A close-up view of debris being ejected from the South Tower of the World Trade Center as the 30-floor top section falls to the east shows numerous smoking projectiles that look like comets. Several of them can be seen to explode. One such exploding projectile is followed here. It ejects two fragments, both of which undergo secondary explosions.
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The first piece that comes off the comet-like object can very clearly be seen to explode in a classic style explosion. That is the clincher! It clearly explodes!”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21018
2. “As Obama Golfs with UBS CEO Days After Firm Avoids Criminal Prosecution, UBS Whistleblower Given 40-Month Jail Term
As the pair teed off, another UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, had just been handed a forty-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to assisting a client evade taxes. It was the first sentence in a wider scandal that has seen UBS admit to helping wealthy Americans dodge their tax obligations. On his own initiative, Birkenfeld blew the whistle on UBS. His disclosure and cooperation with US authorities provided inside information into the bank’s conduct and sparked the massive federal investigation.
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21014
3. No kidding:
“A singular absurdity of the 21st century is that the nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined needs to hire mercenaries to fight wars against enemies who have no defense budget at all.”
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/08/28/thugs-of-fortune/
4. “Holder Appoints Torture Prosecutor, Rejects Nuremberg Principle
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Assistant United States Attorney John Durham to investigate torture by U.S. officials since President Bush commenced the “war on terror,” but in the same act also gave political cover from that prosecutor to anyone who actually committed torture.
Holder announced the August 24 appointment with the proviso that anyone who engaged in torture at the urging of senior Bush administration officials would be exempted from prosecution. Holder said torturers “need to be protected from legal jeopardy when they act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance. That is why I have made it clear in the past that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees. I want to reiterate that point today, and to underscore the fact that this preliminary review will not focus on those individuals.”
“I was only following orders” is now apparently a complete defense under the Holder Justice Department. But this was precisely the defense rejected at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War from German soldiers who had committed war crimes. The accused claimed they should be held innocent from punishment for killing Jews and others because they were only following the Führer’s legal orders. Although there were numerous problems with the Nuremberg trials, the one truly worthwhile precedent to come out of the tribunals was the principle that men are always responsible for their own actions.”
5. Afghanistan:
“If Karzai is so widely suspected of stealing this election, why is there not the same global reaction against him as there was against Ahmadinejad in Iran? Is there an unwritten rule that allies of the West get cut some slack?”
6. “The Washington Post’s Cheney-ite defense of torture
If anyone ever tells you that they don’t understand what is meant by “stenography journalism” — or ever insists that America is plagued by a Liberal Media — you can show them this article from today’s Washington Post and, by itself, it should clear up everything. The article’s headline is ”How a Detainee Became An Asset — Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding” — though an equally appropriate headline would be: ”The Joys and Virtues of Torture — how Dick Cheney Kept Us Safe.” I defy anyone to identify a single way the article would be different if The Post had let Dick Cheney write it himself. The next time someone laments the economic collapse of the modern American newspaper, one might point out that an industry which pays three separate reporters (Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate) and numerous editors to churn out mindless, inane tripe like this has brought about its own demise.
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What makes the Post‘s breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims — the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report — provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves.
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The debate over whether torture extracted valuable information is, in my view, a total sideshow, both because (a) it inherently begs the question of whether legal interrogation means would have extracted the same information as efficiently if not more so (exactly the same way that claims that warrantless eavesdropping uncovered valuable intelligence begs the question of whether legal eavesdropping would have done so); and (b) torture is a felony and a war crime, and we don’t actually have a country (at least we’re not suppoesd to) where political leaders are free to commit serious crimes and then claim afterwards that it produced good outcomes.”
