1. “Demolition access to the WTC Towers
On occasion, the public has been asked by George W. Bush to refrain from considering certain conspiracy theories. Bush has made such requests when people were looking into crimes in which he might be culpable. For example, when in 1994 Bush’s former company Harken Energy was linked to the fraudulent Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) through several investors, Bush’s spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, shut down the inquiry by telling the Associated Press — “We have no response to silly conspiracy theories.” On another occasion, Bush said in a televised speech — “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th.”
But paradoxically, we have also been asked to believe Bush’s own outrageous conspiracy theory about 9/11, one that has proven to be false in many ways. One important way to see the false nature of Bush’s conspiracy theory is to note the fact that the World Trade Center buildings could only have fallen as they did through the use of explosives. A number of independent scientific studies have pointed out this fact [1, 2, 3, 4], but it was Bush’s own scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), through their inability to provide a convincing defense of the official line, who ultimately proved that explosives were necessary.
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While examining the tenants in each critical area, we should ask – Cui Bono? That is, who benefited from the destruction of the WTC buildings, and the resulting War on Terror? The obvious answer includes, primarily, the Bush Administration and its friends. It also includes overlapping groups of oil and gas companies, defense contractors, and those who desired to wield undue influence on international policies related to a wide number of issues from civil rights to space domination.
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Add to this L. Paul Bremer, and the possible Marsh ties to demolition technology become clearer. One month after 9/11, Bremer would become the CEO for a new division called Marsh Crisis. Interestingly, the Yale graduate Bremer had been working to complete the National Report on Terrorism, and prior to that had been managing director for Kissinger Associates. According to a US Senate report, Kissinger Associates had a number of meetings with BCCI representatives in the late eighties and early nineties, and it refused to provide documents requested by the Senate investigators.[17] Bremer was also a member of the board for Akzo Nobel, the parent of International Paint, a company that produced a fireproofing application for skyscrapers called Interchar.[24]
Bremer was on the international advisory board for the Japanese mining and machinery company, Komatsu. At the time, Komatsu had been involved in a joint venture agreement with Dresser Industries, the oil-services/intelligence front in which Prescott Bush Sr. and George H. W. Bush got their start with Neil Mallon. The Komatsu-Dresser mining division operated from 1988 to 1997. In July 1996, it patented a thermite demolition device that could “demolish a concrete structure at a high efficiency, while preventing a secondary problem due to noise, flying dust and chips, and the like.”[25] Residues of thermite, the highly energetic chemical mixture, have been confirmed in samples of the WTC dust, and the use of thermite at the WTC was also revealed by environmental data.[1, 2, 3, 4, 26] Dresser Industries merged with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton in 1998.
It is less well known that Bremer’s relationship to Marsh started earlier. In fact, on 9/11, Bremer was the CEO of Marsh Political Risk Practice and he had an office in the south tower. That day, he was interviewed on NBC television, stating that Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[27]
Bremer was called away from Marsh in 2003, to be the Iraq Occupation Governor. His work in that role has been widely criticized.
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If we look at the companies that occupied the impact zones of the WTC towers, and other floors that might have played a useful role in the demolition of the towers, we see connections to organizations that had access to explosive materials, and to the expertise required to use explosives. Mining companies like Washington, Morrison-Knudsen, Komatsu and Aoki Construction (and John Lehman’s Special Devices Inc.) have access to many types of explosive materials. Oil and gas companies, like those associated with Exco, use explosives for exploration. Some of the explosive technologies available to these companies, for example Komatsu and Washington, involve thermite, a chemical mixture that has been identified in the WTC dust and in the environmental data at Ground Zero.
It seems that, if certain management representatives of the tenant companies listed above wanted to help bring the WTC towers down, they would have been well suited to do so. The companies mentioned were located at well-spaced intervals in the buildings, and some, for example Marsh and the Primark subsidiaries, had a reputation of being secretive. In fact, a number of the executives from these firms were either on the board of intelligence firms (e.g. In-Q-Tel, TASC), or were closely related to others who were. Others were connected to the CIA itself, and to some of the largest defense contractors in the world, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Halliburton, and SAIC.
There are also strong connections to those who benefited from the 9/11 attacks, most notably the Bush family and their corporate network, including Dresser Industries (now Halliburton) and UBS, and to Deutsche Bank and it subsidiaries, reported to have brokered the insider trading deals. There are links between these tenant companies and the terrorist-related fraudulent bank BCCI.
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In the end, we might see that conspiracies are not just limited to the powerless people who happen to live on the most strategically important lands in the world. The conspiracies that matter might involve the powerful people who seek access to those lands, and who have spent their lives seeking more power.”
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0907/S00124.htm
2. “Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its Name to Support Escalation in Afghanistan?
As humanitarians and as feminists, it is the welfare of the civilian population in Afghanistan that concerns us most deeply. That is why it was so discouraging to learn that the Feminist Majority Foundation has lent its good name — and the good name of feminism in general — to advocate for further troop escalation and war.
On its foundation Web site, the first stated objective of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls” is to “expand peacekeeping forces.”
First of all, coalition troops are combat forces and are there to fight a war, not to preserve peace. Not even the Pentagon uses that language to describe U.S. forces there. More importantly, the tired claim that one of the chief objectives of the military occupation of Afghanistan is to liberate Afghan women is not only absurd, it is offensive.
Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this instinctively.
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The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. When there is no justice for women, they find no other way out but suicide.
Feminists and other humanitarians should learn from history. This isn’t the first time the welfare of women has been trotted out as a pretext for imperialist military aggression.
Columbia Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, a woman of Palestinian descent, writes: “We need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives; so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.”
Feminists around the world must refuse to allow the good name of feminism to be manipulated to provide political cover for yet another war of aggression.
The Feminist Majority Foundation would do well to heed the demand of dissident Member of Parliament Malalai Joya, representing Farah province, who was kicked out of the parliament last year for courageously speaking out. Addressing a press conference in the wake of the U.S. bombing of her province she was clear: “We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes.”
That should be the first action item for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls.”
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141165
3. “McNamara’s Other Debacle
Beginning in 1976, the Bank poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a scheme by the government of Indonesia to remove — sometimes forcibly — several million people from the densely populated island of Java and resettle them on comparatively barren islands. One Australian critic noted that transmigration was largely “the Javanese version of Nazi Germany’s lebensraum.”
McNamara’s profusion of aid allowed politicians in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere to seize far more power over farmers, businessmen, factory owners, and other productive individuals. The result was a profusion of state monopolies that helped destroy hope for entire generations.
As Counterpunch editor and author Alexander Cockburn observed, “The managerial ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet’s Chile after Allende’s overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the ‘65 coup in Indonesia, and to the Romania of Ceausescu.”
As long as McNamara could continue boosting the raw amounts of World Bank loans, he could continue pretending that he was saving the world. McNamara bankrolled socialist governments based on the same type of phony statistics that he used to justify expanding the U.S. war in Vietnam. He could strut like a vanquisher of either communism or world poverty as long as he embraced statistical hooey.
Even after laying wreckage to much of the globe, Robert McNamara was still treated by much of the mainstream media as the “best and the brightest.” (The Washington Post appointed him to its board of directors). Citizens should be wary of those who would place halos over humanity’s brutal oppressors.”
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0907b.asp
5. “TSA: Tyrannical, Silly Agency
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=132
6. “Does the PASS ID Act Protect Privacy?
Does PASS ID address “most of the major privacy and security concerns with REAL ID”? Not even close. PASS ID is a national ID, with all the privacy consequences that go with that.
Changing the name of REAL ID to something else is not an alternative to scrapping it. Scrapping REAL ID is something Senator Akaka (D-HI) proposed in the last Congress. Fixing REAL ID is an impossibility, and PASS ID does not do that.”
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/07/07/does-the-pass-id-act-protect-privacy/
7. Afghanistan:
“It is bad news that President Hamid Karzai has brought the old Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam back into government, especially since he was implicated in a massacre of Taliban prisoners of war in 2001. Note that Karzai is bringing back another warlord with a lot of blood on his hands, Muhammad Fahim, as his vice president. Karzai, in fact, appears to want to turn his government into warlord central. What does that say about Karzai?”
8. “Swine Flu Kills People Whose Bodies Are Highly Stressed
The World Health Organization states:
The majority of those who died were pregnant, had asthma, diabetes or other chronic diseases…
Moreover, extremely obese people are susceptible. As Bloomberg writes:
Scientists don’t yet know whether extremely overweight people get sicker because of associated conditions like heart disease and asthma, or whether the excess fat itself makes them more vulnerable.
The common thread in all of these conditions appears to me to be that swine flu killed people whose bodies were stressed - either by illness, extreme obesity or pregnancy. Pregnancy is a wonderful thing, but it is stressful to the mother’s body.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/swine-flu-kills-people-whose-bodies-are.html
9. “The Fed’s “Independence” Argument is False
The Fed’s main argument against an audit by Congress is that it would interfere with the Fed’s “independence”.
For example, in his Congressional testimony yesterday – entitled “Federal Reserve independence” – the vice chair of the Fed used the “i” word 30 times.
What Does Fed Independence Mean?
The Fed is pretending that it is merely trying to insulate itself from political pressure, and that politician’s re-election concerns should not interfere with sound “monetary policy”.
That sounds good, doesn’t it?
But it is a red herring
Congress is elected by the people, and the people can throw the bums out if they don’t listen to the people’s demands. So even though most congress members are political hacks, they are subject to at least some accountability.
The Fed, on the other hand, is subject to no accountability. The Fed is refusing to provide Congress any information on where the trillions of dollars it has handed out have gone. The Fed is also refusing to disclose what toxic assets it has taken from the banks and put om its own books.
And there are a few congress people who actually have the best people’s interests in mind, and want to hold the Fed accountable – on behalf of the people.
What the Fed is really arguing is that it should not have to answer to the American people.
Because if the American people knew what the Fed was really doing, they would demand that it be terminated immediately.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/feds-independence-argument-is-false.html
10. “Honduras: US-backed mediation legitimizes military coup
The talks convened in the Costa Rican capital San José on Thursday with the purported aim of resolving the political crisis unleashed by the June 28 coup in neighboring Honduras, are shaping up as a farce. The apparent object of this fraudulent exercise is to legitimize the military overthrow of the elected president of Honduras and realize the aims of Washington and the predominant sections of the right-wing Honduran oligarchy.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14320
11. “That about sums everything up: War Crimes are heinous and intolerable acts that all decent people reject; “anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated”; and War Criminals must not be allowed in any positions of authority . . . . except when the War Crimes in question are committed by Americans, in which case all investigations and accountability must be blocked and those who defended and even approved them are perfectly welcomed in our highest positions of authority (including, ironically, overseeing our war in Afghanistan). See also, quite relatedly: this post from earlier today on how we continue to shield from any accountability the clear and serious crimes committed by Bush officials in how they spied on Americans. Let’s just repeat the sermon from the anonymous Obama official in demanding an investigation into crimes by this Afghan warlord: “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.“ It doesn’t appear that they know what the word “anyone” means.
UPDATE: Obama today is in Ghana and, according to CBS News‘ Mark Knoller, he vowed that the U.S. would help Africa “hold war criminals accountable” — meaning, of course, African war criminals. Obviously, the magnitude of war crimes can vary, but given the huge impact (including many detainee deaths) which Bush war crimes wreaked, no reasonable person can argue that accountability is inappropriate there because they aren’t significant enough. Rather obviously, the only attribute that causes us to shield them from exposure and accountability is that they are American.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
