Tuesday, January 12 2010   -   Editorials

January 12, 2010
by James Hufferd, Ph.D.
Founder, 911 Truth of Central Iowa

Barely two weeks ago, on Christmas Day, 2009, a young Muslim man from Nigeria with a multiple-entry visa to enter the United States was reported to have attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet bound from Amsterdam preparing to land at Detroit International Airport by igniting a bomb hidden in the crotch of his underwear. Passengers aboard the plane prevented him from succeeding, and potentially from killing all 278 passengers, plus crew. He was subsequently reported to have trained or received instruction in Yemen and taken inspiration from an al-Qaeda-connected Islamic mullah who is an American citizen living in that country and implicated in other terrorist events.

Thus, the incident was construed as a new major case of radical Islamic terrorism against the United States. Disturbingly, the plot apparently almost succeeded, for reasons now hotly debated, even though the terrorist's name and profile were already in U.S. security service files and on watch lists. Superficially, it was widely reported as an open-and-shut case of anti-U.S. Islamic extremism, necessitating a new round of "security measures" for air travel.

However, almost from the beginning there was another credible source of information that, when considered alongside other information being reported, substantially alters the picture and the implication of the collective evidence. Doubtless for that reason, this second, partially corroborated source has not been thoroughly exploited or widely examined, but instead has been almost universally ignored and shunted aside without comment by U.S. officials and the corporate media. The source is Mr. Kurt Haskell, 39, a successful former U.S. government lawyer, currently a practicing attorney in greater Detroit along with his wife, Lori. Together, they were returning from a vacation in Africa on that day on that same flight from Amsterdam.

 

Sunday, January 10 2010   -   9/11 Consequences

January 8, 2010
GeorgeWashington2.blogspot.com

American civilian and military leaders have been creating new terrorists through their:

(1) Use of torture

and

(2) Killing of innocent civilians- especially children - in Arabic countries.

Torture

A high-level American Special Ops interrogator says that information obtained from torture is unreliable, and that torture just creates more terrorists. Indeed, he says that torture of innocent Iraqis by Americans is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place.

 

Sunday, January 10 2010   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
RawStory.com

Is Rudolph Giuliani's political career over?

The former mayor of New York City has been making his rounds in U.S. media this week, trying to explain away his false claim that there were no domestic terrorist attacks on the United States during the Bush administration.

For a man often mocked as "the mayor of 9/11," that's an awfully bold suggestion, and one that could spell the end of his relevance in U.S. politics, according to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

"The whole reason anybody ever thought of Rudy Giuliani as a potential national figure for the Republican party is because of his supposed expertise," Maddow said during a Friday broadcast. "The supposed expertise he had with terrorism and national security because he had been the mayor of New York City when it was attacked on September 11."

 

Sunday, January 10 2010   -   In the Media

by David Edwards and John Byrne
January 8, 2010
Raw Story

UPDATE: ABC's George Stephanopoulos has taken responsibility for not challenging former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the mayor's assertion on Good Morning America Friday that "we had no domestic attacks under Bush."

As noted below, a Giuliani spokesman "clarified" the mayor's statement later in the day, arguing that the mayor meant no attacks after 9/11.

"Whatever the mayor meant, it’s not what he said," Stephanopoulos wrote on his ABC blog. "All of you who have pointed out that I should have pressed him on that misstatement in the moment are right. My mistake, my responsibility."

Original story follows below

The former New York City mayor who has sometimes been mocked for using "a noun, a verb and 9/11" in stump speeches appears to have forgotten -- or has mentally reclassified -- the worst terrorist attack on American soil. "We had no domestic attacks under Bush," Rudy Giuliani told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Friday.

Even if Giuliani doesn't consider the attacks on 9/11 a "domestic" attack then surely he forgot about the anthrax attacks of 2001 or an Egyptian national who attacked the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002.

While ABC's George Stephanopolous let Giuliani get away with his misstatement both during the interview and on his blog, ABC's Jake Tapper called the former mayor out. "Giuliani's comments that there were zero terrorist attacks under Bush, 1 under Obama, is false no matter how you slice it," tweeted Tapper.

 

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."