1. Cell phone calls were NOT technologically possible on 9/11:
“The Cell Phone Calls
Bamford mentions (p. 90) the two calls that Barbara Olson supposedly made from AA Flight 77 to her husband Ted, who served as the Bush administration’s solicitor general. Apparently the author is unaware that these calls have since been discredited. Initially Ted Olson described them as cell phone calls. Later, however, he modified his story and stated that his wife had reached him using a passenger phone (or an air phone, as they are called). The problem is that American Airlines did not equip its Boeing 757s with passenger phones at the time of the 9/11 attack. Nor is it possible that Barbara was able to connect using a cell phone, since in 2001 cell phone technology was not yet capable of supporting calls from high-flying commercial jets. The FBI tacitly conceded these points at the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, at which the FBI submitted a report about the calls allegedly made from the four flights on 9/11. The report mentions only one call from Barbara Olson and describes it as an “unconnected call,” indicating that there was no conversation. The FBI admitted, in other words, that the call never took place! Their disavowal is astonishing, especially given the media attention that the alleged calls from Barbara Olson to her husband received in the first days after the September 11 attack. The calls were extremely important in establishing the official story in the public mind. Yet, to the best of my knowledge the press has completely ignored the FBI’s subsequent admission that it was all a hoax. Here, I must credit David Ray Griffin for his research on this important issue, which I have just summarized. [13]“
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19579
2. As some of you know, the Tonkin Gulf incident is one of the most blatant false flags in history. There were NO Vietnamese ships even in the gulf at the time, but LBJ used the fake incident to massively increase the US presence in Vietnam.
Now we another Tonkin type incident:
“Those Chinese sailors who “harassed” a U.S. military vessel lingering perilously close to a Chinese base on Hainan Island, in the South China Sea, reportedly stripped down to their underwear when our sailors turned water hoses on them. Maybe the shower facilities on Chinese fishing vessels – it was fishing trawlers, not military gunboats, that met the Americans on China’s doorstep – are insufficient, or maybe the Chinese were mooning us. I’m inclined to think the latter. In any case, Sunday’s incident ratchets up tensions with China – which have been roiled in recent weeks, not only by a series of similar incidents, but also on account of issues broader than China’s claims to virtually the whole of the South China Sea.
To begin with, the U.S. claims that the USNS Impeccable was manned by civilians and was just going about its undefined business when, suddenly, those big bad Chinese started “harassing” us – the bullies! But wait. Take a look at the Impeccable:
This baby is 5,368 tons, and over 281 ft. long: it is a surveillance ship, designed to track enemy submarines. China’s contingent of nuclear-powered subs are reportedly based at Yulin, on Hainan. And while the U.S. government maintains that the crew is “civilian,” half its crew are military personnel.
Now look at the Chinese vessels that were supposedly “harassing” this rather intimidating U.S. warship:
As John Stossel would put it: Give me a break! These are the ships that supposedly “aggressively maneuvered” around the Impeccable – as the Pentagon put it – “in an apparent coordinated effort to harass the U.S. ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters”? Behind the whiny rationale, however, lurks a damning admission: Yes, the U.S. routinely spies on the Chinese, and fully expects to get away with it. After all, for centuries foreigners have been lurking on the Chinese coastline, establishing colonies and warily poking and prodding the Chinese, with mostly limited responses – until now.
…
Imagine if Chinese military vessels appeared 75 miles off the coast of, say, southern California, for the quite obvious purpose of tracking our submarine defenses and conducting surveillance of our San Diego naval base. It would be bombs away, pronto, and no questions asked. However, the Chinese penumbra of sovereignty is apparently more restricted.“
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14384
3. “Charles Freeman, a veteran diplomat slated to become the top U.S. intelligence analyst, withdrew from consideration Tuesday. He released a statement denouncing the “Israel Lobby” for “character assassination.” Here is the text of the statement.
…
I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.“
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123672847973688515.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
4. Good:
“Interpol reviews Iran request for Israeli arrests
Iran has asked Interpol for help in tracking down 25 senior Israeli officials in relation to the recent Gaza offensive, the international police organisation said in a statement on Tuesday.
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Iran, which does not recognise Israel’s right to exist, said in December it had set up a court to try Israelis for attacking Gaza. Earlier this month it said it had asked Interpol to arrest what it called 15 Israeli “war criminals”.“
http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/03/10/interpol-reviews-iran-request-for-israeli-arrests/
5. “Why the U.S. Under Obama Is Still a Dictatorship
Instead of fudging, in anticipation of future emergencies, President Obama and Attorney General Holder need to spell out clearly that no president will ever again treat suspected terrorists, either Americans or foreigners, arrested on American soil as “enemy combatants.” Otherwise, Barack Obama’s fine words, in August 2007, when he declared, “We will again set an example to the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary,” will be meaningless, and Judge Rogers’ opinion — that the very constitutional foundations of the Republic had been fatally undermined — will be as applicable to the Obama administration as it was to that of George W. Bush. “
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0903b.asp
6. Ludicrously silly, not to mention WAY too intrusive:
“Body odor: New proof of ID?
The Department of Homeland Security plans to study the possibility that human body odor might be used to determine when people are lying, or to identify individuals in the same way that fingerprints can.
In a federal procurement document posted Friday on the Web, the department´s Science and Technology Directorate says it will conduct an “outsourced, proof-of-principle study to determine if human odor signatures can serve as an indicator of deception. … As a secondary goal, this study will examine … human odor samples for evidence to support the theory that an individual can be identified by that individual´s odor signature.”
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/10/body-odor-new-proof-id/
7. “Pentagon knowingly exposed troops to cancer-causing chemicals, document shows
A newly leaked military document appears to show the Pentagon knowingly exposed US troops to toxic chemicals that cause cancer, while publicly downplaying the risks exposure might cause.
The document, written by an environmental engineering flight commander in December of 2006 and posted on Wikileaks (PDF) on Tuesday, details the risks posed to US troops in Iraq by burning garbage at a US airbase. It enumerates myriad risks posed by the practice and identifies various carcinogens released by incinerating waste in open-air pits.
Because of the difficulties in testing samples, investigators could not prove that chemicals exceeded military exposure guidelines. But a military document released last December found that chemicals routinely exceeded safe levels by twice to six times.“
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Pentagon_knowingly_exposed_troops_to_cancercausing_0310.html
8. “Did Schumer and Emanuel Sink Freeman?
My interpretation of Chas Freeman’s withdrawal from appointment as the chairman of the National Intelligence Council is that it was provoked primarily by Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel. Schumer’s call to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was probably the decisive event, though we don’t know what Emanuel’s reaction was.
That is, the original charge against Freeman was led by the spy for Israel, Steve Rosen, whose hiring by Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum/ Campus Watch is excellent evidence of what those operations really are. Rosen, when he was a head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s Middle East bureau, handed over classified Pentagon documents to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, which were given to him by the agent Larry Franklin, a high-level Pentagon employee who reported to Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz.
As long as the criticisms were coming from the looney Likudnik fringe and from the Weekly Standard etc. (i.e. from the Rupert Murdoch right wing of the Republican Party, which is now about as central to Washington politics as the French Foreign Legion is to Paris’s), Freeman hung tough.
But when the Democratic Party movers and shakers intervened, that move completely undermined Freeman. Because he is the guy who would have to come up to the Hill and defend those portions of the National Intelligence Estimates that are made public. He would be the public face of the 16 US intelligence agencies, which Congress funds at an alleged $40 billion a year. And while he could have weathered snarky comments and ad hominem criticisms from the handful of marginalized Neoconservatives left in Congress, he could not have thrived, nor could the agencies whose conclusions his office distilled into the NIEs, if heavy hitters like Schumer were unalterably hostile.
Schumer angered some of his constituents with his defense of the Israeli total war on Gaza’s civilian population this winter, and you wonder if his isn’t the last AIPAC generation in US politics. I like Schumer and loved the way he stood up to Bush, but he and other admirable people like Mike Bloomberg just have this moral black hole in their souls when it comes to supporting far rightwing Israeli policies (policies that they would unalterably oppose if pursued by the US government).
What happened to Freeman is further evidence for the resilience of the Israel lobbies and their enormous power in US politics. The Neoconservatives were roundly defeated on the budget, and even had to swallow George Mitchell as a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But they still have the power to exclude a Washington Arabist such as Freeman even from an appointive position.
Israeli Apartheid will continue unabated under Obama.”
http://www.juancole.com/
9. Another war is coming:
“Top-level talks continue on US-led military intervention in Sri Lanka
Further evidence has emerged confirming that top-level discussions are underway involving Washington, Colombo and New Delhi over an American-led military intervention in northern Sri Lanka on the pretext of evacuating civilians trapped by the island’s civil war.
Speaking to a group of South Asian journalists last weekend, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher was asked about press reports in Colombo revealing plans for a marine expeditionary brigade attached to Pacific Command (PACOM) to be sent to Sri Lanka.“
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12642
10. “Earlier this week, I wrote:
It’s difficult to select what one thinks is the single most illustrative symbol of how our country now functions, but if I were forced to do so, I would choose the fact that it is America’s journalists — who claim to be devoted to serving as a check on Government and exposing its secrets — who are, instead, leading the way in demanding that the Government’s actions of the last eight years be concealed; in trying to quash efforts to investigate and expose those actions; and in demanding immunity for government lawbreakers. What kind of country does one expect to have where (with some noble exceptions) it is journalists, of all people, who take the lead in concealing, protecting and justifying government wrongdoing, and whose overriding purpose is to serve, rather than check, political power?
Today, The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus provides as pure an example of this warped “journalistic” mentality as one can imagine:
On the legal issues entwined in the war on terrorism, Obama is, again wisely, proceeding more slowly than many civil libertarians demand. Guantanamo will be closed — eventually. Military commissions have been halted, torture policies renounced and secret memorandums released.
Yet the Obama Justice Department backstopped the Bush Justice Department’s assertion of the state secrets privilege to block lawsuits challenging wiretapping and extraordinary rendition. The administration argued that prisoners in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in court. It leaned on the British government to keep evidence of alleged torture secret.
Look at what Marcus is cheering for in that second paragraph, what she considers to be good things: Preventing judicial scrutiny of illegal government spying and kidnapping programs. Abducting people with no due process, shipping them off to Afghanistan, and then locking them up for years with no rights of any kind. Purposely concealing — keeping secret — evidence of massive government torture programs. These are the extreme secrecy and suppression efforts that this “journalist” favors.
Imagine if you walked into a random class in a journalism school and asked one of the students why they enrolled in journalism school, and they replied this way:
I want to become a journalist so that I can help the Government conceal its secrets. Especially when high political officials break the law, I think it’s really important that nobody find out about it. In particular, I think it’s crucial that victims of government torture and illegal spying be prevented from uncovering what was done and imposing accountability on our Government leaders. And the most important thing is that when government leaders break the law, they not be investigated.
So I want to go into journalism in order to do what I can to help the Government suppress the truth, avoid exposure, and evade accountability — because I think the key role of journalists is to do everything possible to enable the most powerful political leaders to hide what they’ve done from the public. That’s what I see as the most important function a journalist can serve.
That’s Ruth Marcus. That’s exactly what she’s saying here. She’s actually praising the Obama administration for “lean[ing] on the British government to keep evidence of alleged torture secret.” In fact, it’s most of our press corps saying the same thing. Protection of and servitude to political power and the maintenance of government secrets is their driving religion.
Thomas Jefferson, in a 1799 letter to Archibald Stewart, wrote: ”Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.” And Jefferson later added:
Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.
With some important exceptions, our press corps does exactly the opposite of what Jefferson envisioned. Instead of “trusting to them for light,” we have The Post‘s Richard Cohen demanding that political leaders be permitted to operate — these were his words — “with the lights off.” And instead of wanting to “shut up the press” due to a “fear of investigations of their actions,” political leaders now want to amplify and glorify the press as much as possible, since it’s led by the likes of Ruth Marcus, David Ignatius and Stuart Taylor who are singularly devoted to blocking investigations — not conducting them — and ensuring that government wrongdoing remains concealed, not exposed. All you have to do is read what they say — compare it to Jefferson’s expectation of what the role of the press would be– and see how twisted and corrupted our national media is.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
