Friday, November 28 2008   -   9/11 Consequences

INTRODUCTION UPDATE, continued:

Furthermore, a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs Press Release states:

In February 2008, Dr. Katz sent an e-mail stating "Shh! – Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"
[911truth.org Ed.: Note that Katz says here, "...among the veterans we see in our facilities..." This does not count the veterans who couldn't get appointments, whose families tried to commit them before they killed themselves but were turned away, or who were too mentally ill to even seek help...]

See also, "Committee chairman accuses VA of criminal negligence," in USAToday, May 6, 2008. And from the Rand Corporation, "One In Five Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Suffer from PTSD or Major Depression: Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment, according to a new RAND Corporation study." Or this excellent article at The Nation, "On Veterans Day, Don't Forget About the War" by independent journalist and author, Aaron Glantz, editor of www.warcomeshome.org. Or this new article from the San Francisco Chronicle, "Bases brace for surge in stress-related disorders," which states: "Some 15,000 soldiers are heading home to this sprawling base after spending more than a year at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military health officials are bracing for a surge in brain injuries and psychological problems among those troops. ... Medical staff at Fort Campbell say they also worry that there will be a new surge of suicides — an escalating problem in recent years, largely related to the stresses of war."  

Thursday, November 27 2008   -   Open Letters

Five years ago tomorrow the 9/11 Visibility Project began, in Kansas City and Seattle, holding weekly vigils asking America to support the 9/11 Families in their efforts to demand an investigation of the events of 9/11. For the next 18 months, Kansas City was in the streets every single weekend with signs, flyers, outrage, and courage as we watched the families' success in forcing the creation of the Commission turn to deception upon deception. City after city began to join us, the Eleventh of Every Month campaign kicked off with monthly actions, national groups like Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Lawyers for 9/11 Truth, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, We Are Change, and so many others came to life. As we came to realize we were never really going to "reform" the media, we became the media instead, through radio shows, independent newspapers, public access tv productions, dvd, book, and flyer creation, and perhaps most importantly, person to person communication of real truths their corporate media was not telling them.

We have succeeded much more than we usually recognize. In spite of our government "catapulting the propaganda" and their media minions continuing to assist in making sure the lies are disseminated thoroughly, we know (through our last national Zogby poll) that a majority of Americans do not believe the government propaganda narrative of 9/11. We are rejecting, as a people, the fear mongering hatred continuously heaved upon us. We're asking, "What role do I play in this? If this is being done in MY name, what responsibility do I have to stop the carnage?" And in answer, we the people are overwhelmingly seeing with new eyes the real state of the union. And of the world. And we will NOT be silent.

 

Thursday, November 27 2008   -   Other Important News

22 Nov 2008 15:40:47 GMT
Source: Reuters
PRISTINA, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Germany declined to comment on Saturday on reports that three Germans arrested on suspicion of throwing explosives at an EU office in Kosovo were intelligence officers.

The explosive charge was thrown on Nov. 14 at the International Civilian Office (ICO), the office of EU Special Representative Pieter Feith, who oversees Kosovo's governance, but caused only minor damage. The men were detained on Thursday.

A spokesman for the German foreign ministry in Berlin confirmed that three Germans had been arrested, but declined to make any further comment as an investigation was under way.

 

Thursday, November 27 2008   -   9/11 Consequences

JURIST Contributing Editor Mary Ellen O'Connell of Notre Dame Law School and panel colleagues at a recent Washburn University School of Law symposium on "The Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism" offer their consensus on the appropriate way forward on critical issues in international law and policy that will confront President Barack Obama's Administration when it takes office on January 20, 2009...

---

Within hours of the attacks of 9/11 the Bush Administration decided to treat the attacks as part of a worldwide war--a new kind of war that would free the Administration to re-write the rules. A "global war on terrorism" was declared and new rules for the targeting, detention and trials of persons suspected of acts of terrorism or membership in terrorist organizations were created. Seven years later, upon the election of a new president, there is an intense debate under way in the United States as to what to do about the "global war" and the laws and institutions resulting from it.

 

Wednesday, November 26 2008   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

On Wednesday, November 19, 2008, Professors Anthony Hall, Graeme MacQueen, John McMurtry, and Michael Keefer discussed 9/11 and how this relates to the global community.

The webcast was broadcast on the http://globalizationstudies.ca/ website. (This version of the discussion courtesy: http://www.911truthcanada.org/

9/11 and the Global Community - Part 1 of 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=200239992729359153&hl=en

 

Wednesday, November 26 2008   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

All three parts to a debate between 9/11 Activist Jon Gold and Pat Curley, the creator of the popular blog ScrewLooseChange.

The debate took place on Monday, November 24th, 2008 on the Franklin Pierce University closed circuit television show, The Dynamic Duo, and was moderated by the show's hosts, Justin Martell and Eric Jackman.

The only editing that has been done to the three segments is all references to commercials have been removed (to make the conversation continuous), along with the opening and closing credits. The content of the debate has not been altered in any way.

 

Tuesday, November 25 2008   -   Resources and Materials

The nearly 40% of American people who doubt the official account regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks will be gratified to learn that their misgivings have become recommended reading by a pillar of the book trade, Publishers Weekly.

The leading starred review on PW's "Web Pick of the Week" is Dr. David Ray Griffin's newly released "The New Pearl Harbor Revisited," (Interlink/Olive Branch press, 2008).

In its November 24, 2008 online issue, PW writes:

Griffin "addresses many points in exhaustive detail, from the physical impossibility of the official explanation of the towers' collapse to the Commission's failure to scrutinize the administration to the NIST's contradiction of its own scientists to the scads of eyewitness and scientific testimony in direct opposition to official claims.

read more

 

Monday, November 24 2008   -   Other Important News

By Jeremy Scahill
November 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107666/

Click here to view this guide as a single page.

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's  boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

 

Monday, November 24 2008   -   9/11 Consequences

November 21, 2008
By William Glaberson
New York Times

A federal judge issued the Bush administration a sharp setback on Thursday, ruling that five Algerian men have been held unlawfully at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp for nearly seven years and ordering their release.

It was the first hearing on the government's evidence for holding detainees at Guantánamo. The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington, said the government's secret evidence in the case had been weak: what he described as "a classified document from an unnamed source" for its central claim against the men, with little way to measure credibility.

"To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation," Judge Leon said. He urged the government not to appeal and said the men should be released "forthwith."

 

Monday, November 24 2008   -   9/11 Consequences

Refuse to Tolerate Torture
By Linda Rigas
November 18, 2008
Excerpts from Scott Horton's Justice After Bush: Prosecuting An Outlaw Administration in Harper's Magazine.

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protestors, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted "signing statements" that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detainees
From UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and International Human Rights Law Clinic | 12 November 2008

Press conference video from C-SPAN
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the war on terror, according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley. (Read full article.)

 

Monday, November 24 2008   -   Other Important News

November 23, 2008
by Justin A. Martell
911blogger.com

Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) took one of the first steps in holding the Bush Administration accountable when he introduced House Resolution 1531 on Thursday.

The official title of HR 1531, which was introduced to the House Judiciary Committee, is "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the President of the United States should not issue pardons to senior members of his administration during the final 90 days of his term of office."

The resolution notes, "President George W. Bush may have committed crimes involving the mistreatment of detainees, the extraordinary rendition of individuals to countries known to engage in torture, illegal surveillance of United States citizens, unlawful leaks of classified information, obstruction of justice, political interference with the conduct of the Justice Department, and other illegal acts," and that, "Bush has been urged to grant preemptive pardons to senior administration officials who might face criminal prosecution for actions taken in the course of their official duties."

 

Friday, November 21 2008   -   Other Important News

For Immediate Release

November 20, 2008

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today released its final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) in New York City. The final report is strengthened by clarifications and supplemental text suggested by organizations and individuals worldwide in response to the draft WTC 7 report, released for public comment on Aug. 21, but the revisions did not alter the investigation team's major findings and recommendations, which include identification of fire as the primary cause for the building's failure.

 

Friday, November 21 2008   -   Other Important News

By Joaquin Sapien
ProPublica
November 19, 2008

Whether it's relaxing pollution control standards for power plants or allowing loaded weapons into national parks, the Bush Administration is scrambling to approve or change as many federal rules as it can before it hands off power to President-elect Barack Obama. This surge of "midnight regulations" presents a thorny question for the next administration: What can it do to void rules it thinks should be undone?

An Obama spokesman told ProPublica that the transition team can't comment on the new administration's strategy yet. However, John Podesta, a leading member of the transition team, has said Obama will use his "executive authority without waiting for congressional action" to reverse many of Bush's policies.

But that authority has its limits.

 

Thursday, November 20 2008   -   Endorsements & Support

Nov 18, 2008
AE911Truth.org

Actor and activist Ed Asner has signed the AE911Truth online petition and sent a letter of support.

The text of the letter reads: (link to PDF)

EDWARD ASNER

October 6, 2008

To Whom It May Concern:

I would like to thank Richard Gage, AIA and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth for presenting the scientific facts behind the unprecedented destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7. AE911Truth presents solid research that contradicts the official story of the building's destruction with the overwhelming evidence of explosive controlled demolition.

An accurate understanding of history is required to make good decisions in the future. Over and over again, history has shown that the first public perceptions of historical events are not always correct. I, along with millions of others, have serious questions about our country's recent history about 9/11. (Continues)

SEE ALSO:

Richard Gage is currently touring Europe. More info on the tour is available at AE911truth.org  

Thursday, November 20 2008   -   Get Involved

Please invite your friends/groups to join us for a FREE SHOWING of two documentaries at the Anthony Wayne Movie Theater outside of Philadelphia! Please pass this email on to others, and remember, it is very important for you to bring NEW people as guests! Here are the details of the upcoming event:

Thursday, November 20, 2008
Anthony Wayne Movie Theater

5:00 P.M. - America: Freedom to Fascism (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N331kGvh0U0) - written and directed by the late Aaron Russo
7:00 P.M. - 9/11: Blueprint for Truth [2008 Edition] (http://www.ae911truth.org)

December's film will be "Able Danger," and a couple of guests will be on hand! (Press release follows).