Iran showdown has echoes of faked Tonkin attack
Nick Juliano
January 11, 2008
A dramatic showdown at sea. Crossed communication signals. Apparently-hostile craft nearby. Sketchy intelligence leading to ratcheted up rhetoric.
The similarities between this week's confrontation between...
Naomi Wolf in her blog of Dec. 13 brings a necessary note of outrage to the unfolding story of the torture tapes. Let us not forget, as we examine the affair around the CIA's claim to have destroyed video records of prisoner interrogations, that U.S. government officials have already admitted or directly and publicly confessed to a series of crimes: torture, lying to a government investigation, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence. Wolf argues for adding murder as a charge. There is no rationale left for not convening an immediate, independent investigation by special prosecutor.
Wolf: "What we are likely to see if the tapes... are ever recovered is that the "confessions" of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil liberties in this country [were] obtained through methods such as electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family members... if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the many violently coerced "confessions" upon which the whole house of cards of this White House and its hyped "war on terror" rests, it would likely cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones (remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes)."
Elsewhere, for further speculation on what the CIA may be hiding, a discussion thread at Democratic Underground by poster leveymg makes the case that "Abu Zubaydah was a key Al-Qaeda figure in the CIA's Chechnya operation, which involved several of the 9/11 hijackers. He was in a position to know about the relationship of the 9/11 Hamburg cell with the CIA."
Meanwhile, we recommend the full text of Naomi Wolf's article, after the jump...
Point, Click ... Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
By Ryan Singel
The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system
that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according
...
'The Muckraker Report's FOIA request for the documents proving the chain of custody of the so-called "bin Laden confession video" has produced additional circumstantial evidence that the video may have been the product of a CIA sting effort on or about September 26, 2001. If true, this is an incredibly important finding, as the official story concerning the video claims the videotape was obtained by U.S. forces in Jalalabad, Afghanistan in late November 2001. For background on this story, please see Writer Claims bin Laden Confession Video Offers Evidence of Criminal Conspiracy To Go to War on Part of US and Britain, And Possible Foreknowledge of the 9/11 Attacks.
Thursday May 17, 2007 10:16 PM
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA to release an inspector general's report on the terrorist...
by Bryan Sacks
"If independent reporters ever want to gain evidence that proves that elements within the U.S. government had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks but failed to defend against them, or even anticipated...
