Sunday, November 22 2009   -   Research/Evidence

By Ray McGovern
November 17, 2009
Consortium News

As Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators go to trial, the corporate media's embargo on the truth about the Bush years will be under great strain.

Media commentary on the upcoming 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has raised concern that state secrets may be divulged, including details about how the Bush administration used torture to extract evidence about al-Qaeda.

"I think that we're going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don't want to look at" is how American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denney LeBoeuf put it, according to The New York Times on Saturday.

No problem, says Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims to have "great confidence" that other evidence -- apart from what may have been gleaned from the 183 times Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, for example -- will suffice to convict him.

Maybe so, But what the Fawning Corporate Media (or FCM) have so far neglected is the likelihood that the testimony will be so public that they will have to break their studied silence about why Sheikh Mohammed and his associates say they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11.

For reasons that are painfully obvious, the FCM have done their best to ignore or bury the role that Israel's repression of the Palestinians has played in motivating the 9/11 attacks and other anti-Western terrorism.

It is not like there is no evidence on this key issue. Rather, it appears that the Israel-Palestine connection is pretty much kept off limits for discussion.

 

Friday, November 20 2009   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

More great news from The Hard Evidence Tour Down Under
November 19, 2009

Wow!! Finally a proper interview in Sydney! Listen here: http://www.911truth.org/911truthmedia/Audio/Richard_Gage_WSFM_11-2009.mp3

Go to WSFM and vote here on the question of whether "Gage makes sense" www.wsfm.com.au

Please thank them by e-mail asap.....

Email Jonesy - brendanjones [at] wsfm.com.au
Email Amanda - amanda [at] wsfm.com.au

This is a testament to the work you're all doing. Thank you all!

Kind regards,

John Bursill

 

Friday, November 20 2009   -   Other Important News

November 10th, 2009
By David DeGraw
AmpedStatus

As most of you have noticed, we are primarily focused on covering the economic coup. We strongly feel that the theft of Trillions of taxpayer dollars by a small group of men on Wall Street is the biggest story of our time. We understand that these are very difficult times for most people and there are many pressing and vitally important issues confronting us. However, the theft of Trillions of dollars has to be the lead story every day until there are investigations and prosecutions to resolve it.

Many of the news sites that we link to on a daily basis have been covering this issue. However, these sites are not covering the issue sufficiently. There should be blazing headlines on a daily basis: ECONOMIC COUP IN THE US! TRILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS STOLEN!

Think about all the vital issues you care about and then think about the Trillions of dollars that were stolen. How could a small fraction of that money directly affect the issues you care about most? We need to make this connection, and we need to make the theft of Trillions of dollars THE LEAD ISSUE RIGHT NOW!

 

Friday, November 20 2009   -   Other Important News

By Cain Burdeau (AP)
November 18, 2009
Google news

NEW ORLEANS -- A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in Hurricane Katrina.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval sided with five residents and one business who argued the Army Corps' shoddy oversight of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet led to the flooding of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish. He said, however, the corps couldn't be held liable for the flooding of eastern New Orleans, where one of the plaintiffs lived.

Duval awarded the plaintiffs $720,000, or about $170,000 each, but the decision could eventually make the government vulnerable to a much larger payout. The ruling should give more than 100,000 other individuals, businesses and government entities a better shot at claiming billions of dollars in damages.

 

Friday, November 20 2009   -   Endorsements & Support

On October 21st at the University of San Diego, Mr. Dwain Deets, former Director of NASA Aerospace Projects, gave a multimedia presentation on behalf of nearly one thousand architects and engineers who cite evidence of explosive demolition in all three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11 and are calling for a new, independent investigation into their destruction. These architects and engineers are listed on their website at ae911Truth.org.

Mr. Deets was an engineering executive with NASA Dryden Flight Research Center for more than 37 years and formerly served as Director, Research Engineering Division at Dryden. He received the Presidential Meritorious Rank Award in the federal government's Senior Executive Service (1988). In 1986, Deets was awarded the Wright Brothers Lectureship in Aeronautics, a distinguished speaking engagement sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
Resolutely empirical, non-political, and non-finger-pointing, ae911Truth only asks for a new investigation of the towers� collapse that does justice to the forensic evidence it presents. The concerns presented by Mr. Deets and \r\n the conclusions of Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth are shared by hundreds of scientists; senior-level military, intelligence, and government officials; firefighters; pilots and aviation professionals; scholars and university professors; 9/11 survivors and family members; and media professionals around the world.

 

Wednesday, November 18 2009   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

Richard Gage AIA, of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, talks to architect Jan Utzon, son of Joern Utzon, the architect of the Sydney Opera House.

 

Wednesday, November 18 2009   -   Legal Response to 9/11

by Kristen Breitweiser,
9/11 widow and activist
November 16, 2009
HuffingtonPost.com

Even after witnessing the horrors of 9/11 that included me helplessly watching the murder of my husband on live television, I still believe that we are a civilized nation of laws. And like the Nuremberg trials that brought the murderers of millions to justice, now more than ever, Americans need to trust our own judicial system to fully and openly prosecute the mass murderers of 9/11 while the rest of the world bears witness.

Because while the terrorists were successful in bringing down the Twin Towers and hijacking airplanes on 9/11, our Constitution should never be hijacked or brought down as a result of anything--let alone the potential adversity faced in prosecuting modern day monsters like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Indeed, in the fight against Islamist extremism, we should never bow to the terrorists by compromising, manipulating, re-writing or flat-out ignoring the core, bedrock principles of our Constitution that speak to the very heart of who we are as a nation--a democracy.

Yet, quite alarmingly, Republicans seem to be exhibiting just this sort of crisis of confidence in our Constitution's ability to prosecute these horrible men. Republicans argue that men like KSM are war criminals who can only be convicted in military commissions where they won't receive the protections of our laws. Republicans seem to lack a certain faith in our Constitution's ability and adaptability in meting out the demands of modern day justice.

 

Tuesday, November 17 2009   -   Other Important News

IANS 16 November 2009
Times of India

Ed. Note: The LA Times article mentioned is available here:

CIA says it gets its money's worth from Pakistani spy agency: It has given hundreds of millions to the ISI, for operations as well as rewards for the capture or death of terrorist suspects. Despite fears of corruption, it is money well-spent, ex-officials say.

And for more reading on the ISI connection to 9/11 (and utter failure by the 9/11 Commission to investigate that connection) see History Commons' 9/11 Timeline, here.

LOS ANGELES: The CIA has paid millions of dollars to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since 9/11, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, says a media report.

The ISI also collected "tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA programme", which pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday citing current and former US officials.

 

Sunday, November 15 2009   -   Politics & 9/11

By emptywheel
Saturday November 14, 2009 7:51 am
Firedoglake.com

A senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, has written a book exposing the degree to which our response to 9/11 was disorganized and outdated, geared to respond to an attack from Russia rather than from terrorists. Most significantly, Farmer reveals that FAA and NORAD altered their chronologies of the day only after a briefing at the White House.

 

Tuesday, November 10 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed
October, 2009
New Internationalist.org

Islamic fundamentalist militants are the enemies of Israel and Western governments, right? Think again. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports.

Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our own response, in the form of the 'War on Terror'. This is the official narrative. And it's false. Not only did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11.

The CIA's jihad

The story begins in the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, when the CIA had already begun financing elements of an emerging Islamist mujahidin force inside Afghanistan. The idea, according to former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, was to increase the probability of a Soviet invasion, and entrap 'the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire'.¹

Osama bin Laden arrived in the country later that year, sent by then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, where he set up the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) which helped finance, recruit and train mujahidin fighters.² Bin Laden, the MAK, and the Afghan mujahidin in total received about half a billion dollars a year from the CIA, and roughly the same from the Saudis, funnelled through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).³

By around 1988, as Jane’s Defence Weekly reports, 'with US knowledge, Bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries'.⁴ US and Western intelligence agencies facilitated this process, seeing rightwing Islamist movements as a counterweight to Communist, leftwing and nationalist political trends. They supported the Saudis and other Gulf states, as well as Pakistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan among others, in proliferating Islamist extremist institutions in far-flung countries such as Algeria, Yemen, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Funding for these activities was intertwined with the establishment of organized criminal financial centres in Malaysia, Madagascar, South Africa, Nigeria, Latin America, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkestan, and elsewhere.⁵

 

Sunday, November 8 2009   -   Get Involved

November 7, 2009
from John Brusill, The Hard Evidence Tour organizer:

Hello all,

We still have 135 (out of 292) Tickets to sell for Saturday the 14th event and 210 (out of 292) for Sunday the 15th event.

Many of you have not bought tickets to the Sunday Event because you think it probably won't sell out or you didn't know you had to? Please consider the organisers and firm these seats now as payment on the day is a hassle and inconvenient for all concerned!

To buy tickets for "Truth in Action" Sunday the 15th in Sydney here www.stickytickets.com.au/2212/Truth_in_Action.aspx and please remember the steller line up including Luke Rudkowski (Head of WeAreChange NY and founder of WAC), Janice Matthews (Head of 911Truth.org), Cosmos (Head of TruthAction.org), Ken Jenkins (911 Truth's #1 Psychologist), Dr Frank Legge (Co-ed of the Journal of 9/11 Studies) and Hereward Fenton (Australia's top 9/11 Journalist)! Don't miss this event!

 

Saturday, November 7 2009   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

 

Saturday, November 7 2009   -   Other Important News

by Brad Jacobson
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
RawStory.com

[Read Part I, Part II and Part III of this series.]

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Asked when his office expects to conclude the investigation, Comerford said, “As a matter of policy we do not set deadlines since any number of variables or factors could result in a delay.”

He did confirm that investigators in his office have read Raw Story’s recent articles on the topic.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

Gary Comerford, Inspector General spokesman for the Defense Department, told Raw Story last week that his office is conducting an investigation into the retired military analyst program and confirmed that the investigation began during the summer.

 

Saturday, November 7 2009   -   9/11 Consequences

By Philip Giraldi
November 4, 2009
Campaign for Liberty

Most Americans believe that we are in a terrible dilemma. An increasing number are uncomfortable with the continuing carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan and fearful of the consequences of yet another Middle East war, this time against Iran, but most also believe that our country is threatened by dark forces that seek to destroy us and that extreme measures are justified. Few realize that fear alone is bringing about our transformation into a country driven by constant warfare to the detriment of our constitutional liberties.

Those who believe that a change of course is essential if we are to survive as a nation quite rightly demand the disengagement of the United States from two wars and the avoidance of further conflicts. They understand that the United States has acted unwisely and illegally in its interference in the affairs of others and also that the presence of American military forces all over the world has not made us safer and has in fact served as a catalyst for escalating violence. But those who see the state of the world with such clarity must first convince a majority of their fellow citizens that disengagement is not another word for national suicide. In short, the American people must come to understand that their safety is best assured when our government does not go around the world looking for dragons to slay. A key element in being able to reassure the American people could be the development of a positive and proactive intelligence program that speaks the truth and, inter alia, could actually help avoid conflicts and demonstrate that every citizen benefits when the United States is at peace and a friend to all nations.

 

Friday, November 6 2009   -   Research/Evidence

November 4, 2009
Kevin Fenton
History Commons Groups

New details of a NORAD exercise called Amalgam Virgo 01-02 have been found in a document at the National Archives. The exercise involved a suicide pilot attacking a military installation in the US. It was run in early June 2001, just three months before 9/11.

The document was found in the 9/11 Commission’s files at the National Archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson (a.k.a. Paxvector) and uploaded to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd. Some information about the exercise was revealed at the History Commons Groups blog in June, when we publicised a commission document summarising a group of military exercises designed to help the military deal with suicide hijackings. However, the newly-found three-page scenario provides more detail.