By Tom Devine and Coleen Rowley
(Rowley is a Former FBI Special Agent)
hat tip: Huffington Post
Posted: May 22, 2010
One month before 9/11, instructors at a Minnesota flight school call the FBI. Among other suspicious happenings, the most unusual “student” they have ever encountered just plopped down thousands in cash to learn to fly a 747, claiming his only purpose was “ego-boosting.” Agents in the Minneapolis FBI Office immediately confirm the information and seek permission to search by warning FBI Headquarters in over 60 emails and frantic telephone calls that “this is a guy who could fly into the World Trade Center.” Although the ‘Director of Central Intelligence’ is briefed within days with a presentation titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly“, neither the FBI or CIA staff does anything until after 9/11. Right after the attacks, however, the officials quickly cover-up these pre 9/11 lapses — actions hastened by internal repression.
This wasn’t the first lapse. In the years before 9/11, an FAA “Red Team” warns that it breaches airport security 90 percent of the time, but is censored from writing its findings and banned from retesting. The same Logan Airport gate exploited by the 9/11 hijackers had flunked just months before. After the attacks, the government grounds and reassigns the Red Team leader (a whistleblower) to remedial duties.
May 24th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
By paul craig roberts
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.”
March 25th, 2010 | Posted in Print Edition | Read More »
Bob Bauman
Legal Counsel for The Sovereign Society
March 17, 2010
I voted for John McCain for president, (did I have a choice?), but I’m wondering whether the senior senator from Arizona has taken leave of his constitutional senses.
Ten days ago, McCain and his might-have-been 2008 vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Ct), introduced a bill entitled the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.”
A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the United States based on suspected activity. Read the bill here and then continue reading…
The bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States. It does so by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.
But the bill makes no distinction between “U.S. persons,” (defined as green card holders or U.S. citizens) and non-U.S. persons. Any of them (of us) could be arrested by the military!
March 20th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
by Paul Craig Roberts
The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.
I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.
How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.
flickr image by wallyg
February 28th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
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