1. This is why we pursue 9/11 Truth:
“The struggle for 9/11 truth has gone on now for over seven years, although I’ve been involved only since 2003. In that time I’ve learned a good deal about history and social inertia, and I’ve made some progress in my communications skills. Many people might think that speaking out publicly, against the wishes of authority like I did, risking one’s career and public standing, can only be harmful to a person. But I’ve found that by showing that I was genuinely seeking a positive outcome, the opportunity to make such a sacrifice became a blessing. There were changes, of course, including a new job and moving to a new town, and a huge amount of work with my new “unpaid job”, but it has been worth it. This is in part due to the fact that I’ve learned that there are many people in the world who feel as I do, that the events of 9/11 were paradoxically something of a gift to mankind. We don’t all agree on the details, but in my view, 9/11 is a wake-up call that can be used for the purpose of realizing our own limitations, and thereby making adjustments to how we live and interact with each other, and how we prioritize the education of our children. Once we tap into this ongoing “inside job”, we will have the power to make lasting positive change in our society.
…
The reason 9/11 can be considered a gift is that so many people have been deceived for so long about what happened. This fact allows us to realize how such deception occurs, how the resulting self-deception can deeply affect our lives, and how it can go on for so long. So 9/11 has awoken us to deeper levels of political reality – deep politics as Peter Dale Scott says – but more importantly it can awaken us to awareness of our own deep psychology.
…
With the WTC 7 report, the public was given just three weeks to comment on a report that was nearly seven years in the making. As for the quality of the report, I was really surprised at how weak it was. It seemed that NIST didn’t even try to present a logical explanation for what happened, but simply relied on certain fawning media to help them close the discussion quickly and without thought. With some effort, I was able to get a response out on the sixth anniversary. In that essay (found here: http://911review.com/articles/ryan/NIST_WTC7.html), I pointed out that the WTC 7 report “contradicts the previous major claims by NIST, ignores the most important of the existing evidence, [and] produces no scientific test results to support itself.” In other words, there is no science involved in the WTC 7 report from NIST, it is pure and quite transparent deception.
…
I don’t know if this interests you or not, but the way that “science” has responded to 9/11 is a very good example of the way science often actually works in the real world. It is frequently not objective, not based on evidence, and not rational. With 9/11, we can see this in both the NIST report and in the silence of so many American scientists.
…
The first point that should draw the attention of anyone who has scientific background is the infinitesimally low probability that so many unprecedented events could have happened all on the same day. On 9/11, we had the first ever complete failure of our national air defenses (times four), while at the same time the first ever situation where all of the members of our chain of command were unavailable or incapable to respond to a national emergency, followed by the first three times that a skyscraper has fallen through the path of most resistance at nearly free-fall speed for any reason other than demolition, and so on and so on. The list of unprecedented events is staggering actually. And considering that all of that led us (emotionally) to the conclusion that we should invade the most strategically important lands in the world – lands that we already planned to invade anyway – the probability of such a scenario should be highly suspect, to make a gross understatement.”
http://americanbuddhist.net/truth-deception-interview-kevin-ryan-9-11
2. This woman, who was a threat to the government on 9/11, was on the jet that crashed yesterday. Just last week, Eckert was at the White House with Barack Obama, part of a meeting the president had with relatives of those killed in the 2001 attacks and the bombing of the USS Cole to discuss how the new administration would handle terror suspects. ‘Kind of makes you wonder doesn’t it ? I know I do every time a plane drops out of the sky without a distress call. The first thing i think is who was on it’:
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19375
3. “Geert Wilders – a film producer and also a member of parliament in the Netherlands – is facing a prison term there for “insulting” Muslims. His short film “Fitna” in 2008 juxtaposed verses from the Koran with scenes of violence committed by jihadist terrorists. The Dutch appellate court refused a free-speech defense because the insults were so egregious.
If convicted, Wilders faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison. Said the defendant: “I lost my freedom already four and a half years ago in October 2004, when my 24-hour police protection started because of threats by Muslims in Holland and abroad to kill me.”
I have heard from Muslims in this country that jihadists around the world have more than insulted traditional Muslim law by their fierce punishments of both non-Muslims and Muslims who have acted in speech or writing against jihadists’ reinterpretations of the Quran. Some of these protesters, exercising freedom of conscience, have been killed for their “blasphemy.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/09/the-cost-of-criticizing-jihadists/
4. “Jane Fonda‘s controversial documentary opposing the Vietnam War is to be released on DVD – 37 years after it was pulled from cinemas and withdrawn from circulation.
The actress emerged as a prominent political activist in the 1960s, opposing the longrunning American conflict in the country.
Fonda teamed up with Donald Sutherland and Fred Gardner in 1970 to form the FTA (Free The Army) tour, an anti-war road show, and their protests were filmed for the documentary.
The movie hit cinemas in 1972, the same week Fonda made a controversial trip to Hanoi, North Vietnam, visiting opposition forces.
A week after its release, the film was removed from theatres, with director Francine Parker blaming pressure from the White House for making the movie “disappear”.“
http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0677474
5. “Barbed wire villages raise fears of refugee concentration camps
Sri Lanka was accused yesterday of planning concentration camps to hold 200,000 ethnic Tamil refugees from its northeastern conflict zone for up to three years — and seeking funding for the project from Britain.
The Sri Lankan Government says that it will open five “welfare villages” to house Tamils fleeing the 67 sq mile patch of jungle where the army has pinned down the Tamil Tiger rebels.
…
It also says that it will be compulsory for people fleeing the area to live in the camps until the army — which will guard them — has screened them, hunted down the Tigers and demined the area. The camps will be ringed with barbed wire fencing
…
Robert Evans, a Labour MEP who has visited Sri Lanka as chairman of the European Parliament Delegation on Relations with South Asia, said: “These are not welfare camps, they are prisoner-of-war cum concentration camps.” Human Rights Watch called the camps “detention centres” and said that they violated UN guidelines on internally displaced people, which say they can only be detained or interned under exceptional circumstances.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5721635.ece
6. “Government Considering Buying Up Bad Alt-A Mortgages
It’s smarter than most of the idiotic things the government is doing with taxpayer money. At least it would actually help some people, and might help to mitigate one of the many sources of the crisis.
True, it rewards those that made poor decisions, and penalizes the rest of us. But if the government insists on skinning the taxpayers to give bailouts, at least it may be a better use of money than, say, forking it over to wealthy bankers.“
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/02/government-considering-buying-up-bad.html
7. “Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit confirm Department of Defense involvement in the CIA’s ghost detention program, revealed three prominent human rights groups today. The groups—Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ)—today released documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Department of State (DOS), resulting from their lawsuit seeking the disclosure of government documents that relate to secret detention, extraordinary rendition, and torture. At a public press conference, the groups revealed that these documents confirm the existence of secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq; affirm the DOD’s cooperation with the CIA’s ghost detention program; and show one case where the DOD sought to delay the release of Guantánamo prisoners who were scheduled to be sent home by a month and a half in order to avoid bad press.
“These newly released documents confirm our suspicion that the tentacles of the CIA’s abusive program reached across agency lines,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, Director of the NYU International Human Rights Clinic. “In fact, it is increasingly obvious that defense officials engaged in legal gymnastics to find ways to cooperate with the CIA’s activities. A full accounting of all agencies must now take place to ensure that future abuses don’t continue under a different guise.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12285
8. “It invokes one of the worst myths in our political discourse: the idea that there’s something wrong, intolerant or “Stalinist” about pressuring or even campaigning against incumbents “from one’s own party” who advocate positions that you think are bad and wrong. That activity happens to be the essence of democracy, and we need more, not less, of it. If anything is Stalinist, it’s the sky-high incumbent re-election rates and the sense of entitlement in our political class that incumbents should not ever face primary challenges even if they support policies which the base of the party reviles. Why shouldn’t GOP voters who love tax cuts and hate government domestic spending, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, demand that their elected representatives support those views (in exactly the same way that Democratic incumbents who supported the Iraq war and/or Bush’s lawless surveillance state should have been targeted for defeat)?
Republican groups demand from politicians support for their beliefs. By contrast, as Judis describes, Democratic groups — including (perhaps especially) liberal activist groups — now (with some exceptions) lend their allegiance to the party and its leader regardless of how faithful the party leadership is to their beliefs. That disparity means that there is often great popular agitation and political pressure exerted from the Right, but almost none from the Left
During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas. Many online political and “news” outlets — including some liberal political blogs — discovered that the most reliable way to massively increase traffic was to capitalize on the pro-Obama fervor by turning themselves into pro-Obama cheerleading squads. Grass-roots activist groups watched their dues-paying membership rolls explode the more they tapped into that same sentiment and turned themselves into Obama-supporting appendages. Even labor unions and long-standing Beltway advocacy groups reaped substantial benefits by identifying themselves as loyal foot soldiers in the Obama movement.
The major problem now is that these entities — the ones that ought to be applying pressure on Obama from the Left and opposing him when he moves too far Right — are now completely boxed in. They’ve lost — or, more accurately, voluntarily relinquished — their independence. They know that criticizing — let alone opposing — Obama will mean that all those new readers they won last year will leave; that all those new dues-paying members will go join some other, more Obama-supportive organization; that they will prompt intense backlash and anger among the very people — their members, supporters and readers — on whom they have come to rely as the source of their support, strength, and numbers.
As a result, there is very little political or media structure to Obama’s Left that can or will criticize him, even when he moves far to what the Beltway calls the “center” or even the Right (i.e., when he adopts large chunks of the GOP position). That situation is extremely bad — both for the Left and for Obama. It makes impossible what very well might be the apocryphal though still illuminating FDR anecdote:
FDR was, of course, a consummate political leader. In one situation, a group came to him urging specific actions in support of a cause in which they deeply believed. He replied: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
As Judis points out, Obama, on some issues, might move to the Right because he wants to.
…
Part of the political shrewdness of Obama has been that he’s been able to actually convince huge numbers of liberals that it’s a good thing when he ignores and even stomps on their political ideals, that it’s something they should celebrate and even be grateful for. Hordes of Obama-loving liberals are still marching around paying homage to the empty mantras of “pragmatism” and ”post-partisan harmony” — the terms used to justify and even glorify Obama’s repudiation of their own political values.
…
Political ideas and values that have no meaningful pressure being exerted on their behalf will always be those that are most ignored. That’s just the most basic rule of politics. Last year, Accountability Now was created to provide exactly that pushback against political incumbents, and there will be a major announcement very soon along with its formal launch (an Executive Director has been hired and much of the infrastructure has been created and the groundwork laid). For the moment, on one issue after the next, one can vividly observe the harm that comes from a political faction being beholden to a leader rather than to any actual ideas or political principles.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
9. “As Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in as Zimbabwe’s new prime minister in a power-sharing government, he told press “You guys need to chill the fuck out about Bobby, okay? Look we’ve all made mistakes, said stuff we shouldn’t have, executed one political dissident too many. Life’s too short to hold grudges though, eh?”
In his first day in office, Tsvingarai stated that he faced “Immediate challenges that require immediate remedies. Our currency is worth less then the air expelled saying the word “Hyperinflation” and our government is riddled with crooks that The Big M knows nothing about, seriously. And the air conditioning in my office sounds like two robots buttfucking.”
The new prime minister warned the international community that “People need to get over Mugabe as a person. To you, he may seem like a gibbering lunatic with wacky views on homosexuality, democracy and not flinging opposition ministers into gorges. But having got to know him, I can say he’s a real sweet guy that makes a bitching mojito. And you should hear him on karaoke singing “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”. Helluva set of pipes.”
When asked why three secret service officers were holding pistols to his temple while a fourth held a set of notes under his face, Tsvangirai stated “These guys? Pay them no mind. Bobby M hired them to look after me. He said that if anyone tried to assassinate me, they’d be up real close. So these guys are keeping their guns next to my face so scare them away. Honestly. Could we change the subject, please?” He went on to dismiss claims that he was being forced to read a prepared statement by Mugabe, claiming the papers were being thrust under his nose because “I forgot to order a lectern. My bad.”
Mugabe praised Tsvingarai’s appointment, stating “This is a new day for the people of Zimbabwe. An era of trust and cooperation is upon us. I know I share my colleague’s fullest confidence as well as the support of his family, who are being housed in my maximum security enclave for their own protection.” He also refuted reports that news footage showed Tsvingarai mouthing the words “Please. Help. Me.” during his inauguration.“
http://pushjelly.blogspot.com/2009/02/mugabe-schmugabe-says-tsvangirai.html
