1. “Professor Pileni’s Resignation as Editor-in-Chief of the Open Chemical Physics Journal
After the paper entitled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” which I along with eight colleagues co-authored, was published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal, its editor-in-chief, Professor Marie-Paule Pileni, abruptly resigned. It has been suggested that this resignation casts doubt on the scientific soundness of our paper.
However, Professor Pileni did the only thing she could do, if she wanted to save her career. After resigning, she did not criticize our paper. Rather, she said that she could not read and evaluate it, because, she claimed, it lies outside the areas of her expertise.
But that is not true, as shown by information contained on her own website (http://www.sri.jussieu.fr/pileni.htm). Her List of Publications reveals that Professor Pileni has published hundreds of articles in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. She is, in fact, recognized as one of the leaders in the field. Her statement about her ”major advanced research” points out that, already by 2003, she was ”the 25th highest cited scientist on nanotechnology” (http://www.sri.jussieu.fr/pileni.htm).
Since the late 1980s, moreover, she has served as a consultant for the French Army and other military institutions. From 1990 to 1994, for example, she served as a consultant for the Société Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (National Society for Powders and Explosives).
She could, therefore, have easily read our paper, and she surely did. But by denying that she had read it, she avoided the question that would have inevitably been put to her: ”What do you think of it?”
Faced with that question, she would have had two options. She could have criticized it, but that would have been difficult without inventing some artificial criticism, which she as a good scientist with an excellent reputation surely would not have wanted to do. The only other option would have been to acknowledge the soundness of our work and its conclusions. But this would have threatened her career.
Professor Pileni’s resignation from the journal provides an insight into the conditions for free speech at our universities and other academic institutions in the aftermath of 9/11. This situation is a mirror of western society as a whole—even though our academic institutions should be havens in which research is evaluated by its intrinsic excellence, not its political correctness.
In Professor Pileni’s country, France, the drive to curb the civil rights of professors at the universities is especially strong, and the fight is fierce.
I will conclude with two points. First, the cause of 9/11 truth is not one that she has taken up, and the course of action she chose was what she had to do to save her career. I harbor no ill feelings toward Professor Pileni for the choice she made.
Second, her resignation from the journal because of the publication of our paper implied nothing negative about the paper.
Indeed, the very fact that she offered no criticisms of it provided, implicitly, a positive evaluation—an acknowledgment that its methodology and conclusions could not credibly be challenged.”
2. “Remember Those Saudi Flights After 9/11?
A long time ago, I spent some time looking into the flights that took members of the Saudi Royals, as well as members of the Bin Laden family out of the country in the days, and weeks after 9/11. Here is what I found.
…
One of the individuals on those flights was Osama Bin Laden’s brother, Khalil Bin Laden. On July 21st 2004, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey posted a flight manifest showing the name of Khalil Bin Laden.
In October 2003, Vanity Fair released an article written by Craig Unger entitled, “Saving the Saudis” that said, “Khalil bin Laden, who boarded a plane in Orlando that eventually took him back to Saudi Arabia, won the attention of Brazilian investigators for possible terrorist connections. According to a Brazilian paper, he had business connections in the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais, not far from the tri-border region, an alleged center for training terrorists.”
On August 22nd 2004, CNN reports that an addendum released by the 9/11 Commission, “states that all the Saudi nationals were screened by the FBI to make certain they were not a threat to national security, and that no terrorists escaped from the United States on any of the Saudi flights.”
If the allegations regarding Khalil’s connection to terrorism are true, then in my opinion, either the State Department, or the Bush White house aided and abetted a “terrorist” in the days after 9/11, and the 9/11 Commission, for whatever reason, decided not to tell us about it.
“Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released new documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) related to the “expeditious departure” of Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, from the United States following the 9/11 attacks. According to one of the formerly confidential documents, dated 9/21/2001, terrorist Osama bin Laden may have chartered one of the Saudi flights.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/20610
3. “Obama admin: No grounds to probe Afghan war crimes
No legal rights to investigate Taliban deaths – or Bush admin. refusal to do so, officials say
Obama administration officials said Friday they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who human rights groups allege were killed by U.S.-backed forces.
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The mass deaths were brought up anew Friday in a report by The New York Times on its Web site. It quoted government and human rights officials accusing the Bush administration of failing to investigate the executions of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of prisoners.
U.S. officials said Friday they did not have legal grounds to investigate the deaths because only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country.
The Times cited U.S. military and CIA ties to Afghan Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom human rights groups accuse of ordering the killings. The newspaper said the Defense Department and FBI never fully investigated the incident.
…
A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.”
http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/07/11/obama-admin-no-grounds-to-probe-afghan-war-crimes-6/
As I wrote yesterday about the CIA program that Panetta recently disclosed to Congress:
As a former CIA agent says, the real question is who ordered the CIA to withhold the information from Congress . . .
In a nation of laws, Bush, Cheney – or whoever in the White House ordered the cover-up of the operation – would be prosecuted.
We now know who ordered the cover-up.
It was in fact Cheney.
According to the New York Times:
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees…
The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/cheney-ordered-cover-up-of-program.html
5. “The Holder trial balloon: Abu Ghraib redux
Prosecuting only obscure “rogue” interrogators while immunizing powerful, high-level officials would not be an act of courage but of cowardice. It would not strengthen the rule of law but would pervert it further. And rather than deter future lawbreaking, it would signal — yet again — that our most powerful political officials are free to break the law with impunity. If Holder is too frightened to include the parties truly responsible for America’s torture regime in the scope of the investigation he orders, then he ought simply to appoint a strong and independent prosecutor with the mandate to investigate anyone and everyone who might have broken our nation’s torture laws, and leave it to the prosecutor to make all decisions without interference (and if a well-regarded prosecutor decided based on standard factors of prosecutorial discretion, rather than as a matter of pre-ordained DOJ “fairness” policy, that the DOJ memos made prosecution too difficult as a practical matter, then so be it). But whatever else is true, the tactics authorized by George Bush and Dick Cheney were patently criminal regardless of how many memos they directed John Yoo to write.
…
It should go without saying that I have no sympathy for CIA agents who tortured detainees, but prosecutions aimed at them, while immunizing the high-level officials who implemented the torture regime, would be — in addition to the harms described above — grotesquely unfair. “
