1. The USA Today pair of office buildings in Arlington, VA, not far from the Pentagon, are commonly referred to as the Twin Towers, just like the WTC. Planning a military exercise that involved those buildings on 9/11 would have helped provide cover if one of the murderers slipped up and talked:
“If my theory about there having been an exercise on 9/11 based around the scenario of a plane hitting the USA Today building is correct, then this would have had clear advantages for the 9/11 plotters: If any of them had been overheard by their colleagues before 9/11, talking about “the plane crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11,” they could have made the excuse that they were just referring to this training exercise.”
…
I am aware that USA Today journalists/editors were on the scene early at the Pentagon, to justify the official conspiracy theory, that flight 77 hit the Pentagon.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18346
2. “William Colby [CIA Director under Ford] said the CIA controls everyone of any significance in the major media.”
Colby died under very suspicious circumstances.*
I think that tells us all we need to know about why so called professional journalists are parroting the White House talking points on 9/11. They’re owned.
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* Colby died in a suspicous drowning accident in 1996, just after he had become an editor of an important financial newsletter, Strategic Investment, which covered the Vince Foster “suicide” in detail. Its editors hired three renowned handwriting experts to investigate Foster’s suicide note, which hadn’t been found when his briefcase was first searched, but later materialized, torn into pieces, with no fingerprints on any of the pieces. Upon comparing this document with others of Foster’s writings, these experts declared it was a forgery, and a not very good one at that.
Colby supposedly decided to go canoeing alone one night, without the life jacket he always wore, and left the house unlocked, the computer on, and dinner half-eaten on the table. His canoe was found on April 27, and although the entire area was searched several times, his body wasn’t found until May 6, just 20 yards from where the canoe had been found ten days earlier.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18343
3. It’s bad enough that the CIA overthrew so many governments over the last 60 years, but now we learn that the officials involved also made money inside trading stocks of the compnies that benefited from the coups:
“Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we now know that the various Cabots and Dulleses had a series of top-secret meetings in which they decided that Árbenz had to go and sponsored a coup that drove Árbenz from office in 1954.
With a U.S. puppet back in the president’s mansion, UFC’s profits were safe. But it appears the company wasn’t the only beneficiary of this Cold War cloak-and-dagger diplomacy: A recent study by economists Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu argues that those in on the planning process also profited handsomely. By tracking the stock prices of UFC and other politically vulnerable firms in the months leading up to CIA-staged coups in Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, and Iran, the researchers provide evidence that someone—perhaps one of the Dulleses, Cabots, or others in the know—was trading stocks based on classified information of these coups-in-the-making.
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Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu examine how the stock market reacted to events that no Wall Street trader should have known about: top-secret meetings of the coup-plotting cabals at CIA headquarters and presidential approvals of CIA-organized invasions. These events would have increased the expected future profits of companies like UFC—if the CIA-led coup in Guatemala were successful, for example, UFC would get its plantations back. If stock traders were privy to the coup-planning process, we would expect them to bid up the prices of affected companies in anticipation of these higher profits. These meetings and authorizations were all highly classified, however, and since you can’t trade on information you don’t have, UFC’s stock price shouldn’t have budged until the coup actually took place and the investing world learned of the regime change.
Unless, that is, some of the Cabots, Dulleses, or other insiders were using their privileged information to profit personally from a future coup.
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Such trading on inside information is illegal, and when it involves highly classified details about a future CIA coup, it verges on treason. Yet the researchers found that prices of companies affected by the CIA’s regime-toppling efforts—UFC in Guatemala, Anglo-Iranian (oil) in Iran, Anaconda (mining) in Chile, and American Sugar in Cuba—went up in the weeks and months preceding the coups.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2203121/pagenum/all
4. Watch the second video – isn’t that the most obvious controlled demolition int he history of the world?
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18358
5. “In his most recent speech, yesterday in Sarasota, Florida, Obama didn’t mention at all his plan to end the war in Iraq. He said nothing — yes, nothing — about withdrawing US forces. Here is the full text of what he said about Iraq in that speech:
When it comes to keeping this country safe, we don’t have to choose between retreating from the world and fighting a war without end in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending $10 billion a month in Iraq while the Iraqi government sits on a huge surplus. As President, I will end this war by asking the Iraqi government to step up, and I will finally finish the fight against bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. I will never hesitate to defend this nation. From day one of this campaign, I have made clear that we will increase our ground troops and our investments in the finest fighting force the world has ever known. Watching our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines fight in Iraq and Afghanistan has only deepened my commitment to invest in 21st century technologies so that our men and women have the best training and equipment when they deploy into combat and the care and benefits they have earned when they come home.
I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy – especially now. The cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq, means that Washington will have to tighten its belt and put off spending on things we don’t need.
Let’s analyze that.
First, he doesn’t reiterate that he is pulling US forces out. Instead, he appears to say that the key is to get Iraq to pay for the war, to get the Iraqis to use their surplus. That may appeal to budget-conscious US voters, but — especially with the price of oil dropping fast — Iraq, which is a poor, Third World nation with a devastated economy, isn’t going to pay for the war.
Second, he says that he wants “the Iraqi government to step up,” meaning, presumably, to fight its own war. That, of course, is exactly what President Bush can been saying, namely, that the US will “stand down” when the Iraqis “stand up.” Problem is, the Iraqis need to be handed an unconditional timetable that doesn’t depend on what they do or don’t do. Iraq doesn’t need President Obama to “asking” it to step up.
Third, and most troubling, Obama says that Americans will have to tighten their belts because of the “cost of the war in Iraq.” Doesn’t that mean that the war will continue?”
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/378887/obama_and_iraq?rel=hpbox
6. Being a moron redux – Palin:
“ Sarah Palin gets pranked by a comedy team from Montreal pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Scariest things about the interview:
1. Palin laughs pleasantly when “Sarkozy” says he loves to kill little animals
2. Palin seems to think that there is an analogy between the American relationship with Russia and the French relationship with Belgium
3. Palin’s idea of bringing “energy” to politics is to involve supermodels; does she think that is the way to resolve the mortgage crisis?”
http://www.juancole.com/
7. “Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years.
The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.
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Figure 2. Climate changes in the past 17,000 years from the GISP2 Greenland ice core. Red = warming, blue = cooling. (Modified from Cuffy and Clow, 1997)”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783
8. “Do you “pal around with terrorists”? Are you a “radical” or express views that the government considers “extremist”?
On October 28, the whistleblowing website Cryptome published the FBI Directorate of Intelligence: Counterterrorism Division’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon. This eye-opening “Unclassified/For Official Use Only” (U/FOUO) document purports “to standardize terms used in the FBI analytical products dealing with counterterrorism.”
But what it does instead, in keeping with the FBI’s insatiable appetite for “actionable intelligence product,” is create new categories of individuals who might fall under the purview of state “counterterrorism” investigations.
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In other words, an individual’s political views, racial background or ethnic origin can serve as a pretext for an investigation.
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“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest). You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”
There you have it, the criminalization of dissent.
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As we have seen over the years since 9/11, the grounds for launching “counterterrorism” investigations have shifted from directly targeting intelligence and/or terrorist operatives on U.S. soil, to American dissidents and their supporters, the vast majority of whom are antiwar, environmental, civil liberties, socialist and labor activists.
Indeed, millions of Americans have questioned “the cultural values and beliefs of the United States,” particularly when they have challenged the Bush regime’s doctrine of aggressive, preemptive war or the systematic looting of the economy by capitalist grifters.
The Lexicon, while affirming that the theoretical or investigative work of alleged “ideologues” and “propagandists”–such as investigative journalists or historians–”might be constitutionally protected,” the bar is set very low here and this too, fits the Bureau’s own historical ideological mindset that dissent = terrorism.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10774
9. ” if I could be granted one small political wish, it would be the permanent elimination of this widespread, execrable Orwellian fetish of reverently referring to the President as “our commander in chief.” And Biden’s formulation here is a particularly creepy rendition, since he’s taunting opponents of Obama that, come Tuesday, they will be forced to refer to him as “our commander in chief Barack Obama” (Sarah Palin, in the very first speech she delivered after being unveiled as the Vice Presidential candidate, said of John McCain: ”that’s the kind of man I want as our commander in chief,” and she’s been delivering that same line in her stump speech ever since).
This is much more than a semantic irritant. It’s a perversion of the Constitution, under which American civilians simply do not have a “commander in chief”; only those in the military — when it’s called into service — have one (Art. II, Sec. 2).
Worse, “commander in chief” is a military term, which reflects the core military dynamic: superiors issue orders which subordinates obey. That isn’t supposed to be the relationship between the U.S. President and civilian American citizens, but because the mindless phrase “our commander in chief” has become interchangeable with ”the President,” that is exactly the attribute — supreme, unquestionable authority in all arenas — which has increasingly come to define the power of the President. Recall the explanation by GOP Sen. Kit Bond in June when explaining why telecoms should be immunized for lawbreaking after being “directed” by George Bush to allow illegal government spying on their customers:
I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.
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You are standing up on prime time live television, asking the president of the United States a question when the country is about to go to war.” White House reporters weren’t questioning a political official who is to be held accountable. They were gently — “deferentially” — posing questions to The Commander-in-Chief.
This is also a crucial aspect of the still broader trend of vesting more and more unchecked, centralized power in the White House. The more the President is glorified and elevated (he’s not merely a public servant or a political official, but “our Commander in Chief”), the more natural it is to believe that he should have the power to do what he wants without anyone interfering or questioning.
Whether deliberate or not, the chronic assignment to the President of this title is a method for training the citizenry to conceive of our political leaders, especially the President, as someone whose authority is naturally and desirably expansive and absolute. He’s supreme. It converts civilians into soldiers and Presidents into supreme rulers. It’s no surprise that this is the shape our government has now taken; this phraseology both reflects and helps to enable the transformation of the President into an unaccountable, virtually omnipotent figure.
Worse still, to equate “the President” with “our commander in chief” is to depict the U.S. as a state of endless war and pervasive militarism. Even in the limited sense that the Constitution uses the term (”Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States”), the President doesn’t always wield that power, but only when those branches are “called into the actual Service of the United States.”
It was never envisioned by the Founders that we would have a permanently deployed military, which is why they imposed on Congress’ power ”To raise and support Armies” the prohibition that “no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years“ (Art. I, Sec. 8). Equating “the President” with “our commander in chief” rests on the opposite assumption: that this power is not just central to the presidency, but intrinsic to it, because we’re always a nation at war. “
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
