bankrupting government services, shredding the Bill of Rights and launching endless imperial wars, they are now obviously out to milk it to perpetuate one-party rule. Rove certainly does "understand 9/11" or at least the profit in its abuse. - Ed.

Mr. Rove, the first thing that I would like to address is Afghanistan - the place that anyone with a true "understanding of 9/11" knows is a nation that actually has a connection to the 9/11 attacks. One month after 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan, took down the Taliban, and left without capturing Usama Bin Laden - the alleged perpetrator of the September 11th attacks. In the meantime, Afghanistan has carried out democratic elections, but continues to suffer from extreme violence and unrest. Poppy production (yes, Karl, the drug trade) is at an all time high, thus flooding the world market with heroin. And of course, the oil pipeline (a.k.a. the Caspian Sea pipeline) is better protected by U.S. troops who now have a "legitimate" excuse to be in that part of Afghanistan. Interesting isn't it Karl that the drug "rat line" parallels the oil pipeline. (Yet, with all those troops guarding that same sliver of land, can you please explain how those drugs keep getting through?)  

Wednesday, June 1 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

by Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
June 2, 2005

Remember the Cheney/Rumsfeld/PNAC call for this militant metastasis in 2000? Or their realistic complaint that this "transformation" would take forever "absent a cataclysmic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor"? Or that Darth Cheney still holds 433,333 stock options in Halliburton, which is making more money off this imperial oil grab than any firm on earth? Map the bases, chart the profits, connect the dots. - Ed.

...With over 6,000 military bases in the U.S., we are in some ways a vast military camp. But while politicians screamed [about base closings] locally, Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon never thinks less than globally; and, if you throw in the militarization of space, sometimes even the global has proven too small a framework for its presiding officials... Our global Baseworld already consists of at least 700 military and intelligence bases; possibly – depending on how you count them up – many more. Under Rumsfeld's organizational eye, such bases have been pushed ever further into the previously off-limits "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union (where we now probably have more bases than the Russians do) and ever deeper into the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands of the planet.

The Bush administration's fierce focus on and interest in reconfigured, stripped-down, ever more forward systems of bases and an ever more powerfully poised military "footprint" stands in inverse proportion to press coverage of it. To the present occupants of the Pentagon, bases are the equivalent of imperial America's lifeblood, yet basing policy abroad has, in recent years, been of next to no interest to the mainstream media.

 

Saturday, April 23 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

by Michelle Chen
The NewStandard
April 22,2005

The case of a government interpreter-turned-whistleblower serves to illustrate the snowballing trend of hiding embarrassing information -- a pattern critics believe may ironically lead to greater public insecurity.

Fine Sibel story that offers an acute and chilling overview of this administration's new Great Wall of secrecy. Shows how they have exploited 9/11 to block transparency & democratic oversight, criminalize truth tellers, void accountability, and imperil our neighborhoods and nation as a whole. In sum, it helps expose both the Means of their 9/11 cover-up and another powerful Motive for their 9/11 crimes. - Ed.

April 22 - Yesterday, a national security whistleblower finally had her day in court, while public interest advocates intensified their campaigns for a more open government, challenging what they see as a pattern of secrecy and impunity in the name of national security interests.  

Saturday, April 16 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

by Chris Floyd
April 15, 2005
Follow-up to "Into the Dark."

Yet another brutal wake up call for those still doubting that this administration would sacrifice innocent lives to further its geo-political agenda. - Ed.

More than two years ago, we wrote here of a secret Pentagon plan to foment terrorism: sending covert agents to infiltrate terrorist groups and goad them into action — i.e., committing acts of murder and destruction... It was a plan that countenanced — indeed, encouraged — the deliberate murder of innocent people and the imposition of U.S. military rule anywhere in the world that American leaders desired.

This plan is now being activated.

In fact, it's being expanded, as the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh revealed. Not only will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups and provoke them into action; the Pentagon itself will create its own terrorist groups and "death squads."  

Saturday, April 9 2005   -   9/11 Consequences

By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK
April 5, 2005

Liberal handwringing over the World Bank simply reflects a failure to recognise the role it exists to fulfil.

Big Picture Alert! Profoundly insightful piece on the role and redemption a former 9/11 insider may find proving two wrongs can make a right. - Ed.

It's about as close to consensus as the left is ever likely to come. Everyone this side of Atilla the Hun and the Wall Street Journal agrees that Paul Wolfowitz's appointment as president of the World Bank is a catastrophe. Except me.