By Byron Belitsos
May 4, 2010

Some say it began with the invasion of Iraq. Others, with the inauguration of George W. Bush for his second term. Many point to the day of 9/11. But those in the know—including ten distinguished speakers headlining the “Understanding Deep Politics” Conference in Santa Cruz this May 14-16—trace the era of deep politics further back: Some to JFK’s assassination; others, to the aftermath of World War II. And a few speakers in Santa Cruz will stretch us back to Hitler, Lenin, Weishaupt, or Machiavelli, from there to ancient secret societies, and even back to the dawn of human governance itself—in the belief that conscious political deception is an inescapable feature of human nature. But all agree on the general definition of deep politics: It refers to government in which two dimensions of action always coexist: Overt and covert, or benign and utterly ruthless.

We can trace it forward too; by now we know that the ways of deceptive government did not end with the ascent of Obama. As with the Bush era, the overt side of American politics still refers to government actions thinly covered in the mainstream press; on this level of action, we know that Obama signed the largest military budget in history, expanded the war in Afganistan, bailed out banks, and “reformed” health care; but on the covert side of the equation, most don’t realize—given how the corporate media and Obama’s benign rhetoric is busy distracting us—that the new president has carried forward virtually all of the discredited Bush-era War or Terror policies. Worse, Obama and his gallery of advisors steeped in the ways of postmodern corruption have shocked Americans by their eagerness to uphold the Bush administration’s ornate machinery of quasi-constitutional and sometimes criminalized covert action. At a minimum, these include: claims of “state secrets,” NSA (National Security Agency) domestic surveillance, emergency powers linked with the de facto repeal of Posse Comitatus (which enable martial law), summary assassination, illegal detention, and counter-insurgency warfare techniques that defy international law. In addition, Obama countenanced trillions in secret bailout money issued by the Federal Reserve; and, he handed back-room deals to Big Pharma and the health insurance cartel that locks their super-profits into “Obamacare.”

The speakers in Santa Cruz will help you trace these steps by the new administration, measures that further America’s (and the world’s) descent into what might be called the postmodern reign of deep politics. The unprecedented Santa Cruz event also offers us the hope of seeing through the charade.

Jon Gold Interviews Cosmos, Founder of truthaction.org, at Ground Zero, Michael Badnarik, and appears on radio with the CNY Urban Guy Show

Cosmos: "... Until there is justice for this mass murder, this gigantic mass murder, then it's going to be a part of my life and I'm going to be dedicated to doing what I can to get justice. All I'm interested in 9/11 is a legitimate, independent, criminal investigation of the crime, leading up to prosecution of those responsible for this crime."

Badnarik: "Well, I support the truth. I want to know what really happened. And I don't think that 911 truth should be a denigration or a slur. I mean, why would you be angry with somebody who wants the truth? I thought whenever you go into a court you want the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God. So why not have the truth when it comes to whatever happened on 9/11 in 2001?"

Napolitano stands by controversial report
Top Democrat says he's 'dumbfounded'

April 16, 2010
By Audrey Hudson and Eli Lake
Washingtonimes.com

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that she was briefed before the release of a controversial intelligence assessment and that she stands by the report, which lists returning veterans among terrorist risks to the U.S.

But the top House Democrat with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security said in a letter to Ms. Napolitano that he was "dumbfounded" that such a report would be issued.

Republicans rabid over right-wing report
April 29, 2010
CapitolHillBlue.com

Republicans on Wednesday said a Homeland Security Department intelligence assessment unfairly characterizes military veterans as right-wing extremists. House Republican leader John Boehner described the report as offensive and called on the agency to apologize to veterans.

The agency's intelligence assessment, sent to law enforcement officials last week, warns that right-wing extremists could use the bad state of the U.S. economy and the election of the country's first black president to recruit members.

The assessment also said that returning military veterans who have difficulties assimilating back into their home communities could be susceptible to extremist recruiters or might engage in lone acts of violence.

Double header presentation: Two speakers, two nights, two Bay Area cities

Friday and Saturday,
May 7 and 8, 2010

San Rafael and San Leandro, California

On September 11th, 2001 the greatest destruction and loss of life associated with the terrorist attacks took place in New York City. After almost nine years and numerous government investigations, many public misconceptions persist about the events of that tragic day, especially regarding the unprecedented destruction of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

During this live multimedia presentation Seattle firefighter Erik Lawyer and SF Bay Area architect Richard Gage, AIA, will examine the myths surrounding the events at the World Trade Center. Using well-documented forensic evidence, news footage and eyewitness accounts, they seek to correct the public record.

Interview and notes by John Bursill
April 26, 2010
911Visibility.com

Visibility 9-11 is excited to welcome for the first time long-term activist/organiser, film maker, writer, engineer and psychologist Ken Jenkins. Ken's qualities of patience, fairness, optimism and clear logical thinking are well displayed in this interview! I consider Ken a cornerstone of this movement pursuing 9/11 Truth, to which he has devoted nearly nine years of his life. Ken's work is primarily as a film maker. He has produced and directed documentaries for the likes of Richard Gage, David Ray Griffin and Dr Steven Jones, just to name a few. Ken's skills have been invaluable to the 9-11 movement and given us all valuable tools to help us all take many scientific and academic presentations to the the general public. Ken is a professional videographer and consistently provides these films at a high level of production value and offers them at a tenth of the cost to us to use in our activsm. It is true to say that without the efforts of Ken Jenkins and his right-hand man, hummux, our movement would be less successful! Visibility 9-11 sincerely thanks Ken and hummux for this very important and tedious work.

Ken is also a very popular speaker and generally talks about the psychological barriers to 9/11 Truth. He recently published an excellent article, "The Truth is Not Enough: How to Overcome Emotional Barriers to 9/11 Truth", which was requested by the magazine editors of Global Outlook for the 13th edition.

[FULL TOUR DETAILS BELOW]

Nobel Peace Prize nominee speaking at Bradley

Peoria Journal Star
April 18, 2010

PEORIA -- "Is the War in Afghanistan Justified by 9/11?" is the theme of Dr. David Ray Griffin's speech set for Sunday at Bradley University.

Griffin is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, author, professor emeritus and co-director of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont University in Claremont, Calif.

He also has appeared on radio and television programs on the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Japan's national network. He was ranked 41st in the New Statesman's "The 50 People Who Matter Today."

Griffin will appear at Bradley as part of a 14-stop tour, which includes several locations in Maine, as well as Chicago; St. Louis; Des Moines, Iowa; Milwaukee; Louisville, Ky.; West Hartford, Conn.; Boston; Montreal; and Toronto.

Final Event in the Series for Spring 2010 -- An evening with Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action

Please join the co-editors of Censored 2010 for a public talk and discussion

Truth Emergency International: Censorship, Propaganda, and American Empire
Peter Phillips, President, Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
Mickey Huff, Director, Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation

Thursday, April 22: 7pm PDT, 10pm EDT, 02:00 GMT

CLICK HERE TO WATCH. (Presentation will be archived after the broadcast at NoLiesRadio.org)

A right-wing neocon organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD)¹ -- which devotes itself to attacking religiously and socially progressive churches while supporting US imperial policies (going back to the Nicaraguan Contras funded illegally by the Reagan administration² ) -- has recently put out a press release attacking my next book, which is scheduled to be published this coming fall. Saying that I am "back with another outrageous book" in which I allege "new absurdities," the IRD claims that I am "this time alleging that the Obama administration is attempting to undermine 9/11 conspiracy theorists."³

False Assumptions about My Forthcoming Book

However, if members of the IRD staff could have waited until my book had been published, so they could have read it before attacking it, they could have seen that it does no such thing. They could have seen that it simply deals with an article, entitled "Conspiracy Theories," co-authored in 2008 by Cass Sunstein and another professor at Harvard Law School.⁴ Using the "9/11 conspiracy theory" as their primary example of conspiracy theories, Sunstein and his co-author argued that the government should try to undermine it and that the best way to do this would be through a method they called "cognitive infiltration." In 2009, President Obama appointed Sunstein as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.⁵ My forthcoming book is entitled Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. Neither the title nor the book itself suggests that Obama will have Sunstein actually carry out this plan.

The IRD's premature criticism of my book is also wrong on another point. By speaking of what I will be "alleging," the IRD was supporting its press release's title, "9/11 Conspiracy Theorist Dreaming Up New Absurdities." The IRD's suggestion, in other words, is that I simply "dreamed up" the "absurdity" that someone connected to the Obama administration had a proposal for undermining 9/11 conspiracy theorists. However, the proposal made by Sunstein has been extensively discussed on the Internet.⁶ With a little research, therefore, the IRD could have learned that I had not simply made something up.

There they are, the people who brought you every bit of the action in the WikiLeaks video and all of the other horrors flowing from invasion of Iraq. Madeleine Albright (far right, above), former Clinton Secretary of State, is a good place to start. From 60 Minutes:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it. --60 Minutes (5/12/96)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the National Nuclear Day day in Tehran on April 9. Ahmadinejad has written to UN chief Ban Ki-moon, asking him to launch an investigation into the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, news reports said on Monday.

AFP - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written to UN chief Ban Ki-moon, asking him to launch an investigation into the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, news reports said on Monday.

"The minimum expectation from your excellency is to set up an independent and trusted fact-finding group to comprehensively investigate the real factors behind September 11," Ahmadinejad said in the text of the letter carried by official news agencies.

They did not say when the letter was sent.

The hardliner, who in March dismissed 9/11 as a "big lie," said in the letter that the attacks "were the main pretext for attacks" by NATO on Afghanistan and Iraq.

On April 12th, 2010 ABC Radio National's "Counterpoint" host Michael Duffy decided to weigh in on the truth of the 9/11 events. In this clearly biased and ludicrous attack on those who would question the still unexplained events of September 11, 2001, Duffy demonstrated he has done little research into the matter. Seemingly, he has decided research is neither warranted nor required to make wild assumptions about and apply derogatory labels to 9/11 researchers and their questions.

In this short and emotive hit piece Duffy uses an excerpt from a recent lecture given by Clive Williams, Adjunct Professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University (ANU), to provide the spin. Professor Williams lays out an overview of the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories as part of his lecture called "Terrorism Conspiracy Theories and the 1978 Sydney Hilton bombings, Lockerbie, 9/11 and the London 7/7 bombings". This lecture will be played in full on Radio National's "Big Ideas" on Sunday 18th April at 5pm and is available in podcast at the ABC. In this excerpt Williams skims over the evidence of an alternate "conspiracy", citing the predictable "straw man" arguments and loose journalistic attempts to look at the evidence, using the Discovery Channel's laughable documentary, "9/11: Science and Conspiracy" as a reference. Ironically, Williams uses these absurdities ignorantly in his attempt to debunk the experts who are actually qualified to comment on such matters, and -- surprise, surprise -- he also conveniently forgets to mention them. In a desperate attempt to make sense of his "reality", Williams rolls out the blind academics' favourite proof that 9/11 was just as we were told -- yes, it's the argument that the government is, without doubt, just too damn incompetent to pull off such a complicated plan! Unfortunately, this so-called educator misses the irony in the stark "official reality" that 19 poorly trained and ill-equipped Arab hijackers did pull it off!

Duffy introduces this crude attempt at journalism as follows:

"Just who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington? Was it Osama Bin Laden or are there other contenders? Perhaps it was rogue government agents operating with the tacit support of an equally shadowy group of industrialists. Or maybe it was revenge-seeking aliens who escaped from area 51."

David Ray Griffin comes to Drake University on April 23 to tell us why the official explanation for the 9/11 attack on the United States doesn't hold water.

A theologian, philosopher of religion and professor emeritus at California's Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, Griffin has been at it for about seven years now and says he won't stop until the government conducts a new, impartial, independent investigation.

As opposed to the 9/11 Commission probe. He calls that exercise a charade.

Griffin has written eight books on the subject with another on the way: "Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory."

The appointee, a former Harvard professor named Cass Sunstein who now heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, co-wrote an academic paper saying government should undermine conspiracy theory groups by infiltrating their chat rooms, social networks and group meetings.

Griffin believes "cognitive infiltration" is the wrong term. "It's more like fascism," he says.

As yet another study is released documenting the damaging health effects of breathing in toxic Ground Zero dust, it's good to see corporate media outlets taking it seriously. (Most media outlets, anyway--the New York Post continues to give a platform to deniers.)

It's worth remembering, though--since they won't remind you--that for many months after 9/11, some outlets--the New York Times in particular--downplayed the fallout and mustered shockingly little journalistic skepticism of government reassurances about safety.

The attitude of Andrew Revkin, the Times' environmental reporter at the time, says it all. As I wrote in 2006:

343 brave New York City Firefighters died on 9/11. This episode of Visibility 9/11 is dedicated to them!

If you have not heard the name Erik Lawyer it is one to remember. Erik is a full time firefighter and is a new, shining light in the 9/11 Truth Movement. He has been impressing all he meets with his simple message demanding a thorough criminal forensic investigation of the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe. He and his fire-fighting comrades want the authorities to do their job and carry out an investigation in accordance with fire scene investigation protocols, to which he and all US firefighters adhere religiously.

On 9/11 so many things happened for the first time and the one that is of greatest concern to Erik and his group, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, is the near complete destruction of evidence at this fire crime scene and the subsequent monumental cover up and obfuscation of the little remaining evidence. Independently gathered evidence clearly demonstrates that incendiaries and explosives were used to facilitate the three WTC buildings destruction. For more information, see the Visibility 9-11 Special Report, Thermite Fingerprint- The Loaded Gun of 9-11.