1. WTC 7 controlled demolition:
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Building 7 was the third skyscraper to be reduced to rubble on September 11, 2001. According to the government, fires, primarily, leveled this building, but fires have never before or since destroyed a steel skyscraper.
The team that investigated the collapse were kept away from the crime scene. By the time they published their inconclusive report in May, 2002, the evidence had been destroyed.
Why did the government rapidly recycle the steel from the largest and most mysterious engineering failure in world history, and why has the media remained silent?“
2. “ With Obama in office, liberals learn to love war.
The big truth is that the antiwar movement has largely collapsed in the face of Barack Obama’s victory: the massive antiwar marches that were a feature of the Bush years are a thing of the past. Those ostensibly antiwar organizations that did so much to agitate against the Iraq War have now fallen into line behind their commander in chief and are simply awaiting orders.
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During the Bush era, there was a growing convergence of Republican realists and antiwar liberals. Yet in the age of Obama, it seems, many of the latter are getting in touch with their inner hawk.
President Obama is often compared to FDR or John F. Kennedy, but I agree with Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, who worries that he’s more likely to turn out to be another Lyndon Baines Johnson—a president who triumphed against a perceived warmonger at the polls and embodied liberal hopes on the domestic scene but was then driven from office by a war-weary electorate and an insurgency within his own party. Add a rapidly expiring economy at home to an increasingly unpopular war—or series of wars—abroad, and you have a recipe for disaster: Obama’s Vietnam and the Democratic Party’s Waterloo.”
http://amconmag.com/article/2009/apr/20/00020/
3. “At the White House, Joking about a Torture Investigation?
The president and his aides do not seem eager to investigate the alleged misdeeds of the Bush-Cheney administration. The political calculation is obvious and not without justification: There’s a lot of hard stuff to get done these days and probing former Bush officials could be seen as a distraction and possibly undermine political support for the administration and Democrats in Congress. But such political figuring may not influence the independent Spanish judicial system and Judge Garzon (who has been asked by Spanish prosecutors not to continue handling the Bush Six case because he is already overseeing terrorist prosecutions against these ex-Gitmo detainees). If an investigation proceeds, Obama could well have to decide whether or not to comply with Spanish requests for US government documents–that is, to help or hinder the investigation. Later in the process, Obama could even conceivably have to contend with extradition requests. If any of this comes to pass, it won’t then be a laughing matter.“
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/04/white-house-joking-about-torture-investigation
4. “U.S. Mercenaries to UN: Stop Using the Word ‘Mercenary’ in Your Investigation into Mercenaries
Seriously. What are these guys smoking? In the letter, IPOA says the UN’s ”continued use of ‘mercenary’ is perceived as derogatory.”
Oh did the poor little mercenaries have their feelings hurt by that mean old world body? What does the IPOA say about the killing of unarmed civilians by “stability contractors”?
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The UN should not engage in this silliness with these PR hacks pushing the services of these hired gun thugs. What’s their name again? Oh, right, the International Association of Saintly Kitten Rescuers.”
5. “Legal left cools toward Obama
A growing chorus on the legal left is cooling toward President Barack Obama as a result of recent actions by the Justice Department vigorously defending the Bush administration in what it termed the war on terror.
“Obama Position on Illegal Spying: Worse Than Bush,” a large graphic declared over the weekend on the home page of a respected group advocating freedom on the Internet, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Obama has been pilloried by a liberal TV icon who was one of President George W. Bush’s most vociferous critics, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.
“During his run for the presidency, Barack Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, argued strongly against the Bush administration’s use of executive authority, including its self-justification, its rationalization of the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens,” Olbermann said on his show last week. “That was then. This is now. … Welcome to change you cannot believe in — or sue over.”
Obama is also under withering attack from an attorney who was one of the most widely read critics of Bush’s legal strategy in the war on terror, Glenn Greenwald. He recently blasted Obama administration moves as “extremist” and “bizarre.”
“Reading this brief from the Obama DOJ is so striking — and more than a little depressing — given how indistinguishable it is from everything that poured out of the Bush DOJ regarding secrecy powers in order to evade all legal accountability,” he wrote on Salon last week, before calling his fellow civil libertarians to rise up. “It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior,” he said.
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But liberal attorneys, who set up groups such as “Habeas Lawyers for Obama” during the campaign, complain that Obama is walking away from statements he made as a senator and presidential candidate rebuking the Bush administration for putting prisoners beyond the reach of the law.
“Obama has said no place should be out of reach of the law. Now, he’s done precisely that,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “You have this administration routinely stating principles as a precursor to violating those very same principles.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21207_Page2.html
6. “Meanwhile, a study of Iraq War deaths at King’s College and Royal Holloway College in the UK has found that 85% of the deaths caused by US aerial bombardment of targets in Iraqi cities have been women and children.
I have long maintained that it is likely a violation of the Geneva Conventions for the US air force to systematically bomb cities that the US military is already occupying. Typically such close air support in urban areas is called in by infantry or armor patrols to deal with snipers atop tenement buildings. But since families live in the tenement buildings, taking out a sniper or two often results in significant civilian deaths. It is likely that the death toll of women and children is much greater than the Iraq Body Count suggests, since pulberized buildings are not always cleared away in a slum, and when they are, bodies are not always exhumed.
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[The war criminal Richard] Armitage admits:
1. He and his boss Colin Powell lost a major battle within the Bush administration on whether the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war applied to guerrillas captured during the “war on terror.”
2. That the Bush administration engaged in torture in the form of waterboarding, though he denied that he had sure knowledge of this practice at the time he was in office
3. That he probably should have resigned, but hung on for fear of how bad policy could get if he and others were not there to fight the battles
4. He says that the US Senate should have known about the torture, calls them “AWOL,” and implies that there will be no investigation of Bush crimes against humanity because such a process would implicate the senators themselves, as at the very least having been derelict in their duty to advise and consent. (I wonder if he is also implying that some Democratic senators knew about the waterboarding and remained silent, so that they will not now launch a prosecution?)“
7. Sounds like Michael Vick killing his dogs by beating their heads against concrete:
“Bush Authorized the Use of Insects on Prisoners, Banging Prisoners’ Heads Against the Wall
Torture memos just declassified today show that the Bush administration authorized placing prisoners in confinement boxes with insects and “walling”, which means banging their heads against the wall.
You can read the memos themselves here.
Remember that all Bush administration officials – including Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and Justice department lawyers – who authorized, promoted or even failed to stop the torture program are guilty of war crimes.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/bush-authorized-use-of-insects-on.html
8. “Ethiopia /USA/ Somali Pirates’ Cover-up
One of the best kept secrets in the international media these days is the link between the USA, Ethiopia and the Somali pirates. First, a little reliable background from someone on the ground in the Horn of Africa.
The Somali pirates operate out of the Ethiopian and USA created enclaves in Somalia calling themselves Somaliland and Puntland. These Ethiopian and USA backed warlord controlled territories have for many years hosted Ethiopian military bases, which have been greatly expanded recently by the addition of thousands of Ethiopian troops who were driven out of southern and central Somali by the Somali resistance to the Ethiopian invasion.
After securing their ransom for the hijacked ships the Somali pirates head directly to their local safe havens, in this case, the Ethiopian military bases, where they make a sizeable contribution to the retirement accounts of the Ethiopian regime headed by Meles Zenawi.
Of course, the international naval forces who are patrolling the Horn of Africa know all too well what is going on for they have at their disposal all sorts of high tech observation platforms, ranging from satellites to unmanned drones with high resolution video cameras that report back in real time.
The French commandos started to pursue the Somali pirates into their lairs last year until the pirates got the word that for the right amount of cash they were more than welcome in the Ethiopian military bases in their local neighborhoods. Ethiopia being the western, mainly USA, Cop on the Beat in East Africa put these bases off limits to the frustrated navies of the world, who are no doubt growling in anger to their USA counterparts about why this is all going on.
Now that the pirates have started attacking USA flagged shipping, something that was until now off limits, it remains to be seen what the Obama administration will do. One thing we in the Horn of Africa have learned all too well, when it comes to Ethiopia, don’t expect anything resembling accurate coverage by the media, especially those who operate under the cloak of “freedom of the press.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13217
9. This is good news:
“Obama to release OLC torture memos
In a just-released statement, Barack Obama announced that — in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit — he has ordered four key Bush-era torture memos released, and the Associated Press, citing anonymous Obama sources, is reporting that “there is very little redaction, or blacking out, of detail in the memos.” Marc Ambinder is reporting that only the names of the CIA agents involved will be redacted; everything else will be disclosed. Simultaneously, and certainly with the intend to placate angry intelligence officials, Attorney General Eric Holder has “informed CIA officials [though not necessarily Bush officials] who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects that they will not be prosecuted,” and Obama announced the same thing in his statement.
I will add more detailed commentary, along with an interview with the ACLU’s lead counsel, Jameel Jaffer, as soon as the documents themselves are available. If the report about the OLC memos are accurate, Obama will have done exactly the right thing here and will deserve real credit.
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These memos are now becoming available, and do truly appear to be almost entirely unredacted. They are unbelievably ugly and grotesque and conclusively demonstrate the sadistic criminality that consumed our government. Just consider parts of this August 1, 2002 Memo (.pdf) by then OLC official (and now-federal judge) Jay Bybee, authorizing the following techniques for Abu Zubaydah, who was shot three times on his capture and still suffering from those wounds when these techniques were authorized (click on images to enlarge – it’s worth it):
“Walling” is slamming an individual into a wall. “Cramped confinement” means “placement of the individual in a confined space” that “is usually dark . . . the dimensions of which restrict the individuals movements” — in other words, a coffin-like space. The memo specifically states that the purpose of “stress positions” is to cause “muscle fatigue.” And here is what “insects placed in a confinement box” means (and here is one unexplained redaction):
Later, the memo notes that Zubaydah was to be told that the insect inserted in his box was a “stinging insect.” It then provides detailed instructions on how the insects can be used to torment him:
The memo then describes waterboarding in excruciating detail, matter-of-factly noting: “the subject’s body responds as if the subject were drowning.” Amazingly, it concludes that “the use of waterboarding constitutes a threat of imminent death,” but is nonethless permissible and legal because it does not result in “prolonged mental harm.”
The memo also takes note of the fact that Zubyaduh had serious wounds from his capture, yet none of that interfered in the authorization to subject him to these techniques. This was the concluding paragraph:
That’s what the U.S. Justice Department authorized and what our highest officials ordered. And that’s just one of the four memos released today.
UPDATE II: The ACLU has all four memos here. This 46-page May 10, 2005 memo (.pdf) from OLC Chief Steven Bradbury authorizes (under Constitutional and international law) all of these tactics for any “high-value detainees”: nudity, “dietary manipulation” involving “minimum caloric intake at commerical weight-loss programs,” “corrective techniques” (facial and abdominal slapping), water dousing, “walling,” stress positions and “wall standing” (to “induce muscle fatigue and the attendent discomfort”), cramped confinement, and sleep deprivation. It also authorized “no more than two sessions” of waterboarding in “any 24-hour period.”
Bradbury here discusses (and, of course, approves) of the specific methods used to have a detainee undergoing sleep deprivation wear a diaper:
Bradbury legalized all of these methods despite this amazing ackonwledgment; if you read just one memo excerpt, read this one:
They explicitly recognized that the techniques they were authorizing were ones that we condemned other countries for using — including as “torture” — but nonetheless approved them, explicitly saying that the standards we impose on others do not bind us in any way:
Finally, given all the talk about how it would be so unfair to prosecute Bush officials given that they believed what they were doing was legal, Bradbury made clear in the last paragraph of the memo just how dubious was his conclusion that all of these techniques were legal:
The more one reads of this, the harder it is to credit Obama’s statement today that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution.” At least when it comes to the orders of our highest government leaders and the DOJ lawyers who authorized them, these are pure war crimes, justified in the most disgustingly clinical language and with clear intent of wrongdoing. FDL has a petition urging Eric Holder to immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings should commence.
Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos, providing all the information and impetus the citizenry should need to demand investigations and prosecutions. But it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
10. “The Crisis That Could Bring Down Obama
In a financial crisis like the current one, Warren explains, the government has three choices: 1. Liquidate failed banks. (That’s what happened in the S&L crisis. The government took over institutions, fired the managers, wiped out investors, but protected depositors. A lot of savings and loans simply went out of business.) 2. Put them in receivership. (That’s what Sweden did in the 1990s: failed managers were fired and replaced, depositors were protected, and the banks were returned to private hands under new management with healthier balance sheets.) or 3. Subsidize the banks. This last option is what led Japan to its “lost decade”–the real value of bank assets are obscured, as the government funnels tax money into insolvent banks, propping them up indefinitely. This last is the approach the United States is now taking.
If you want to hear someone absolutely destroy that approach to the current crisis, check out a round of recent interviews with William Black, the professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri who was deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the S&L crisis in the 1980s. Black, who liquidated a few banks in his time and earned the eternal enmity of Charles Keating, minces no words in describing the massive fraud by bankers and the regulators, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whom he describes as abetting them.
“This whole bank scandal makes Teapot Dome look like some kind of kids’ doll set,” Black told the investors’ journal Barron’s in an interview published in the print edition on April 13. (The interview appeared online on April 9, but you need a paid subscription to access the site). He covers the same points in a highly watchable interview on Bill Moyer’s Journal..
“We have lost the ability to be blunt,” Black tells Barrons. He is talking about the person he describes to Bill Moyers as a “failed regulator,” Geithner. “Now we have a situation where Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner can speak of a $2 trillion hole in the banking system, at the same time all the major banks report they are well capitalized. And you have seen no regulatory action against what amounts to a $2 trillion accounting fraud. The reason we don’t see it–aren’t told about it–is that if they were honest, prompt corrective action would kick in, and then they would have to deal with the problem banks.”
In other words, the banks are insolvent. That’s why they must rely on the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But at the same time, they are claiming to be healthy. Both things can’t be true.”
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22439.htm
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