http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/goldwag-some-thought.html

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

9/11 -- the sheer shock of it, the deaths, the sense of violation-still rouses incredible emotions. The seven years of international adventurism, state-sanctioned torture, domestic spying, rampant privatization, and upward redistribution of income that followed, all of it promoted by waving the bloody flag, have left us more polarized as a society than we've been since at least the 1960s.

I recently heard from Daniel Edd III, a passionate and voluble member of the 9/11 Truth Community. "How do you feel about this guy's qualifications?" he asked, posting a link to the Wikipedia entry on Steven E. Jones. "Have you ever watched the documentary 9/11: Press for Truth?" he continued.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-m-gillon/a-new-wrinkle-in-the-jfk_b...
Steven M. Gillon
Resident historian of the History Channel
Posted: October 30, 2009 10:25 AM

This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson's behavior in the wake of the assassination.

The interview with McHugh, originally conducted for the John F. Kennedy Library in 1978, remained closed for 31 years. It was finally declassified in the spring of 2009. I just happened to be working at the Kennedy Library on the day the interview was opened to the public and have used it for the first time in my new book, The Kennedy Assassination -- 24 Hours After.

No, no mention of 9/11. Just a reminder that for the mainstream press you can talk about Bush's "abuses of power," but you can't cross the imaginary line that protects the 9/11 Commission.

October 26, 2009
Editorial
The Cover-Up Continues

The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.

We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.

The Paranoid Style at Pacifica
posted by Eyal Press on 10/22/2009 @ 4:20pm

In his Wall Street Journal column yesterday, Tom Frank paid homage to Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." As Frank noted, Birthers convinced that Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged in a plot to turn the United States into a fascist state are heirs to a long tradition of conspiracy thinking that has periodically flourished on the fringes of the American right.

But the paranoid style has seeped into some institutions on the left as well. For proof, look no further than a recent meeting of the Pacifica radio network's National Board, where a resolution was introduced that requires all programmers to disclose funding sources above $5,000. "The reason I created this motion," Chris Condon, a member of Pacifica's National Governance Committee, explained, "is because there has been a lot of debate about whether or not Amy Goodman has received CIA conduit foundation funding from the Ford Foundation and other places."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Michael Mukasey blames 9/11 on the "civilian justice system":

"Nevertheless, critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad—people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15752

The New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by Scott Shane about the CIA’s defiance of a court order to release documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its so-called Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer for a Cuban exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public engagements with Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald allegedly killed Kennedy. For over six years a former Washington Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, has been suing the CIA for the release of these documents. [1]

Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more newsworthy than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for most people to read) on the front page of the New York Times.

The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed, perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK assassination.

October 21, 2009
Moon scientist Stewart Nozette held as Israeli spy in FBI sting

An American astrophysicist with top-level nuclear security clearances appeared in court yesterday after being arrested in an FBI sting and charged with trying to sell secrets to Israel.

Stewart Nozette, who helped to discover water on the Moon and spent six years at a top-secret defence technology agency, was lured into a trap by federal agents.

They posed as Israeli intelligence operatives who met him at a Washington hotel and agreed to pay him cash for classified papers.

“I don’t get recruited by Mossad every day,” Mr Nozette allegedly said, according to wiretaps. “I knew this day would come. I just had a feeling.”

He was arrested at his home in a leafy suburb of Washington on Monday and charged with attempting to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information. He faces life in jail if convicted. Mr Nozette was an acclaimed government scientist who had worked for Nasa.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're already spying on social media...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10378741-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&t...

Visible Technologies, a company that monitors online social activity and packages the findings for clients, has forged a "strategic partnership" with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's not-for-profit investment arm, to give the organization insight into social media.

The deal was first reported on Monday by Wired.

According to Visible Technologies, In-Q-Tel is also investing in the company through a "technology development agreement." It did not release more details than that.

However, examining Visible Technologies' work may offer insight into what In-Q-Tel has in mind.

N.Y. 9/11 trial looms: Feds weigh moving ex-Al Qaeda 'military commander' Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

BY James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Tuesday, October 13th 2009, 4:00 AM

WASHINGTON - The confessed 9/11 mastermind and four other killers from Guantanamo Bay may soon be flown to New York to face death penalty trials, the Daily News has learned.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will decide by Nov. 16 whether to yank the plotters out of the U.S. base in Cuba and send them to a courthouse blocks from Ground Zero, officials confirmed.

The Justice Department is prepared to swiftly indict five detainees linked to 9/11 - including ex-Al Qaeda "military commander" Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - if Gitmo trials are scrapped, officials said.

That outcome is highly probable.

"If the decision is made to go to a federal court, there could be indictments as soon as early next year," an Obama administration official told The News.

Two other officials confirmed that.

Lindsey Graham seeks to block 9/11 trials in U.S.

James Rosen
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is trying to prevent the Obama administration from holding criminal trials in civilian courts for the alleged Sept. 11 plotters instead of bringing them before military commissions.

Graham, who helped craft the 2006 law that established the military commissions, said Friday that he'd attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that would prohibit the Obama administration from spending money on the prosecution and trial of the accused terrorists before U.S. civilian federal judges.

"Khalid Sheik Mohammed needs to be tried in a military tribunal," Graham said. "He's not a common criminal. He took up arms against the United States."

Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is being held at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, along with four other alleged plotters of the jetliner strikes that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/06/arab-states-have-launched_n_310...

By Robert Fisk | The Independent

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6262491/MI5-w...

MI5 warned the government that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack in the weeks leading up to September 11, including the morning itself, a new history of the Security Service discloses.

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent
Published: 4:49PM BST 05 Oct 2009

Newly published memos disclose an escalating concern about the terrorist leader right up until the moment he launched his attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington killing nearly 3,000 people.

But the files also reveal that MI5 discounted the threat from Islamic extremism just six years before the attacks and did not believe that America was vulnerable.

The author of the book, Defence of the Realm, has been given access to all of MI5’s files dating back to its foundation in October 1909 in the first authorised history of an intelligence service anywhere in the world.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/world/pakistan/Pak-US-lost-track...

Pak, US lost track of Osama five years ago: Musharraf
ANI 4 October 2009, 11:30am IST

WASHINGTON: Former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has said that the US and Pakistan both lost track of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden five years ago, The Dawn reports.

Musharraf, who is on a lecture tour of the US currently, told students and delegates at a college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that both Pakistani and US intelligence have failed to collect any details regarding Laden's whereabouts, and now they are even unable to ascertain whether he was dead or alive.

Musharraf also said there is a need of a multifaceted strategy to deal with the Taliban effectively.

He said that while the Al-Qaeda should be eliminated from Pakistan by force, dealing with the Taliban would require a military, political and socio-economic approach.

The former general underlined the fact that the Taliban was a widespread organization with no central command.

NY judge: CIA can keep 9/11 videotape info secret

By LARRY NEUMEISTER (AP) – 4 hours ago

NEW YORK — A New York City judge says he won't order the release of hundreds of documents the CIA has refused to make public regarding the destruction of videotapes of detainee interrogations following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Manhattan federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled Wednesday after viewing a few of nearly 600 documents related to the CIA's 2005 destruction of videotapes documenting new harsh questioning techniques.

He said a federal judge must defer to the CIA director in assessing information related to such an issue of national security.

The judge also said he probably would have ruled on the same grounds that the videotapes would not have to be released if they had not been destroyed.

A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union says he doesn't know if he'll appeal.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/thousands-have-illnesses-_n_299...

NEW YORK — A city task force on medical problems linked to the collapse of the World Trade Center says tens of thousands of New Yorkers have sought treatment or enrolled in a health monitoring program.

The annual report by the World Trade Center Medical Working Group was released Thursday. The report says nearly 16,000 people have sought out care at publicly funded programs for people with illnesses potentially related to the attacks.

Another 42,000 rescue, recovery and clean up workers were in monitoring programs.

But the report also found that there are people who aren't taking advantage of available medical services, including thousands of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

A recent poll by Public Policy Polling showed 22% of those polled either believed Bush allowed 9/11 to happen or were unsure. That same question revealed 38% of self-described "Liberals" either believed Bush allowed 9/11 or were unsure. 21% of "Moderates" and 16% of "Conservatives" held the same opinion.

Compare these results with other 9/11-related polls. A World Public Opinion poll from 2008 showed only 46% of the world believes al-Qaeda alone perpetrated 9/11; 15% believe the US government did it.

These polls demonstrate, more than anything, that the degree of skepticism expressed by the public reflects the framing of the question: the more open-ended the skepticism of the question, the more respondents agree with it. The most indicative of this trend is the 2006 CBS/NY Times poll about Bush administration foreknowledge: 16% said "telling the truth", 53% said they are "mostly telling the truth but hiding something", 28% said they are "mostly lying", 3% not sure.

In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Zbigniew Brzezinski calls for NATO to transform itself into a "hub" for a global security "web". This article is an expanded version of a NY Times Op-Ed piece he wrote in August.

Brzezinski advocates the following:

"But to remain relevant, NATO cannot — as some have urged — simply expand itself into a global alliance or transform itself into a global alliance of democracies. A global NATO would dilute the centrality of the U.S.-European connection, and none of the rising powers would be likely to accept membership in a globally expanded NATO. Furthermore, an ideologically defined global alliance of democracies would face serious difficulties in determining whom to exclude and in striking a reasonable balance between its doctrinal and strategic purposes.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/14/binladen.message/index.html

(CNN) -- An audio message purportedly from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has accused President Barack Obama of being unable to fulfil his election pledge to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq.

Osama bin Laden is seen in an image taken from a videotape that aired on Al-Jazeera in September 2003.

Osama bin Laden is seen in an image taken from a videotape that aired on Al-Jazeera in September 2003.

The tape emerged on radical Islamist Web sites, just two days after the United States marked the eighth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"To the American people, this is my message to you: a reminder of the reasons behind 9/11 and the wars and the repercussions that followed and the way to resolve it," the message said.

"From the beginning, we have stated many times ... that the cause of our disagreement with you is your support of your allies, the Israelis, who are occupying our land in Palestine. Your stance along with some other grievances are what led us to carry out the events of 9/11."