Tuesday, August 11 2009   -   Legal Response to 9/11

August 10, 2009
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

Today we began the signature review, and with much promise! The first step: to do a recount of the signatures the Board of Elections did validate. And, after counting only 5 out of 52 volumes, we have found the Board of Elections reported 229 signatures fewer than what they actually validated inside the volumes. If their count continues to be off at the same rate, we will gain some 2,300 signatures - SIMPLY BY RECOUNTING THE ONES THAT WERE ALREADY VALIDATED. And we have already identified one petitioner who collected hundreds of signatures and was wrongly invalidated, along with all the signatures he gathered! And there are thousands of invalidated signatures ripe for challenging because the signer is on the voter roll but put their wrong address - these signatures will also be deemed valid if the signature on the petition matches the signature on their voter registration form.

In short, we have every reason to be optimistic that we will eclipse the 30,000 requirement, and that we will have our day in court to argue our right to establish a new commission to investigate 9/11.

We need help. We have 9 more business days to finish our review, and we have no more than 8 volunteers signed up to help on any day. We can use 20 volunteers per day, and we will need that many to get the job done. If you live in or around NYC, please give just one or two business days between now and next Friday, August 21. Whether you can give one day or five days, please email us at volunteer@nyccan.org with your name, phone number and schedule of availability, and please put VOLUNTEER in the subject field. Come get a free lunch and be part of this historic recount!

 

Tuesday, August 11 2009   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

 

Tuesday, August 11 2009   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

By Reid Wilson
August 10, 2009
TheHill.com A bipartisan pair of governors is opposing a new Defense Department proposal to handle natural and terrorism-related disasters, contending that a murky chain of command could lead to more problems than solutions.

Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas (R), chairman of the National Governors Association, and Vice Chairman Gov. Joe Manchin (D) of West Virginia penned a letter opposing the Pentagon proposal, which they said would hinder a state's effort to respond to a disaster.

Current law gives governors control over National Guard forces in their own states as well as any Guard units and Defense Department personnel imported from other states.

The letter comes as the Pentagon proposes a legislative fix that would give the secretary of Defense the authority to assist in response to domestic disasters and, consequently, control over units stationed in an affected state.

 

Monday, August 10 2009   -   Accountability

9/11 survivors call for renewed probe as 8th anniversary approaches
Posted by Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist August 09, 2009
NJ.com: Blog.nj.com

The eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is a month away and some survivors of those lost believe it's a good time to renew an investigation into the events of that disastrous day. New York City disagrees.

"We know we never have learned the truth, it's as simple as that,'' says Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick, one of the most ardent supporters of the creation of the 9/11 commission in 2002. It was headed by former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean.

"Members and staff of the 9/11 commission have said many of the questions raised by the attacks have never been answered."

Van Auken was a founding member of Sept. 11 Advocates, originally a group of four New Jersey widows whose husbands were killed that day. The group, informally called "the Jersey girls," successfully lobbied for the creation of the commission.

 

Monday, August 10 2009   -   Other Important News

Sibel Edmonds Deposition: Deep Corruption Beneath the Surface', 'Larson', 'Erik', 'By Erik Larson

Aug 8, 2009, Sibel Edmonds gave a sworn deposition in which she testified to her knowledge of treasonous crimes and corruption involving current and former members of Congress and State and Defense Dept. officials. Given the nature of the deposition, the lines of questioning focused on Turkish espionage and services obtained through bribery and blackmail by Turkish officials and proxies. However, Edmonds has previously disclosed that the corruption involving U.S. officials also includes money laundering, trafficking in drugs, arms and nuclear secrets, U.S. support for Bin Laden/Al Qaeda, and obstruction of FBI investigations related to 9/11, before and after the attacks; she said these things came up “briefly” during the deposition. Edmonds learned of these things from wiretaps she listened to while working as a translator for the FBI in 2001-2002.

 

Wednesday, August 5 2009   -   9/11 A/V Galleries

New York City--On Monday, August 3, 2009, the New York Supreme Court appointed an independent referee to oversee a line-by-line review of the NYC CAN petition signatures that were declared invalid by the New York City Clerk and Board of Elections. Dennis P. McMahon, a volunteer attorney assisting the petitioners and NYC CAN at this stage of the process, appeared before Supreme Court Justice Edward H. Lehner who issued the ruling in accordance with the petitioners' request.

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday, August 6 to set a schedule and outline logistics of the signature recount and review process. NYC CAN will assemble staff to review each of 24,664 signatures against an April 2009 Board of Elections database of registered voters. All disputed signatures will be assembled into a Bill of Particulars and presented to the referee for review.

The review is the next step in challenging the City Clerk's rejection of the NYC CAN petition for a new investigation in New York City and comes after the group filed a Verified Petition/Order to Show Cause with the Supreme Court of the State of New York last week. 52,000 signatures were filed (http://www.nyccan.org/nyccanfilespetition.php) with the City Clerk's office by NYC CAN on June 24th, 2009.

 

Monday, August 3 2009   -   Anthrax

By Tom Burghardt
August 2, 2009
Antifascist Calling

The 2001 anthrax attacks underscore the dangers posed to our health and safety by the Bioweapons-Industrial Complex.

The killer(s) employed a military-grade version of the deadly pathogen, a four-mutation blend of anthrax prepared at the government's test site at the remote Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Based on available evidence it's a near certainty that the weapon came from stockpiles at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.

Before the dust cleared prominent opposition politicians had been attacked, five people were murdered, 10,000 more were exposed and representative government ground to a halt as panic set in.

According to multiple media reports, federal investigators concluded that the anthrax spores in the letters addressed to former Senate leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) could only have been produced in a state-run lab. The weaponized version of the pathogen contained as many as one trillion spores per gram, a concentration sufficient enough to kill half the American population if widely distributed.

But rather than giving pause to Pentagon weaponeers, Big Pharma who profit handsomely from vaccine production, the $100 billion agribusiness empire that drives research and the politicians who do their bidding, decades-long U.S. biowar programs have miraculously morphed overnight into a new growth industry: "biodefense."

What had once been Washington's dirty little secret has now blossomed into a $50 billion cash-cow for academic and corporate grifters, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pointed out last year, "massive U.S. biodefense spending and a buildup of high-containment laboratories throughout the country might have created an internal security risk that no outside terrorist group could ever duplicate. Nearly two dozen new federal and many more new private biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories have been built in recent years, meaning a large cadre of scientists has access to extraordinarily lethal material."

 

Monday, August 3 2009   -   Accountability

By Stephen C. Webster
August 2, 2009
RawStory.com

CIA director and Democratic appointee Leon Panetta, in an article published Sunday, said Democrats must recognize the "reality" of 9/11 is what drove the conduct of George W. Bush administration in the months following September 11, 2001, which somehow justifies not looking into suspected crimes.

He added, in an apparent warning to the House Intelligence Committee, that that "focusing on the past" could hurt the CIA's core mission amid a climate of recriminations over its practices.

"I've become increasingly concerned that the focus on the past, especially in Congress, threatens to distract the CIA from its crucial core missions: intelligence collection, analysis and covert action," Panetta opined in the online edition of The Washington Post.

"In our democracy, effective congressional oversight of intelligence is important, but it depends as much on consensus as it does on secrecy," he continued. "We need broad agreement between the executive and legislative branches on what our intelligence organizations do and why. For much of our history, we have had that. Over the past eight years, on specific issues -- including the detention and interrogation of terrorists -- the consensus deteriorated. That contributed to an atmosphere of declining trust, growing frustration and more frequent leaks of properly classified information."

Several paragraphs later, he appears to offer a blanket excuse for torture, CIA black sites, kidnapping, indefinite detention, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and warrantless spying, among a litany of other notable scandals.

 

Sunday, August 2 2009   -   Anthrax

By Daniel Tencer
August 1, 2009
RawStory.com

Until the US holds a "broader inquiry" into the investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings, US House Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) won't be satisfied that there isn't a mass killer on the loose in his home town.

Holt -- whose 12th Congressional district of New Jersey includes a postal facility from which some of the anthrax letters were mailed during the 2001 biological terrorism scare -- says that the FBI "suffers from a credibility gap" because of the many mistakes made by the bureau during its long investigation into the first serious case of biological terrorism on American soil.

"If the technical and scientific procedures [used by the FBI] are as flawed as the non-technical procedures, they certainly deserve a look," the Frederick, Md., News-Post quoted Holt as saying.

At the FBI's request, the National Academy of Sciences has convened a 15-member panel to review the scientific soundness of the FBI's eight-year-long investigation into the anthrax mailings. According to Elie Dolgin at Nature magazine, the FBI believes the scientific review of its own investigation to be "unprecedented."

 

Sunday, August 2 2009   -   In the Media

By Peter Phillips
8/1/09

The corporate media in the United States are ignoring valid news stories, based on university quality research. It appears that certain topics are simply forbidden inside the mainstream corporate media today. To openly cover these news stories would stir up questions regarding "inconvenient truths" that many in the US power structure want to avoid.

For example, current research indicates that public schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. According to a new Civil Rights report, published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US. Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. Millions of non-white students are locked into "dropout factory" high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate. The most severe segregation in public schools occurs in the Western states, including California--not in the South, as many people believe. Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum.

Other taboo stories include civilian death rates in Iraq and questions on 9/11. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and a professional survey company in Great Britain, Opinion Research Business (ORB) report that the United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since our invasion six and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, ORB reported that, "survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003 ... . We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000." A 2006 Johns Hopkins study confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces. Iraqi civilian death levels in the summer of 2009 likely now exceed 1.2 million.

 

Saturday, August 1 2009   -   Civil Liberties-Police State

Militarization of public health in the case of emergency is now official

by Michel Chossudovsky
July 31, 2009
Global Research

According to CNN, the Pentagon is "to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials."

"The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.

It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.

Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.

As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called "execution order" that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.

Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said." (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009, emphasis added) 

 

Saturday, August 1 2009   -   Research/Evidence

[See Related Story below]

July 31, 2009
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/former-fbi-translator-bin-laden-w...

Before you hear what she has to say, you should know a little about Sibel Edmonds' background.

Edmonds is a former FBI translator, who the Department of Justice's Inspector General and several senators have called extremely credible (free subscription required).

Some of Edmonds allegations' have been confirmed in the British press.

Now, Edmonds is saying that Osama Bin Laden worked for the U.S. right up until 9/11, and that that fact is being covered up because the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years.

Is there are confirmation of Edmonds' claim?

Yes.

 

Saturday, August 1 2009   -   Research/Evidence

By Luke Ryland
July 31, 2009
Against All Enemies blog

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11."

These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies.

As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from 'actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia') as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

 

Saturday, August 1 2009   -   Get Involved

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

9/11 Family Members and Survivor File for Re-validation of Citizens' Signatures with New York State Supreme Court, following rejection of NYC CAN petition by the City Clerk and Board of Elections

New York City -- On Wednesday, several 9/11 victim family members and a survivor took the first step in challenging the City Clerk's rejection of the NYC CAN petition for a new investigation in New York City. The group filed a Verified Petition/Order to Show Cause with the Supreme Court of the State of New York requesting a review of Board of Election documentation and a 'special referee' appointed to re-validate the over 52,000 signatures filed by NYC CAN on June 24th.

The NYC CAN petition was rejected by the City Clerk on Friday, July 24th, a week ago, certifying less than the minimum of 30,000 qualified signatures of electors. This benchmark, according to the Clerk's office, was not met. A "qualified elector" is a registered New York City voter who was eligible to vote in the last election. According to the letter sent by the Clerk to the City Council, the NY Board of Elections validated 26,003 signatures and invalidated 24,664, leaving 1,333 that were not certified.

 

Friday, July 31 2009   -   Research/Evidence

by Kevin Ryan
July 30, 2009
911blogger.com

The Journal of 9/11 Studies has published a new paper by Dr. Frank Legge, entitled "What Hit the Pentagon?", available here: http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2009/WhatHitPentagonDrLegge.pdf

Here are some excerpts:

"The most logical inference from the Pentagon attack evidence is that the perpetrators of 9/11 knew that there would be many members of the public who would become suspicious for one reason or another. The perpetrators realized that a powerful technique for weakening the arguments of the skeptics would be to have them arguing against one another."