Muriel Kane
January 27, 2009

RawStory.com

The super-secretive National Security Agency has been quietly monitoring, decrypting, and interpreting foreign communications for decades, starting long before it came under criticism as a result of recent revelations about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Now a forthcoming PBS documentary asks whether the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if it had been more willing to share its data with other agencies.

Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, and found that it had been closely monitoring the 9/11 hijackers as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin Laden's operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped bin Laden's satellite phone, starting in 1996.

By Clint Hendler
Columbia Journalism Review
January 14, 2009

Advocates for open and transparent government are quick to note that no American presidential administration has, in practice, been enthusiastic about reducing secrecy in the executive branch--for some obvious and sometimes quite legitimate reasons. There are secrets that almost everyone agrees should remain secret. But secrecy must be balanced with the citizens' right to examine the operations of their government--to learn, to improve, to enforce, and sometimes to shame. That's especially true when there are political or bureaucratic incentives for secrecy that deserve far less respect than true matters of national security. And despite the bipartisan resistance from those in power, the arc of history has trended, if unevenly, toward openness. Claims of excessive secrecy have become a tried and true political battering ram, easily wielded by the party in opposition. Technological evolution has not only made the dissemination of information easier and faster, but also has heightened our appetite for disclosure. The trend isn't confined to the political sphere. Betty Ford's frank discussion of her struggles with cancer and alcoholism in the 1970s marked a new era of openness in our personal medical lives, and the invention of the personal video camera spawned a cottage industry around moments--gaffes, goofs, tragedies--that were once private.

Click Here To Listen: http://noliesradio.org
LIVE Thursday, Jan 15th at 6am Pacific - 9am Eastern - 14:00 GMT

Who is the real Eric Holder? Is he a real civil rights advocate who recently made a speech advocating the closing of Gitmo and the stopping of rendition, torture, and warrantless secret domestic searches and wiretaps? Is he a coverup attorney who has been accused of deflecting press attention from a possible murder of a witness regarding the government's culpilbility in the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing and defending Chiquita Brands role in the funding of death squads in Columbia? Or is he simply a slimy lawyer accused of infuence peddling in his role in the pardon of Mark Rich in the Clinton Whitehouse? See our website for the sources on these statements.
http://noliesradio.org

Michael J. Fox to play paraplegic on FX series

By DANIEL FRANKEL
January 14, 2009

It's been a hot-potato even for the most heavyweight of political pundits in recent years, but the fifth season of the FX series "Rescue Me" will intrepidly delve into the controversial theory that the 9/11 attacks were aided or perpetrated by the U.S. government.

Season five will find the men of Engine 62 divided over the polarizing theory after a journalist working on a 10-year-anniversary story delves up painful memories.

"I think there are a lot of well-thought-out ideas and theories (about 9/11) that to me make more sense than has been popularly espoused, and I'm glad we could explore it in the context of the show," said cast member Daniel Sanjata, addressing tube journos at the Television Critics Assn. confab in Universal City Tuesday.

In the grim, sleepless months of excavation after the September 11 attacks, forensic pathologists in New York City worked day and night to identify the dead. They didn't have much to go on. The collapsed World Trade Center towers had burned at temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees, incinerating those trapped inside. Many of the bodies of the passengers aboard the two airplanes that struck the buildings were consumed by burning jet fuel, leaving only traces of DNA, much of it so damaged that it was impossible to read. Few bodies were found intact. Most of the human remains culled from the vast wreckage at Ground Zero were little more than tiny fragments of charred tissue and bone. The volume was overwhelming. Robert Shaler, who headed the city's Department of Forensic Biology and was a leader of the identification effort, worried his lab would be paralyzed if it tried to identify every piece. At first, they decided they would only attempt to test samples that were "the size of a thumb or larger," he says. But when they saw how small many of the fragments were, they changed their minds. "If we were really going to make an honest effort," Shaler says, "we had to do everything that came along."

Shaler and his colleagues at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner gave weekly updates to family members of the victims, reporting how many of the dead had been identified and reassuring them that the city was doing everything to identify their loved ones. But the families weren't only concerned with their own dead. In meeting after meeting, Shaler says, relatives would ask about the hijackers. Had the scientists identified any of their remains?

By Paul Craig Roberts
January 08, 2009
Information Clearinghouse

The American print and TV media has never been very good. These days it is horrible. If a person intends to be informed, he must turn to foreign news broadcasts, to Internet sites, to foreign newspapers available on the Internet, or to alternative newspapers that are springing up in various cities. A person who sits in front of Murdoch's Fox "News" or CNN or who reads the New York Times is simply being brainwashed with propaganda.

Before conservatives nod their heads in agreement, I'm not referring to "the liberal media." I mean the propaganda that issues from the US government and the Israel Lobby.

It was neoconservative Bush regime propaganda fed to America through Judith Miller and the New York Times and through Murdoch's Fox "News" that convinced Americans that they were in danger from a small secular Arab country half way around the globe called Iraq. It was the American media that convinced Americans that getting rid of dangerous "weapons of mass destruction," weapons that did not exist in Iraq, would be a cakewalk paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.

Elizabeth Woodworth
December 30, 2008

In a companion essay (reprinted below), I discussed the response of some articles in the mainstream press to the claim, made by some defenders of Israel, that Professor Richard Falk should be removed from his current position of UN rapporteur on human rights abuses in the Palestinian Territories -- a claim that was reflected in the refusal of Israel on December 14, 2008, to allow him to enter the country. I included in this essay a discussion of an article by reporter Joel Brinkley because, although it was published before Israel's action against Falk¹, it could be read as a defense of that action. Brinkley, who had previously worked for the New York Times, argued that Falk did not have the right "frame of mind" for his UN position. In the present essay, I will focus on Brinkley's argument for this charge, suggesting that it shows that he does not have the right frame of mind for his own current position as visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University.

Brinkley's Discussion of 9/11

Brinkley's charge that Falk is unfit for his UN role is quite remarkable, given Falk's stature. He is Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has had published (as author or editor) over 60 books by academic and other mainstream presses. He is also widely respected and sought after as a speaker and conference participant.

Interview: Monday, Dec 29, 2008 from 4 - 6 pm Pacific Time
Activist singer-songwriter Vic Sadot has a new CD out, 9/11 Truth & Justice Songs. Vic will be interviewed by Che X on the popular San Francisco station known as Pirate Cat Radio.

Vic Sadot has been an activist since his college days when campus activists at the University of Delaware convinced him that we were being lied to about the Vietnam War. Songwriter Phil Ochs became a hero to Vic and his brothers and sisters from 1968 until Ochs' shocking suicide in 1976. In May of 1973 Vic was a community volunteer at Georgetown University's WGTB. He jumped at the opportunity to interview Phil Ochs. Vic wrote a tribute song to Phil Ochs a year after Ochs died: Broadside Balladeer.

Vic's current project is a Limited Edition collectors item fitting for a first announcement on a show like Pirate Cat Radio's "Notes from the Underground". The show will be archived and available for mp3 download within 2 hours after the broadcast concludes. "9/11 Truth & Justice Songs" was begun in Delaware studios. Vic moved to Berkeley, California in September of 2008.

For Immediate Release: December 22, 2008
Contact: Krista Minteer (212) 845-5207

Human Rights Group Requests Stay in KSM's Military Commission Case

New York--Human Rights First filed a friend-of-the-court brief today, requesting a stay of proceedings in the military commission case of the alleged 9/11 conspirators, United States v. Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, et al. until after President-elect Barack Obama takes office. Obama has repeatedly criticized the military commissions, and he has vowed to close Guantanamo and try suspected terrorists in ordinary criminal or military courts.

The amicus brief was filed in response to a request by Muhammed and his co-defendants, made during a court appearance on December 8th, to withdraw all legal motions and plead guilty. The military judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley adjourned the case temporarily to allow for mental competency evaluations of two of the defendants and for the government to brief whether the Military Commissions Act permits guilty pleas in a capital case. But the military prosecutors are continuing to press forward with the case, and they are likely to seek another hearing before President-elect Obama takes office. Three of the five detainees, including Muhammed, are representing themselves and have resisted working with the military lawyers assigned to assist them.