By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.

I've seen this movie before.

In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself. Noted the Los Angeles Times:

The Newburgh Four -- And The Goverment Mole Who Betrayed Them

By Zachary Roth - May 22, 2009

We're starting to get a rich picture of the four hapless Jihadis who were arrested Wednesday night for plotting to bomb two New York synagogues, as well as the FBI informant who deceived them. And the overall portrait that's emerging is that of a group of struggling, disaffected petty criminals, who bonded at a Newburgh, NY mosque over having spent time in prison, before being taken in by a Pakistani immigrant looking to win leniency for a crime of his own.

May 11, 2009
washingtonsblog.com

The Red Cross is the organization charged with deciding what is torture and what isn't.

The International Committee of the Red Cross interviewed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - the alleged 9/11 mastermind - at Guantanamo Bay.

Here's what KSM told the Red Cross (see below for more from a review of this report):

During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

by Michael Collins
May 10, 2009
SmirkingChimp.com

A strange feeling of déjà vu arises while listening to the administration sell further U.S. military intervention in Pakistan (our Predator drones are already there).

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen claimed in late March that Pakistan's intelligence service has "close links with al Qaeda and the Taliban network." In fact, Mullen warned, the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is "offering logistical support to them (the Taliban)."

In early April, veteran foreign policy icon and special advisor to the president on Afghanistan and South Asia, Richard Holbrook, let us know what this meant. There is a fundamental difference between the Pakistan conflict and the Viet Nam war, he argued. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Holbrook went on to say this:

"And the people who are in this area who we are fighting either pose a direct threat, having committed 9/11, having done Mumbai, having killed (Benazir) Bhutto, and they have publicly said they are going to do more of the same. That is: al Qaeda of course and their allies the Taliban." Richard Holbrooke, May 5, 2009 (Repeating April 19, 2009 statement)

On May 9, General David Petraeus supported his superiors as he announced that Pakistan was now "the world headquarters for the al Qaeda senior leadership." . . .

Perpetual 9/11

We're experiencing an example of the enduring power 9/11 as a justification for just about anything. Military adventures that kill foreigners have the potential to create what Chalmers Johnson so eloquently described as "blowback" in his trilogy on the perils of aggressive foreign policy. We're expected to believe that our violent actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, including robot killer aircraft, will somehow produce a different result this time. We will be "safer."

April 23, 2009
by Prof. Marjorie Cohn
Global Research

Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn't believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury's 2005 memos asserted that "enhanced techniques" on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

April 21, 2009
by George Washington
Washingtonsblog.com

5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".

He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

And yet, the government knew that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not linked. For example, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".

Images and Words

Anthony Hall is like many other 9/11 skeptics. At some point, after examining the events of 9/11 and the international consequences of that foul deed, (particularly the consequences that befell countries with a predominantly Arab/Muslim population), Mr. Hall decided to speak out. The difference between Hall and most 9/11 skeptics, is that Mr. Hall is a sitting academic at a university in Lethbridge, Alberta, in Canada.

Hall joined a growing list of Canadian academics who have chosen to speak out publicly; John McMurtry, Graeme MacQueen, Michael Keefer, and of course, Michel Chossudovsky, a pioneer in 9/11 skepticism.

He made his debut as a skeptic of the 9/11 Official Conspiracy Theory (OCT) on September 6, 2008 in Edmonton, Alberta, with a reading of his paper, The Lies and Crimes of 911. The paper is an excellent introduction to a series of complex, related studies, that encompass globalization, US imperial tendencies, and false-flag terrorism. Hall is well-versed in these issues, and won an Alberta Book Award for his volume, The American Empire and the Fourth World;

More Than 20 Types Of War Crimes Against Children Ascribed To Ex-President Bush In Iraq And Afghanistan

Monday, 23 March 2009
Press Release: Sherwood Ross
Scoop World Independent News

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush's pursuit of the "war on terror" have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush's war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

President Barack Obama continued with his latest escalation of the war in Afghanistan by announcing his plans to send an additional 4,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to train Afghan government puppet forces. He also announced plans to send hundreds of diplomats and civilian officials to the country, in what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called an "integrated military-civilian strategy". Like his predecessor George W. Bush, Obama raised the specter of "terrorism" to justify his actions.

Obama stated that, "If the Afghanistan government falls to the Taliban or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged, that country will again be a base for terrorists." Obama warned that the al-Qaida "terrorists" were actively planning further attacks on the U.S. from havens in Pakistan. He stated, "So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." He went on to claim, "That is the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you." Does this sound a little too much like Bush's excuse for the initial invasion in 2001? I was waiting to hear Obama say, "bring 'em on."

An Open Letter to the Peace/Anti-War Movement from Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and Veterans For Peace

After six years of war and the historic election of a new President, we as veterans, military and Gold Star families felt an urgent need to reach out to the larger peace/anti-war movements to make our position on Iraq clear during this time of political and economic uncertainty. Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and Veterans For Peace continue to stand together in our demand to Bring the Troops Home Now! We ask all those who have stood with us in the past to stay faithful to the cause.

President Obama has announced a plan to gradually reduce troop levels in Iraq. Many in the peace/anti-war movements are breathing a sigh of relief, and suggesting that it is time for us to scale back our efforts to bring an end to the occupation of Iraq. But for our troops on the ground, their families and the Iraqi people, the nightmare continues. They need all of us to stay in the struggle. IVAW, MFSO and VFP have been long united in our call for an immediate and complete end to the occupation of Iraq and will not shift our stance under any circumstances.

Charlie Giles and his family need our help. Charlie has been a huge advocate for the 9/11 First Responders. As a member of the FealGood Foundation, Charlie was not allowed to receive any assistance from the organization because it would have been seen as a conflict of interest. Sadly, and appropriately, the FealGood Foundation asked Charlie to resign so that he now can get help. John Feal released this statement:

Today the Fealgood Foundation lost board member Charlie Giles to his financial crisis. Charlie, a 9/11 responder who was seriously affected by 9/11,, was told he won his workmens comp case last week and received an award letter in the mail. His lump sum settlement would have been $40,000 plus payments every 2 weeks. The insurance company now has appealed it, and has left this hero with an eviction notice from his apartment which he moved into after losing his house last year. Charlie was asked to resign from the board because none of my board members can receive charity or any monies while sitting on the FGF board. ...

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Andy Worthington, London-based journalist and author of "The Guantánamo Files" (Pluto Press), has released the first definitive list of the 779 prisoners held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The list, which is the result of three years' research and writing about Guantánamo, provides details of the 533 prisoners who have been released, and includes, for the first time ever, accurate dates for their release. It also provides details of the 241 prisoners who are still held, including the 59 prisoners who have been cleared for release. Although some stories are still unknown, the stories of nearly 700 prisoners are referenced either by links to Andy's extensive archive of articles about Guantánamo, or to the chapters in "The Guantánamo Files" where they can be found.