1. It’s hard to say this with out sounding really nasty, but the world would be much better off if people who cause catastrophe actually felt some remorse. In Japan, Korea, China, government officials kill themselves after being found out. Freddie Mac was a government creation that was at the heart of causing the current problems, and this guy played a major role. You might ask why it was OK with the government that he was still in charge of things at Freddie Mac, rather than being fired:
“Freddie Mac official found dead… Read More
David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what broadcast reports said was an apparent suicide.
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Before taking that job, Kellerman served as senior vice president, corporate controller and principal accounting officer. He was with Freddie Mac for more than 16 years.”
2. “In Defense of Anthony Hall, Canadian 9/11 Skeptic
We can understand technically how they could have obtained this information. We could speculate that the NSA put Israeli companies on specific targets, but even this does not comport with the OCT of “surprise” terrorist attacks on 9/11. The truth of the matter will have to be dragged out of the respective intelligence agencies. Broadly speaking, it seems like every intelligence agency on the planet knew that 9/11 was coming, including Egyptian intelligence, Russian intelligence, and French intelligence. Saudi intelligence was hard-wired into the operation, according to author Joseph Trento, and the CIA/FBI/US Army man-on-the-scene, Ali Mohammed, apparently had complete foreknowledge, so the notion that 9/11 was a surprise to anyone except for out-of-the-loop civilians is getting pretty hard to sustain.
(Lest we forget, we also have the Haaretz report on the Odigo warning.)
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It does indeed seem that when Israel’s atrocious foreign policy is thrust into the spotlight, charges of anti-semitism against any and all critics shortly follow, and Canada is no exception.
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Last month, a group of Jewish Canadians (including Noami Klein) expressed their concern at this growing trend;
Statement: Jewish Canadians Concerned about Suppression of Criticism of Israel
We are Jewish Canadians concerned about all expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, and social injustice. We believe that the Holocaust legacy “Never again” means never again for all peoples. It is a tragic turn of history that the State of Israel, with its ideals of democracy and its dream of being a safe haven for Jewish people, causes immeasurable suffering and injustice to the Palestinian people.
We are appalled by recent attempts of prominent Jewish organizations and leading Canadian politicians to silence protest against the State of Israel. We are alarmed by the escalation of fear tactics. Charges that those organizing Israel Apartheid Week or supporting an academic boycott of Israel are anti-Semites promoting hatred bring the anti-Communist terror of the 1950s vividly to mind. We believe this serves to deflect attention from Israel’s flagrant violations of international humanitarian law.
B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress have pressured university presidents and administrations to silence debate and discussion specifically regarding Palestine/Israel. In a full-page ad in a national newspaper, B’nai Brith urged donors to withhold funds from universities because “anti-Semitic hate fests” were being allowed on campuses. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff have echoed these arguments. While university administrators have resisted demands to shut down Israel Apartheid week, some Ontario university presidents have bowed to this disinformation campaign by suspending and fining students, confiscating posters, and infringing on free speech.
We do not believe that Israel acts in self-defense. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, receiving $3 million/day. It has the fourth strongest army in the world. Before the invasion of Gaza on 27 December 2008, Israel’s siege had already created a humanitarian catastrophe there, with severe impoverishment, malnutrition, and destroyed infrastructure. It is crucial that forums for discussion of Israel’s accountability to the international community for what many have called war crimes be allowed to proceed unrestricted by specious claims of anti-Semitism.
We recognize that anti-Semitism is a reality in Canada as elsewhere, and we are fully committed to resisting any act of hatred against Jews. At the same time, we condemn false charges of anti-Semitism against student organizations, unions, and other groups and people exercising their democratic right to freedom of speech and association regarding legitimate criticism of the State of Israel.
Just over a week after the release of the Jewish Canadians’ statement, British MP George Galloway was barred entry from Canada by the Conservative Stephen Harper government, spurred by an open letter from Canada’s Jewish Defense League.
Defaming in the name of ‘anti-defamation’
And of course, the point of such defaming is to distract from the substance of his arguments, seemingly unable to confront them directly.
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and an excellent short summary of Israeli foreknowledge. There is a world of difference between that line of inquiry and claiming “No Jews died on 9/11″ and/or “Jews did 9/11″, which is of course racist, absurd and demonstrably false. Israel is a land, Jew an ethnicity. We don’t have criticism of Jews, we have criticism of Israel’s involvement in false flag operations. Nobody has the right to label such justified criticisms anti-semitic; but they’ll attempt it for as long as it remains an effective weapon in deconstructing political activism.“
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19897
3. Jane Harmon:
“This story has legs, if only because it illustrates a prime example of Bush-era corruption. Alberto Gonzales reportedly scotched the investigation into Harman – which was widely and erroneously reported as having found nothing – because he needed her help on the warrantless wiretaps issue. Did she make a deal with him, or was the quid pro quo implicit? It’s a sad day when we have to wiretap our own government officials to dig out the truth and protect our own security, but better them than the rest of us. They, after all, are the source of the corruption: indeed, it might not be a bad idea to allow warrantless wiretaps only of government officials, both elected and appointed. Now that would put a real crimp in the culture of corruption.
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What’s significant about the Harman case is that all the elements that have given the Israel Lobby such power in Washington – political heft, lots of money, and the exception-making requirements of the “special relationship” – have come together in a kind of Harmanic convergence, if you will, to illustrate why and how the Lobby’s influence is corrupting. “
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/04/21/harmanic-convergence/
4. “The parallels between the pirates of yesterday and today are striking. Then, as now, American observers miscast the pirates as Muslim radicals. In fact, as Frank Lambert explains in his book The Barbary Wars, those pirates actually served secular governments that were part of the Ottoman Empire (much as Sir Francis Drake plundered Spanish ships on behalf of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century or Jones served the United States in the 18th). Then, as now, the pirates resorted to preying on commercial shipping because they’d been boxed out of legitimate trade.
The Barbary pirates took to looting European vessels because European governments had barred the states of Algiers, Tripoli, and Morocco from trading in their markets. Back then, the fledgling United States accused the Barbary pirates of being slavers without acknowledging that the U.S. was then the center of the global slave trade. Today, the U.S. government decries piracy, but doesn’t do anything to prevent the maritime poaching of fishing reserves that helped push pirates from their jobs into risky but lucrative careers in freebooting.“
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2009/04/21/pirates-of-procurement/
5. “Nobel laureate accuses Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’
Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire on Tuesday accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” policies in annexed east Jerusalem, where the municipality plans to tear down almost 90 Arab homes.
“I believe the Israeli government is carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians here in east Jerusalem,” said Maguire, who won the 1976 Nobel prize for her efforts at reaching a peaceful solution to the violence in Northern Ireland.“
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090421/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictjerusalem
6. Harmon:
“There is an immense irony in her faux horror that she was wiretapped without her knowledge, since the allegation against her is that then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dropped the investigation of her over the deal she seems to have made with the Israeli agent, precisely in order to retain her as an advocate of warrantless wiretapping. The tap on the Israeli agent, into which she fell, was apparently in fact court-authorized, so she was being treated better than she wanted the rest of us treated.
Another piece of breaking news is that Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban may have been involved. That is, he was a major funder for Nancy Pelosi and the thinking was that he would threaten to cut his campaign contributions to her if she did not make Harman the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
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Saban is that most dangerous of persons, a billionaire ignoramus and fanatic with enormous political influence.”
http://www.juancole.com/
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.
He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
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Tortured Logic
Yesterday, Seator Levin revealed that the U.S. used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions.
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In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.
What Does That Say About the Persuasiveness of the 9/11 Commission Report?
Indeed, as I have repeatedly noted, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.
The 9/11 Commission itself is complaining that the government lied to – and hid evidence from – the Commission. See this, this and this.
Now that we know that the interrogators used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions, does the 9/11 Commission Report carry any weight whatsoever?”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/5-hours-after-911-attacks-rumsfeld-said.html
