By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.

I've seen this movie before.

In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself. Noted the Los Angeles Times:

The Newburgh Four -- And The Goverment Mole Who Betrayed Them

By Zachary Roth - May 22, 2009

We're starting to get a rich picture of the four hapless Jihadis who were arrested Wednesday night for plotting to bomb two New York synagogues, as well as the FBI informant who deceived them. And the overall portrait that's emerging is that of a group of struggling, disaffected petty criminals, who bonded at a Newburgh, NY mosque over having spent time in prison, before being taken in by a Pakistani immigrant looking to win leniency for a crime of his own.

Millions of people around the world doubt the official version of the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission, and this number is growing everyday. Our goal is clear: we want all these people to sign our petition. To sign our petition… click here.

We are also calling on all 9/11 Truth Movement local groups to support this initiative. We hope to work with all of you very soon. Check this page for networking tools.

Let's all unite behind a new independent 9/11 investigation and let's show the world how big this movement really is.

Guest Editorial by Sibel Edmonds
May 22, 2009
BradBlog.com

"In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill...we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one." --- Plato

During the campaign, amid their state of elation, many disregarded Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama's past record and took any criticism of these past actions as partisan attacks deserving equally partisan counterattacks. Some continued their reluctant support after candidate Obama became grand finalist and prayed for the best. And a few still continue their rationalizing and defense, with illogical excuses such as 'He's been in office for only 20 days, give the man a break!' and 'He's had only 50 days in office, give him a chance!' and currently, 'be reasonable - how much can a man do in 120 days?!' I am going to give this logic, or lack of, a slight spicing of reason, then, turn it around, and present it as: If 'the man' can do this much astounding damage, whether to our civil liberties, or to our notion of democracy, or to government integrity, in 'only' 120 days, may God help us with the next [(4 X 365) - 120] days.

May 23, 2009
By Thomas C. Fletcher
Review of new book by David Ray Griffin, Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?
Amazon.com

OSAMA BIN LADEN: DEAD OR ALIVE? by David Ray Griffin is a crucially important and timely examination of the whole range of evidence bearing on the question, is Osama bin Laden still alive? The importance of this question for the present comes from the fact that the United States under its new president is escalating its offensive in Afghanistan and expanding the war into Pakistan, and has claimed that the "hunt for bin Laden" is one of its principal motivations for doing so. Either explicitly or implicitly, the US government and major media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post continue to assert that bin Laden is alive, hiding in the tribal territories on the "AfPak" border, posing an undiminished threat to US security.

In his gripping new book, Griffin strikes at the root of this pretext for war by closely examining all the evidence that has come out since September 11, 2001, either indicating that bin Laden is still alive or that he is in fact dead. His conclusion is that bin Laden is certainly dead, and that in all likelihood he died in very late 2001. Griffin shows that many US experts in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency came to this very same conclusion long ago, but their views, which do not support the continuation of what President Obama, borrowing the term from Dick Cheney, calls "the long war," have received very little media attention. Were they to do so, one of the main props for the war regime would be undermined.

May 22, 2009
Peter Dale Scott
911Truth.org

Here is an excerpt from the text of what Cheney said at the American Enterprise Institute on May 21, 2009:

"For me, one of the defining experiences was the morning of 9/11 itself. As you might recall, I was in my office in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour. That was Flight 77, the one that ended up hitting the Pentagon. With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now. A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below.

There in the bunker came the reports and images that so many Americans remember from that day - word of the crash in Pennsylvania, the final phone calls from hijacked planes, the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape burning alive. In the years since, I've heard occasional speculation that I'm a different man after 9/11. I wouldn't say that. But I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities."

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The US's political discourse and foreign policy in recent years has been based on the assumption that Osama bin Laden is still alive. George W. Bush promised as president that he would get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and has been widely criticized for failing to do so. The US's present military escalation in Afghanistan is said to be necessary to "get Osama bin Laden." The news media regularly announce the appearance of new "messages from bin Laden." But what if Osama bin Laden died in December 2001 -- which is the last time a message to or from him was intercepted?

In this book, David Ray Griffin examines the evidence for the claim -- made by everyone from former CIA agent Robert Baer to Oliver North -- that bin Laden is surely no longer with us. He analyzes the purported messages from bin Laden and finds that, as many have suspected, they do not provide evidence of bin Laden's existence after 2001. This leads naturally to the question: if Osama bin Laden did indeed die in 2001, how and why have dozens of "messages from bin Laden" appeared since then?

Griffin's meticulous analysis supports above all one simple and urgent conclusion: if Osama bin Laden is dead, the US should not be using its troops and treasure to hunt him down.

Zelikow made the claim he was not involved in the initial stages of the dispute in response to an allegation made by commission staffer John Azzarello and relayed by Shenon. After the staff investigators drafted a memo for the commissioners in early April 2004 outlining why they thought NORAD and FAA officials had deliberately lied to them to overstate the military’s readiness during the attacks, Zelikow “just buried that memo,” according to Azzarello. In response, Zelikow claimed that he had not even known of the issue at the start. The implication was that, as he had not known of it, it could not be him that was orchestrating--or even involved in--a dispute between the staff investigators and the commission’s lawyers, Daniel Marcus and Steve Dunne.

Remember Star Wars? Do you remember the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative to build a massive missile defense system that raised so much controversy during the Reagan and first Bush years? 130 billion of our tax dollars were poured into developing that system. It was designed to detect and intercept missiles fired from an unknown destination traveling at well over 10 times the speed of a commercial airliner, and to shoot them down in 15 minutes or less, before they reached their US targets.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) website, "a defensive system may need to hit a warhead smaller than an oil drum that is traveling above the atmosphere at speeds greater than 13,000 miles per hour." The CBO report states that missile defense and intercept systems must take down an ICBM in a matter of minutes or it is all over.

You may remember that before 9/11, there were a number of tests of the Pentagon's missile defense systems. Some tests failed, while others succeeded. But there is an important question here. If these sophisticated military systems were designed to detect missiles fired from unknown locations at over 13,000 mph and shoot them down in mere minutes, why on 9/11 could they not detect any one of the four large airliners traveling at a mere 600 mph, especially when two of them were known to be lost for over 40 minutes before they crashed?

Thank you! As a result of your generous support in the last week, NYC CAN has been able to TRIPLE the size of its petitioning staff. For the next two and a half weeks, we will be able to collect 1,000 signatures everyday and skyrockect our total to nearly 60,000.

On Sunday, May 17, 2009, we eclipsed the milestone of 40,000 signatures!

Official Account of 9/11: "Terribly Flawed," "Laced with Contradictions," "a Joke," "a Cover-up"

May 18, 2009 -- More than 40 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and most have called for a new investigation. It is outrageous that most Americans are entirely unaware of their publicly stated concerns -- a direct result of the refusal of national print and broadcast news organizations to cover this extremely important issue. There is no denying the credibility of these individuals or their loyalty to their country as demonstrated by their years of service collecting and analyzing information and planning and carrying out operations critical to the national security of the United States.

These 41 individuals formerly served in the U.S. State Department, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the branches of the U.S. Military. They are listed in the article by their branch of service.

May 20, 2009
Sundayherald.com

INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION: Islamist dies in Tripoli shortly after human rights group visit from Fred Bridgland in Libya

THE ISLAMIST terrorist who was the key source of the false intelligence used to trigger the US and UK 2003 military invasion of Iraq has been found dead in a Libyan prison cell.

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi allegedly commited suicide by hanging in the prison where he was being held in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. His death followed a visit by a team from Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading independent organisations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.

Investigating an Embarrassment: More Questions on Al-Libi’s Torture, Death
By Jeff Kaye
May 12, 2009
Firedoglake.com

The news of the death by possible suicide of former CIA "ghost prisoner", Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, also known as Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, has caused only a small murmur in the U.S. press. The Washington Post''s Peter Finn wrote a story on it Monday, noting the key fact that it was the tortured confession of al-Libi in an Egyptian prison, where he had been rendered by the U.S. and subjected to beatings and mock burial, that was used by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February 2003 presentation to the UN as evidence that Iraq was in league with the Al Qaeda terrorists and/or interested in using WMD.

Bmaz made this point the other night when writing on the initial reports of al-Libi''s death. Marcy Wheeler, in a new article, notes some suspicious matters concerning the timing of the events. The newly breaking story has also now been picked up by McClatchy (H/T Perris). Both Marcy and the McClatchy article note the "relentless pressure" put on interrogators to find some link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Powell''s claims that Al Qaeda had been trained in chemical and biological weaponry by Saddam Hussein''s regime was a key element of the U.S. drive to invade and occupy Iraq. But al-Libi recanted this story in January 2004. According to the Washington Post, the Defense Intelligence Agency and some CIA analysts weren''t apparently convinced. The fact he lied "to avoid torture" was verified by "a bipartisan report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence," according to a press release Monday on Al-Libi''s death by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today that the White House Office of Administration (OA) does not need to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith, writing for the 3-0 majority, concluded: "the Office of Administration is not [covered by FOIA] because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the President and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent authority."

The Detainee Abuse Timeline has new entries about the recently disclosed Red Cross report on torture and a really interesting 1943 memo about the respectful interrogation techniques the US used in World War II.
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... Finally, the Domestic Propaganda Timeline has a new entry about the recent tea parties organised by Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works.
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