1. Goodness – this guy ought to already know that his own government did the ‘terror’ attack. An obvious false flag:
“Call for public inquiry into 7/7 from former head of counter-terrorism
An independent public inquiry should be held into how suicide terrorists were able to carry out the July 7 bombings, Scotland Yard’s former head of counter-terrorism says.
Andy Hayman, who was Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at the time of the bombings in 2005, is the first figure from the security establishment to break ranks and call for an open inquiry.
Almost four years after Mohammad Sidique Khan and his Leeds-based cell carried out the bombings, Mr Hayman says that he is “uncomfortable” with the official position that an inquiry would divert resources from the fight against terrorism. In his book, The Terrorist Hunters, extracts from which are published in The Times today, Mr Hayman says: “Incidents of less gravity have attracted the status of a public inquiry — train crashes, a death in custody, and even other terrorist attacks. How can there not be a full, independent public inquiry into the deaths of 52 commuters on London’s transport system?
“There has been no overview, no pulling together of each strand of review, no one can be sure if key issues have been missed.”
…
Just as with 9/11, terror drills were taking place on 7/7 in London and involving almost the exact same scenario as actually occurred.
…
How can investigating the worst terrorist attack ever to happen here, been detrimental to the ‘war on terror.’ Surely we have to know what happened in order to try and prevent it happening again.
The only thing the governments refusal to investigate makes me think is, what are you hiding?
…
These were the notorious terror drills which turned into the real thing as real bombs went off in the same locations and at the same times as has been planned for the mock bombings of the exercise. The exercise was being run by a private security company and their spokesman afterwards refused to identify who had employed them to run the exercise.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6539369.ece
2. “In stark legal turnaround, Obama now resembles Bush
President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred.
In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama’s legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush’s: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/70383.html
3. “British Army officer launches stinging attack on ‘failing’ UK strategy in Afghanistan
The officer, who works in defence intelligence, has described the British presence in Helmand as an “unmitigated disaster” fuelled by “lamentable” government spin and naïvety.
Writing in the British Army Review, an official MoD publication, Major SN Miller, stated: “Lets not kid ourselves. To date Operation Herrick [the British codename for the War in Afghanistan] has been a failure”.
He claimed that hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money had been wasted on a war which had failed to deliver any real reconstruction, governance or security.
Rather than “winning hearts and minds”, Major Miller, who serves in the Defence Intelligence Staff serving Intelligence Corps, said the British presence had had the opposite effect.
But his most blistering attack was on the UK’s counter-narcotics policy, where the illicit sale of drugs has been successfully used by the Taliban to fund the insurgency and kill British troops.
He wrote: “British policy towards the poppy crop has been an unmitigated disaster. The chief “effect” of the British presence in Helmand has been to transform Helmand into the opium centre of the world.
“This remarkable milestone was achieved just two years into the British intervention.”
4. Uh-oh – an obvious step on the path to banning all privately-owned guns
“On Terrorist Watch List, but Allowed to Buy Guns
Mr. Lautenberg plans to introduce legislation on Monday that would give the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists.
The government’s consolidated watch list, used to identify people suspected of links to terrorists, has grown to more than one million names since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It also has drawn widespread criticism over the prevalence of mistaken identities and unclear links to terrorism.
A report in May from the Justice Department inspector general found that the list kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation carried the names of 24,000 people included on the basis of outdated or sometimes irrelevant information.
…
Mr. Arulanandam said the gun lobby would have to examine the details of the newest proposal before taking a position. But he added: “Senator Lautenberg has always been on the wrong side of the Second Amendment. His approach is not in the interests of public safety.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/politics/20watch.html?_r=1&ref=us
5. Iran:
“The regime has arrested Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, daughter of the former president, who spoke at a pro-Mousavi rally, along with 4 other members of that family. This step is typical of an old Iranian ruling technique, of keeping provincial tribal chieftains in check by keeping some of their children hostage at the royal court. It is widely suspected that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a multi-billionaire who is well connected politically, is funding and aiding the reform movement’s protests.
…
A. Richard Norton asks at IC Global Affairs whether the Iranian state really has the upper hand. He writes, “Dealing with civil disturbances is a labor intensive work. The natural response is to arrest the leaders and cut their communications, but those steps do not seem to be working to this point. People who are sufficiently inspired to join a demonstration at some risk to their lives constitute a movement not a bureaucratically organized unit. Particularly in fast-moving street confronations where wile, personality and courage are the currency unexpected leaders quickly emerge. As important, people learn quickly how to test, taunt and stretch the government forces. Provided the demonstrators desist from using deadly violence, their moral legitimacy will be enhanced. Plus, the government forces are hardly a monolith.”
…
Graphic video of protesting women shot down can be found here. Warning: Very disturbing.
Brave Roger Cohen is in Tehran for the NYT, and he speaks of motorcycles set on fire sending columns of flames into the air, of teargas swirling about, of police wavering about whether they can attack fellow Iranians, and of the barricades being staffed by courageous women of all sorts.”
6. This really isn’t surprising, since the US has been at war with Iran for over 50 years:
“Iran: fear of foreign plotters may be justified
According to the journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker last year, covert operations by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command were used to support the PJAK Kurdish dissident group in northern Iran, the disaffected ethnic Arab minority in Khuzestan in the south-west, and militant Baluchi Sunni Muslim separatists in the south-east, bordering Pakistan.
While not officially acknowledged or disavowed in the U.S., the covert programme has been repeatedly linked by Iran to ongoing violence, bomb attacks and assassinations in all three areas, as well as to the main external opposition group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is allegedly funded and armed by the U.S. Iran also occasionally claims to have evidence of involvement by Israel’s Mossad spy agency and British intelligence.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14044
7. Oh, how ironic:
“U.S. Govt. Threatens to Prosecute Waterboarding
We’ve been lobbying the Department of Justice all these months without realizing that the key to justice lay in the Department of the Interior, and specifically in the National Park Service, which has told activist Steve Lane he will be prosecuted if he attempts to demonstrate waterboarding at Thursday’s anti-torture rally in Washington, D.C. The permit for the rally reads “Waterboarding exhibit will not be allowed for safety reasons.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14034
8. “There are many reasons why establishment media discussions of our political conflicts are so incomplete, distorted, vapid and unsatisfying. But one significant reason is that one of the most important causes of our decayed political culture is a topic which is excluded almost completely from those discussions: namely, the central role the establishment media itself — with its uncritical and loyal subservience to political power — plays in enabling and protecting that decay.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
