1. Colleen Rowley:
“She said that she thought the DOJ IG report got it mostly right. The DOJ IG basically concluded risk aversion, incompetence, misunderstandings, etc.
…
The hypocrisy is off the charts. Citizens are expected to give up their privacy because the intel community claims they must have police state powers to prevent terrorist attacks. OTOH, intelligence officials involved in outrageous pre-9/11 conduct refuse to answer to the public. Why is it acceptable for Congress to renew the Patriot Act eight years after 9/11 while the public remains ignorant due to abuse of national security classification procedures and an incurious mainstream media?
Agents – now there’s a group we don’t have yet…………. FBI & CIA agents for 911 truth
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The arguments for a real investigation need not depend on everyone being convinced (or willing to publicly acknowledge) 9/11 was an inside job.
Because even if the “gist” of the story were true–a completely surprise attack organized solely by al-Qaeda–the Federal government’s (and the military’s) mishandling of this crime has been so egregious, marked by so much dissembling and obvious criminal misbehavior, that an investigation would STILL be warranted. Any of the following reasons should be sufficient:
1. The largest removal and destruction of physical evidence from a crime scene in history.
2. The fact that the government has handed us not less than THREE mutually contradictory accounts of how these attacks succeeded without military intervention–each story more ludicrous than the one before. (Why for example has nobody been prosecuted for perjury for lies told under oath?)
3. The fact that no one at NORAD or the FAA or the FBI has been fired, or even publicly reprimanded, for the way they botched their jobs–indeed, some key players in the “failures” leading to and allegedly made on 9/11 have even been promoted and given awards.
Three examples out of hundreds that can be made. Any of these should be grounds for investigation by themselves.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21736
2. “Alas Afghanistan
The New York Times tells us that Obama’s advisers are curling themselves around a strategy that will protect “about 10 population centers” in Afghanistan. The debate is no longer over whether to send more troops but over how many more to send. Obama hasn’t made his mind up yet, the Times reports, but the story is a sanctioned leak, so you know he’s pretty close to a decision. This is a propaganda technique known as “desensitizing.” By the time official word comes down the pike, we’ll already be used to the idea and will have moved on to caring about something else.
The Times story comes on the heels of the news of the resignation of Matthew Hoh, a senior foreign service officer whose resignation letter said in part, “I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there. I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al-Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.
…
“One of the enduring oddities of the American foreign policy debate,” he writes, “is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?”
It doesn’t. “
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/10/28/alas-afghanistan/
3. “My Problem with J Street
J Street has come under attack from the usual suspects, to include the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and assorted individual neocons. Because of the attacks, there has been a “my enemy’s enemy” response and a number of opponents of AIPAC and the neocons have rallied to J Street, in some cases purely because the neocon onslaught suggests that J Street must be a good thing. Some defenders of J Street have pointed out that it is more moderate than AIPAC and therefore must be considered a better lobbying option even if it sometimes has to embrace compromise policies that are imperfect. Others have argued that even when it has to take certain positions tactically it still represents the best hope for a peaceful future in the Middle East.
I have to disagree. I believe that J Street is just another Israel advocacy group with a slightly more progressive and politically correct and therefore acceptable message. J Street wants carte blanche United States support for Israel and, indeed, it might reasonably be described as little more than a spin-off of the existing Israel Lobby to make it more palatable to the liberal Democrats that make up the Obama Administration. It is one more voice pushing the same old agenda with slightly different window dressing. This is not to suggest that AIPAC and J Street are actually acting in collusion but the two pro-Israel lobbies clearly have the same overriding objective: to preserve unlimited American support for the state of Israel, not advancing the interests of the United States except insofar as one assumes erroneously that Tel Aviv’s and Washington’s interests are identical. J Street calls continued massive US military aid to Israel “an absolutely essential aspect of Israel’s security.” If it is difficult to perceive any pro-American element to the J Street program it is because it is not about the United States at all – it is about Israel. J Street believes Washington should continue indefinitely in its role as Israel’s patron, security guarantor, and financial supporter.
On many of the specific issues, J Street is AIPAC lite. It accepts an Israeli state based on religion, not on equal rights for all citizens, specifically supporting the apartheid-like right of any Jew to “return” without affording similar rights to Christians or Muslims who resided in Palestine before 1948. Its Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami calls a one-state solution to Israel/Palestine with all citizens having the same rights a “nightmare.”
…
One might well question in any event why there should exist a lobby operating in Washington consisting of American citizens promoting the interests of a foreign country — but we live in strange times. The founding fathers might have considered such a schizophrenic world view inappropriate for ostensibly loyal American citizens, a view that I share.”
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/10/28/my-problem-with-j-street/
4. “Obama’s REAL death Panels
Again, there is no distinction between foreigners and U.S. citizens.
…
In 2002 Scott Silliman, director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University asked: “Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, D.C., under [the Bush] theory? The answer is yes, you could.”
Nothing much has changed since then. Obama has eliminated the use of the phrase “enemy combatant,” but The New York Times reported that the change is merely meant to “symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies.” The words may have changed, but Obama attorney general Eric Holder’s definition of who can and cannot be held, said the Times, is “not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”
These days, Obama has ramped up the assassination of political opponents of the U.S. and the U.S.-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying more Predator drone plane attacks than Bush. But that’s just for now. Obama could still personally order a government agency to murder you.
Which is weird. But not nearly as weird as the fact that you probably don’t care enough to do something about it.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20091027/cm_ucru/obamasrealdeathpanels
5. “The Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page is at it again, using made-up “facts” and dubious logic to influence a foreign-policy debate in the direction favored by the capital’s still influential neocons.
In this latest case, the topic is Afghanistan and the Post’s misinformation may contribute to the deaths of many more U.S. troops and Afghanis, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman explains in this guest essay:
The Washington Post is creating its own facts in order to support its argument for U.S. nation-building in Afghanistan.”
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/102809a.html
6. ‘Could have’? OF COURSE they were duped:
“Attorney says evidence shows Chicago man accused in terror plot could have been duped”
http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/10/28/atty-chicago-terror-suspect-could-have-been-duped-2/
7. Vaccine:
“Obama Administration Launches Deceptive Swine Flu Propaganda Blitz
Elsewhere in the world, particularly in Europe, civilians are increasingly rejecting the H1N1 vaccine. Recent polls in Germany and Austria show only 13 and 18 percent respectively willing to take the shot. In Sweden, four vaccine related deaths have been announced and almost 200 healthcare workers have reported becoming more seriously ill from the vaccination than they might have from a flu infection. In the US, anywhere from 90-99 percent of adverse events go unreported.
If people would simply shut off the CDC’s supported propaganda noise being blasted across the airwaves and newspapers— the spectacle of newscasters being inoculated, interviews with government health officials or private doctors and academics receiving consultation fees from drug makers, and the drivel of the New York Times—and simply do their homework, Americans would wake up and realize the hoax behind the swine flu pandemic. All of the information is before us. Nothing is hidden. All the contradictions and hypocrisies are contained within the massive vaccine industrial complex—including the government health agencies and professional medical associations. The lie is too large for them to not expose themselves if we simply look.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15860
8. “The Holocaust In Cambodia And Its Aftermath Is Remembered
John Pilger recalls the stricken society he found in Cambodia in 1979 which he described in his epic dispatches and documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia He reminds us that the Pol Pot horror emerged from the bombing ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and that Cambodia was again “punished” when its liberators came from the wrong side of the cold war and the Thatcher government send special forces to train the Khmer Rouge in exile
The aircraft flew low, following the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, what we saw silenced all of us on board. There appeared to be nobody, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the border.
Whole villages were empty. Chairs and beds, pots and mats lay in the street, a car on its side, a bent bicycle. Behind fallen power lines lay or sat a single human shadow; it did not move. From the paddies, lines of tall wild grass followed straight lines. Fertilised by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children, these marked common graves in a nation where as many as two million people, or more than a quarter of the population, were “missing”. “
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23843.htm
9. “Why Americans Gotta Read the “War Crimes Times!”
The War Crimes Times provides information to the general public, to law-makers, and to our justice-seeking allies on war crimes, war criminals, and on the necessity and means of prosecuting war criminals. When national leaders initiate hostilities they create the conditions—the extreme use of force coupled with limited accountability—for the war crimes which invariably follow. War crimes are therefore an inherent part of war. The suffering caused and the enmity aroused by war crimes must be regarded as costs of war. Since these and other costs far exceed any benefits of war, we seek to end war as a tool of international policy. Towards this goal, we believe that holding war criminals accountable will send a strong message to those currently in power to very carefully weigh all the consequences of the decision to go to war. While we recognize that United States has long relied on military force to further its foreign policy goals, we feel that the Bush Administration’s blatant and egregious violations of international law demand special attention. The WCT has resolved to see that Bush, Cheney, & Co. are prosecuted for war crimes no matter how long it takes. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23845.htm
