1. ALL news organizations have lied about the most important aspect of 9/11, that ALL the videos you’ve seen are fake:
“9/11 honour and dishonour
As it becomes increasingly clear that the official explanation of 9/11 is insupportable and won’t stand the test of time, I thought it might be apropos to establish a media “Honour” and “Dishonour” roll, recording those news organizations who have or haven’t done their job in reporting the story. The idea here is that, 10 or 15 years from now, when the great majority of people have cottoned-on to the fact that the government lied — just as the great majority now realize that about the Kennedy assassination — we’ll be able to look back and see which of them maintained the best traditions of journalism, and which were compliant or complicit.
This list is pretty much off the top of my head, and certainly subject to change, persuasion, and the wisdom of crowds. In other words, if you have suggestions for additions and subtractions, or moving an organization from one list to the other, let me know via the comments form. “
http://backofthebook.ca/2010/04/14/911-honour-and-dishonour/2445/
2. “Dr. Strangelove, Made in Israel
One would expect the Air Force’s top civilian adviser to be someone who has spent some time in the US military or who has a very particular educational or skills set that brings something special to what is, after all, a very senior and sensitive position. Not so. Dr. Lani Kass, who is the senior Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz, was born, raised, and educated in Israel and then served in that country’s military where she reached the rank of major. She has a PhD in Russian studies but advises Air Force Generals on Cyberwarfare, terrorism, and the Middle East. And Kass appears to have close and continuing ties to her country of birth, frequently spicing her public statements with comments about life in Israel while parroting simplistic views of the nature of the Islamic threat that might have been scripted in Tel Aviv’s Foreign Ministry.
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Dr. Kass’s full first name is Ilana and her maiden name is Dimant. She has a 1971 BA in political-science and Russian area studies, summa cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a 1976 joint PhD from the Kaplan School of the Hebrew University and Columbia University in international affairs. She apparently met her husband Norman at Columbia. Both she and her husband are fluent in Russian and Hebrew. After completing her PhD, she served in the Israeli Air Force, achieving the rank of major.
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To challenge Dr. Kass’s position is not to question her academic credentials and intelligence or even her ability or integrity, but it is not unreasonable to ask why the Pentagon would appoint to a sensitive position someone who was born, raised, and served at a senior level with the armed forces in a foreign country.
And it is also not unreasonable to stop and consider whether Kass might well be an agent working for the Israeli government, which aggressively spies against the United States. She left Israel and began her journey through the US defense department in 1981, when Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was still active. Israeli intelligence certainly was then and is now capable of what is referred to in intelligence jargon as a seeding operation in which “a mole” is placed in an innocuous position and expected to rise higher, eventually obtaining access to top secret information and even sometimes winding up in a position in which it is possible to direct policy as a so-called agent of influence. Kass started her ascent by working on Russia for beltway bandit Booz Allen Hamilton, quite likely for completely innocent reasons but also possibly because it was a non-threatening way to ease her entry into the world of government contractors. “
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/04/14/dr-strangelove-made-in-israel/
3. “I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 20 years ago that America would someday be routinely firing missiles into countries it’s not at war with. For that matter, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a few months ago that America would soon be plotting the assassination of an American citizen who lives abroad.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/title-2/?ref=opinion
4. “When the Army Uses “Enhanced Interrogation” on an American Soldier
In gruesome detail, Luther described what happened to him at Camp Taji’s aid station. He thought he would receive medical care. Instead he was confined to an isolation chamber and held there for over a month, under enforced sleep deprivation, until he agreed to sign papers saying that he was ill before coming to Iraq and thus not eligible for disability and medical benefits. “They wanted me to say I had a ‘personality disorder,’” Luther told me.
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Luther’s call did not come out of the blue. For two years I had been investigating this personality disorder scandal: how military doctors were purposely misdiagnosing soldiers, wounded in combat, as having this pre-existing mental illness. As in the civilian world, where people can be locked out of the insurance system if they have a pre-existing condition, soldiers whose wounds can be attributed to a pre-existing illness can be denied disability benefits and long-term medical care.
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Luther was one of thousands severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan now facing a lifetime without medical care. I had spoken to dozens of soldiers in his shoes. But his call haunted me. He sent me photos of the isolation chamber. It was the size of a walk-in closet and was crammed with cardboard boxes, a desk and a bedpan. Armed guards monitored him 24 hours a day. Luther told me how they stopped him from sleeping, keeping the lights on and blasting heavy metal music at him all through the night: Megadeth, Saliva, Disturbed. When he rebelled, Luther was pinned down and injected with sleeping medication.
“This was an aid station,” he said, “but it felt a lot more like enhanced interrogation than medical care.”
After a month, Luther was willing to sign anything — and did. Soon after he signed his name to a personality disorder discharge, he was whisked back to Fort Hood and informed about a PD discharge’s disastrous consequences. No disability pay, no long-term medical care, and because he didn’t serve out his contract, he’d have to pay back a portion of his signing bonus. “They told me I now owed the Army $1,500.”
5. “The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy
As I analyzed in Part 2 of this series, “Western Civilization and the Economic Crisis: The Impoverishment of the Middle Class,” the eradication of the middle class has been a long-term process, and so too has the process of constructing a Homeland Security State. As people fall into social despair, governments will resort to political despotism. The Homeland Security State is designed to control populations and protect the power of the political and economic elite. If the elites do not construct a pervasive police state, the people might take over the social, political and economic levers of power and reconstruct a new social system. Therefore, the elites must “do away” with democracy in order to protect their own positions of power.
The construction of a pervasive and powerful Homeland Security State is not simply about the structures of surveillance. The emergence of a Homeland Security State will be marked by a new totalitarianism – not quite fascism and not quite communism – but a new system entirely: it’s not Germany in the Second World War, this is 1984. With that, the state apparatus will become incredibly oppressive and brutal force will likely be employed in order to induce submission to the state. The militarization of society is a central facet in this. This will be the subject of the next part in this series, “When Empire Hits Home,” with a focus on the evolution of a military form of governance in the west, construction of dictatorial and totalitarian societies, the prospects of martial law, and the structures of state oppression, including the use of “detention camps” to imprison “uncooperative” elements of the population.
While this essay focused on the prevalence and evolution of a police state surveillance society in the west, the next part focuses on the militarization of society itself: the descent into dictatorship and despotism. This is the price that is paid for empire. Too long have the people of the west been acquiescent to and ignorant of the rabid imperialism of our nations, the incessant and endless spreading of despotism, poverty, exploitation and death around the world.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the top American imperial strategists in recent history, wrote “The Grand Chessboard”, which was a blueprint for an American empire to control the world. In it, he wrote, “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”[94] In other words, America is and must continue to be an empire, but imperialism and democracy cannot prosper together; it is one or the other. The elites of the west have chosen empire over democracy.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18676
6. “Why Are Corporate Groups Funding the Tea Party?
How can we be sure? The website announcing the new federation lists a number of Tea Party “allies” and “support groups.” Many of these groups are corporate-dominated front groups such as Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity — two groups who’ve relentlessly promoted the Tea Party movement with massive resources. Not listed as an “ally” is the super-rich Koch family, which has also poured giant resources towards boosting the Tea Partiers. Fox News and other corporate media outlets, too, are non-official Tea Party “support groups.”
What are the goals of these corporate groups? Profits for corporations, at whatever the cost to the rest of us. And because they all subscribe to corporate ideology, the investments in the Tea Party come with strings attached. So what do the corporations and super-rich want from the Tea Party in return? Glenn Beck gives the most specific answers to this question.
Beck is a right-wing populist who supports the Tea Party via his television show on Fox News. At the same time, he dedicates much of his time to “educate” his supporters as to who their enemies are. In no particular order: Obama, labor unions, working class organizations like ACORN, “progressives,” “social justice” advocates, and “socialists” and “Marxists.” For Beck, all of these constituencies are the same and equally involved in an absurdly complicated conspiracy to “destroy America.”(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJDDvyAQO6s&feature=related)
The fact that this fanatic rant is being broadcast internationally is very telling, hinting that Beck’s corporate sponsors have crossed the political Rubicon onto territory dominated by the extreme right wing.
Beck, along with his other right-wing colleagues, are reviving the putrid American tradition of Communist witch hunts and McCarthy-style red-baiting. Such tactics are used in times of social unrest, where the corporate elite needs both distraction and excuses for persecuting anyone who challenges corporate rule. “
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18677
7. “What happened to “look forward, not backward”?
Let’s spend just a moment thinking about what this means. We’ve known since December, 2005, that Bush officials, including at the NSA, committed felonies by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law — crimes punishable by a five-year prison term and$10,000 fine for each offense. All three federal judges to rule on the question have found those actions to be in violation of the law. Yet there have been no criminal investigations, let alone indictments, for those crimes, and there won’t be any, due to Barack Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward.” Thus, the high-level political officials who committed crimes while running the NSA will be completely immunized for their serious crimes.
By stark contrast, an NSA official who brought to the public’s attention towering failures and waste at the NSA — revelations that led to exposés that, as Shane put it, were “honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists” — is now being prosecuted for crimes that could lead to a lengthy prison term. Why doesn’t Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward,” protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens? Isn’t the DOJ’s prosecution of Drake the classic case of “Looking Backward,” by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/15/prosecutions/index.html
