Book 'Game Change' portrays Sarah Palin as unstable ignoramus who believed Saddam was behind 9/11
BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, January 11th 2010, 4:33 AM

The gossipy new campaign book that has the political world buzzing portrays Sarah Palin not just as an ignoramus who believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 but also as possibly mentally unstable.

"Game Change," the 2008 deconstruction, says the stress of vaulting onto the national stage caused Palin to have wild mood swings.

"One minute, Palin would be her perky self; the next she would fall into a strange blue funk," the authors write.

The morning of her ill-fated CBS interview with Katie Couric, Palin - "her eyes glassy and dead" - was unresponsive to attempts to prep her as she was being made up.

"As they were about to set off to meet Couric, Palin announced 'I hate this makeup' - smearing it off her face, messing up her hair, complaining she looked fat," the book relates.

The Yemen Hidden Agenda: Behind the Al-Qaeda Scenarios, A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint
By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, January 5, 2010

On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was "suspected" of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in U.S. exaggerated

(CNN) -- The terrorist threat posed by radicalized Muslim- Americans has been exaggerated, according to a study released Wednesday by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A small number of Muslim-Americans have undergone radicalization since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the study found. It compiled a list of 139 individuals it categorized as "Muslim-American terrorism offenders" who had become radicalized in the U.S. in that time -- a rate of 17 per year.

That level is "small compared to other violent crime in America, but not insignificant," according to the study, titled "Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans."

To be included on the list, an offender had to have been wanted, arrested, convicted or killed in connection with terrorism-related activities since 9/11 -- and have lived in the United States, regardless of immigration status, for more than a year prior to arrest.

U.S. learned intelligence on airline bomb suspect while he was en route
U.S. border enforcement officials came close to stopping the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines jet while the suspect was en route to Detroit on Christmas Day, new data show.
By Sebastian Rotella
5:36 PM PST, January 6, 2010

U.S. border security officials learned of intelligence about the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt as he was en route to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials said in new disclosures today.

The new information shows that border enforcement officials came close to uncovering the plot despite previous intelligence failures that were criticized by President Obama this week.

If the intelligence had been discovered sooner, it could have resulted in the interrogation and search of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight, senior law enforcement officials said.

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-15/126276936312960.xml&coll=1

Christie picks a familiar face to lead homeland security
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

Gov.-elect Chris Christie plans to announce his choice as the leader of the state's homeland security effort this afternoon, tapping another former colleague from the U.S. Attorney's Office for his cabinet.

Senior Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna will be introduced as Christie's choice to direct the state Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, said two officials who have been briefed on Christie's selection. McKenna is currently the chief of the criminal division at the federal prosecutor's office and was executive assistant U.S. attorney for much of Christie's time running the U.S. Attorney's Office.

As a federal prosecutor, McKenna was a key member of the team responsible for shaping the case against the Pakistani militant indicted for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

He also coordinated the interaction between the U.S. Attorney's Office and other federal agencies, including those handling counter-terrorism functions.

January 6, 2010
Op-Ed Contributors
How 12/25 Was Like 9/11
By THOMAS H. KEAN and JOHN FARMER Jr.

IN the days since the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing, many officials, including the White House’s counterterrorism director, John Brennan, have insisted that the Detroit incident was “not like 9/11.” In many respects, we agree. But the government’s handling of the intelligence leading up to the attack was eerily reminiscent of one of the most shocking — and relatively underreported — revelations to come out of the 9/11 commission’s hearings.

The Chilcot Inquiry: Britain’s 9/11 Commission
by Maidhc Ó Cathail / January 5th, 2010

All too often, official inquiries are conducted by the very people who should themselves be under investigation.

In this respect, Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war bears a distressing similarity to the 9/11 Commission.

In a remarkable symmetry, both inquiries involve a Jewish Zionist historian, who not only advised his country’s leader to go to war against Iraq, but actually provided the ideological justification for that unnecessary war.

Preemptive Wars

Perhaps Philip Zelikow was one of the few people who was not surprised by his appointment as executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. After all, the Professor of History at the University of Virginia had shown uncanny prescience in foreseeing an event such as 9/11 itself. In 1998, as project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism Group, Zelikow had written:

The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

by Tom Burghardt / January 4th, 2010

Despite some $40 billion dollars spent by the American people on airline security since 2001, allegedly to thwart attacks on the heimat, the botched attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day was foiled, not by a bloated counterterrorist bureaucracy, but by the passengers themselves.

Talk about validating that old Wobbly slogan: Direct action gets the goods!

And yet, the closer one looks at the available evidence surrounding the strange case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the more sinister alleged “intelligence failures” become. As this story unfolds it is becoming abundantly clear that U.S. security officials had far more information on the would-be lap bomber than we’ve been told.

U.S. growth prospects deemed bleak in new decade
6:55pm EST

By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A dismal job market, a crippled real estate sector and hobbled banks will keep a lid on U.S. economic growth over the coming decade, some of the nation's leading economists said on Sunday.

Speaking at American Economic Association's mammoth yearly gathering, experts from a range of political leanings were in surprising agreement when it came to the chances for a robust and sustained expansion:

They are slim.

Many predicted U.S. gross domestic product would expand less than 2 percent per year over the next 10 years. That stands in sharp contrast to the immediate aftermath of other steep economic downturns, which have usually elicited a growth surge in their wake.

"It will be difficult to have a robust recovery while housing and commercial real estate are depressed," said Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University professor and former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

December 31, 2009
Jet Plot Shows Growing Ability of Qaeda Affiliates
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over American soil on Christmas Day represents an ominously new and lethal ability by a branch of Al Qaeda to attack the United States directly, according to government and independent counterterrorism specialists.

Until now, American officials had expressed concern over the capability of Qaeda affiliates in North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, and a militant Islamist group in Somalia closely tied to Al Qaeda, to attack American and other Western targets in their regions. But they remained confident that these groups — unlike Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in Pakistan — could not threaten the United States itself.

Published on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 by Salon.com
Cause and Effect in the 'Terror War'
by Glenn Greenwald

"In all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims" -- Supreme Tough Guy Warrior Mark Steyn, National Review, yesterday.

"The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan" -- New York Times, December 4, 2009.

"In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen" -- New York Times, yesterday.

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http://www.riskandinsurance.com/story.jsp?storyId=312470321&topic=Main

Researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that as many as 8 percent of the workers and volunteers who engaged in rescue and recovery, essential service restoration, and cleanup efforts reported experiencing post-9/11 asthma attacks or episodes.

Asthma is typically seen in only 4 percent of the population.

"Although previous WTC studies have shown significant respiratory problems, this is the first study to directly quantify the magnitude of asthma among WTC responders," said Hyun Kim, lead author of the analysis.

Researchers examined the medical records of 20,843 WTC responders who received medical screenings from July 2002 to December 2007 as part of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine-coordinated WTC program, which offers responders free medical surveillance examinations and targeted treatment for health conditions related to WTC work exposures. Results were compared with the U.S. National Health Survey Interviews adult sample data for the years 2000 and 2002-07.

U.S. Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged
by Gareth Porter / December 29th, 2009

WASHINGTON (IPS) — U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted “an Asian intelligence source” – a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials – as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

9/11 Truthers Foiled by 12/25 Attack

Hey 9/11 Truthers, CNN is reporting that al Qaeda just took credit for the Northwest Airlines terrorist attack:

“Be prepared to suffer because the killing is coming and we prepared you men who love death just as you love life and by God’s permission, we will come to you with more things that you have never seen before. Because, as you kill, you will be killed and tomorrow is coming soon. The martyrdom brother was able to reach his objective with the grace of God but due to a technical fault, the full explosion did not take place.”

—al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

Whatever the connection between Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man who tried to blow up an airliner last week, and al-Qaida (whatever that is), it appears a concerted effort is being made to establish a new hotbed for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The press has begun using the moniker "Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula" to indicate an actual organization.

First, the airliner attack is being attributed to "Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula":

"al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the thwarted attack as retaliation for a U.S. operation against the group in Yemen. Yemeni forces, helped by U.S. intelligence, carried out two airstrikes against al-Qaida operatives this month in the lawless country that is fast becoming a key front in the war on terror. The second one was a day before 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land in Detroit.