September 3, 2010

Additional Declassified U.S. Secret Service Records Describe Unidentified Aircraft Circling Washington, D.C. On 9/11

Additional Declassified U.S. Secret Service Records Describe Unidentified Aircraft Circling Washington, D.C. On 9/11

The following is a two page U.S. Secret Service Executive Summary included within a April 23, 2010 Freedom of Information Act release, describing the activities of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, families of the president and vice-president, threats against Air Force One and activity within the Presidential Emergency Operations Center on September 11, 2001. The Executive Summary report describes Secret Service reports of an unidentified aircraft circling Washington, D.C. and the activity of other noteworthy Secret Service protectees on September 11, 2001.

DOWNLOAD & READ DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS [pdf]:

http://www.mediafire.com/?7xie8kdglcdf468

Previously published documents [pdf]:

http://www.mediafire.com/?vydb4nxdmyy

NASA Flight Director Confirms 9/11 Aircraft Speed As Improbable

NASA Flight Director Confirms 9/11 Aircraft Speed As Improbable

NASA Flight Director Confirms 9/11 Aircraft Speed As The "Elephant In The Room"

06/22/2010 – (PilotsFor911Truth.org) Recently Pilots For 9/11 Truth have analyzed the speeds reported for the aircraft utilized on 9/11. Numerous aviation experts have voiced their concerns regarding the extremely excessive speeds reported above Maximum Operating for the 757 and 767, particularly, United and American Airlines 757/767 Captains who have actual flight time in all 4 aircraft reportedly used on 9/11. These experts state the speeds are impossible to achieve near sea level in thick air if the aircraft were a standard 757/767 as reported. Combined with the fact the airplane which was reported to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center was also producing high G Loading while turning and pulling out from a dive, the whole issue becomes incomprehensible to fathom a standard 767 can perform such maneuvers at such intense speeds exceeding Maximum Operating limits of the aircraft. Especially for those who research the topic thoroughly and have expertise in aviation.

Co-Founder of Pilots For 9/11 Truth Rob Balsamo recently interviewed a former NASA Flight Director in charge of flight control systems at the NASA Dryden Flight Research facility who is also speaking out after viewing the latest presentation by Pilots For 9/11 Truth – "9/11: World Trade Center Attack".

Retired NASA Senior Executive Dwain Deets published his concerns on the matter at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) as follows:

 


A Responsibility to Explain an Aeronautical Improbability
Dwain Deets
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (Senior Executive Service – retired)
AIAA Associate Fellow

The airplane was UA175, a Boeing 767-200, shortly before crashing into World Trade Center Tower 2. Based on analysis of radar data, the National Transportation and Safety Board reported the groundspeed just before impact as 510 knots. This is well beyond the maximum operating velocity of 360 knots, and maximum dive velocity of 410 knots. The possibilities as I see them are: (1) this wasn’t a standard 767-200; (2) the radar data was compromised in some manner; (3) the NTSB analysis was erroneous; or (4) the 767 flew well beyond its flight envelope, was controllable, and managed to hit a relatively small target. Which organization has the greater responsibility for acknowledging the elephant in the room? The NTSB, NASA, Boeing, or the AIAA? Have engineers authored papers, but the AIAA or NASA won’t publish them? Or, does the ethical responsibility lie not with organizations, but with individual aeronautical engineers? Have engineers just looked the other way?

The above entry remained at the moderated AIAA Aerospace America Forum for approximately two weeks before being removed without explanation. Click "Who is Ethically Responsible" submitted by Dwain Deets at the Pilots For 9/11 Truth Forum for discussion on this entry at AIAA.

Dwain Deets credentials and experience are as follows:

 

Dwain Deets
MS Physics, MS Eng
Former Director, Aerospace Projects, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
Served as Director, Research Engineering Division at Dryden
Recipient of the NASA Exceptional Service Award
Presidential Meritorious Rank Award in the Senior Executive Service (1988)
Selected presenter of the Wright Brothers Lectureship in Aeronautics
Associate Fellow – American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
Included in "Who’s Who in Science and Engineering" 1993 – 2000
Former Chairman of the Aerospace Control and Guidance Systems
– Committee of the Society of Automotive Engineers
Former Member, AIAA Committee on Society and Aerospace Technology
37 year NASA career

It is established based on corroborated expert statements, raw data, and precedent, that the extremely excessive speed reported for the 9/11 aircraft is truly the "Elephant In The Room" and needs to be thoroughly investigated.

For summary of speed analysis, please see article 9/11: Speeds Reported For World Trade Center Attack Aircraft Analyzed.

To view the scene from "9/11: World Trade Center Attack" analyzing the reported speeds in more detail, please click here.

For full detailed analysis covering the events which took place in New York City on September 11, 2001, interviews with experts, including analysis of "Hijacker" pilot skill, Black Box recovery and more… please view the latest presentation from Pilots For 9/11 Truth, "9/11: World Trade Center Attack".

Founded in August 2006, Pilots For 9/11 Truth is a growing organization of aviation professionals from around the globe. The organization has also analyzed Flight Data provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for the Pentagon Attack and the events in Shanksville, PA. The data does not support the government story. The NTSB/FBI refuse to comment. Pilots For 9/11 Truth do not offer theory or point blame at this point in time. However, there is a growing mountain of conflicting information and data in which government agencies and officials refuse to acknowledge. Pilots For 9/11 Truth Core member list continues to grow.

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/core.html for full member list.

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/join to join.

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9/11 Truth Movement Reaches Critical Mass at Santa Cruz “Deep Politics” Conference/ Barbara Honegger June 21

9/11 Truth Movement Reaches Critical Mass at Santa Cruz “Deep Politics” Conference/ Barbara Honegger June 21

http://www.ae911truth.org/news/41-articles/310-911-truth-movement-reache…

9/11 Truth Movement Reaches Critical Mass at Santa Cruz “Deep Politics” Conference

 

News News Releases By AE911Truth
Written by Barbara Honegger   
Monday, 21 June 2010 19:31

AE911Truth Spoken of by Several Presenters – Courted by Alternative Media

The spectacular explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling platform was a darkly resonant backdrop for the paradigm-challenging “Understanding Deep Politics” conference held in Santa Cruz, CA, May 14-16.

Just as everyone knows that the “real story” isn’t the fireball or even the massive slick on the surface, but the invisible deep source of the catastrophe, a critical mass of world Truth leaders came together to expose the deep and dark forces behind the staged explosions of 9/11, the ongoing geopolitical catastrophe they were used to justify, and the slick of official myths spread by the mainstream media to try to keep the American public from waking up and ending its collective nightmare.

The “Deep Politics” theme of the conference originated with one of the keynote speakers, University of California Berkeley Emeritus Professor Peter Dale Scott. Prof. Scott coined the term “deep politics” to refer to the covert “dark side” goals, means and operations of a hard-right “Western” military, intelligence, corporate and criminal cabal behind the series of engineered crises that have shaken America and the world — the facilitated “Reichstag Fire” attack on U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor that had the desired effect of catapulting America into World War II; the myth of the U.S. ship attack in the Gulf of Tonkin used to escalate the Vietnam War; the assassination of JFK, who refused to attack Cuba, and of RFK and MLK, who wanted to end the Vietnam War; the attack on the USS Cole, which was intended to escalate the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, but didn’t; the 9/11 “Reichstag Fire” self-attack on their own world military headquarters, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center used to burst the cabal’s geopolitical agenda to the surface; and the WMD Big Lie used to rationalize the attack on Iraq.

Professor Scott’s address was on the use of the 9/11 false flag attacks to trigger initiation of secret emergency Continuity of Government (COG) executive operations and powers which are still in force. He called upon Congress to enforce the existing statute that requires the President’s COG authorities to lapse if not affirmatively renewed.

Speaker Jim Marrs, New York Times best-selling author whose book Crossfire formed a basis for Oliver Stone’s deep politics movie “JFK,” reviewed the infiltration of top Nazis into the Pentagon, U.S. Space Program and other American institutions in the wake of their surface defeat in World War II — the subject of his recent book The Rise of the Fourth Reich.

The world dean of 9/11 Truth research Professor David Ray Griffin gave the one presentation specifically focused on the attacks of Sept. 11, summarizing his recent book The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7 compellingly proving its collapse due to controlled demolition using pre-placed explosives. In the audience for Prof. Griffin’s talk and throughout the two-and-a-half-day conference was our own AE911Truth founder Richard Gage, AIA, who received a rousing ovation when recognized from the podium for his global work spreading the truth about the evidence for the engineered destruction of the three WTC towers. Several members of the alternative media interviewed Mr. Gage at the AE911Truth information and sales table where an array of books, DVDs, brochures, t-shirts, and cards were nearly sold out to the 9/11 truth-hungry participants.

Renowned Canadian television journalist and 9/11 author Barry Zwicker gave an overview of the repeat use of false flag attacks in modern history, including the attack on the USS Liberty, the Gulf of Tonkin deception, the first WTC bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the 7/7 London subway bombings and the Madrid bombings, among others. He is currently working on a book on the “routine” use of such false flag self-attacks to achieve ends of state.

The most tangible and encouraging development of the conference was Zwicker’s revelation that Canadian and international legal experts are moving forward with what they call the “11/11 Project” for an international inquest on the mass crimes of September 11. “11/11” refers to November 11, 2011 — one month after the projected date of the announcement of the inquest’s judgment on Sept. 11, 2011 — “when,” Zwicker said with his signature grin and twinkle, “all of our goals will have been achieved.”

Zwicker and some other speakers are also working on a “Santa Cruz Declaration” which they’ll be circulating in draft to Truth Movement leaders for feedback. Be sure to check this site in the near future for the debut of that Declaration.

Former MI-5 intelligence officer and leader of Britain’s 9/11 truth movement Annie Machon gave a fast-moving synopsis of her experiences in the British Security Service and as a whistleblower exposing the involvement of the agency’s sister service MI-6 in the attempted assassination of Libyan leader Col. Gaddafi.

The speaker most familiar with the corporate machinations behind the Gulf oil disaster was former international oil-field executive Ian Crane, who spoke on “Exposing the Agenda of the New World Order.” He detailed the U.S.-led push for hegemony and control of global resources, focusing on the escalating attack on world populations in the name of corporate globalization and “harmonization.”

American Iraq-born physician and activist Dr. Dahlia Wasfi received a standing ovation for her moving and documented presentation exposing the lie of Israeli victimhood and putting individual faces and stories on one of the New World Order’s most devastating attacks on innocent populations who live atop “global” resources — the people of Iraq. Wasfi makes a historically compelling case that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is an extension of Israel’s invasion and occupation of Palestine.

Former U.S. Representative, vocal 9/11 Truth advocate and tireless international activist for the Palestinian cause, Cynthia McKinney, was slated to be a keynote speaker, but had to cancel due to a family emergency.

Award-winning author and progressive political analyst Michael Parenti spoke on “Deep Ideology: How Reactionary Agendas Shape Political Awareness” and the importance of language and mental framing for a breakthrough in mass awareness and acceptance of 9/11 and other critical truths.

Sonoma State University Professor of Sociology and founder and president of The Media Freedom Foundation’s “Project Censored” for the past15 years, Peter Phillips, and his successor Professor Mickey Huff spoke on the “core knot” problem of state/corporate control and censorship of the mass media and its recent consolidation into half a dozen media giants.

On the financial side, attorney and author of Web of Debt Ellen Brown summarized the history and inner workings of the Federal Reserve and how the People and the States can circumvent it to take back the power to create money that the establishment “Money Trust” usurped.

Whereas the speakers did an outstanding job of stating the problem — a U.S.-led, right-wing international criminal cabal whose false flag attacks are protected by official secrecy and corporate media collusion, they struggled to come up with broadly viable solutions. The political leanings of participants in the Solutions Panels, in fact, ran the entire gamut from the extreme left to the libertarian right, and some avoided friendly fire by diplomatically agreeing to disagree. For instance, the future envisioned by Professor Griffin and one of the panel facilitators, Byron Belitsos — a world democratic government – was derided by Ian Crane, whose anti-solution was effectively to drop out and “do your own thing” before the inevitable global collapse.

The most far-reaching solution for achieving legal accountability was the above-mentioned Canadian “11/11 Project.” Other specific, though limited, proposals were: a new think tank to fund research and publishing by academic Truth Movement leaders, by Annie Machon; and Professor Scott’s call for Congress to implement the law requiring the emergency executive powers under COG to lapse if not affirmatively renewed.

The Soviet regime suddenly fell in great part due to Glasnost, the opening of its dark and moribund system to the light and freer dissemination of truth. As we look back from November 11, 2011, we may see that the Santa Cruz “Deep Politics” conference was a turning point in our own American “Glasnost” that just as suddenly — and unexpectedly — brought down the Old “New World Order” almost as fast as the World Trade Center Towers fell on 9/11.

All of the outstanding presentations and panel discussions can be viewed online for a nominal fee at the conference web site, www.understandingdeeppolitcs.org.

SEC: Government Destroyed Documents Regarding Pre-9/11 Put Options

SEC: Government Destroyed Documents Regarding Pre-9/11 Put Options

<!–break–>

 

***

At least one Wall Street firm reported their suspicions about this activity to the SEC shortly after the attack.

The same thing happened with United Airlines on the Chicago Board Options Exchange four days before the attack. An extremely unbalanced number of trades betting United’s stock price would fall — also transformed into huge profits when it did after the hijackings.

"We can directly work backwards from a trade on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The trader is linked to a brokerage firm. The brokerage firm received the order to buy that ‘put’ option from either someone within a brokerage firm speculating, or from one of the customers," said Randall Dodd of the Economic Strategy Institute.

U.S. investigators want to know whether Osama bin Laden was the ultimate "inside trader" — profiting from a tragedy he’s suspected of masterminding to finance his operation. Authorities are also investigating possibly suspicious trading in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Japan.

 

 

On September 29, 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out:

"Usually, if someone has a windfall like that, you take the money and run," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Whoever did this thought the exchange would not be closed for four days.

"This smells real bad."

***

There was an unusually large jump in purchases of put options on the stocks of UAL Corp. and AMR Corp. in the three business days before the attack on major options exchanges in the United States. On one day, UAL put option purchases were 25 times greater than the year-to-date average. In the month before the attacks, short sales jumped by 40 percent for UAL and 20 percent for American.

 

***

Spokesmen for British securities regulators and the AXA Group also confirmed yesterday that investigations are continuing.

The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of the options.

***

Last weekend, German central bank president Ernst Welteke said a study pointed to "terrorism insider trading" in those stocks.

On October 19, 2001, the Chronicle wrote:

On Oct. 2, Canadian securities officials confirmed that the SEC privately had asked North American investment firms to review their records for evidence of trading activity in the shares of 38 companies, suggesting that some buyers and sellers might have had advance knowledge of the attacks.

***

FMR Corp. spokeswoman Anne Crowley, said her firm — which owns the giant Fidelity family of mutual funds in Boston — has already provided "account and transaction" information to investigators, and had no objection to the new procedures announced yesterday. Crowley declined to describe the nature of the information previously shared with the government.

So the effort to track down the source of the puts was certainly quite substantial.

What were the results and details of the investigation?

Apparently, we’ll never know.

Specifically, David Callahan – executive editor of SmartCEO – submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the SEC regarding the pre-9/11 put options.

The SEC responded:

This letter is in response to your request seeking access to and copies of the documentary evidence referred to in footnote 130 of Chapter 5 of the September 11 (9/11) Commission Report.

***

We have been advised that the potentially responsive records have been destroyed.

If the SEC had responded by producing documents showing that the pre-9/11 put options had an innocent explanation (such as a hedge made by a smaller airline), that would be understandable.

If the SEC had responded by saying that the documents were classified as somehow protecting proprietary financial information, I wouldn’t like it, but I would at least understand the argument.

But destroyed? Why? (See Afterword for additional details.)

Not the First Time

This is not the first destruction of documentary evidence related to 9/11.

I wrote in March:

As I pointed out in 2007:

The 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.

The official 9/11 Commission Report states:

Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members. A number of these "detainees" have firsthand knowledge of the 9/11 plot. Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses-sworn enemies of the United States-is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting.

In other words, the 9/11 Commissioners were not allowed to speak with the detainees, or even their interrogators. Instead, they got their information third-hand.

The Commission didn’t really trust the interrogation testimony. For example, one of the primary architects of the 9/11 Commission Report, Ernest May, said in May 2005:

We never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.

As I noted last May:

Newsweek is running an essay by [New York Times investigative reporter] Philip Shenon saying [that the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the information was based on the statements of tortured detainees]:

The commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda’s history relied heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it.

The panel raised no public protest over the CIA’s interrogation methods, even though news reports at the time suggested how brutal those methods were. In fact, the commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.

That has troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final report. In intelligence circles, testimony obtained through torture is typically discredited; research shows that people will say anything under threat of intense physical pain.

And yet it is a distinct possibility that Al Qaeda suspects who were the exclusive source of information for long passages of the commission’s report may have been subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques, or at least threatened with them, because of the 9/11 Commission….

Information from CIA interrogations of two of the three—KSM and Abu Zubaydah—is cited throughout two key chapters of the panel’s report focusing on the planning and execution of the attacks and on the history of Al Qaeda.

Footnotes in the panel’s report indicate when information was obtained from detainees interrogated by the CIA. An analysis by NBC News found that more than a quarter of the report’s footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s "enhanced" interrogation program, including the trio who were waterboarded.

Commission members note that they repeatedly pressed the Bush White House and CIA for direct access to the detainees, but the administration refused. So the commission forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel’s behalf.

The commission’s report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods were used in gathering information, stating that the panel had "no control" over how the CIA did its job; the authors also said they had attempted to corroborate the information "with documents and statements of others."

But how could the commission corroborate information known only to a handful of people in a shadowy terrorist network, most of whom were either dead or still at large?

Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking ….

Kerrey said it might take "a permanent 9/11 commission" to end the remaining mysteries of September 11.

Abu Zubaida was well-known to the FBI as being literally crazy. The Washington Post quotes "FBI officials, including agents who questioned [alleged Al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaida] after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home" as concluding that he was:

[L]argely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.

For example:

Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida’s capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA’s harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida’s information.

"I don’t have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him. The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much."

***

"They said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ " said Coleman, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. " ‘This guy’s a Muslim. That’s not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?‘" Coleman helped lead the bureau’s efforts against Osama bin Laden for a decade, ending in 2004.

 

Coleman goes on to say:

Abu Zubaida … was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.

***

Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problems that called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they’re going to tell him anything?"

ACLU, FireDogLake’s Marcy Wheeler and RawStory broke the story yesterday that (quoting RawStory):

 

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission’s request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration’s ability to protect the nation.

"In response to the Commission’s expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation," the letter read. "There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross — the line separating the Commission’s proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government’s ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks."

***

"The Commission staff’s proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line," the letter continued. "As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees."

Destruction of Evidence

The interrogators made videotapes of the interrogations. The 9/11 Commission asked for all tapes, but the CIA lied and said there weren’t any.

The CIA then destroyed the tapes.

Specifically, the New York Times confirms that the government swore that it had turned over all of the relevant material regarding the statements of the people being interrogated:

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission ….

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

But is the destruction of the tapes — and hiding from the 9/11 Commission the fact that the tapes existed — a big deal? Yes, actually. As the Times goes on to state:

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

Indeed, 9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote:

Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

The CIA also is refusing to release any transcripts from the interrogation sessions. As I wrote a year ago:

What does the fact that the CIA destroyed numerous videotapes of Guantanamo interrogations, but has 3,000 pages of transcripts from those tapes really mean?

Initially, it means that CIA’s claim that it destroyed the video tapes to protect the interrogators’ identity is false. Why? Well, the transcripts contain the identity of the interrogator. And the CIA is refusing to produce the transcripts.

Obviously, the CIA could have "blurred" the face of the interrogator and shifted his voice (like you’ve seen on investigative tv shows like 60 Minutes) to protect the interrogator’s identity. And since the CIA is not releasing the transcripts, it similarly could have refused to release the videos.

The fact that the CIA instead destroyed the videos shows that it has something to hide.

Trying to Create a False Linkage?

I have repeatedly pointed out that the top interrogation experts say that torture doesn’t work.

As I wrote last May:

The fact that people were tortured in order to justify the Iraq war by making a false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 is gaining attention.

Many people are starting to understand that top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee found that the U.S. used torture techniques specifically aimed at extracting false confessions (and see this).

And as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

[A]ccording to NBC news:

  • Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
  • At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being "tortured."
  • One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
  • The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

In fact, the self-confessed "mastermind" of 9/11 also confessed to crimes which he could not have committed. He later said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information – telling them what he thought they wanted to hear – in an attempt to stop the torture. We also know that he was heavily tortured specifically for the purpose of trying to obtain false information about 9/11 – specifically, that Iraq had something to do with it.

***

Remember, as discussed above, the torture techniques used by the Bush administration to try to link Iraq and 9/11 were specifically geared towards creating false confessions (they were techniques created by the communists to be used in show trials).

***

The above-linked NBC news report quotes a couple of legal experts to this effect:

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says he is "shocked" that the Commission never asked about extreme interrogation measures.

"If you’re sitting at the 9/11 Commission, with all the high-powered lawyers on the Commission and on the staff, first you ask what happened rather than guess," said Ratner, whose center represents detainees at Guantanamo. "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, therefore their conclusions are suspect."…

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law, put it this way: "[I]t should have relied on sources not tainted. It calls into question how we were willing to use these interrogations to construct the narrative."

The interrogations were "used" to "construct the narrative" which the 9/11 Commission decided to use.

Remember (as explored in the book The Commission by respected journalist Philip Shenon), that the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was an administration insider whose area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of "public myths" thought to be true, even if not actually true. He wrote an outline of what he wanted the report to say very early in the process, controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission’s inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this article and this article).

***

As constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley stated:

[The 9/11 Commission] was a commission that was really made for Washington – a commission composed of political appointees of both parties that ran interference for those parties – a commission that insisted at the beginning it would not impose blame on individuals.

Other Obstructions of Justice

[Other examples of obstructions of justice include the following:]

  • The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Joint Inquiry of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees into 9/11 said that government "minders" obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses
  • The 9/11 Commissioners concluded that officials from the Pentagon lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements
  • Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House. As the New York Times notes:

    Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence . . .

    * * *

    The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.

    In his book "Intelligence Matters," Mr. Graham, the co-chairman of the Congressional inquiry with Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, said an F.B.I. official wrote them in November 2002 and said "the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source.” On Tuesday, Mr. Graham called the letter "a smoking gun" and said, "The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House."

We don’t need to even discuss conspiracy theories about what happened on 9/11 to be incredibly disturbed about what happened after: the government’s obstructions of justice.

Indeed, the 9/11 Commissioners themselves are disturbed:

  • The Commission’s co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation"

 

 
 
 
 
  • The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said "At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true."

Afterword: Footnote 130 to chapter 5 of the official 9/11 Commission Report states:

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 

9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options- investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price-surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10-highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous. Joseph Cella interview (Sept. 16, 2003; May 7, 2004; May 10-11, 2004); FBI briefing (Aug. 15, 2003); SEC memo, Division of Enforcement to SEC Chair and Commissioners, "Pre-September 11, 2001 Trading Review," May 15, 2002; Ken Breen interview (Apr. 23, 2004); Ed G. interview (Feb. 3, 2004).

Did the Commission have full access to information regarding put options? Was the Commission misled, as it was on other issues? Was evidence destroyed or fabricated? We will never know, as the underlying documents have – according to the SEC – been destroyed.

Full Article:  http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/06/sec-government-destroyed-documents.html

US Navy Veterans Continue to Seek Justice for Israeli Attack Tuesday 01 June 2010 by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report

US Navy Veterans Continue to Seek Justice for Israeli Attack Tuesday 01 June 2010 by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report

http://www.truthout.org/us-navy-veterans-continue-seek-justice-israeli-a…

photo
Damage to USS Liberty, June 1967. (Photo: U.S. Navy)
US Navy Veterans Continue to Seek Justice for Israeli Attack

Tuesday 01 June 2010

by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report

The Israeli military has attacked a flotilla of international peace activists, killing as many as 19 innocent civilians while they were carrying ten tons of aid to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This is not the first time the Israeli military has attacked a nonthreatening entity in international waters.

On June 8, 1967, while sailing in international waters, the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty was attacked by air and naval forces of the state of Israel. Of the Liberty’s crew of 294, more than half were killed or wounded. More than 40 years later, survivors are still seeking justice.

The Israeli forces attacked with full knowledge that the Liberty was an American ship, yet survivors have been forbidden to tell their story under oath to the American public.

Joe Meadors was on the Liberty during the attack.

“I watched some jets pass us then turn left after they passed our ship, then they started strafing [attacking repeatedly with bombs or machine-gun fire from low-flying aircraft] us,” Meadors told Truthout.

“The attack lasted 90 minutes, during which we got a message off to the 6th fleet asking for assistance, and we learned later, Joe Tully, commanding officer of the USS Saratoga, launched aircraft within minutes of the attack, but he told us later they were recalled before they reached the horizon. We found this out 20 years after the attack.”
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Meadors said he and his group, the USS Liberty Veterans Association, believe that Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, the Sixth Fleet carrier division commander at the time of the attack, was following orders from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who called off the Navy’s rescue mission for the USS Liberty.

Meadors, along with other survivors of the attack, have been engaged in what has evolved into a more than 40-year struggle to find justice.

“The most frustrating thing has been a lack of reaction from the US government,” Meadors explained, “On June 8, 2005 we filed a war crimes report, and they [the US Government] are required to investigate these allegations. They’ve created reports about our mission, but they never did conduct an actual investigation of the attack itself.”

Meadors and the other veterans he works with to bring about a governmental investigation of the attack take the position that they should not have to force the government to do this.

In 2003, an independent commission of highly regarded experts was created to look into the matter. The Moorer Commission, named after its chairman, included Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, United States Navy (Ret.), former chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. Raymond G. Davis, United States Marine Corps and former assistant commandant of the Marine Corps.

Findings of this commission included: “Israel launched a two-hour air and naval attack against USS Liberty … Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty’s life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded … Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.”

Ray McGovern is a senior CIA analyst who served under seven presidents – from John Kennedy to George H. W. Bush.

McGovern is clear about why he believes the US government continues to refuse to launch an investigation. “For the same reason that President Johnson called back the fighter/bombers; i.e., so as not to embarrass our friend Israel,” McGovern explained to Truthout, “It is my view that the killing of 34 USS Liberty crew and wounded more than 170 others and the fact that the US Navy, Congress, executive branch not only prohibited the survivors to speak about it, but also launched faux ‘inquiries,’ is the poster child for what is wrong with the US relationship with Israel, showing the penchant of senior US officials to sacrifice honesty, justice, and US servicemen on the sacral altar of “compassionate attachment” to Israel.”

McGovern added that, in his view, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty is “the archetypical example of how Israel was given convincing affirmation of its belief that it can get away with murder, literally, and the US Gulliver would be bound to ignore it … or even mount ‘official’ inquiries to explain it away.”

Bryce Lockwood survived the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty and was awarded the Silver Star for his heroic actions during the attack, when he saved at least one wounded sailor’s life.

Lockwood, like McGovern, feels there is no doubt whatsoever that the attack was no accident.

“It was deliberate,” Lockwood told Truthout. He went on to explain why he thinks Moshe Dayan, who was appointed as Israel’s Defense Minister in 1967, ordered the attack.

“I only learned recently, via a document released by the CIA, that Dayan ordered the attack, despite objections from his staff members,” Lockwood explained, “Our ship had the capability of monitoring virtually everything … all communications. The Israelis had nuclear capability, and it was extremely important to the Johnson administration that the Israelis not use the nuclear option. We could monitor all of this, even when it was done by the Israelis. The Israelis wanted unbridled use of the nuclear option, and they didn’t want us to know about it … that’s why they attacked us.”

Another reason why Lockwood is so certain that the attack was deliberate is because he watched Joe Meadors hoist three US flags up a pole in an attempt to insure the Israeli pilots knew they were firing on a US ship.

“The Israelis claim they didn’t see a US flag, but they shot down two, and Joe raised three of them, since they kept firing on them,” Lockwood explained, “They riddled the third with bullet holes, but it stayed up.”

In addition, writing in his memoirs, Richard Helms, the director of Central Intelligence at the time of the attack, explained that the CIA undertook a “final” investigation after more evidence became available, and he offered the following information concerning the CIA’s final finding:

“Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the incident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel. Later, an interim intelligence memorandum concluded the attack was a mistake and not made in malice against the US…. I had no role in the board of inquiry that followed, or the board’s finding that there could be no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.”

Meadors’ and Lockwood’s struggle to find justice spans decades, and there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight.

Meadors is measured in his explanation of how he perceives the politics behind the lack of an investigation. “Politicians feel the Israeli lobby is so powerful, that if they do anything about this it will cost them votes. Nobody thinks it was a mistake, everybody knows it was deliberate. But they won’t investigate it because they feel it would damage the relationship between the US and Israel.”

“I’m disgusted with our country and our representatives,” Lockwood concluded, “My country doesn’t give a damn about me or the people on the Liberty. I’m terribly disappointed in the way our country has dealt with us.”

While both Meadors and Lockwood urge people to contact their Congressional representatives and demand an investigation, Meadors is moving ahead with looking for an attorney who will help the USS Liberty Veterans group to which he belongs determine if they have a course of action through federal courts.

Loss Of Liberty
51:53

Dead In The Water – The Sinking of the USS Liberty
1:08:32

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review by Glenn Greenwald

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review by Glenn Greenwald

 www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/21/bagram/index.html 

 

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review

Reuters/Jonathon Burch
A detainee holding cell is pictured at the detention centre at the U.S. Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.

(updated below – Update II)

Few issues highlight Barack Obama’s extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world — far away from any battlefield — and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.  Back in the day, this was called "Bush’s legal black hole."  In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo.  Since then, detainees havewon 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.

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Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram — including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned.  Amazingly, the Bush DOJ — in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention — contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (underBoumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind.  In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged.  One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, asThe New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held thatBoumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram.  I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are "virtually identical to the detainees inBoumediene," and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same:  namely,"the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely."  

But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss.  They quickly appealed Judge Bates’ ruling.  As the NYT put it about that appeal:  "The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort tomaintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight."  Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).

So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.  When the Boumedienedecision was issued in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."  ButObama hailed it as "a rejection of the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo," and he praised the Court for "rejectinga false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."  Even worse, when Obama went to the Senate floor in September, 2006, to speak against the habeas-denying provisions of the Military Commissions Act, this is what he melodramatically intoned:   

As a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence. . . .

By giving suspects a chance – even one chance – to challenge the terms of their detention in court, to have a judge confirm that the Government has detained the right person for the right suspicions, we could solve this problem without harming our efforts in the war on terror one bit. . . .

Most of us have been willing to make some sacrifices because we know that, in the end, it helps to make us safer.  But restricting somebody’s right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe. 

Can you smell the hypocrisy?  How could anyone miss its pungent, suffocating odor?  Apparently, what Obama called "a legal black hole at Guantanamo" is a heinous injustice, but "a legal black hole at Bagram" is the Embodiment of Hope.  And evidently, Obama would only feel "terror" if his child were abducted and taken to Guantanamo and imprisoned "without even getting one chance to ask why and prove their innocence."  But if the very same child were instead taken to Bagram and treated exactly the same way, that would be called Justice — or, to use his jargon, Pragmatism.  And what kind of person hails a Supreme Court decision as "protecting our core values" — as Obama said ofBoumediene – only to then turn around and make a complete mockery of that ruling by insisting that the Cherished, Sacred Rights it recognized are purely a function of where the President orders a detainee-carrying military plane to land?  

Independently, what happened to Obama’s eloquent insistence that "restricting somebody’s right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer; in fact, recent evidence shows it is probablymaking us less safe"?  How does our policy of invading Afghanistan and then putting people at Bagram with no charges of any kind dispose people in that country, and the broader Muslim world, to the United States?  If a country invaded the U.S. and set up prisons where Americans from around the world where detained indefinitely and denied all rights to have their detention reviewed, how would it dispose you to the country which was doing that?

One other point:  this decision is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which serves to further highlight how important the Kagan-for-Stevens replacement could be.  If the Court were to accept the appeal, Kagan would be required to recuse herself (since it was her Solicitor General’s office that argued the administration’s position here), which means that a 4-4 ruling would be likely, thus leaving this appellate decision undisturbed.  More broadly, though, if Kagan were as sympathetic to Obama’s executive power claims as her colleagues in the Obama administration are, then her confirmation could easily convert decisions on these types of questions from a 5-4 victory (which is what Boumediene was, with Stevens in the majority) into a 5-4 defeat.  Maybe we should try to find out what her views are before putting her on that Court for the next 40 years?

This is what Barack Obama has done to the habeas clause of the Constitution:  if you are in Thailand (as one of the petitioners in this case was) and the U.S. abducts you and flies you to Guantanamo, then you have the right to have a federal court determine if there is sufficient evidence to hold you.  If, however, President Obama orders that you be taken to from Thailand to Bagram rather than to Guantanamo, then you will have no rights of any kind, and he can order you detained there indefinitely without any right to a habeas review.  That type of change is so very inspiring — almost an exact replica of his vow to close Guantanamo . . . all in order to move its core attributes (including indefinite detention) a few thousand miles North to Thompson, Illinois.  

Real estate agents have long emphasized "location, location, location" as the all-determining market factor.  Before we elected this Constitutional Scholar as Commander-in-Chief, who knew that this platitude also shaped our entire Constitution? 

UPDATE:  Law Professor Steve Vladeck has more on the ruling, including "the perverse incentive that today’s decision supports," as predicted by Justice Scalia in his Boumediene dissent:  namely, that a President attempting to deny Constitutional rights to detainees can simply transfer them to a "war zone" instead of to Guantanamo and then claim that courts cannot interfere in the detention.  Barack Obama quickly adopted that tactic for rendering the rights in Boumediene moot — the same rights which, less than two years ago, he was praising the Supreme Court for safeguarding and lambasting the Bush administration for denying.  Vladeck also explains why the appellate court’s caveat — that overt government manipulation to evade habeas rights (i.e., shipping them to a war zone with the specific intent of avoiding Boumediene) might alter the calculus — is rather meaningless. 

UPDATE II:  Guest-hosting for Rachel Maddow last night, Chris Hayes talked with Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights about the Bagram ruling and Obama’s hypocrisy on these issues, and it was quite good, including a video clip of the 2006 Obama speech I excerpted above: 

 

 

The Port Authority Seeks New Homes for WTC 9/11 Steel

The Port Authority Seeks New Homes for WTC 9/11 Steel

Port Authority Seeks New Homes for WTC 9/11 Steel
http://www.panynj.gov/wtcprogress/wtc-9-11-steel.html

The Port Authority is soliciting proposals from public and municipal agencies and not-for-profit organizations interested in acquiring a piece of 9/11 World Trade Center steel for public display.

Letters requesting a piece of steel should be sent on official letterhead to the Port Authority to the attention of Christopher O. Ward, Executive Director with a copy to Timothy Stickelman, Esq. of the Port Authority Law Department and Norma Manigan in Public Affairs. The mailing address for all three is:

225 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10003.

You can email the request to Norma Manigan at nmanigan@panynj.gov.

The letter should describe your organization or agency, specify the type of artifact you are requesting, how the artifact will be used, an architectural description of the place where it would be displayed (e.g. metal case with glass panel), and other pertinent information and photos, designs or sketches of the proposed display. Our distribution is limited to public and municipal agencies and not-for-profit organizations.

Once your request is received and approved, you will be contacted by Peter Miller who will work with you to decide on the appropriate material for your display and will determine the logistics of transportation for the artifact. You will be solely responsible for all logistical details associated with picking up your artifact, including bringing the proper equipment, securing any necessary permits to transport the artifact and providing proof of insurance, indemnifying the Port Authority during removal and transportation.

http://www.panynj.gov/wtcprogress/wtc-9-11-steel.html

(Thanks to user Hsaive for providing formatting help to improve this blog entry. Thanks!!!)

Day 16 Council Members

Day 16 Council Members

Fellow Advocates:

Today we head into our seventh meeting with a member of the New York City Council. Your phone calls and faxes made this meeting happen, and they are making a tremendous difference in paving the way for honest and courageous council members to raise the discussion with their colleagues on the City Council. If you want to get glimpse of the action, scroll down to the bottom of this email to read the cover letter of the packet we leave with the council members.

Please remember we need your help tomorrow to reach our goal of 1,000 phone calls the City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn.

Thank you!

Day 16 Council Members…
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Posted on behalf of NYC CAN

Day 16 Council Members

Council Member Gale Brewer
Phone: (212) 873-0282
Fax: (212) 873-0279

Council Member Erik Martin Dilan
Phone: (718) 642-8664
Fax: (718) 642-8639

Council Member Julissa Ferreras
Phone: (718) 651-1917
Fax: (718) 565-5937
Please email us at info@nyccan.org to share what you learned from your phone calls!

As always, two simple rules for participating in this campaign:

1) Talk only about World Trade Center Building 7

2) Be courteous and respectful

Each morning NYC CAN informs the council members’ offices that anyone who is disrespectful, or who mentions other aspects of 9/11, is trying to sabotage the legitimate call for a proper investigation into the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. And to ensure that opponents of truth do not undermine our effort, we will need each and every one of you to get involved and drown out their vitriolic voice with courtesy, clarity and honesty.

________________________________________

The Script

We have three points to make:

1) A third building called World Trade Center Building 7 also collapsed on September 11th. This building housed the Office of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operations Center.

2) The federal government issued a report saying that office fires caused this building to collapse, however, there is overwhelming physical and testimonial evidence that this building was brought down with the use of explosives.

3) In response, 1,100 architects and engineers have signed a petition calling for a new investigation because the federal government’s report is deeply flawed and unscientific.

Translated to a phone call:

• Hello, my name is _________. I would like to leave a message for Council Member ______ to ask that he/she take measures to investigate the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. Who should I speak with?

You will either be transferred to someone else, or the receptionist will say, “you can speak with me”, or the receptionist will say, “Thank you, we will let the council member know”. If you are given time to elaborate on your message, you say:

• I would like to inform the council member that:
i. A third building called World Trade Center Building 7 also collapsed on September 11th. This building housed the Office of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operations Center.

ii. The federal government issued a report saying that office fires caused this building to collapse, however, there is overwhelming physical and testimonial evidence that this building was brought down with the use of explosives.

iii. In response, 1,100 architects and engineers have signed a petition calling for a new investigation because the federal government’s report is deeply flawed and unscientific.
• Be sure to thank the person you are speaking with.

Translated to a fax (feel free to copy/paste this exact text or to modify it):

April 6, 2010
Dear Council Member ___________,

I am writing to ask that you take measures to open an investigation into the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.

World Trade Center Building 7 was the third building to collapse on September 11th when it came down at 5:20 in the afternoon. This building housed the Office of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operations Center.

An agency of the federal government called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a report in 2008 saying that office fires caused this building to collapse, however, there is overwhelming physical and testimonial evidence that this building was brought down with the use of explosives.

In response, 1,100 architects and engineers have signed a petition calling for a new investigation because the federal government’s report is deeply flawed and unscientific. To learn more, please go to the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website, AE911Truth.org.

You can watch footage of World Trade Center Building 7 collapse by googling “WTC 7″.

Thank you very much for looking into this important matter.

Sincerely yours,
________________________________________

Cover Letter for today’s meeting:
April 6, 2010

Dear Council Member:

Thank you for meeting with my colleagues and me to discuss some of the troubling questions surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. We are very grateful that you responded to our telephone and fax campaign aimed at helping the City Council learn about the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.

We come to you with the full awareness that seeking the truth about September 11th is an immense challenge politically, and that you are focused on many issues critical to the well-being of New Yorkers. We do not expect immediate results, but we do hope that you will commit to working with your colleagues in the City Council to build support so that concrete results can be achieved when the time is right.

Our goal is for the City Council to open an inquiry into the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which, until September 11th, housed the Office of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor. Every facet of evidence indicates this building was demolished with the use of explosives.

The following materials are included in this packet to help you learn about WTC 7:
1) A road map for conducting an inquiry into the collapse of WTC 7.
2) A table of contents for the footage contained in the attached DVD.
3) An essay critiquing the federal government’s investigation of WTC 7.
4) A paper documenting the discovery of high-tech explosives in the WTC dust.
5) A 2004 poll that found 66% of New Yorkers supported a new 9/11 investigation.

Why should we investigate 9/11 today? Helen and Bob McIlvaine, who lost their son Bobby on 9/11, made it crystal clear by saying, “When a crime as heinous as this takes place, it is assumed that justice will be served and the perpetrators will be discovered and punished. Much to our dismay, this has not taken place. We only want the truth… Our only hope, at this point, is to support NYC CAN in calling for an unbiased and non-political investigation of our son’s murder.”

As you are well aware, 9/11 has also been used to justify many questionable policies both at home and abroad. As a member of the New York City Council, you are uniquely positioned to help put an end to those policies by dismantling the central justification for the “War on Terrorism”. We believe this would ignite a momentous transition to more socially and economically beneficial policies, and help return our country to the principles on which it was founded. We hope you will work with your fellow council members to seize this opportunity to fundamentally reshape our city and our country for the better.

Sincerely,

Ted Walter
Executive Director, NYC CAN

9/11: Some guys have all the luck

9/11: Some guys have all the luck

Jim Pierce, a cousin of President Bush, sees the South Tower of the WTC hit from the nearby Millennium Hotel. Pierce is the managing director of the AON Corporation, an insurance company with offices in WTC 2. He had arranged a business conference, to be held on the tower’s 105th floor this morning. However, the previous night, the conference was moved to the Millennium Hotel because the group was too large for the original room. According to a book by former First Lady Barbara Bush, Pierce later learns that 12 people are in the room where the meeting was originally planned to take place when the South Tower is hit, and only one of them survives. Boston Globe, 2001; Ananova, 9/18/2001; Newsweek, 10/27/2003 Another AON Corporation meeting is taking place on the 105th floor of the South Tower, run by business executive Mary Wieman. Of about 50 participants in attendance, only six are able to escape. [New York Times, 12/17/2001; USA Today, 9/2/2002]

Source:http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=jim_pierce
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Paul Craig Roberts – Good-Bye. Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

Paul Craig Roberts – Good-Bye. Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

Good-Bye. Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
March 24, 2010

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Link to Original CounterPunch Story:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03242010.html

“After years of ridiculing the 9-11 truth movement, Counterpunch has finally published an article that briefly
questions the “official” 9-11 conspiracy theory. It is written by Paul Craig Roberts. I sent them both a thank
you note….” ~ hat tip to Henry for submitting this

Also published over at OpEdNews