1. “John Farmer is not a friend to 9/11 truth. His admissions are a limited hangout. However he has made 2 specific statements that can be used against him. Here’s how to play the Farmer card:
Quote 1: (as noted above from his book) “at some level of the government, at some point in time…. there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened… I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described… The NORAD air defense tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin.”
This is the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission admitting that the Commission both received and promulgated a false story.
Quote 2: (from Farmer’s own Staff testimony) “The interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft in which elevators and stairwells were grouped.”
This is the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission caught red-handed lying about the absence of the 47 steel core columns.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/22457
2. I guess I’m a Cassandra:
“
That whole generation of Internet writers born in the flames of 9/11, including Sullivan and Johnson, retarded and distorted the development of web journalism, aside from having a deleterious effect on public opinion in the post-9/11 era. They were the progenitors of the intellectual groupthink, and, yes, rigidity, that led us to our present predicament. For Sullivan, or any one of that crowd, to compare themselves favorably to Greenwald, of all people, would be laughable if it didn’t underscore precisely what’s wrong with our media and the culture that it conjures.
Why, one wants to know, is it the ones who were right from the beginning – the prophets without honor, the Cassandras who weren’t listened to – who labor in obscurity, while the idiots who tout the conventional wisdom are hailed and given plaudits without end?
Fools are rewarded, and the prescient are ignored – it’s the way of the world. Okay, I’m willing to live with that. But when the fools start calling out their intellectual betters, disdaining them for their “rigidity,” and touting their own foolish selves as having the “flexibility” to “evolve” – that’s where I have to draw the line and protest.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/01/26/old-war-bloggers-never-die/
3. “Obama Takes on the Muslim World
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush recognized that Israel’s endless war on the Palestinians, a grossly unequal struggle waged with the military, financial, and diplomatic support of the United States, had put America at risk. For a brief moment, Bush spoke strongly of the need to establish a Palestinian state and bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a speedy and just conclusion. Bush even demanded an end to Israeli incursions into the West Bank and the targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders.
In very little time, the president realized that acknowledging America’s own foreign policy in the Middle East had put America in the terrorist crosshairs was unlikely to be a vote-getter, particularly among the Republican Party’s Evangelical faithful, who view the establishment of the state of Israel as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. So the president, with the eager support of both parties and a tame corporate media, chose the explanation that foreigners willing to fly airplanes into buildings must hate America’s freedom and openness, our margaritas and miniskirts. This facile and entirely specious assertion was a much more palatable explanation for 9/11 than that American intervention, particularly U.S. support of corrupt Arab kings and potentates, a blank check for Israeli adventurism, and a murderous embargo on the Iraqi people, had provoked an intense hatred of the U.S. among a small but growing percentage of Muslims around the world.
…
As Bush learned in 2001, pressure on Israel, no matter how justified, takes courage and has political costs. The Democratic Party has long received a large proportion of its financial support from Israel’s friends in the United States, and Israel has many advocates in the Obama administration, the best example being the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Israeli army. So President Obama quickly surrendered to Israel’s American constituency, dropped his insistence that settlement of Palestinian lands cease, and began to pressure the Palestinian Authority’s weakling President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations without preconditions. “
http://original.antiwar.com/john-taylor/2010/01/26/obama-takes-on-muslims/
4. No kidding:
“JAG Officer: Indefinite Detention ‘Defies Common Sense’
He gave three reasons.
“First, both under the Military Commissions Act of 2009 and under the Classified Information Protection Act [CIPA], in use in federal courts, there are elaborate mechanisms in place to protect classified information,” Frakt said.
“Second, given that the remaining detainees at Guantanamo have been held, on average, for over seven years, the likelihood that there is an ongoing need to protect classified sources and methods in such cases is remote.”
“Finally, it is hard to believe that there would be any greater risk of revealing important classified information than in the 9/11 trial, yet the administration is pressing forward with this and several other cases against high-value detainees who were kept in secret CIA ghost prisons and subjected to still classified methods of interrogation,” he noted.
“The administration has acknowledged the right of all detainees to petition for habeas corpus in federal court. Why does the administration seem to believe classified information could be adequately protected in federal habeas litigation, but not in a criminal trial? It seems far more likely that there is simply inadequate admissible non-coerced evidence of criminality,” Frakt said.”
http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2010/01/26/indefinite-detention-defies-common-sense/
5. “CIA Torture Success Claim Cast Overboard, Drowns
Jeff Stein has a great piece on how the most prominent CIA apologist for waterboarding has finally ‘fessed up that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Much of the news media treated this CIA “expert” like a hero back in 2007. I assume they will ignore his recantation.”
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/01/27/cia-torture-success-claim-cast-overboard-drowns/
6. “Children’s TV Stars Face Anti-Terror Quiz
“We were out and about doing ‘dork hunting’ ourselves on the streets of London.
“Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts. We’ve got hairdryers in our belt, a kids’ walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning ‘under the act of terrorism’.”
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/TV-Presenters-Anna-Williamson-And-Jamie-Rickers-Held-By-Police-Under-Under-Anti-Terror-Powers/Article/201001415536056?lpos=UK_News_Carousel_Region_4&lid=ARTICLE_15536056_TV_Presenters_Anna_Williamson_And_Jamie_Rickers_Held_By_Police_Under_Under_Anti-Terror_Powers
7. “Four charged in phone scheme at Sen. Landrieu’s office ;
Or, Rightwing Politics is Mostly Dirty Tricks
James O’Keefe, the rightwing activist who tried to punk ACORN by dressing as a pimp, was endorsed in a resolution by 31 Republican congressmen as a role model. Yes, the very model of an upright gentleman.
…
But the Right in the US wants its way no matter what, and is constantly anxious that maybe the people will wake up to the scam that is being pulled on them by people who actually represent big corporations but claim to speak for the “people.” Politics nowadays is about fatally crippling Obama and rolling back the Democratic surge, by any means possible.
…
And now you have a Watergate-style break-in by James O’Keefe and associates at the Louisiana offices of Senator Mary Landrieu, seeking to bug her office.
…
Ironically, O’Keefe is now charged with a felony, whereas it was never proven that, despite unprofessional trash talking in O’Keefe’s videotape, the ACORN employees he sought to entrap ever actually did anything illegal.
Dirty tricks are nothing new from the Right, and are necessary, since they don’t offer good governance and their main argument is that the Market will magically take care of everyone if only unscrupulous businessmen are left completely unregulated by the government.
This ideology is what got us into the present mess. So since the platform of the Right is obviously untrue, what is left but scummy attack videos and illegal office break-ins and bugging. The public after all has an extremely short memory or mostly doesn’t much care about politics, so why not try to manipulate them?”
8. Ugh:
“Israel Moves Closer to Hook-up With NATO”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17233
9. “Elitists in Populist Clothing
I don’t mean to quibble with the notion that Scott Brown – as a truck driver and former nude centrefold – is well qualified to sit in the U.S. Senate. It’s the notion that he’s a populist that sticks in my craw.
But it’s his alleged populism that led to his dramatic upset win last week in Ted Kennedy’s old seat.
Right-wingers like Brown hide the elitism of their agenda by presenting themselves as ordinary working types, as truck-driving, gun-toting folk who may have just slaughtered something with their bare hands in the back shed.
Nothing could be less populist than the right’s agenda – which reached its zenith under George W. Bush – with tax cuts for the rich, financial deregulation and whittling away labour and social protections.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17229
10. “Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens
So we’re in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and basic precepts of Western justice. Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination “hit list” of their citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints. By stark contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens. And the most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but want to defend this: how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process? “
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
11. “Pentagon Calls for ‘Office of Strategic Deception’
Remember the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that helped collect dubious intelligence that led to the war in Iraq? Or the program where the Pentagon secretly briefed military analysts to promote the Iraq war?
Meet the would-be Office of Strategic Deception.
In a little-noticed report earlier this month, the Defense Department’s powerful Defense Science Board recommended creation of an entity designed solely for “strategic deception” against US adversaries.
…
Whitman said he stood by an earlier statement in which he averred “the intent and purpose of the [program] is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American public.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24515.htm
12. “The Kidnapping of Haiti
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration. “
