Zelikow made the claim he was not involved in the initial stages of the dispute in response to an allegation made by commission staffer John Azzarello and relayed by Shenon. After the staff investigators drafted a memo for the commissioners in early April 2004 outlining why they thought NORAD and FAA officials had deliberately lied to them to overstate the military’s readiness during the attacks, Zelikow “just buried that memo,” according to Azzarello. In response, Zelikow claimed that he had not even known of the issue at the start. The implication was that, as he had not known of it, it could not be him that was orchestrating--or even involved in--a dispute between the staff investigators and the commission’s lawyers, Daniel Marcus and Steve Dunne.

Remember Star Wars? Do you remember the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative to build a massive missile defense system that raised so much controversy during the Reagan and first Bush years? 130 billion of our tax dollars were poured into developing that system. It was designed to detect and intercept missiles fired from an unknown destination traveling at well over 10 times the speed of a commercial airliner, and to shoot them down in 15 minutes or less, before they reached their US targets.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) website, "a defensive system may need to hit a warhead smaller than an oil drum that is traveling above the atmosphere at speeds greater than 13,000 miles per hour." The CBO report states that missile defense and intercept systems must take down an ICBM in a matter of minutes or it is all over.

You may remember that before 9/11, there were a number of tests of the Pentagon's missile defense systems. Some tests failed, while others succeeded. But there is an important question here. If these sophisticated military systems were designed to detect missiles fired from unknown locations at over 13,000 mph and shoot them down in mere minutes, why on 9/11 could they not detect any one of the four large airliners traveling at a mere 600 mph, especially when two of them were known to be lost for over 40 minutes before they crashed?

Thank you! As a result of your generous support in the last week, NYC CAN has been able to TRIPLE the size of its petitioning staff. For the next two and a half weeks, we will be able to collect 1,000 signatures everyday and skyrockect our total to nearly 60,000.

On Sunday, May 17, 2009, we eclipsed the milestone of 40,000 signatures!

Official Account of 9/11: "Terribly Flawed," "Laced with Contradictions," "a Joke," "a Cover-up"

May 18, 2009 -- More than 40 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and most have called for a new investigation. It is outrageous that most Americans are entirely unaware of their publicly stated concerns -- a direct result of the refusal of national print and broadcast news organizations to cover this extremely important issue. There is no denying the credibility of these individuals or their loyalty to their country as demonstrated by their years of service collecting and analyzing information and planning and carrying out operations critical to the national security of the United States.

These 41 individuals formerly served in the U.S. State Department, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the branches of the U.S. Military. They are listed in the article by their branch of service.

May 20, 2009
Sundayherald.com

INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION: Islamist dies in Tripoli shortly after human rights group visit from Fred Bridgland in Libya

THE ISLAMIST terrorist who was the key source of the false intelligence used to trigger the US and UK 2003 military invasion of Iraq has been found dead in a Libyan prison cell.

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi allegedly commited suicide by hanging in the prison where he was being held in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. His death followed a visit by a team from Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading independent organisations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.

Investigating an Embarrassment: More Questions on Al-Libi’s Torture, Death
By Jeff Kaye
May 12, 2009
Firedoglake.com

The news of the death by possible suicide of former CIA "ghost prisoner", Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, also known as Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, has caused only a small murmur in the U.S. press. The Washington Post's Peter Finn wrote a story on it Monday, noting the key fact that it was the tortured confession of al-Libi in an Egyptian prison, where he had been rendered by the U.S. and subjected to beatings and mock burial, that was used by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February 2003 presentation to the UN as evidence that Iraq was in league with the Al Qaeda terrorists and/or interested in using WMD.

Bmaz made this point the other night when writing on the initial reports of al-Libi's death. Marcy Wheeler, in a new article, notes some suspicious matters concerning the timing of the events. The newly breaking story has also now been picked up by McClatchy (H/T Perris). Both Marcy and the McClatchy article note the "relentless pressure" put on interrogators to find some link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Powell's claims that Al Qaeda had been trained in chemical and biological weaponry by Saddam Hussein's regime was a key element of the U.S. drive to invade and occupy Iraq. But al-Libi recanted this story in January 2004. According to the Washington Post, the Defense Intelligence Agency and some CIA analysts weren't apparently convinced. The fact he lied "to avoid torture" was verified by "a bipartisan report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence," according to a press release Monday on Al-Libi's death by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today that the White House Office of Administration (OA) does not need to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith, writing for the 3-0 majority, concluded: "the Office of Administration is not [covered by FOIA] because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the President and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent authority."

The Detainee Abuse Timeline has new entries about the recently disclosed Red Cross report on torture and a really interesting 1943 memo about the respectful interrogation techniques the US used in World War II.
Read more

... Finally, the Domestic Propaganda Timeline has a new entry about the recent tea parties organised by Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works.
Read more [More]

Dr. David Leifer - http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/staff/homepage/davidleifer.shtml

When: 6:30pm, Thursday the 4th of June 2009
Where: Sydney University, Architecture Faculty, Lecture Hall 1
Title: The Life and Death of World Trade Centre One

Dr. David Leifer, Architect and Senior Lecturer at Sydney University continues to question the veracity of the "official explanation" of the WTC collapses on September 11th 2009.

In this lecture on Thursday the 4th of June, Dr. Leifer will uncover what is most probable, not what is politically correct about the collapse of WTC 1 that was impacted by Flight 11 on 9/11. It is worth remembering that three Sydney residents died in WTC 1; Alberto Dominguez on Flight 11 and both Craig Neil Gibson and Steve Tompsett, working in the building. There is no doubt this issue is relevant to us in Sydney and we hope more academics in Sydney and Australia join Dr. Leifer in serious research of these murders.

9/11: Blueprint for Truth - WTC Building 7 - 10 minutes - from the new AE911Truth “Companion” Edition DVD