Monday, November 7 2011   -   OccupyWallStreet

November 9, 2011
by Stephen C. Webster
RawStory.com

In a video published to YouTube, an unidentified protester holding a video camera, filming a police line during the early hours of Thursday, Nov. 3, is apparently shot with a rubber bullet even after repeatedly asking officers, "Is this okay?"

Rubber bullets, though considered non-lethal, have killed people before. They can also cause serious internal injuries and even break bones. Despite their name, rubber bullets are small metal cylinders merely coated with a layer of rubber, and can be launched from traditional firearms. ...

 

Monday, November 7 2011   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

November 7, 2011
From EndoftheAmericanDream.com
at Lewrockwell.com

If you live in the United States today, you need to understand that your privacy is being constantly eroded. Our world is going crazy, government paranoia is off the charts and law enforcement authorities have become absolutely obsessed with watching us, listening to us, tracking us, recording us, compiling information on all of us and getting us all to spy on one another. If you doubt that we are rapidly getting to the point where the government will monitor every breath you take and every move you make, just read the rest of this article. The truth is that the government is watching you more closely than ever, and they are spending billions upon billions of dollars to enhance their surveillance capabilities even further. If our society stays on this current path, we will eventually have zero privacy left. At this point, it is not too hard to imagine a society where we will not be able to say anything, buy anything, sell anything, assemble with others or even leave our homes without government permission. We truly are descending into a dystopian nightmare and the American people had better wake up.

Sadly, most people living in the United States and in Europe do not realize what is happening. Most of them think that everything is just fine. The "Big Brother control grid" that is being constructed all over the western world squeezes all of us just a little bit tighter every single day, and most people don't even feel it.

But when you step back and take a look at the big picture, it truly is horrifying.

The following are 14 new ways that the government is watching you....

 

Monday, November 7 2011   -   Research/Evidence

October 30, 2011
by Kevin Ryan
DigWithin.net

When Underwriters Laboratories fired me for challenging the World Trade Center (WTC) report that it helped create with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it said "there is no evidence" that any firm performed the required fire resistance testing of the materials used to build the Twin Towers. Of course, that was a lie.

With this experience in mind, I checked to see how many times the 9/11 Commission Report used the phrase "no evidence," and noted in particular the times the Commission claimed to have "found no evidence" or that "no evidence was uncovered." I discovered that the phrase "no evidence" appears an amazing 63 times. An example is the dubious statement -- "There is no evidence to indicate that the FAA recognized Flight 77 as a hijacking until it crashed into the Pentagon (p 455).

Of these 63 instances, some variation of "we found no evidence" appears three dozen times. This seems to be an unusually high number of disclaimers begging ignorance, given that the Commission claims to have done "exacting research" in the production of a report that was the "fullest possible accounting of the events of September 11, 2001."

The number of times these "no evidence" disclaimers appear in the report is doubly amazing considering how infrequently some of the most critical witnesses and evidence are referenced. For example, the FAA's national operations manager, Benedict Sliney, who was coordinating the FAA's response that day, appears only once in the narrative (and twice in the notes). And the FAA's hijack coordinator, Michael Canavan, appears only twice in the narrative, with neither of those citations having anything to do with Canavan's assigned role as the key link between the military and the FAA, a role whose failure the Commission says caused the attacks to succeed. Similarly, the testimony of FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who says Bin Laden worked with the U.S. government up until the day of the attacks, is mentioned only once in the notes. William Rodriguez, the WTC janitor who has publicly testified to basement level explosions, is not mentioned at all despite having given testimony to the Commission.

 

Thursday, November 3 2011   -   Resources and Materials

November 3, 2011
by Jeffrey Strahl
911truth.org

In mid-October 2011, I posted a review of David Ray Griffin's new book, 9/11 Ten Years Later -- When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed at Amazon, here.

This review drew comments from James B, one of the two top people at Screw Loose Change, a leading "debunking" website used as a reference by many an internet opponent of 9/11 truth. The result was a major debunking of Screw Loose Change. This piece is intended to help those who in the future will go up against the likes of Screw Loose Change, since the trap's nature is both the content of the SLC argument as well as its form. The focus of our exchange was the evidence regarding events at the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9/11, where three steel frame high-rises were destroyed. ...

This is intended to help those who in the future will go up against the likes of Screw Loose Change, since the trap's nature is both the content of the SLC argument as well as its form. I edited down repeat quotations by both myself as well as James B, leaving them in full only where these quotes are necessary for context. I also left out most of my "trapped rat" remarks, which are OK in the context of the debate, but need not be repeated as often. The full exchange can, of course, be viewed at the Amazon review; the URL is provided at the very beginning of this article.

 

Tuesday, November 1 2011   -   Editorials

Monday, October 31, 2011
by Staff Report
TheDailyBell.com

From source article: And in fact, there are a handful of banking families, including the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, who have come to dominate economic and political affairs in the Western world. Unlike aristocrats, capitalists are not tied to a place, or to the maintenance of a place. Capital is disloyal and mobile -- it flows to where the most growth can be found, as it flowed from Holland to Britain, then from Britain to the USA, and most recently from everywhere to China. -- Richard K. Moore/New Dawn Magazine/Global Research

Dominant Social Theme: The elites are a bunch of corporations and greedy capitalists. What banking families? They're never mentioned in the mainstream media, are they? So how can they exist?

Free-Market Analysis: This is an excellent article in our view, perhaps because we agree with most of it -- though at the end of this analysis we will present some important ways in which we DISAGREE.

Nonetheless, it's "our" paradigm in some ways, presented eloquently by Richard K Moore, "an expatriate from Silicon Valley, [who] retired and moved to Ireland in 1994 to begin his 'real work' -- trying to understand how the world works, and how we can make it better."

 

Monday, October 31 2011   -   OccupyWallStreet

October 30, 2011
by Mickey Z.
ProjectCensored.org
[To subscribe to Media Freedom Foundation's email list and receive occasional Project Censored updates like this one, click here.]

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
- Anais Nin

As the eloquent Ms. Nin explains above, there is such a thing as a pain threshold. In the struggle for social change, this may be the point at which inaction become more agonizing than the fear we all harbor about stepping up and challenging this destructive culture.

I've often wondered when we will collectively decide that we're less afraid of the State than of living on a planet without trees, without drinkable water, without arable land, without a hint of justice. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and all related efforts, this moment is getting closer with each passing day and in that spirit, I'll say ssssshhhhhhh...

Continued...

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Monday, October 31 2011   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

Posted October 31, 2011
From YouTube User Channel Kostafleer


University of Basel Lecture given September 11, 2011
"What Do We Know Ten Years Later?: A Historical Investigation" by Swiss Historian and Peace Researcher Daniele Ganser, Ph.D.
University of Basel
In cooperation with University of Indiana


Dr. Ganser is author of NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, which "describes how secret armies were set up across Western Europe during the Cold War by NATO and the CIA and how in some countries these secret soldiers were linked to terror, torture and coup d'etats."  

Monday, October 31 2011   -   OccupyWallStreet

By Olivia Katrandjian
October 29, 2011
ABCNews.com

Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old two-tour Iraq veteran whose skull was fractured by a rubber bullet or tear gas cannister fired by police during an Occupy Oakland protest, has become a symbol for the Oakland, Calif., protests and put a spotlight on veterans' solidarity with the Occupy movement.

Olsen had joined joined the Occupy Oakland protest after work Tuesday, before clashes broke out between demonstrators and police trying to evict them from a city plaza. Videos of Olsen posted on YouTube show him standing still in a space between police a protesters when he was hit in the head by something and fell to the ground.

When fellow demonstrators tried to come to Olsen's aid, a tear gas cannister exploded in their midst, driving them away from the injured man.

 

Sunday, October 30 2011   -   Other Important News

CIA Criminal Revolving Door: CIA Officer "Albert" Involved in False Intelligence Linking Al-Qaeda to Iran, Iraq

by Kevin Fenton
25 October 2011
BoilingFrogsPost.com

Reprimanded for Torture, Retired, then Back to CIA as a Contractor

A recent book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan shows that the same CIA officer was involved in generating intelligence that falsely linked al-Qaeda to first Iran and then Iraq. The officer was also involved in a notorious torture episode and was reprimanded by the Agency's inspector general.

The officer, who Soufan refers to as "Fred," but whose real first name is "Albert" according to a February 2011 Associated Press article, served at the CIA station in Jordan in 1999. During that time, al-Qaeda, aided by a collection of freelance terrorists headed by Abu Zubaidah, attempted to commit a series of attacks in the country, known as the Millennium Plot. However, the attacks were foiled by the local Jordanian intelligence service, working with the CIA and FBI.

During the investigations of the plotters, Albert drafted a series of official cables that were later withdrawn. Although the withdrawing of the cables was first mentioned in a July 2006 article by Lawrence Wright for the New Yorker, Wright did not mention what was in the cables or by whom they were drafted. The content of one of them and the drafter were first revealed upon the publication of Soufan's book in mid-September 2011.

 

Friday, October 28 2011   -   OccupyWallStreet

by Justin Berton,Will Kane, Chronicle Staff Writers
October 28, 2011
SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle online)

Photo: Jay Finneburgh / AP -- Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen lays on the ground bleeding from a head wound after being struck by a by a projectile during an Occupy Wall Street protest in Oakland,Calif. Olsen suffered a fractured skull while marching with other protesters attempting to reestablish a presence in the area of the disbanded camp, said Dottie Guy, of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Police Chief Howard Jordan says an internal review board and local prosecutors have been asked to determine if officers on the scene used excessive force.

OAKLAND -- Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, stood calmly in front of a police line as tear gas canisters that officers shot into the Occupy Oakland protest Tuesday night whizzed past his head.

"He was standing perfectly still, provoking no one," said Raleigh Latham, an Oakland filmmaker shooting footage of the confrontation between police and hundreds of protesters at 14th Street and Broadway. "If something didn't hit him directly in the face, then it went off close to his head and knocked him down."

The something was a projectile that apparently came from police lines, fractured Olsen's skull and put him in Highland General Hospital. Doctors upgraded his condition Thursday from critical to fair, and said they expect him to make a full recovery.

 

Thursday, October 27 2011   -   OccupyWallStreet

October 26, 2011
Iraq Veterans Against the War

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

Marine Veteran Critically Injured at Occupy Oakland March

Two-time Iraq war veteran sustains skull fracture from police projectile


Late last night, Scott Olsen, a former Marine, two-time Iraq war veteran, and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, sustained a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating in an Occupy Oakland march. The march began at a downtown library and headed towards City Hall in an effort to reclaim a site--recently cleared by police--that had previously served as an encampment for members of the 99% movement.

 

Wednesday, October 26 2011   -   Research/Evidence

by Brian A. Burchill
October 26, 2011
Foreign Policy Journal

There is a structured communication technique called the Delphi Method that draws upon the collective intelligence of a panel of experts to achieve consensus on an issue/theory/proposition. Wikipedia has a thorough explanation of the technique and some of its variations. Briefly, a facilitator provides a questionnaire to survey panelists on an issue, and then receives back the panelists' responses, judgments and reasons. The facilitator then sends all of these replies to all panelists, and each panelist is invited to revise their own response in light of the responses of the other expert panelists. This process is repeated until the range of answers converges on a single answer with an accepted degree of agreement (consensus).

Typically, the identity of each panelist is hidden from the other panelists, and the authorship of each response is also hidden. This procedure overcomes issues of group dynamics that can be impediments to true consensus, and encourages unfettered expression of opinion and critique. The Delphi method has been used successfully since the 1950s to advance knowledge in such fields as social policy, medicine, and science and technology.

 

Tuesday, October 25 2011   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

Trailer for "Hypothesis," a film by Brett Smith:

From the film website, hypothesis.com: hy.poth.e.sis' is a documentary film that follows physics professor Steven E. Jones during a pivotal point in his life. In 2005, Steven went public with a controversial theory regarding the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. His assertion that the collapse was likely the result of pre-positioned explosives rather than the hijacked planes resulted in a backlash from the community and even threatened his standing as a professor at BYU. Despite hate mail, threats, and even bribery to end his research, Steven refused to give in to overwhelming pressure and continued his pursuit of the truth.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bi5UX3u3W8 -- At YouTube channel of LookBetween)

 

Tuesday, October 25 2011   -   Research/Evidence

by Paul Zarembka, Professor of Economics, SUNY at Buffalo
October 14th 2011
ITHP.org

David Ray Griffin's response to this article is posted below.

-- "The present essay provides various types of evidence that the calls [from 9/11 planes] were, indeed, faked." (Griffin, 2011, p. 101)

Watching and participating for almost ten years in the movement to expose the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001, I have come to feel that some are trying too hard to prove that the government is lying. A population can be manipulated not only by lies but also by sprinklings of truths, half truths, and distortions. Indeed, offering some truths is an effective means of undermining critics who argue for lies everywhere.

A self-confident movement does not need to be exposing just lies and only lies. It can examine evidence and draw disparate conclusions about differing accuracies of the huge amount of material to work with. I have felt that the work of David Ray Griffin, a leading commentator on September 11, is an example of turning up stones everywhere with the word "lie" written on them. He seems called upon to write about everything having to do with September 11 in order to turn over stones everywhere. Why?

 

Tuesday, October 25 2011   -   Research/Evidence

by David Ray Griffin
October 22, 2011
ITHP.org

Professor Paul Zarembka has written a critique of a chapter of my recent book, 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes against Democracy Succeed.¹ The chapter in question is entitled "Phone Calls from the 9/11 Planes: How They Fooled America." I thank Dr. Zarembka for taking my chapter seriously enough to write his critique.² However, I submit that my chapter not to be guilty of the charges he levels.

At the beginning of his critique, Zarembka states that I seem intent on "exposing just lies and only lies" -- on "turning up stones everywhere with the word 'lie' written on them." A computer search shows that my chapter contains no instances in which I used the term "lie," "lies," or "lying." I certainly did, to be sure, suggest that various aspects of the official story are false. This would be grounds for reproach if these suggestions were based on errors, and Zarembka suggests that they often are. Indeed, to adopt his formulation, he seemed to be intent on turning up stones everywhere with the word "error" written on them. But the charge that my chapter is filled with errors cannot be maintained.

At the conclusion of Zarembka's critique, he said that he found "weakness" in my chapter's "internal logic." This charge by Zarembka, however, reflects the fact that he simply failed to understand the logic of some of my arguments, or certain facts relevant to those arguments.