Monday, April 11 2011   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

Obama professor among 250 experts who have signed letter condemning humiliation of alleged WikiLeaks source

by Ed Pilkington in New York
April 10, 2011
Guardian.co.ukApril 2011

More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago.

He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that "is not only shameful but unconstitutional" as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia.

 

Thursday, April 7 2011   -   In the Media

Published: Thursday, 7 Apr 2011 | 7:30 AM ET
CNBC.com

NEW YORK, April 7, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Confounding lawyers and legal scholars all over the world, Judge John Walker, first cousin of former President George W. Bush, was one of three judges of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to hear argument Tuesday in Gallop v. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers.

The lawsuit was brought by a soldier injured during the attack on the Pentagon and accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, of conspiring to facilitate the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

The attacks killed 3000 Americans, plus many who have died from the toxic clean-up conditions at Ground Zero.

Attorney William Veale, acting for April Gallop, learned of the assignment the usual 5 days before the argument, and filed a motion to disqualify Judge Walker.

 

Wednesday, April 6 2011   -   Legal Response to 9/11

By Ray McGovern
April 6, 2011
Consortiumnews.com

The Obama administration's decision to use a military tribunal rather than a federal criminal court to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others means the real motives behind the 9/11 attacks may remain obscure.

The Likud Lobby and their allied U.S. legislators can chalk up a significant victory for substantially shrinking any opportunity for the accused planners of 9/11 to tell their side of the story.

What? I sense some bristling. "Their side of the story?" Indeed! We've been told there is no "their side of the story."

For years, President George W. Bush got away with offering up the risible explanation that they "hate our freedoms." The stenographers of the White House press corps may have had to suppress smiles but silently swallowed the "they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms" rationale.

The only journalist I can recall stepping up and asking, in effect, "Come on; now really; it's important; why do the really hate us" was the indomitable Helen Thomas.

 

Tuesday, April 5 2011   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

By Eric W. Dolan
April 4, 2011
Rawstory.com

On Wednesday, the New York State Supreme Court will consider whether the state must investigate an ethics complaint filed against a New York State-licensed psychologist and major in the U.S. Army who allegedly co-authored, implemented, and monitored an abusive interrogation program at Guantanamo Bay.

The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) asked the court to direct the New York State Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) to investigate a misconduct complaint against Dr. John Francis Leso, who led the first Behavioral Science Consultation Team at Guantanamo Bay.

The OPD is responsible for regulating the ethical conduct of all New York-licensed psychologists, but has refused to investigate Dr. Leso's alleged role in the use of abusive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay.

The office is accused of failing to investigate Leso's misconduct, despite being presented with numerous documented allegations of Leso's violations of professional standards.

 

Tuesday, April 5 2011   -   Legal Response to 9/11

April 4, 2011
NBCnewyork.com

The accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks will be tried in a military tribunal and not in Manhattan federal court blocks from the World Trade Center site, officials said Monday.

The Justice Department's announcement was a major reversal for the Obama administration, which had faced strong pressure to abandon its 2009 decision that it would seek to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators in civilian court downtown.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Congress has imposed restrictions on where Guantanamo detainees can be tried, and rather than fight those restrictions and delay the trial, he ordered prosecutors to dismiss the federal indictment in New York in favor of a military trial.

Holder emphasized that prosecutors had been "prepared to bring a powerful case" against the suspects and said he still believes a civilian trial would have been the best choice.

The 2009 announcement that the 9/11 suspects would be tried in New York was met with fierce opposition from many elected officials, families of victims and those who live and work in Lower Manhattan, who would have had to contend with several rings of heavy security for the months of the trial.

 

Monday, April 4 2011   -   Get Involved

Posted April 4, 2011
From We Are Change Oklahoma

Please see details here: http://www.facebook.com/CopBlock#!/event.php?eid=144542868945239

This year will be the 16th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Please consider joining We Are Change Oklahoma along with other investigators, survivors, and victims' family members to help expose this cover-up. We have several banners and we will be handing out our flyer "Top ten reasons to question the official story of the Oklahoma City bombing". We hope to see you there! Without Truth there is no Justice!

Top 10 Reasons to Question the Official Story of The Oklahoma City Bombing
http://okcbombingtruth.com

We Are Change Oklahoma
http://wearechangeoklahoma.org
info@wearechangeoklahoma.org

 

Friday, April 1 2011   -   Research/Evidence

March 30, 2011
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (ae911truth.org)

These videos are raw footage of AE911Truth's exclusive interviews with two of the world class experts appearing in Architects and Engineer's upcoming hard hitting documentary "9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out": Scott Grainger, Fire Protection Engineer, and Tom Sullivan, Former Explosives Loader for Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI)

 

Friday, April 1 2011   -   Research/Evidence

March 26, 2011
by Shoestring
Published at his blog at 911blogger.com

Army officers at the Pentagon were planning a training exercise that would take place less than a week after 9/11 and that would, extraordinarily, be based around the scenario of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Preparations for the exercise were being made about a week before September 11.

The existence of the planned exercise was revealed by Major General Peter Chiarelli, who on September 11, 2001, was the Army's director of operations, readiness, and mobilization. In that position, which he had moved into about a month before 9/11, Chiarelli was in charge of current operations in the Army Operations Center (AOC) at the Pentagon.

Chiarelli recalled in a February 2002 interview that, after beginning his new position, he had "planned to do an exercise for the Crisis Action Team, the CAT." He said, "In some of my pre-briefings, in learning about the job, it was briefed to me that the Crisis Action Team had not stood up, except for an exercise, in about 10 years in any great role." He therefore had members of his staff design a CAT exercise that, he said, he planned to run on September 17. [1]

 

Tuesday, March 29 2011   -   Get Involved

Back to the Streets!
Rally Against the Wars at Home and Abroad
on April 9th (New York City) and April 10th (San Francisco)

WHO ARE THE WARMAKERS?

THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.

WHO ARE THE PEACEMAKERS?

WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healthy planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.

The Warmakers spend trillions of dollars yearly on endless wars in pursuit of global domination and profit while murdering millions of innocent people, installing corrupt and hated governments and funding occupations that displace millions from their homelands -- trampling on the right of oppressed people to self-determination.

THEY send our youth -- victims of the economic draft -- to fight over the very fossil fuels whose unrestrained use threatens the future of the planet while corrupt and virtually unregulated oil giants dump billions of gallons of death into our rivers and oceans.

THEY wage a fake "war on terrorism" at home -- the new McCarthyism -- that promotes racism and Islamophobia aimed at destroying civil liberties and democratic rights.

THEY grant repeated and untold trillions in bailouts to banks, corporations and financial institutions while breaking unions, robbing pensions, destroying jobs, foreclosing homes, de-funding education and vital social services and are once again threatening Social Security and Medicare.

THEY offer no solutions to the current crises other than more of the same.

THE PEACEMAKERS DEMAND a better world. Only a massive, united, inclusive and independent movement has the power to bring it into being. ...

 

Friday, March 25 2011   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

March 25, 2011
By EVAN PEREZ
Wall Street Jounal.com

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.

The move is one of the Obama administration's most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.

The Supreme Court's 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

 

Friday, March 25 2011   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

Friday, March 11, 2011
by Staff Report
The Daily Bell

 

A controversial congressional hearing Thursday on the radicalization of Muslim Americans touched on sensitive questions involving terrorism and tolerance a decade after the 9/11 attacks. At times emotional and theatrical, the four-hour session of the House Homeland Security Committee included calls from moderate Muslims for support in overcoming extremists seeking to indoctrinate their children, as well as protests from Democratic legislators who complained the hearing unfairly implicated all Muslims for the criminal acts of a small minority. In the end, committee Chairman Peter King (left), R-New York, said the hearing that generated widespread media coverage "actually went a lot easier than it could have." He ... promised additional hearings in coming months, with the next perhaps focusing on the radicalization of Muslims in U.S. prisons. -- CNN

Dominant Social Theme: Don't trust the Muslims.

Free-Market Analysis: Yesterday's hearing on radicalization of Muslim Americans brings up a larger perspective regarding what is going on in America and a close look into Western-style democracy. The incessant harping on "terrorist Islam" as presented in these US congressional hearings (see above article excerpt) does seem to indicate a trend regarding America's -- in fact the entire West's -- descent into authoritarianism, driven by hysteria over a religion that many of its worshipers (ironically) conflate with "peace."

Peter King is promising more hearings on Islamic terror and one has no reason to doubt they will occur. King has come under attack for these hearings, which some believe are deliberately whipping up hysteria against Muslims, but he has branded such accusations as false and baseless. In fact, ever since 9/11, King has been voicing concerns about Muslim fundamentalism and even wrote a novel about an Al Qaeda penetration in Long Island that resulted in a string of bombings. The protagonist of the book, a blunt, Irish congressman, investigates and eventually exposes the plot.

 

Friday, March 25 2011   -   Other Important News

March 24th, 2011
By Eric W. Dolan
RawStory.com

An Indiana prosecutor and Republican activist has resigned after emails show he suggested Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage a fake attack on himself to discredit unions protesting his budget repair bill.

The Republican governor signed a bill on March 11 that eliminates most union rights for public employees.

In an email from February 19, Indiana deputy prosecutor Carlos F. Lam told Walker the situation presented "a good opportunity for what's called a 'false flag' operation."

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism discovered the email among tens of thousands released to the public last week following a lawsuit by the Isthmus and the Associated Press.

"If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions," Lam said in his email.

"Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest," he continued. "Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions."

 

Thursday, March 24 2011   -   Legal Response to 9/11

Represented by the Center for 9/11 Justice

NEW YORK, March 23, 2011 --

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A December 2010 poll conducted by the prestigious Emnid Institute, and reported in the German magazine "Welt der Wunder," revealed that 89.5% of German respondents do not believe the official story of 9/11.

The issue is heating up in America as well, and will soon be heard in court.

Top Secret Military Specialist April Gallop saw disturbing things up close that have not been reported in the media.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, she was ordered by her supervisor to go directly to work at the Pentagon, before dropping off her ten-week-old son Elisha at day care.

Amazingly, the infant was given immediate security clearance upon arrival.

The instant Gallop turned on her computer an enormous explosion blew her out of her chair, knocking her momentarily unconscious.

 

Tuesday, March 22 2011   -   Open Letters

March 22, 2011
911truth.org

Dear Mr. Moyers:

We note the wide publication of a speech you gave on January 27, 2011 titled "Is This a Private Fight or Can Anyone Get In It?" In it you described "truthers" (your designation) -- people seeking the truth about the attack of 9/11 -- as guilty of disinformation, of sophistry and of cherry-picking anomalies in order to perpetrate what you claim to be a "Big Lie." You also stated that the central claim of "truthers", that the Government has lied about the attacks, has not taken hold in the public mind.

Regarding public opinion, that a sizable proportion of people throughout the world believe there was federal involvement of some form in the attack has been mainstream news for years, and there is now a Wikipedia page devoted to global opinion polls about 9/11. As well, you know that the Commission was established only after more than a year of entreating by families of victims, that it was severely limited in both time and funding, that it was under the absolute control of a director with ties to the Administration, and that abundant information inconsistent with an official story was excluded.

What has become known as the "9/11Truth Movement" includes a great diversity of people, many with impeccable credentials and reputations, who have in common an understanding that the official governmental story of 9/11 is filled with obvious fabrications and who feel impelled to pursue the truth. The collective that you have painted with the "liar" brush includes us, many of our esteemed colleagues and a multitude of fine and prominent people the world over. We the undersigned have come together to state unequivocally that we have not cherry picked information or lied. We believe that by any reasonable standard we are owed a public apology.

 

Tuesday, March 15 2011   -   Accountability

March 7, 2011
Washingtonsblog.com

The two main players in releasing the Pentagon Papers were Daniel Ellsberg and United States Senator Mike Gravel.

Senator Gravel is the person who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. This act made the papers public record, so that they could not be censored by the government. He was the only member of Congress courageous enough to do so.

Both Ellsberg and Gravel - like many other high-level former officials in the government and intelligence services (including many well-known whistleblowers) - support a new 9/11 investigation. Ellsberg says that the case of a certain 9/11 whistleblower is "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers". (Here's some of what that whistleblower says.) He also said that the government is ordering the media to cover up her allegations about 9/11.

And he said that some of the claims concerning government involvement in 9/11 are credible, that "very serious questions have been raised about what they [U.S. government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there might have been", that engineering 9/11 would not be humanly or psychologically beyond the scope of those in office, and that there's enough evidence to justify a new, "hard-hitting" investigation into 9/11 with subpoenas and testimony taken under oath (see this and this).

Gravel is now backing a California ballot initiative for a new 9/11 investigation. The text of the initiative is below.