1. “Panetta Admits CIA Has “Misled” Congress
Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta has admitted the CIA has misled Congress on intelligence matters since at least 2001. On Wednesday, a group of seven Democratic lawmakers released a letter describing Panetta’s comments. House intelligence committee chair Silvestre Reyes said CIA officials “affirmatively lied” in a recent briefing on an unspecified matter.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/9/headlines#11
2. Amazing. A newspaper published a truthful op-ed peice:
“New 9-11 investigation needed to prove science doesn’t lie
When looking at all the evidence, nothing produces a “smoking gun” more than the collapse of both World Trade Center towers and World Trade Center Building 7.
All three buildings fell symmetrically at near free-fall speed into the path of most resistance. The National Institute for Standards and Technology investigated the collapse of both towers for the 9/11 Commission. They claimed that the collapse of both towers were due to the impact damage of the aircraft and the fires that weakened the steel columns, which in turn caused the floors to sag and collapse inward — bringing the upper floors down.
NIST can’t explain what caused the “global collapse” of both towers. Why didn’t the unaffected and undamaged floors below slow down or stop the collapse? How can 400,000 yards of concrete be pulverized into dust due to a gravitational collapse? NIST has no answers for these questions.
Steven Jones, a former BYU physics professor, has found active thermitic material in WTC dust samples. Thermite is an incendiary that can cut through steel like a hot knife through butter.
WTC 7, a 47-story building collapsed at free-fall acceleration into its own footprint at 5:20 p.m. This structure was not hit by a plane and, according to NIST, collapsed primarily due to fire — a first in the history of steel-framed buildings. Only small pockets of fire in isolated areas of the building occurred, somehow allowing it to collapse symmetrically. Oddly enough, its collapse was omitted from the 9/11 Commission Report.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/9/headlines#11
3. “Accused of returning to terrorism, former Gitmo detainee a respected Afghan politician
A former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was named by the Pentagon as one of 74 former captives who returned to terrorism after being released has done no such thing.Instead, he has returned to doing what he was really doing before being picked up by US forces and shuttled off to Gitmo for six years: Working as a politician, a tribal elder representing Afghanistan’s Kunar province.
So says a new report from McClatchy Newspapers, which profiles Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil, a tribal elder who regularly meets with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other government officials on behalf of the people of Kunar province.
In May, an unreleased Pentagon document was leaked to the press, alleging that one in seven released Gitmo detainees — fully 74 individuals — had returned to terrorism once freed.
And while the veracity of that claim was questioned, the leaked Pentagon document was still considered important in changing the Washington establishment’s mind about President Obama’s plan to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Shortly after the report made it to the press, Congressional Democrats voted to oppose funding, requested by President Obama, to shut down Guantanamo Bay.
Now, with the apparent confirmation that at least one of the people accused of terrorist recidivism is actually a respected Afghan government official, questions will likely arise about the accuracy of that Pentagon report, as well as the motivations behind its being released to the press.”
4. “McNamara’s Evil Lives On
To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.
Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America’s leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.
Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:
“Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed—there were killed—3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage—it was fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that was militarily impossible—we were trying to break the will; I don’t think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090707_robert_scheer_july_8_column/
5. “May He Rest in Darkness
McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank
In his later years, McNamara never offered any reflection on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice, well- spoken war criminal.
…
the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.
Like Albert Speer, he got away with it, never having to hang his head or drop through a trap door with a rope around his neck“
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07072009.html
6. “California Dreamin’: How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14270
7. “Two Ways to Pay As You Go
The day after ramming through nearly $100 billion more for wars and $100 billion in loans to European banks through the IMF, the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer, introduced a “PayGo” bill, requiring that any spending be paid for with cuts in other spending. But having this law on the books would not have stopped the previous day’s legislation. War “supplemental” bills are deemed “emergencies” and an exception is made for them. And lending money you don’t have and can’t be sure of getting back, through an unaccountable organization with a record of damaging those it claims to help, is not considered spending at all.
…
But the exceptions for wars and loans are serious exceptions. They could both be addressed through amendments to the PayGo legislation. I want to focus on the war supplementals, because I think they offer an opening for engagement that would leave Borosage and all progressives and a much larger section of the political spectrum happy. My idea is this: we launch a campaign to amend the PayGo legislation to stipulate that no funding for any war that has been ongoing for over five years counts as an “emergency” or is excluded from PayGo requirements. This would mean that the next war supplemental bill could not be passed without some explanation of where the money was going to come from. (Congressman John Murtha has promised another supplemental this year, having waited to do so until just after the passage of the last one, which was sold as being the final such bill.) Such a campaign could simply target Hoyer to amend his bill to agree that wars that have been dragging on for over five years are not emergencies. Or it could work with Congressional supporters to gather support for an amendment to that effect or a sign-on letter committing members to reject PayGo unless that change is made.
What would such a campaign produce? For certain it would call out all the hypocrites in a very visible way. All of those Republicans and Blue Dogs and everybody else who votes for war money, and does so extra-irresponsibly off-the-books, would have to put up or shut up about fiscal responsibility. Every time they opened their mouths about fiscal responsibility they could be asked whether they thought wars over five years were emergencies. Every time they said we should pay as we go they could be asked if we should pay as we kill as well. Such a campaign would generate opposition to PayGo and allow Congress Members to oppose it as hypocritical and pro-war waste. And such members need not commit to supporting PayGo if it is amended to include war supplementals. They could still choose to oppose it.
But what if the amendment were made? What if members had committed to supporting PayGo? It would then be a PayGo that, in the minds of everyone, was about the military as well as human needs. We would then have put on the table the question of Pentagon waste, while requiring fiscal discipline — which, yes, is a good thing. This is the question progressives should consider: do we want money for human needs to be borrowed from our grandchildren or taken away from the war machine? That shouldn’t be a difficult choice.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14274
8. “McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef has an article today that is a consummate example of excellent journalism. I don’t want to excerpt any of it or even summarize what it reports because I really want to encourage everyone to click the link and read it in its entirety (it’s not very long: roughly 1,300 words).
…
As the McClatchy article reflects, what is and is not real “journalism” is not that complicated. The government makes a claim. The role of the “journalist” is not to repeat it or merely report that the government claims it, but instead, to investigate it with skepticism to determine whether it is true, and then report if it isn’t. And journalists don’t have to wait for a member of the “opposition party” to call them and object before doing so. That’s so basic that it’s staggering to believe that it is disputed, and yet not only is that proposition disputed, it is explicitly rejected by many — if not most — establishment journalists. And in that fact lies much of the explanation for what has happened in the U.S. during this decade (at least).”
