1. The obvious reason the government won’t let the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis come to trial is because the Saudis will testify that the US did 9/11 as a false flag attack on itself:
“Law Review: Critical Juncture For 9/11 Lawsuit Against Saudis
http://www.911blogger.com/node/20329
2. “University offers six-week degree in ‘Peace and Activisim’
ANTI-military activists have been offered training on how to disrupt Australia’s top-level wargames with the US military in an official course run by Sydney University.
The University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies offered students a six-week “Peace and Activism Training Course” culminating in a trip to Queensland next month to disrupt Exercise Talisman Sabre.
The $500 course fee even included travel expenses for the six-day trip to Rockhampton to take part in the “Peace Convergence” for the first week of the three-week exercise.
An online discussion group by organisers investigated by The Daily Telegraph reveals the group plans to blockade Rockhampton airport on Sunday, July 12 and other direct action.
It also anticipates possible arrests.
In previous years protesters have tried to blockade the Shoalwater Bay military training base and several have been arrested.”
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25603087-5005961,00.html
3. “Wall Street Insiders Ask Obama Some REAL Questions about the Economic Crisis
Two former Wall Street insiders wrote an excellent editorial in the New York Times:
We’re concerned that nothing has really been fixed. We’re doubly concerned that people appear to feel the worst of the storm is over — and in this, they are aided and abetted by a hugely popular and charismatic president and by the fact that the Dow has increased by 35 percent or so since Mr. Obama started to lay out his economic plans in March. But wishing for improvement and managing by the Dow’s swings are a fool’s game. (Disclosure: One of us, Mr. Lewis, was convicted on federal charges of stock manipulation in 1989…
They go on to ask President Obama some real questions that the MSM isn’t asking, such as:
- Six months ago, nobody believed that our banking system was well designed, functioning smoothly or properly regulated — so why then are we so desperately anxious to restore that model as the status quo?
- Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid — the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth — when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?
- Instead of promising the imminent return of good times, why isn’t Mr. Obama talking more about the importance of living within our means and not spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need?
- Why is the morphine drip still in the veins of the financial system?
- Is there to be any limit on bailouts? … Will we soon be bailing out Dartmouth, which just lost its AAA bond rating? Is there no room left for what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction”? And what is the plan to get the American people out of all these equity stakes we now own and don’t want?
- Why has Mr. Obama surrounded himself largely with economic advisers who are theoreticians and academics — distinguished though they may be — but not those who have sat on a trading desk, made a market, managed a portfolio or set a spread?
- Why isn’t the Obama administration working night and day to give the public a vastly increased amount of detailed information about what happens in financial markets?…
- Why is the government still complicit in making the system ever less transparent, even when it comes to what should clearly be considered public information?
- And what has become of the S.E.C.’s year-old investigation into who made short-dated, out-of-the-money bets in March 2008 hoping Bear Stearns would fail — bets that were suddenly worth millions of dollars when the company did collapse later that month?
- Why do we still not know why Mr. Paulson, Mr. Geithner and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, allowed Lehman Brothers to file bankruptcy last Sept. 15 but then, a day later, saved A.I.G.? Or why last November this trio decided to absorb potential losses on $301 billion of Citigroup’s shaky assets, when conventional wisdom among insiders held that they were worth only $150 billion at best?
- Also, before Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ chief executive, appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last October, it demanded from company executives boxes of documents about what happened at Lehman and why. Where are those documents?
- Why hasn’t President Obama insisted on public hearings over what happened during this financial crisis?
- Why are we not looking to change our current civil and criminal racketeering statutes, which are playing a perverse role in investigations of the crisis?
Do any reporters have the backbone to ask these questions of Obama and his economic team?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/06/wall-street-insiders-ask-obama-some.html
4. “Defeat of Graham-Lieberman and the ongoing war on transparency
Yesterday, there was a potentially temporary though still quite significant victory for those who believe in open government and transparency: as Jane Hamsher first reported, House leaders and the White House were forced to remove the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment from the war supplemental spending bill, because widespread opposition to that amendment among progressive House Democrats was jeopardizing passage of the spending bill. Readers here and those of various blogs who bombarded House members with opposition calls on Friday obviously played an important role in forcing the withdrawal of this pernicious amendment. Successes of this sort are rare enough that — even if fleeting — they warrant some celebration.
Whether there is value in disclosing these specific torture photographs is a secondary issue here, at most [though in light of the ongoing debate in this country over torture and accountability, as well as the irreplaceable value of photographic evidence in documenting government abuses (see Abu Ghraib), the value of these sorts of photographs seems self-evident]. A much more critical issue here is whether the President should have the power to conceal evidence about the Government’s actions on the ground that what the Government did was so bad, so wrong, so inflammatory, so lawless, that to allow disclosure and transparency would reflect poorly on our country, thereby increase anti-American sentiment, and thus jeopardize The Troops. Once you accept that rationale — the more extreme the Government’s abuses are, the more compelling is the need for suppression — then open government, one of the central planks of the Obama campaign and the linchpin of a healthy democracy, becomes an illusion.
…
These arguments for suppressing torture photos and other evidence of government abuses are grounded in the worst aspects of the Bush/Cheney mindset. Anyone who doubts that should really read the joint Graham/Lieberman statement from yesterday. It has all the familiar, odious, authoritarian rhetorical tactics of the last eight years: The Commander-in-Chief has decreed that these photos must be suppressed for us to be Safe, and that presidential decree should end the debate. Anyone who refuses to comply is causing Americans generally and especially Our Troops to be slaughtered (“release would be tantamount to a death sentence to some who are serving our nation” — “Transparency, and in this case needless transparency, should not be paid for with the lives of American citizens”). You don’t need to know what’s in these photos; we’ve seen them and you can trust us that they must remain secret.
Leave aside the typical, disgusting hypocrisy of the Graham/Lieberman duo, as they feel free to disregard “The Commander-in-Chief’s” judgment about what is necessary to Keep us Safe whenever they choose, as they did when they accused Obama of “helping our enemies” by releasing the OLC memos. The arguments being made here by Graham and Lieberman to justify the new secrecy powers they want to vest in Obama are the same tired, exploitative platitudes — give us what we want or you will have the blood of American citizens and The Troops on your hands — that has been used to justify everything from torture and warrantless spying to the war in Iraq and extreme and ever-increasing government secrecy. Only this time, these tactics are being hauled out on behalf of new powers which the Obama White House, rather than the Bush White House, is demanding.
Open government and transparency are critically important values for their own sake. That was something Obama himself, during the campaign, repeatedly claimed to believe. We have a very permissive secrecy law in place — FOIA – that enabled us to Stay Safe for decades. There is no reason to gut it. As the Supreme Court put it in 2004:
FOIA is often explained as a means for citizens to “know what the government is up to.” This phrase should not be dismissed as a convenient formalism. It defines a structural necessity in a real democracy.
The Supreme Court pointed out in 1978 that Congress enacted FOIA because it recognized that an informed citizenry is “needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” Seeing the evidence of exactly what the Government did, who did it and what was done about it — and not allowing the Government to keep its actions secret except in the narrowest of circumstances — is critically important in its own right. That is the foundation of open government.
If there are justifiable reasons under FOIA to keep these photos secret, then Obama will win in court. If there aren’t justifiable reasons, then he’ll lose — again — and the photos should be disclosed. That’s how FOIA is supposed to work. Adopting the arguments being made to justify cover-up of Bush-era war crimes is to wage war on the concept of transparency itself. And changing FOIA any time the President decides that government embarrassment must be avoided is to affirm the core Bush/Cheney rationale: we cannot Stay Safe unless we gut our long-standing legal frameworks. That’s what Graham/Lieberman — and the pernicious rationale underlying it — is designed to do, and, if accepted, it will inevitably spread to justify suppression in many other areas. Indeed, it is already doing so.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
