1.  I would hope so, since none of these guys had anything to do with 9/11:

“LA Times: “Death penalty in 9/11 trials may be difficult”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21995

2.  “9-11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey finally confesses 9-11 Commission could not do it’s job

Jeremy confronts Kerrey about the aspects of treason involved with covering up the truth about 9-11, and Kerrey responds “It’s a 30 year conspiracy”.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21994

3.  “The Galula Doctrine

According to the official narrative, poverty, ignorance, and isolation from modernity are the reasons for the stubborn refusal of the Afghan people to support their American and NATO liberators. The solution, by this administration’s lights, is to construct what has never really existed in Afghanistan: a unified, modern nation-state. Building “infrastructure,” it seems, is the liberal-progressive answer to humanity’s problems worldwide, and in Afghanistan, too, where roads, hospitals, schools, networks of mass communication, and the very fabric of modernity itself must be built from the ground up.

The sheer arrogance of American policymakers and military theoreticians blocks them from recognizing the simple reality of the insurgents’ motivation, which is nothing more nor less than aversion to the conditions of military occupation. Short of withdrawing all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, there is no way to satisfy the central demand of the Afghan insurgents – who resist the American-NATO occupation not because they are ignorant savages who hate us for our freedoms, but because they seek their own version of freedom – which, understandably, does not involve kowtowing to an American viceroy.

…

The truth, however, is that the Vietnam War was always a losing proposition, as was the Algerian conflict. Absent massive repression, the peoples of those nations would never have consented to “pacification” by the West, and it is useless to pretend otherwise. At the core of COIN theory is a valuable insight, first put forward by Étienne de La Boétie, in his classic The Politics of Obedience: the rulers of a country must, to some significant degree, win the voluntary consent of the ruled.

However, it should be clear that winning “hearts and minds” is incompatible with invading and occupying a foreign country, no matter how ostensibly benevolent one’s motives may be. Assuming our unwillingness to utilize more extreme methods of “pacification,” such as those engaged in by Monsieur Galula and his confreres in Algeria, the advantages enjoyed by rebels in asymmetrical warfare – especially when it is waged on their home turf – may be impossible to overcome. In which case, the Afghan war is an exercise in futility.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/29/the-galula-doctrine/

4.  “Obama’s Big Speech

I’d like to see him go on TV Tuesday night and say, “My fellow Americans, I was wrong. Our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with national security anymore and we can’t afford it, and I’m not sending one more kid into harm’s way to fight there. As of tonight, I’m ordering a complete withdrawal.” But the odds of that happening are slimmer than a licorice rope. Obama couldn’t take the heat.

Former four-star Barry McCaffrey, the military-industrial ghoul who was the worst of the retired military media analysts who helped sell the Iraq war to the American public, is, incredibly, back on the air with NBC. He’s pushing the “no exit strategy, no timeline in Afghanistan” line. McCaffrey has ties to DynCorp International, a company that has a five-year contract to support bases in Afghanistan.

A swell fellow, that McCaffrey is, but he’s really just a symptom of a larger American disease. Our wars, even though they’re destroying our economy, are making a lot of people rich. The cash caisson, the gravy ship, and the wild blue budget continue to grow. War is our only export, and counterinsurgency is the perfect tool of the Long War mafia, because counterinsurgency wars are unwinnable.”
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/11/29/obamas-big-speech/

5.  “The endless appeals to “spreading democracy,” fostering “stable governments,” and all the rest are nothing but marketing and public relations. They are the camouflage for the actual purposes of our government’s actions. You can dissect and demolish those purported justifications for U.S. policy all you wish; our leaders don’t care about any of that, no matter how successful your demolition efforts are, because all of that is completely irrelevant. But our leaders and most commentators do love the marketing, so with only very rare exceptions, their analysis and even their criticisms remain on this superficial level.

It comes as no surprise, then, that of all the unified commands, CENTCOM is the one in which, in today’s world, the U.S. empire’s rubber meets the road most abrasively. The command’s area of responsibility includes a great part of the world’s known petroleum and natural gas deposits, a preponderance of Israel’s enemies, and the places in which the George W. Bush administration has chosen to focus its so-called Global War on Terror. Of course, the region also includes Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. forces have been fighting for years, and, sandwiched between these two battlefields, Iran, where Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocons ardently desire to extend the fighting at the earliest opportunity.

This is the general policy that Obama continues, and that he will continue into the foreseeable future. He made his intentions clear from the beginning of his campaign, and nothing has changed. Nor will it, certainly not insofar as Obama is concerned. …

Higgs’ argument and those I consistently make explain the U.S. presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in countless other places around the world.”

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/11/wherein-we-gaze-into-our-inerrant.html

6.  No surprise here:

“President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.

The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the “family jewels.’’”

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/11/29/declassification_of_secret_documents_to_be_delayed/

7.  No surprise here:

“FBI paid controversial NJ blogger for help

A New Jersey blogger about to stand trial on charges he made death threats against federal judges apparently was paid by the FBI in its battle against domestic terrorism, according to a published report.

The Record of Bergen County reported Sunday that Hal Turner received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups and was sent undercover to Brazil.

Turner also claims the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements on his radio show, but the newspaper also found many federal officials were concerned that his audience might follow up on his violence rhetoric.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jzBi0fWBvJIDUVijJgw7oQJRMYrQD9C9G98O0

8.  “It’s impossible to find a more perfectly representative face for the rotted Washington establishment than Evan Bayh.  He is the pure expression of virtually every attribute that makes the Beltway so dysfunctional, deceitful and corrupt.

Bayh wants to send other people into every proposed war he can find and keep them there forever ever without ever bearing any of the costs himself — not in military service for him or his family nor even in higher taxes to pay for his glorious wars.  Sacrifice is for everyone other than Evan Bayh and his friends.  He runs around praising himself as a “deficit hawk” while recklessly supporting wars and indefinite occupations that the country can’t afford and which drive us further into debt.  He feigns concern over the “deficit” only when it comes time to deny ordinary Americans benefits which he and his family already possess in abundance.  He is a loyal servant to the insurance and health care industries over his own constituents — as his wife sits on the Boards of numerous health care giants, who, right when Bayh became a Senator, began paying her millions of dollars in cash and stock.  And this Sermonizer of Personal Responsibility is the ultimate by-product of nepotism, following faithfully and effortlessly in the footsteps of his Daddy-Senator, whose seat he now occupies.  The fact that he’s a Democrat — and was Obama’s close-second choice for Vice President — just underscores how bipartisan these afflictions are.

When the sad and destructive history of the U.S. over the last decade is written, the coddled, nepotistic, self-serving face of Evan Bayh should be prominently included.  It embodies virtually every cause.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

1.  I don’t believe the official 9/11 narrative on whether the Pentagon plane even existed, but if you do, have fun dealing with this:

“NTSB data: Flight deck door remained closed on AA77: hijacking “impossible”

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 departed Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles at 8:20 am Eastern Time. According to reports and data, a hijacking took place between 08:50:54 and 08:54:11[1] in which the hijackers allegedly crashed the aircraft into the Pentagon at 09:37:45. Reported by CNN, according to Ted Olson, wife Barbara Olson had called him from the reported flight stating, “…all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers…”[2]. However, according to Flight Data provided by the NTSB, the Flight Deck Door was never opened in flight. How were the hijackers able to gain access to the cockpit, remove the pilots, and navigate the aircraft to the Pentagon if the Flight Deck Door remained closed?”

There’s a bit of a “wow” factor here: this is material provided by the NTSB, the government agency charged with investigating all airplane incidents and accidents in the US. We all know that Ted Olson lied about the cell phone calls from AA77, but this flight data recorder material (provided by a government agency) throws another wrench in the official version of AA77’s fate.

…

Who cares if the mainstream media mock us as conspiracy theorists because we talk about the evidence of controlled demolition? They are still trying to convince us that Oswald killed Kennedy and that there was no conspiracy involved in the assassination. I consider it a badge of honor to be mocked by the pathetic controlled news media. Do we care more about uncovering the truth, or about how the discredited lame stream news media attacks us?”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21980

2.  Every single act by Israel is done in bad faith and malice:

“Israel Greets Start of Settlement ‘Freeze’ With New Construction“

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/11/27/israel-greets-start-of-settlement-freeze-with-new-construction/

3.  “On Friday, District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the release from Guantánamo of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, a 48-year-old Algerian, after granting his habeas corpus petition. Her ruling has not yet been declassified, so the reasons for her decision are not yet clear, but it is significant that the ruling now brings to 31 the number of prisoners who have successfully challenged the basis of their detention in U.S. courts. In contrast, just eight prisoners have lost their habeas petitions, meaning that the success rate in the prisoners’ legal challenges now stands at 80 percent.

It is also likely that her ruling will, as in all the other successful petitions, involve lambasting the government for relying on statements made by other prisoners whose unreliability has been noted by the authorities, and who were either tortured, coerced, or bribed, or on statements made by the prisoners themselves while subjected to grueling and often abusive conditions. It also seems probable that the ruling will refute the government’s claims that its rag-bag of hearsay, innuendo, and snippets of intelligence is coherent enough to constitute real evidence.

…

Without a concerted effort by the administration, by lawmakers, or by the American people to address their responsibility for these men, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed will be left to reflect that it actually makes no difference whether you have been cleared for release on three occasions, or whether you are still regarded as a threat, despite the lack of any credible evidence against you, as the end result is the same: you will, in the end, remain at Guantánamo, possibly for the rest of your life, while those who could do something about your plight either ignore the fact that there is no evidence against you, and continue to smear you as a terrorist, or remain paralyzed by inertia. “
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0911g.asp

4.  “Military Coverup: Washington alters US Air Force document to hide intentions behind military accord with Colombia”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16308

1.  “McKeown says, “There’s a huge leap of faith required to lead someone from asking questions about engineering and structural design to making the argument that elements of the government played a role in the murder of thousands of people, just to provide an excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s something in that leap I don’t quite comprehend.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21973

2.  “The last thing a government unable to avoid an inquiry once the troops had left Iraq wanted was a proper public one that would answer the hard questions on the legality and responsibility for this defining episode of the country’s recent history. What it wants is a report that goes into endless detail, examines a great string of witnesses, gathers “a mountain range of documents” (in Sir John’s words), uncovers some interesting material to keep the journalists happy and then ends up with a final report which says that, yes, there were lapses in the presentation of the case for war and there were serious deficiencies in the planning of the occupation (as we know from recently leaked government documents) but, no, there was no dishonesty in the intent, no lying to the House, no final illegality. Officials and ministers made mistakes but there was nothing dishonourable about the whole exercise or the individuals involved.
…

The inquiry, said Sir John Chilcot, wanted only members “with experience of the workings of government from the inside”. That rather gives the game away. It is the outsider who has always pursued truth most vigorously, particularly the judge trained to pursue lines of inquiry and catch out dissembling, as the Scott, Scarman and Macpherson reports all testify. What Sir John means is that he only wanted people who would share the assumptions of those questioned, as the ever so polite examination of officials in the first two days of hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday amply testified..

Sir John is also guilty of two other deceits (or “Blairisms” if that is too harsh a word). One is that the committee members are “completely independent” and come to the investigation from “different perspectives.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/adrian-hamilton/adrian-hamilton-the-one-thing-chilcot-wont-reveal-is-the-truth-1827469.html

3.  Too bad American war criminals never admit what they did and resign:

“German Army Chief Resigns Over Afghan Civilian Killings

German Army chief General Wolfgang Schneiderhan has formally asked to be relieved of duty today following the release of images from the US warplane involved in the September Kunduz air strike showed that German officials were lying about situation leading up to the attack.

The photographs, released by the nation’s Bild newspaper, show large numbers of civilians at the site of the German-ordered attacked and disproved repeated claims from officials as high ranking as former Defense Minister Franz Jung that there was no evidence of civilian deaths.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/11/26/german-army-chief-resigns-over-afghan-civilian-killings/

4.  “Declassified records show US military officers were present at massacres and at least one formally sanctioned a mass political execution. Some have suggested the overall toll of the massacres could exceed 100,000 when all is said and done.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/11/26/south-korea-confirms-nearly-5000-civilians-killed-in-wartime-massacres/

5.  “It’s interesting how what was once lambasted as “Constitution-shredding” under George Bush is now nothing more than:  Obama’s “civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted.”  Also, the premise implicitly embedded in Matt’s argument is the standard Beltway dogma that there would be serious political costs from reversing the Bush/Cheney abuses of the Constitution and civil liberties.  The success of Obama’s campaign — which emphatically and repeatedly vowed to do exactly that  — ought to have permanently retired that excuse.

Even more important, Matt seems to be implying that he knew all along that Obama never really intended to fulfill his multiple campaign promises to restore civil liberties and dismantle the Bush/Cheney war on the Constitution.  So all of those righteous speeches and commitments and campaign positions were nothing more than dishonest instruments for manipulating and placating  the people who supported his campaign?  I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment.  I neither believed nor disbelieved what Obama said during the campaign, but instead intended to wait for the evidence before deciding.  And particularly once I watched Obama — once his party’s nomination was secure — flagrantly violate his pledge to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity, I had no expectations that he’d feel at all compelled to adhere to his other promises.

…

If Obama ran a campaign which purposely elevated the hopes of so many people — particularly younger and new voters — while secretly harboring the knowledge that he did not feel at all bound by what he was promising, isn’t that a fairly serious indictment of his character, as well as a dangerous game to play for the Democratic Party?

…

I agree with Matt’s explicit point that Congress has an important role to play in checking presidential abuses — a role they’ve clearly abdicated no matter which party was in control.  He’s also right that Presidents don’t easily relinquish power.  But it’s hardly unreasonable to object when someone runs for high political office based on clear and repeated promises that they have squarely violated.  Whatever else is true, watching Obama embrace extremist policies can still be “disappointing” even if one isn’t surprised that he’s doing it.  I could understand and accept a lot more easily this blithe acquiescence to Obama’s record if it weren’t for the fact that progressives and Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush’s use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy — policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own.  One can’t help but wonder, at least in some cases, how genuine those objections were, as opposed to their just having been effective tools to discredit a Republican president for partisan and political gain.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

6.  “Dana Perino: No Terror Attack on USA in Bush Era

Proving once again that there is nothing so untrue a GOP shill can say on Sean Hannity’s rightfest that will cause anyone to challenge it, former G.W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino criticizes the Obama Administration for not labelling the Ft. Hood massacre “terrorism.”  Then she pronounces: “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”

And that, my friends, is how history gets re-written in the modern era.

Just. Like. That.”
http://firedoglake.com/2009/11/25/dana-perino-no-terror-attack-on-usa-in-bush-era/

7.  “Deception Has Always Been The Name Of Zionism’s Game

The proof that Zionism’s founding father knew the substitution of “home” for “state” in the first mission statement was a deception is in his diary, which was not published (was kept secret) for 63 years. Herzl’s entry for 3 September 1897, as published in 1960, included this:

Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly – it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish state… Perhaps in five years, and certainly 50, everyone will know it… At Basel then, I created this abstraction which, as such, is invisible to the vast majority of people.

It wasn’t only the Arabs and the major powers Zionism didn’t want to scare by using the term state. All of its founding fathers were fully aware that most informed and thoughtful Jews everywhere were opposed to the idea of creating a sovereign Jewish state in the Arab heartland. They believed it to be morally wrong. They feared it would lead to unending conflict. And most of all they feared that if Zionism was allowed by the major powers to have its way, it would one day provoke anti-Semitism.

As it happened, that Jewish concern and those Jewish fears were washed away by the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, without which Zionism almost certainly would not have triumphed.

After its unilateral declaration of independence, the Zionist (not Jewish) state’s policy was to advance by creating facts on the ground. In effect its message to the world was, as it still is: “We know we should not have done this, but we’ve done it. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24072.htm

8.  “What Is Totalitarianism?

If the United States came under the control of a totalitarian regime, would we recognize it? This question is of utmost importance today, when many of us harbor fears that some time in the near future ideas such as freedom, liberty, and privacy will be alien to our society. But as we witness the regular passage of legislation designed to restrict and regulate, and the tendency of the Federal government to increase rather than decrease its power (with a handful of exceptions), we are struck by the uninterrupted routine of life in the USA . As the central government brings more and more of private society under its control, we continue to watch cable TV, shop at supermarkets overflowing with products, and eat at our favorite restaurants. Could it be that we have already passed that dreaded threshold and missed it?

The trouble with diagnosing our condition is that most people are unaware of what totalitarianism actually is. Among even the most politically astute, there is little mental room for the possibility that a state in the process of becoming totalitarian might lack the most brutal and outward signs of oppressive regimes portrayed in popular culture. Because of our rather simplistic frame of reference—picture black and white images of National Socialist Germany or the Soviet Union —we recognize a country as either being in the advanced stages of totalitarianism or not at all. But just because a state maintains the structures and language of democracy and continues to have elections, for instance, that does not preclude it from being totalitarian. “

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24073.htm

1.  “Obama Sells Out to the Neocons

Obama vows that he will “finish the job” in Afghanistan to the cheers of warmongering neoconservatives but the simple question is: at what cost, Mr. President? How many more billions will be spent? How many more U.S. service members will perish or suffer serious injuries? And how many more innocent civilians need to die or be maimed in this endless military occupation/nation-building project? The administration refuses to answer those tough questions but it appears they are already planning to increase troop levels well into 2011.”

http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/foreign-policy/2405-obama-sells-out-to-the-neocons

2.  “UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

Terror squad arrest over model rocket
The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.

The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/

3.  “The Thanksgiving of the Fantasticals

A Day of Rule breaking, and Spontaneous Mirth

When we used to do Thanksgiving as cross-dressing and insulting authority:

Thanksgiving was a Northeastern regional commemoration until Abraham Lincoln promulgated it as a national holiday in 1863, and it was celebrated in lots of different ways. One of those ways was for young men to dress up as women or in fantastic costumes and promenade, and mug, and make fun of authority. It was a “masculine escape” from the family, an opportunity to break rules and be outlandish. In our increasingly regimented national security state, we could do with some of that old Thanksgiving cheekiness, though we need both sexes now.

Thanksgiving in the nineteenth century in some parts of the country was a combination of Eddie Izzard (cross-dressing), Lady Gaga (wild costumes and breaking conventions), and Jon Stewart (mirthful insults directed at high political authority). Some historians suggest that the homey, nuclear-family Thanksgiving meal was a reaction against all this public rowdiness. Alas, so successful a reaction that the carnivale side of the holiday has been erased from public memory
…
If only present-day Americans were not so apathetic and timid that they gave up the most basic rights enshrined in our Constitution almost without a fight just because Dick Cheney sneered at them and muttered something about national security — if only they showed some spunk and dared break social conventions and get uppity in the cause of personal liberty rather than that of corporate perquisites from time to time– now that would be something to be thankful for.”

http://www.juancole.com/

4.  “Tony Blair told ‘days before Iraq invasion’ WMD had been dismantled

Iraq inquiry: Tony Blair told ‘days before invasion’ WMD had been dismantled – Telegraph

What I remember is that knowledgeable inspectors and expatriate Iraq scientists were saying this all through 2002 and into early 2003.

Here is Imad Khadduri’s piece from that winter: “Iraq has no N-weapons, claims expatriate scientist 06/01/2003. (Via my posting, at the time at IC.

Bush, Cheney, Blair and the gang knew they were lying. They were just confident that they could run out the clock on the truth.”

http://www.juancole.com/

5.  “Everyone Knew that Iraq Didn’t Have WMDs

Everyone knew the WMD claims were fake.

For example, Tony Blair – the British Prime Minister – knew that Saddam possessed no WMDs. If America’s closest ally Britain knew, then the White House knew as well.

And the number 2 Democrat in the Senate -who was on the Senate intelligence committee – admitted that the Senate intelligence committee knew before the war started that Bush’s public statements about Iraqi WMDs were false. If the committee knew, then the White House knew as well.

But we don’t even have to use logic to be able to conclude that the White House knew.

Specifically, the former highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe says that Bush, Cheney and Rice were personally informed that Iraq had no WMDs in Fall 2002 (and see this).”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/everyone-knew-that-iraq-didnt-have-wmds.html

6. “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does  the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations  faced by President Obama today.   So far, at least, Obama’s behavior has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace.  He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it” – not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom?  These are the key questions.  If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established.  If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA . Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded.  In this regard,  it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm  which operates according to its own rules.  “Let me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought  I’d hear myself saying this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.”  He then recommended Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16273

7.  What a viciously stupid man:

“John Bolton is the prototypical right-wing pseudo-tough-guy:  cheering on every war he can find without ever getting near any of them.  And as usual for this strain of play-acting, chest-beating warrior, all of the belligerence and craving of vicarious power masks a deep and pitiful cowardice.  That is often the principal purpose of warmongering from a distance.  Yesterday, Bolton — on “Washington Times Radio” — revealed that he is so petrified of Terrorists that he would not feel safe in New York City during the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and would not even allow his family there
…

The cowardice on display here is difficult to overstate — and to behold without being ill.  I lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and for many years thereafter.  For weeks — even months and years after that attack — it was widely assumed that New York would be a likely target for another attack, but I never heard a single New Yorker — not one — talk about fleeing the city or hiding their family in some faraway place.  During the 2004 election, New Yorkers voted for the candidate who wanted to treat Terrorism like a law enforcement problem over the pseudo-tough-guy “war president” by a margin of 80-20.  The fears engulfing Bolton and which he’s attempting to infect the country with are found almost exclusively among this species of war-mongers obsessed with flamboyant — and very public — rituals where they proclaim their own “strength” and “courage.”

John Bolton and his comrades love to run around accusing anyone who doesn’t want to wage more wars of being an “appeaser“ and “surrendering“ to Terrorists, but Bolton’s cry here is the ultimate, definitive surrender:  I’m too scared of the Terrorists to go about my normal life. I’m too petrified even to have my family in the same city as a terrorist trial.  We can’t adhere to our normal political system because the Terrorists will kill us all.
…
All over the world, countries have put terrorists on trial in their largest and most important cities — London, Madrid, Mumbai, Denpasar (the capital of Bali).  That’s because their countries weren’t flooded by meek, frightened little men like John Bolton who want to send their fellow citizens to bomb and invade as many countries as they can find in order to conceal and compensate for the suffocating cowardice revealed by both his life and these comments.  It’s a natural human instinct to try to prove to the world that one possesses exactly those characteristics which one most lacks — which is why right-wing warriors of the type represented by John Bolton are so desperate to prove their Churchillian courage and resolve, always from the safest and most risk-free distances.

Quite related to all of this, Brad at Sadly, No examines what he calls American elites’ “nationalist narcissism. They believe not only that America has the right and the duty to be the ‘dominant’ country in the world, but that every other country in the world should be talking forever about how wonderful we are.”  It’s not hard to understand the source of their need to constantly have affirmed what Newsweek’s Howard Fineman this week calls “our special destiny” as he frets that Obama is failing to salvage it by not keeping the U.S. at the Center of the World.  It’s the same need that makes John Bolton and his comrades endlessly try to prove to the world how tough and brave they are even as they hide from and cower before Terrorists.  There are many reasons why America is a country perpetually at war, but this warped and broken psychological state — weak and frightened individuals cheering on faraway wars as a means of feeling tough and strong, all justified by our own Supreme Specialness — is one of the leading causes.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

8.  “Get Ready for the Obama/GOP Alliance
With President Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it’s not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.

There’s another frightening parallel: Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who accomplished perhaps his single biggest legislative “triumph” — NAFTA — thanks to an alliance with Republicans that overcame strong Democratic and grassroots opposition.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24064.htm

9.  “Several months ago, CNN published the results of a couple of disturbing polls about Americans and their religious beliefs. The first found that more Americans are rejecting religion and thus, according to CNN, America is becoming “less Christian.” The second, a Pew survey of only 742 mostly white evangelical Protestants, revealed that more than six in 10 of them believe that torture is often or sometimes justified.

More than six in 10? What this says about those claiming to be God’s own is that perhaps they should use their Bibles for more than “thumping.” Because not one in 10 — not one in 10 thousand — not one in 10 million — Christians believes that torture can ever be justified. Ever.

Anyone who has paid attention to the growing number of evangelical zealots over the past couple of decades must be aware that there is a growing chasm between Religion and Christianity. Today, the term, “religious Christians” is nothing if not oxymoronic. It seems when folks become apocalyptic frothing-at-the-mouth religious, they ultimately stray from the light and life of Christianity, while descending deeper into the darkness and death of Religion.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24056.htm

10.  “Any would-be rogue, hawking vengeance towards her own campaign and grievance against the mass media, unified by absurd tall tales, invites parallels to like-minded rogues. Sarah Palin is indebted to Richard Nixon (for ruthless ambition, dishonesty), Joe McCarthy (moral crusades, dishonesty), Dubya (cheerleading, unfitness, dishonesty), and Dick Cheney (demagoguery, dishonesty). On the positive side, Palin parallels Oprah (celebrity, showmanship), Evita (melodrama, populism), Carrie Prejean (sexy rule breaking), and Annie Oakley (folksy spunkiness, defying critics).

Even beyond winning elections, Sarah Palin wants stardom; her book overtly embraces show personalities; and instinctively, she goes for glitz and duplicity (even lying, to believe McCain and staff).

But when did truth (or reality) impede show business, establishing Palin’s best spiritual mentor as no other than P.T. Barnum, the 19th Century circus barker and con man, whose outlandish publicity triumphs became the “Greatest Show on Earth,” aptly Barnum and Bailey Circus. Palin’s circus obeys Barnum’s model, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Plus adages, “If you hesitate, some bolder hand will stretch out before you and get the prize” and “Without promotion something terrible happens . . . Nothing!”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24062.htm

1.  “His approach of asking questions and putting the burden of proof on the Establishment is good. If the Establishment can’t give us a coherent account, without holes, that answers the normal questions, and is backed by credible, verifiable evidence, why should the public, who the govt is supposed to be accountable to, buy it? Why should the Establishment be allowed to use their tissue of lies to justify anything, let alone wars, a police state and the subversion of the Constitution. People might assume it’s only a little incompetence and criminal negligence that’s being covered up- but even this doesn’t stand up to the evidence that’s already in the public record. Examining 9/11 in any detail leads naturally to the conclusion there’s something monstrously criminal being covered up, and this is not tolerable in a democratic Republic. Actually, studying 9/11 leads naturally to the conclusion is that an ‘inside job’ is being covered up, with the defacto collusion of Congress, the corporate media, and the elite investor class that owns them.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21951

2.  “Liberalism, in its modern incarnation, is intellectually bankrupt, and has been for quite some time, but it took the ascension to power of a decidedly liberal administration to highlight the demise of its moral authority. Young people looking for a comprehensive view of life, a principled perspective on the events shaping their world, are not going to find it in the cost-benefit analyses of dried-up Washington policy wonks who balance the economic “benefits” of mass murder against the weight of the dead. “

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/24/who-will-protest-obamas-war/

3.  “Arrests are being made ‘to expand DNA files’

Recorded crime has fallen every year since 2004-05, but the number of people arrested in England and Wales annually is rising. Latest figures show that arrests rose by 6 per cent to 1.43 million in 2005 and a further 4 per cent to 1.48 million in 2006-07.

Professor Montgomery said there was some evidence that people were arrested to retain the DNA information even though they might not have been arrested in other circumstance.

He said that a retired senior police officer told the commission: “It is now the norm to arrest offenders for everything if there is a power to do so. It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons . . . is so that DNA can be obtained.” He said that the tradition of only arresting someone when dealing with serious offences had collapsed.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6929017.ece

4.  “The Fed Doesn’t Want Banks to Increase Lending

Read that carefully and realize this: An apparently not insignificant portion of the FOMC believes that there is a terrible risk that banks loosen their credit standards and increase lending at a time when, even if the economy posts expected gain, unemployment remains at unacceptably high levels. Silly me, I thought increased lending was the whole point of the exercise to lower interest and expand the balance sheet. That whole credit channel thing. If not to expand lending during a credit crunch, then what else are they expecting?

I am in shock that this sentence made it into the minutes. One can only conclude that a significant portion of policymakers are simply clueless. Or, more disconcerting, they have lost all faith in the ability of financial institutions to channel capital into activities with any hope of financial returns. Has the Fed now embraced the view that they manage the economy through little else then fueling and extinguishing bubbles?

…

These statement is an indication of intellectual bankruptcy at the Fed, that they have learned nothing from the crisis. But that isn’t surprising. CEOs usually need to be fired after they have presided over a disaster. They are incapable of seeing and remedying their errors. Why should senior bureaucrats be any different?”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/fed-doesnt-want-banks-to-increase.html

5.  “Will Christmas Shopping Save Us? As “Black Friday” Nears, New Questions About an Economic Recovery That Isn’t

Why is this happening? Paul Farrell offers 15 reasons on Marketwatch about how the people behind the economic collapse continue to get away with it.

Here are 5 of them.

“1. Gross denial of any moral damage caused by their rampant greed

2. Narcissistic egomaniacs with secret ‘God complexes’

Today, all of Wall Street is dual diagnosed: They’re morally blind money addicts who believe they’re “God’s chosen.” AA would say: They haven’t “bottomed,” won’t recover from their disease till a disaster hits, with another market meltdown and the “Great Depression 2.” Then maybe they’ll “quit playing God.”

3. Paranoid obsessives about secrecy, guilt and non-disclosure

4. Power-hungry need to control government using Trojan Horses

5. Borderline personalities who regularly ignore conflicts of interest”

He goes on with an indictment that clearly suggests nothing has really changed when it comes to the folks who are making money when others aren’t.

So we go back to square one: A distorted and troubled economy. A population addicted to buying things. A manipulated media. And, many signs of deeper trouble ahead as wars are escalated and Congress is paralyzed along parochial and partisan lines.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16268

1.  “The chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee in 2001 told investigators Monday that elements of the Bush Administration were pushing for regime change in Iraq in early 2001, months before the 9/11 attacks and two years before President George W. Bush formally announced the Iraq war.
…

British investigators are probing how Britain got into the Iraq war and if officials misled the public. Already, a leaked report has shown that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair covered up British military plans for a full Iraq invasion throughout 2002, claiming at the time that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change.”

According to Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, the leaked report condemns the almost complete absence of contingency planning as a potential breach of Geneva Convention obligations to safeguard civilians. Coalition forces were “ill-prepared and equipped to deal with the problems in the first 100 days” of the occupation.

Blair’s lies to Parliament and the public, widespread problems with the Army’s supply chain and radio systems, and poor planning for “once Baghdad had fallen” are now confirmed in the public eye.

Particularly egregious are statements Blair made to Parliament in the build up to the invasion. On Sept 24, 2002, Mr. Blair told members of the British Parliament, “In respect of any military options, we are not at the stage of deciding those options but, of course, it is important — should we get to that point — that we have the fullest possible discussion of those options.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21949

2.  “Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
…
The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it’s the contractors’ fault, not the government’s. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. “We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention,” said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. “In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it’s almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations.” Addicott added, “If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That’s one of the reasons we’re not members of the International Criminal Court.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091207/scahill

3.  “Why They Hate Us (I): on military occupation

One of the many barriers to developing a saner U.S. foreign policy is our collective failure to appreciate why military occupations generate so much hatred, resentment, and resistance, and why we should therefore go to enormous lengths to avoid getting mired in them. Costly occupations are an activity you hope your adversaries undertake, especially in areas of little intrinsic strategic value. We blundered into Somalia in the early 1990s without realizing that we weren’t welcome; we invaded Iraq thinking we would be greeted as liberators, and we still don’t fully understand why many Afghans resent our presence and why some are driven to take up arms against us.
…
It is sometimes said that Americans don’t understand this phenomenon because the United States has never been conquered and occupied. But this simply isn’t true. After the Civil War, a “foreign army” occupied the former Confederacy and imposed a new political order that most white southerners found abhorrent. The first Reconstruction Act of 1867 put most southern states under formal military control, supervised the writing of new state constitutions, and sought to enfranchise and empower former slaves. It also attempted to rebuild the south economically, but the reconstruction effort was undermined by corruption and poor administration. Sound familiar? However laudable the aims may have been, the results were precisely what one would expect. Northern occupation eventually triggered violent resistance by the Ku Klux Klan, White League, Red Shirts, and other insurgent groups, which helped thwart Reconstruction and paved the way for the Jim Crow system that lasted until the second half of the 20th century.
…
The bottom line is that you don’t need to be a sociologist, political scientist, or a student of colonialism or foreign cultures to understand why military occupation is such a poisonous activity and why it usually fails. If you’re an American, you just need to read a bit about Reconstruction and reflect on how its effects — along with the effects of slavery itself — have persisted across generations. If that’s not enough, visit a society that is currently experiencing occupation, and take the time to go through a checkpoint or two. Then you might understand why the local population doesn’t view the occupying forces as benevolent and isn’t as grateful as occupiers often think they ought to be. “

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/23/on_military_occupation

4.  “A hawk who claims the State can properly command the resources of its own citizens to invade or attack the citizens of another State confronts a very high bar of proof. And it is important to understand that the burden of proof is upon the hawk and not upon critics; in other words, the burden falls upon the person who advocates a process that kills non-combatants and not upon those who fundamentally object to the death of innocent human beings.”

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.2872

5.  “Have Israeli spies infiltrated international airports? South Africa deports airline official after investigation

South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16242

6.  “Canada ’s Guantanamo

A scandal erupted last week in sleepy Ottawa with the revelations of Canada’s chief diplomat in Kandahar in 2006-07, Richard Colvin, who told a House of Commons committee on Afghanistan that Afghans arrested by Canadian military and handed over to Afghan authorities were knowingly tortured. His and others’ attempts to raise the alarm had been quashed by the ruling Conservative government and he felt a moral obligation to make public what was happening.

The startling allegations — the first of their kind from a senior official — have caused extreme embarrassment to the government, which has more than once stated categorically detainees were not passed to Afghan control if there was any danger of torture. Canada has 2,700 soldiers in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the hotbed of the insurgency, on a mission that is due to end in 2011.

Warnings to Colvin to keep quiet were not enough to cow him and he calmly told shocked MPs that he started sending reports soon after he arrived in Kandahar in early 2006 to top officials indicating the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) was abusing detainees. “For a year and half after they knew about the very high risk of torture, they continued to order military police in the field to hand our detainees to the NDS.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16259

7.  “By embracing and defending numerous Bush/Cheney policies he once deplored, “Obama hasn’t changed, just adjusted.”  He’s learned secret things that he can’t tell you about but which — you should accept — do justify his “adaptations.”  Whenever Bush followers would run out of arguments to defend their leader’s actions, that’s the same rationale they’d resort to:   he knows secret things that you don’t know and therefore we should trust him.   So Obama has “learned” things that caused him to abandon his vehement condemnations of indefinite detention, state secrets, military commissions and denial of habeas corpus as unjust and un-American travesties and come to embrace them as important and necessary policies?   Wow:  that must have been quite an education.  Don’t he and his supporters owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a sincere apology for criticizing them all those years for these policies when, as it turns out, they were necessary and just all along?
…
Whether Obama has adopted every last radical Bush/Cheney terrorism policy — he hasn’t — is not the point.  And the question of whether “Obama is as bad as Bush” — he isn’t — is no more relevant than the excuse that Bush’s torture program shouldn’t be criticized because at least it never reached the level of Saddam’s rape rooms and limb removals.  As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration.  And it’s flatly inconsistent to invoke “the rule of law” to defend Obama’s decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he’s violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.
…
McClatchy reports that Obama has made a decision to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan which, if true, means, as Juan Cole says, that “Gen. Stanley McChrystal has won the struggle for policy decisively.”

So, to recap:  we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus.  These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

8.  “Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and four alleged co-conspirators.

The Republican and right-wing rant that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have written for a number of years: Republicans and many Americans who think of themselves as conservatives have no regard for the US Constitution or for civil liberties. They have no appreciation for the point made by Thomas Paine in his Dissertations on First Principles of Government (1790): “An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Republicans and American conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They assume that police and prosecutors are morally pure and, in addition, never make mistakes. An accused person is guilty or government wouldn’t have accused him. All of my life I have heard self-described conservatives disparage lawyers who defend criminals. Such “conservatives” live in an ideal, not real, world. They desperately need to read The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
…
The price that Mohammed will pay will be small compared to the price we Americans will pay. The outcome of Mohammed’s trial will complete the transformation of the US legal system from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. Feige writes that Mohammed’s statements obtained by torture will not be suppressed, that witnesses against him will not be produced (“national security”), that documents that compromise the prosecution will be redacted.

At each stage of Mohammed’s appeals process, higher courts will enshrine into legal precedents the denial of the Constitutional right to a speedy trial, thus enshrining indefinite detention, the denial of the right against damning pretrial publicity, thus allowing demonization prior to trial, and the denial of the right to have witnesses and documents produced, thus eviscerating a defendant’s rights to exculpatory evidence and to confront adverse witnesses, The twisted logic necessary to disentangle Mohammed’s torture from his confession will also be upheld and will “provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time–a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.” http://www.slate.com/id/2236146

It took Hitler a while to corrupt the German courts. Hitler first had to create new courts, like President George W. Bush’s military tribunals, that did not require evidence, using in place of evidence hearsay, secret charges, and self-incrimination obtained by torture.

Every American should be concerned that the Obama administration has decided to use Mohammed’s trial to complete the corruption of the American court system. When Mohammed’s trial is over, an American Joe Stalin or Adolf Hitler will be able to convict America’s Founding Fathers on charges of treason and terrorism. No one will be safe.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24040.htm

9.  “

The Indian [was thought] as less than human and worthy only of extermination. We did shoot down defenseless men, and women and children at places like Camp Grant, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee. We did feed strychnine to red warriors. We did set whole villages of people out naked to freeze in the iron cold of Montana winters. And we did confine thousands in what amounted to concentration camps. — Wellman, The Indian Wars of the West, 1934

European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24039.htm

10.  “In a similar vein, I am sure that many European immigrants, who came to America during the last three hundred years, thought that they, too, were carrying out positive actions when they eradicated indigenous tribes at the behest of their community leaders. I am, also, convinced that many of those conducting the killings felt relieved that such a strange scourge (as the “dirty savages” seemed to be) was systematically obliterated. Indeed, there probably was little remorse on the part of the majority of the butchers as the so-called Indians were viewed as subhuman, just as were Blacks, Jews, Asians and many other persecuted peoples in this country. Indeed, the killers’ sense of identity, doubtlessly, was strengthened individually and as members of a culturally cohesive unit (i.e., an exclusive social assemblage) in the process of carrying out their communally sanctioned, xenophobic brutality.

In this manner, the murderers managed to avoid acknowledging any sense of shared and universal humanity in the maligned others with whom they refused to identify. As such, they recognized few, if any, commonalities. Instead they called the natives alienating terms (such as “blood thirsty vermin,” “Indian giver” and “scalpers”) that further strengthened a feeling of estrangement, made it easier to destroy them and assigned them to the position of “The Other,” an unfortunate and dangerous category in which to be placed.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24044.htm

1.  “The Democrats’ War Tax

David Obey, chairman of the influential Appropriations Committee, John Murtha, who chairs the Defense Subcommittee, and Barney Frank, the banksters’ catamite who heads up the House Financial Services Committee, have proposed the “Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010” – and isn’t that a title worthy of Atlas Shrugged’s mealy-mouthed villains? In this “share-the-shafting” version of the Democrats’ war tax, everyone is conscripted into paying for our foreign policy of endless war, including those who are least able to afford it. If you make “up to $150,000″ a year you would have to pay an extra 1 percent. The balance will come from those who make more. Now that’s real egalitarianism for you: all must suffer, none are spared, because… well, don’t you know there’s a war on?

What – you’re against a tax hike? You’re no doubt a terrorist sympathizer, or, perhaps, even an agent of al-Qaeda.

I can hardly wait for the Democrats to employ this type of rhetoric, memorializing the neocon charge, made during the post-9/11 madness, that opponents of invading Afghanistan and Iraq constituted a “fifth column” – oh, wait, it’s already happened. (Andrew Sullivan, who made just that accusation against the antiwar movement, can now hurl the same charge at tax opponents, since he seems to have switched sides, or parties, in the meantime. Oh, the advantages of ideological ambidexterity!)

…

The greasy evasiveness of the Obey-Murtha-Frank tax-’em triumvirate is epitomized in their joint statement, which declares: “Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for.” This is one of those oh-so-serious-sounding aphorisms, popular in Washington, which have neither moral sense nor logical consistency. If you’re a member of Congress who opposes the war, why then are you voting to fund it – and in what sense, other than a purely Platonic one, can such legislators claim to be war opponents? “
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/22/the-democrats-war-tax/

2.  Of course he is:

“The key question – is Blair a war criminal?”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/oliver-miles-the-key-question-ndash-is-blair-a-war-criminal-1825374.html

3.  “Once conservatives became embarrassed by their cowardly warnings that we would all be killed if we held a 9/11 trial in New York, they switched to a new argument:  trials in a real court would lead to the disclosure of classified information that would help the Terrorists.  In advancing this claim, they relied on the always-unhinged rantings of National Review’s Andy McCarthy — who has also suggested that Bill Ayers was the real author of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father”; attacked his own editors for pointing out the falsehoods of Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claims, which McCarthy insisted were true; defended the Birther movement and dissented from NR’s editorial rejection of it; and was excoriated by Rich Lowry for claiming that Obama “rather likes tyrants and dislikes America.”  This person — someone who is often too fringe, hysterical and delusional even for National Review — is the “legal expert” on which the Right is relying to claim that real trials will jeopardize classified information.
…
Does that sound like a judicial process incapable of concealing secrets, or does it sound more like a Star Chamber where the justice system operates in the dark, even to shield government torture and illegal prisons from disclosure?  Many federal judges — particularly in criminal cases — are notorious for being highly sympathetic to the government.  That’s even more true in a case involving one of the most hated criminal defendants ever to be tried in an American court, sitting a very short distance from the site where he is alleged to have killed 3,000 people in a terrorist attack.  And note that the law permits the judge no discretion:  if the Government claims something is classified, then “the court shall issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information.”  With some exceptions, ever since the “War on Terror” began, nobody has safeguarded government secrets as dutifully and subserviently as federal judges — even when those secrets involve allegations of war crimes and other serious felonies.  That’s what DOJ officials mean when they keep praising Southern District of New York judges for their supreme competence and expertise in handling terrorism cases.  Federal courts in general love to keep what is supposed to be their open proceedings a secret, but that instinct is magnified exponentially in national security and terrorism cases.

Even during the Bush years, numerous defendants accused of terrorist acts were tried and convicted in federal courts — John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ali al-Marri, Jose Padilla.  Those spewing the latest right-wing scare tactic (Osama bin Laden will learn everything if we have trials!) cannot point to a single piece of classified information that was disclosed as a result of any of these trials.  If that were a legitimate fear, wouldn’t they be able to?  Like most American institutions, our federal court system is empowered to shield from public disclosure anything the government claims is secret. Just look at the extreme measures invoked in the Ghailani case to see how true that is.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

1.  “Perhaps KSM is also a magician, and used voodoo to make WTC 7 fall at partial freefall, to make jet fuel “switch elevators” on its way to the lobby, and to then spring the jet fuel over to WTC 7. Perhaps he used magic to persuade the FBI to drop their surveillance of the 1993 bombers, and to fill the towers with nano-thermite. Perhaps KSM used voodoo to vaporize lead and steel in the towers, and to hide Saddam’s mysterious WMD.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21923

2.  What a grotesque charade:

“Albania: Town to Unveil Statue of President Bush”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/world/europe/21briefs-Albania.html?_r=1&ref=world

3.  “USA Today undermines the entire master narrative of US/NATO military operations in Afghanistan, writing: “The U.S. military says the vast majority of the 700 detainees at its biggest prison in Afghanistan could eventually be released because they’re fighting more for money than ideology.”

War hawks are always saying we are there to fight the Taliban because they are ideologically aligned with and inseparable from al-Qaeda. But the guys we’ve been fighting and imprisoning seem just to be poor schmucks looking to make a buck by militia activity.”

http://www.juancole.com/

4.  “Wells Fargo Says It Doesn’t Have to Reserve Against Its Off-Balance Sheet Residential Exposure Because the FHA (Meaning the Taxpayers) Will Pay For It

WFC is basically saying that none of the bank’s $1.1 trillion in conforming OBS [off balance sheet] exposures need to be represented or reserved against.
…
Bottom line: Wells Fargo is saying that since the FHA – that is, the government, that is, the taxpayers – will bail out Wells for loans that go bad, the giant bank doesn’t have to reserve against these possible losses.

Yes, Wells is as bad as the other too big to fails. See this, this, this and this.”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/wells-fargo-says-it-doesnt-have-to.html

5.  “Why we fight”: The Nature of Modern Imperialism

Aggressive and exclusive military alliances like NATO should be disbanded

Alan McKinnon shows that the UK and US ‘defence’ policy is in fact a ‘projection of power’ policy with the primary purpose of defending the commercial interests of transnational companies

The Gulf area still accounts for up to 70 per cent of known oil reserves where the costs of production are lowest. So it is no surprise that US policy continues to focus on Iran which has the world’s second largest combined oil and gas reserves.

The US response has been largely military – the expansion of NATO and the encirclement of Russia and China in a ring of hostile bases and alliances. And continuing pressure to isolate and weaken Iran by a campaign of sanctions orchestrated through the IAEA and the United Nations with the threat of military action lurking in the background. The danger is that, even under the presidency of Obama, an economically weakened United States will tend to use the one massive advantage it has over its rivals – its global war machine.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16210

1.  “The outline of the talk was simply to look at ten characteristics of planned, explosive demolition, and see how the collapses aligned with them (with side by side videos of the collapses and known demolitions) as compared with characteristics of collapses due to fire, which is the official cause – even though no high rise steel frame buildings have ever collapsed due to fire.

I already knew most of what was presented, but a number of his videos of the tower collapses very clearly showed explosive nature of the collapses and the squibs blowing out the side of the buildings just below the collapse zone, but also much further down.

The new info I had not heard of, and there were quite a few photos of this, were large sections of the outer steel framework – weighing 20 tons or so – stuck in the sides of surrounding buildings, blasted out of the towers around 600 feet at an estimated speed of 70mph. These sections were apparently not from the higher parts of the towers but from lower down where more force was required eject them to where they ended up.

…

Why in the world would any firefighter or first responder be allowed to enter a burning giant office building, if buildings are known to collapse into dust in a matter of seconds with no warning?

…

Debunkers know a lot and ask some intelligent questions but turn willingful ignorant when it comes to relevant facs and implications.
THIS MAKES NO SENSE when you are looking for the truth.

…

It seems most professional people particularly in the engineering trades once confronted with scientific forensics concerning the liabilities created by the official story are full on for a real investigation. Professionals in the trades such as Van Romero, and the people at NIST with jobs to lose or grants denied in the case of Van Romero at New Mexico School of Mines, change their stories from condemnatory in tone to one of acquittal of any govt responsibility. Van Romero stated on national television these looked like controlled demolitions. He essentially said what anyone using common sense would think, that a steel building of any type doesn’t just turn to dust. If it does collapse, If by some infinitesimally small chance a huge steel building just collapsed IT WOULDN’T happen symmetrical, and IT WOULDN’T HAPPEN THREE TIMES by any stretch of the imagination.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21913

2.  “Should Obama Fire Gen. McChrystal?

It is not too late for President Barack Obama to follow the example of Harry Truman, who fired the famous Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for insubordination. Then, as now, the stakes were high. Then it was Korea; now it is Afghanistan.

…

Today, Gen. McChrystal is conducting a subtler but equally insubordinate campaign for a wider war in Afghanistan, with the backing of CENTCOM commander David Petraeus.

It is clear in retrospect that President Obama either should not have appointed McChrystal or should have at least taken the telegenic general to the woodshed regarding leaks of his troop recommendations, rather than inviting him to confer quietly on Air Force One seven weeks ago.

…

In my view, Obama should fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal.”
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2009/11/20/should-obama-fire-gen-mcchrystal/

3.  ” Once again, as always, we have to take a side! “Trying these bastards as if they were human beings is an insult to our great nation! Anyone who attacked us the way they did is a monster! So we should treat them like monsters! Pronounce the death sentence and kill the SOBs!” Versus: “Trying them in federal court shows just what a great nation we are! Yes, they’re monsters, but we are so strong, so virtuous, and so, so, so good that we accord even monsters justice in the same way we do everyone else! Truly we are the best that ever was or ever will be!”

You see the critical point of common agreement: the United States is the bestest ever, in this and every other universe. God, we love us. Verily, ’tis a romance for the ages.
…
And: “Failure is not an option.” That is deep. Isn’t that what the Bush administration said about Iraq? Isn’t that what everyone says about Afghanistan? Isn’t that what our solons told us about why we had to bail out the Wall Street criminals? “Failure is not an option” is the way they seek to compel you to obey, to force you to do whatever the hell they’re demanding today. That’s all. It is, you might say, a vicious, goddamned lie, one of the worst lies that those who would control our lives ever tell.

Of course this will be a show trial.
…
One other aspect of this sordid business merits discussion. Events of recent years have often caused me to note one especially bathetic element of the mythologies with which most Americans, including our political leaders, suffocate themselves. We insist on our fairy tales, on our immovable conviction that no matter what destructive acts we commit, regardless of how monstrous our policies may be, there will always be a happy ending. Thus, as just one example, the United States government and its military murder more than one million innocent people — but we still convince ourselves that the outcome justifies the slaughter, that it was “worth it.”
…
The judicial refusal to consider KSM’s years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM’s initial torture from his subsequent “clean team” statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.“

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/11/hey-i-know-lets-put-on-show-trial.html

4.  ” A lesbian soldier who deserted the U.S. army won a key court victory Friday when a judge ordered the refugee board to reconsider her failed asylum claim and take into account compelling evidence that she was persecuted and that her sexual orientation could mean stiffer punishment for going AWOL.

Federal Court Justice Yves de Montigny’s order for the board to consider a gay U.S. soldier as a credible refugee candidate is believed to be a first,
…
Smith, who says she was outed by another soldier who spotted her walking hand-in-hand with a woman at a shopping mall, contends in court documents that she was badgered daily, saddled with extra work by her superiors and received more than 100 threatening notes on her dormitory door, including a death threat.”

http://www.canada.com/life/Lesbian%2Bsoldier%2Bwins%2Basylum/2246070/story.html

5.  It’s NEVER a good idea to humanize murderers:

“The child of Auschwitz’s Kommandant

But whatever improvement he represented, when measured against the worst Auschwitz kommandants, these were in the end only “minor differences”, he argues.

Liebehenschel still participated in genocide and countless innocent people were sent to their deaths during his time there.

…

Former Auschwitz prisoner Wladyslaw Fejkiel said that during Liebehenschel’s command “there were no positive changes for the care of the prisoners, related to food or medications. The sanitary conditions remained insufficient…”

He reports that Liebehenschel asked to be told about prisoners in poor health so that they could be considered first among those to be released from the camp. But he adds that he did “not know of a single case of those prisoners brought to his attention who were therefore released”.

Barbara stresses that she is not attempting to excuse her father’s actions, that she is appalled by what the Nazis did. Her aim is to paint a three-dimensional picture, of a kind rarely given of Nazi war criminals, including the good as well as the bad.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8210135.stm

6.  “Tories, Liberals, compete to demonstrate blind support for Israel

In light of the UN Goldstone report – produced following Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza last winter – which detailed extensive evidence that Israel committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, unquestioning Canadian support for Israel contradicts its traditional support for human rights and support for international law. Woodley continues, “I find it very difficult to believe that at a time when the majority of the international community is calling for investigations into what happened during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, our leaders are arguing over which party is more blindly supportive of Israel.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16203

7.  “”Criminals”?  ”Prosecutions”?  ”Obliged to open a case”?  ”Violations of human rights”?  Just because they maintained a few secret prisons in violation of domestic and international law?  What kind of crazy, purist, Far Leftist utopians are running that place?  They need a heavy dose of pragmatism so they can understand all the reasons why so-called ”crimes” like this can be overlooked — just blissfully forgotten like a bad dream.  Even worse, with intemperate and shrill language of the type they’re throwing around, it’s seems clear that the Lithuanian press is sorely in need of some David Broders, Fred Hiatts, and David Ignatiuses to explain to them that subjecting law-breaking political officials to “investigations” and “prosecutions” is quite disruptive and unpleasant when those crimes involve matters other than consensual sex between adults.
…

Thankfully, the U.S. remains a bastion of pragmatic sanity in this rising sea of accountability extremism.  Unlike those strange Eastern Europeans and absolutist Western European purist judges, we know there are far more important priorities than “investigating” war crimes, compelling transparency, and holding political criminals accountable.  As the rest of the world gets distracted by all this chatter about The Past, our President gallantly protects us from such divisive unpleasantries by aggressively blocking any war crimes investigations and concealing evidence — even modifying decades-old transparency laws to do so if necessary.  Even more inspiring, our patriotic media enthusiastically plays a crucial helping role; The Washington Post has known since 2005 in exactly which countries the CIA maintained its illegal, secret prisons but still refuses to say, even though they’ve now been banned by Executive Order and even though Lithuania and Poland are launching investigations which the Post could easily answer, but chooses not to.

When President Obama was in China last week, he proudly boasted of the American commitment to transparency and lamented that China lacked such values.  Fortunately, he doesn’t get carried away with “principles” the way that these short-sighted Lithuanians and Polish and others do.  Unlike those unhinged primitive nations with no democratic traditions, we understand that government crimes should be disclosed, investigated and punished only when they occur during a time other than the Past.  It’s vital that we maintain our leadership role in teaching this critical value to the world, lest the type of crazed accountability/rule-of-law fetish currently engulfing Lithuania spreads even further like some uncontrollable virus.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

1.  More military lies and bad faith:

“Army limits media access at Palin event at NC base

The main reason is to stop this from turning into a political platform,” said Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum. “There are Army regulations that basically prohibit military reservations from becoming political platforms by politicians.”

AP Associate General Counsel Dave Tomlin called the proposed pools and restrictions on interviews “unlawful and unacceptable.”

“If Army regulations forbid ‘political events’, the Army should have considered that before allowing Palin to hold a public autograph session for a political book on the base,” Tomlin said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091120/ap_on_en_ot/us_palin_fort_bragg

2.  ” US trained butchers of Timor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/sep/19/indonesia.easttimor1

3.  “What Is So Patriotic About Hysteria?

The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots. They claim to be the deepest believers in our system, the strongest defenders of our Constitution, the most upbeat, bold and courageous Americans anywhere. But now that the government is finally prepared to put the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on trial, these same patriots are the first to spread doubt, instigate anxiety and abandon constitutional principles.

When did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try al-Qaida strategist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other residents of the Guantanamo prison in American civilian courts has provoked angry criticism from all the usual sources, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Fox News airwaves. While some of the complaints are thoughtful, many are nothing more than demagogic appeals that seek to undermine the foundations of justice in a democratic society.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_is_so_patriotic_about_hysteria_20091118/

4.  “Why are we in Afghanistan? To start, we can dismiss the preposterous argument advanced by Obama’s most aggressive advisers about defending our country against “terrorism” in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida is nothing if not decentralized, and its adherents are still perfectly capable of attacking the United States from Canada, Boston, Hamburg, or Fort Hood. Anyway, terrorism, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated in Oklahoma City, can originate with the nice young white man next door who shops at the gun store around the corner. “Fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan “to prevent another 9/11” simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers.

No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being “soft on terror” in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as “humanitarian interventionists” — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s “civilizing” mission in the world includes not only establishing “democracy” but also “freeing” Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick18_11-18-09_5DGFNCP_v9.3f8b504.html

5.  “The trial of the Gitmo defendants isn’t going to be about the rule of law, it isn’t motivated by the Obama administration’s liberal idealism, and it most certainly won’t signify anything as rational as putting an end to the “war on terrorism” and treating Al Qaeda the same way we treated the Mafia and Cosa Nostra, i.e. as a floating international criminal conspiracy rather than a stationary military threat. What it will be about is generating war propaganda, positioning the Obama-ites as “tough”on terrorism and serious about national security.

Here’s the narrative the Justice Department will spin out, as the trial – surely to be one of the most closely-watched in recent memory — progresses: the defendants, hiding in their Pakistani-Afghan “safe haven,” were able to plot the 9/11 attacks, and future terrorist acts, from a safe distance, until we swooped in (or, rather, the ISI swooped in, but never mind that … ) and wrecked their plans. The whole legal procedure should be fairly close to its seemingly inevitable verdict just as the debate over the Afghan war reaches an acrimonious crescendo – yet another fortuitous coincidence, no doubt”

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/19/the-gitmo-trial-why-now/

6.  “I’m just really really impressed at how KSM has pulled himself together from his middle of the night capture in Pakistan back in ‘03….

we’re actually still treated to that “what time is it, what a night” look he had — very heavy set, stretched neck tshirt, wide face and uncontrolled hair…back in 03…. but what about his new “forget weight watchers try CIA reprogramming diet” new Mug shot they are showing now — in full head arab garb — thin – -and suddenly: HUGE EYES — and other facial features that DO NOT match the pakistan 03 pic.

the bottom line is the 911 commission used the info gleamed from torturing this guy to paint the 911 official narrative — NOBODY has ever seen him since that capture that even in 03 — newsmen commented that the whole event with pakistani police arresting him seemed very staged–

but now we have this picture of thin — elegantly dressed arab with big bambi eyes – with a “hello my name is KSM, I did it all” – -doesn’t make sense.

Obviously this other guy is a stooge – and they’re doing a “real trial ” to give the people “real theatre” — this is staged.

any other opinions about the photo differences here? Weight loss aside.. they don’t look a thing alike —

really, who is this guy with in the new picture?”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21903

7.  A great letter by Mr. Gibbs:

“Tucson Architect Jody Gibbs Invites Fellow Architects to a Showing of “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup”

http://911blogger.com/node/21910

8.  “The Washington establishment suffers a serious defeat

Grim details how key Committee Democrats such as Frank — who spent the year claiming to support an audit of the Fed in the face of rising anger over its secret and bank-subservient policies — suddenly introduced their own amendment (sponsored by Democratic Rep. Melvin Watt) that would have essentially gutted the Paul/Grayson provisions. Banking industry and Fed officials, as well as the Democratic leadership, then got behind that alternative provision as a means of pretending to support transparency while protecting the Fed from any genuine examination.
…
For that reason, many of the most consequential political conflicts are shaped far more by an “insider v. outsider” dichotomy than by a “GOP v. Democrat” or “Left v. Right” split.  The pillaging of America’s economic security by financial elites, with the eager assistance of the government officials who they own and who serve them, is the prime example of such a conflict.   The political system as a whole — both parties’ leadership — is owned and controlled by a handful of key industry interests, and anger over the fact is found across the political spectrum.  Yesterday’s vote is a very rare example where the true nature of political power was expressed and the petty distractions and artificial fault lines overcome.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

9.  “The American military has killed roughly two million people in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Those attacks were illegal–no declaration of war, no UN mandate–and are largely recognized as such by the American public. Many of the victims were killed with chemical and radioactive weapons, and some while under torture. In other words, these are crimes–some of the biggest mass murders in human history.

There are no angry editorials. The illegal wars, instead of being brought to an end, are being ramped up. The crimes–yes, including the torture–continues. But it’s OK–as long as it doesn’t happen here in the United States. It’s OK to rain death on Pakistanis using drone planes…gotta spare those precious American lives!

Mass murder is shocking when the victims are Americans; it’s doubly shocking when it happens in America.

Thirteen soldiers die in Texas and it’s all we talk about. Two million die in Afghanistan and Iraq and we don’t notice and we don’t even want to hear about it. Only 12 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Afghanistan on a map.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24011.htm