1.  “Richard Myers respond to a question about our response in the negative to Richard Clarke by referencing military exercises that were currently underway (according to Richard Clarke), why has that conversation never been addressed, why were NONE of the personnel that participated in the wargames (pilots, ground crews, etc…) made to testify publicly, and why were NONE of the wargames (with the exception of one) mentioned in the 9/11 Report considering the 9/11 Commission’s job was to give a full and complete accounting of the facts and circumstances regarding the 9/11 attacks?

And what about…

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a837mistakeforexercise#a8…

Major Kevin Nasypany, the NEADS mission crew commander, had helped design the day’s exercise. Thinking the reported hijacking is part of it, he actually says out loud, “The hijack’s not supposed to be for another hour.”

In the ID section, at the back right corner of the NEADS operations floor, technicians Stacia Rountree, Shelley Watson, and Maureen Dooley react to the news. Dooley, the leader of the ID section, tells the other members of her team: “We have a hijack going on. Get your checklists. The exercise is on” (see (8:38 a.m.) September 11, 2001). Rountree asks, “Is that real-world?” Dooley confirms, “Real-world hijack.” Watson says, “Cool!”

When NEADS Commander Robert Marr sees his personnel reacting to the news of the hijacking (see (8:40 a.m.) September 11, 2001), he reportedly thinks the day’s exercise “is kicking off with a lively, unexpected twist.” Even when a colleague informs him, “It’s a hijacking, and this is real life, not part of the exercise,” Marr thinks: “This is an interesting start to the exercise. This ‘real-world’ mixed in with today’s simex [simulated exercise] will keep [my staff members] on their toes.”

Major General Larry Arnold, who is at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, also later says that when he first hears of the hijacking, in the minutes after NEADS is alerted to it, “The first thing that went through my mind was, is this part of the exercise? Is this some kind of a screw-up?”

At 8:43 a.m., Major James Fox, the leader of the NEADS weapons team, comments, “I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.”

You can’t tell me that there isn’t reason to believe some of the confusion was a result of those exercises.

…

Kara does make one particularly interesting point, something I hadn’t read before. He refers to the three F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base, near the Pentagon, that were more than 200 miles away from base for a training mission in North Carolina at the time of the first attack in New York, and which didn’t arrive back at their base until after the Pentagon attack. Kara says that “three fighters from Andrews Air Force Base took off for scheduled training at Dare Range over eastern North Carolina, even though the Wing had just returned from an extended training mission in Nevada and was on a training stand down.”

What a coincidence! On September 11, of all days, the jets went miles away from Washington for a training mission, even though their wing was on a “training stand down.”

…
“We had combat air patrol over at least six cities in ten minutes.” Adm. Tim Keating (NORAD) to the corporate press on Oct 11, 2006 after Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle’s plane hit a Manhattan apartment building. This is the way it always worked until Rummy began screwing with it in early 2001, and then it miraculously started working again this way on 9/12/2001. I wonder why? World wide, false flag terror must be exposed, those involved held accountable, and the practice outlawed by international treaty. If you are pro PEACE start making more noise, especially at your Congress persons offices.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/20437

2.  “9/11 Truth Movement Rejects Propaganda Of Hypocrisy

We as members of the 9/11 Truth community deplore all forms of hatred and violence, including the unprovoked murderous attack by James von Brunn on June 10, 2009, in the Washington Holocaust museum. We also deplore peddlers of hatred who use such events for their own purposes, such as Glenn Beck, who recently said that von Brunn, because of his attack, was now “a hero in the 9/11Truther movement,” which “would like to destroy the country” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQnfJeUzzKk).

There is no foundation whatsoever for these flagrant lies. Beck intentionally overlooks the fact that he shares Von Brunn’s views on the Federal Reserve (stating “it’s totally fine to speak out against the Fed”), views that von Brunn acted upon when he tried to arrest the Fed’s Board with a bag of weapons in tow. Beck essentially overlooks the fact that von Brunn took action on his White Supremacist views, leading him to murder a Black guard in a Jewish museum. Yet Beck cautions viewers that 9/11 Truth advocates pose a graver threat, and are bent on working with al Qaeda to destroy the nation. (“… people like white supremacists or 9/11 truthers that would also like to destroy the country. They’ll work with anybody they can.”)

Beck ostensibly encourages thinking for oneself, questioning authority and holding people to account when it comes to the Fed, yet when it comes to the crimes of 9/11, the mere act of questioning is treasonous, fraught with potential dangers on a scale that threatens the nation itself. Beck facilitates the unfounded, concerted effort to equate all 9/11 Truth advocates with anti-Semites, a propaganda tactic to minimize and demonize dissenting views. Like von Brunn, Beck advocates hatred for those who hold views counter to his own.

SIGNED:
…
This is unconscionable, but then again, we expect no less from this peddlar of poison rhetoric.

Most people are aware that Beck is a cartoon like parody of a serious patriot but unfortunately there are some weak minded individuals who actually take him seriously, people not unlike Von Brun himself. Fortunately people like that are a minority while reasonable and sane people still make up the majority.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/20436

3.  ” ‘The Responsible Left’: Funding Obama’s Expanding Wars

Over the past few days, we reported on how the White House and Democratic Congressional Leadership waged a dirty campaign to scare up votes to support another $106 billion in funds for their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, several of the so-called anti-war Democrats who left their principles at the House coat check on their way in to vote Tuesday are trying to explain away their hypocritical votes.

New York Democrat Anthony Weiner, who voted against the war funding in May — when it didn’t matter — only to vote Tuesday with the pro-war Dems, sounded like an imbecile when he made this statement after the vote: “We are in the process of wrapping up the wars. The president needed our support.” What planet is Weiner living on? “Wrapping up the wars?” Last time I checked, there are 21,000 more US troops heading to Afghanistan alongside a surge in contractors there, including a 29% increase in armed contractors. Does Weiner think the $106 billion in war funding he voted for is going to pay for one way tickets home for the troops? What he voted for was certainly not the “Demolition of the 80 Football-field-size US Embassy in Baghdad Act of 2009.” To cap off this idiocy, Weiner basically admitted he is a fraud when he said the bill he voted in favor of “still sucks.”

Jan Schakowsky, who has done some incredibly important work on Blackwater and the privatized war machine, also voted against the supplemental in May, but switched her vote on Tuesday. “I do believe my president is a peacemaker,” Schakowsky said. “I’m going to give him what he wants.” A peacemaker who is expanding war? Moreover, what happened to the system of “checks and balances?” If Congressmembers, especially anti-war ones like Schakowsky, start just giving the president “what he wants,” then where is the peoples’ voice?

How are these people sleeping at night?

Obviously these folks are partisans or else they wouldn’t be Democrats, but this “Dear Leader knows best” mentality is cultish. Republican Rep. Ron Paul, who, whatever one thinks of him, has been consistently opposed to these wars, put it best when he rose on the floor Tuesday to speak against the war funding: “I wonder what happened to all of my colleagues who said they were opposed to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder what happened to my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration. It seems, with very few exceptions, they have changed their position on the war now that the White House has changed hands.”

One “anonymous” Massachusetts lawmaker told Politico that those Democrats who voted for the war funding and IMF credits are “what we call the responsible left.” Barney Frank, another flip-flopper on war funding, compared the anti-war left to the Rush Limbaugh right-wing, saying, “They have no sense of reality.” Perhaps Rep. Frank should ask the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who lobbied intensely against the war funding he supported if they have “no sense of reality.”

http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/06/19/the-responsible-left-funding-obamas-expanding-wars/

4.  “Destroying Indigenous Populations

The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the land.

However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government seized the Black Hills land in 1877.
…
Most of the Sioux’s land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste by radioactive pollution.

“Nothing grows in these areas – nothing can grow. They are too radioactive,” White Face said.
…
Homeland Contamination

There is uranium all around the Black Hills, South and North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Mining companies came in and dug large holes through these lands to extract uranium in the 1950’s and 1960’s prior to any prohibitive regulations. Abandoned uranium mines in southwestern South Dakota number 142. In the Cave Hills area, another sacred place in South Dakota used for vision quests and burial sites, there are 89 abandoned uranium mines.

In an essay called “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” political activists Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke state that former US President Richard Nixon declared the 1868 Treaty Territory a “National Sacrifice Area,” implying that the territory, and its people, were being sacrificed to uranium and nuclear radiation.

The worst part, according to White Face, is that, “None of these abandoned mines have been marked. They never filled them up, they never capped them. There are no warning signs … nothing. The Forest Service even advertises the Picnic Springs Campground as a tourist place. It’s about a mile away from the Cave Hills uranium mines.”

The region is honeycombed with exploratory wells that have been dug as far down as six to eight hundred feet. In the southwestern Black Hills area, there are more than 4,000 uranium exploratory wells. On the Wyoming side of the Black Hills, there are 3,000 wells. Further north into North Dakota, there are more than a thousand wells.

The Black Hills and its surroundings are the recharge area for several major aquifers in the South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming regions. The crisis can be gauged from the simple description that White Face gives: “When the winds come, they pick up the [uranium] dust and carry it; when it rains or snows, it washes it down into the aquifers and groundwater. Much of this radioactive contamination then finds its way into the Missouri River.”
…
Other tribes, such as the Navajo and Hopi in New Mexico, have been exposed to radioactive material as well. Furthermore, the July 16, 1979, spill of 100 million gallons of radioactive water containing uranium tailings from a tailing pond into the north arm of the Rio Puerco, near the small town of Church Rock, New Mexico, also affected indigenous peoples in Arizona.
…
Dr. Najim begins the report by noting that Coalition Forces, mostly US, used 350 tons of Depleted Uranium weapons in about 45 days in 1991, primarily in the stretch of Iraq northwest of Kuwait where Iraqi troops were on their retreat. Then, in 2003, during the Shock and Awe bombing of Baghdad, the US used another 150 tons of DU. He says that cancer is spreading from the conflict area as a health epidemic and will only get worse. The cancer rate has more than tripled over the last 16 years in Najaf.

According to Dr. Najim, “When DU hits a target, it aerosolizes and oxidizes, forming a uranium oxide that is two parts UO3 and one part UO2. The first is water soluble and filters down into the water aquifers and also becomes part of the food chain as plants take up the UO3 dissolved in water. The UO2 is insoluble and settles as dust on the surface of the earth and is blown by the winds to other locations. As aerosolized dust, it can enter the lungs and begin to cause problems as it can cross cell walls and even impact the genetic system.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14029

5.  “Email from John Harris: regrets dispute with Dan Froomkin

That’s why this Froomkin firing is so revealing.  The fact that one of the very few people to practice real adversarial journalism in the Bush era was decreed not to be a real “journalist” — and has now been fired by the Post — is one of the most illustrative episodes of the past several years regarding what the real function of the establishment media is.  Along those lines, Harris might want to consider also acknowledging that Froomkin was absolutely right when insisting (and Harris wrong when doubting) that Froomkin was not acting as “liberal opinionist” when criticizing Bush, but rather, was as an ”accountability journalist” because he was merely pointing out facts, and would subject the actions and claims of a Democratic president to the same journalistic scrutiny.  Froomkin’s tenacious criticisms of Obama leave no doubt about that.
…

It makes perfect sense that one of the people to whom Krugman’s critique applies most — Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt — is the one with ultimate responsibility for the Froomkin firing.  Froomkin is the anti-Hiatt:  someone who was right about the Bush administration and neoconservatives; who performed the real functions of journalism; and, most of all, sees himself as an outside check on, rather than a loyal servant to, establishment power.  If you were Fred Hiatt, wouldn’t you also be eager to see Dan Froomkin fired and disappeared from sight, for exactly the reasons Krugman wrote?

UPDATE:  One likely benefit of the Froomkin firing is that it highlights the principal and long-standing editorial function of Fred Hiatt, Donald Graham and the Post:  to justify and defend Bush radicalism and lawbreaking and promote neoconservatism.  Along those lines, the Post today has an Editorial condemning the recent decision of a federal judge who is a Bush-43-appointee (a fact the Editorial omits) allowing a lawsuit brought by Jose Padilla against John Yoo to proceed (I wrote about that decision here — see Item 5).  As a result of memos written by Yoo, Padilla — an American citizen — was imprisoned for years without charges, without any access to the outside world (including a lawyer), and was brutally abused.

But to the Post, Yoo’s authorizing that conduct was a mere good faith legal dispute for which (as always) there should be no accountability.  That’s one of the Post’s primary goals in life:  to defend Bush officials from any consequences of their actions, even when those actions violate core Constitutional guarantees and criminal statutes.  Froomkin, a vigorous proponent of accountability (and vocal critic of Obama for blocking such accountability) was completely anathema to that mission.

Along those lines, Andrew Sullivan — who has been criticizing neoconservative dogma and the Post’s allegiance to it for the role it played in Froomkin’s firing — is predictably being smeared as an “anti-semite” by the usual manipulators of that term.  Andrew rightly notes that “these vile smears are designed to police the discourse some more,” but it’s so striking how nobody cares anymore about these smears because they’ve been so overused and are so transparently dumb (Andrew himself dismisses them as “tedious,” and that’s all they are).

Everyone knows what neocons are.  Everyone knows that “neocons” are not tantamount to “Jews.”  Most Jews reject neoconservative ideology.  Some of the leading and most scathing critics of neoconservatism are Jews.  Many leading neocons — Dick Cheney — are not Jewish.  Depicting criticisms of “neocons” as “anti-Semitism” is every bit as manipulative as applying that term to those who criticize Israel.  Neoconservatism is a radical, deceitful and destructive ideology and nobody is going to be deterred from aggressively pointing that out because Weekly Standard, National Review, Commentary and The Washington Post Editorial Page casually toss around the word “anti-Semite” in order to intimidate people out of that criticism.  Those people and that tactic are far too discredited for that to work with anyone.  It doesn’t inspire fear — only pity and contempt.  That The Post is a leading house organ for neoconservative opinion is an important fact and screeching “anti-Semitism” at anyone who points it out will achieve nothing.

…

Obama, the Right and defendants’ rights

On Thursday, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), ruled that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access the state’s evidence in order to subject it to DNA tests which could prove their innocence.  Two lower courts, a district court and the Ninth Circuit, had ruled there was such a right.  In reversing those rulings, the Court’s majority was composed of its conservative Justices (Roberts (who wrote the opinion), Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy).

…

There’s one important fact missing from all of that analysis:  namely, this was yet another case where the Obama DOJ sided with the Bush administration and advocated the position that the conservative justices adopted.  The Obama DOJ aggressively argued before the Court that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access evidence for DNA analysis.  Indeed, its decision to embrace this extreme Bush position caused much controversy and anger back in February. “

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

6.  “Are the Iranian Election Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?

Commentators are “explaining” the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad’s win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.

On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine.

It requires total blindness not to see this.“

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22875.htm

7.  “  The Waning Power of Truth

The Iranian election protests, essentially by the westernized youth of Tehran who wish to be free of Islamic moral codes, have the hallmarks of orchestration. The protesters are color-coded with green wristbands. Their protest signs are in English and are obviously directed at the western media. Their chants are propagandistic and bear no relation to facts known by every Iranian.

And again, the US media and various experts, whose ambitions depend on government-related careers, are force-feeding the American public the disinformation designed to further isolate and weaken, if not overthrow, the Iranian government.

Until 1978 the US ruled Iran through the Shah. The US intends to again rule Iran through puppets. The only two remaining independent governments in the region are Iran and Syria. If the US doesn’t first bankrupt itself, both countries will fall to US black ops destabilization.

The limitless gullibility of the American people guarantees carte blanche to the US government’s schemes. Americans seemingly cannot put two and two together. They have already forgotten the lies about weapons of mass destruction that have resulted in the destruction of Iraq. They have forgotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s publicly expressed remorse at the lies he told the UN. Americans blithely accept the conflation of Talliban with al Qaeda and terrorists and the new war that the Obama regime has started in Pakistan, a war that has already produced 2 million refugees.

It can fairly be said that there is not much difference between the American public and the fictional one under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The few independent voices that do exist are simply drowned out by the constant flow of disinformation.

The US government’s success in spinning 9/11 guaranteed the government’s success in pursuing a hegemonic agenda under a cloak of lies. Although a large percentage of the US population does not believe the government’s account and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experts and informed and well-connected people have challenged the government’s tale, the US media has shown no interest despite the official account of 9/11 bearing every known hallmark of a coverup.“

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22867.htm