(For presentation as the annual distinguished lecture sponsored by the Sociology Department of the University of Winnipeg, 6 March, 2009)

George W. Bush and Omar al-Bashir

Serious allegations of criminality are swirling around ex-US President George W. Bush and current Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. In late February of 2009 it was reported that the Hague-based International Criminal Court was preparing to issue a warrant for al-Bashir alleging his culpability for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. As the documents were being prepared against Sudan’s head of state, ex-President Bush was preparing to initiate a series of high-paying speaking engagements beginning in Calgary Alberta on March 17. Bush’s visit to Alberta’s oil capital tests the consistency and authenticity of the Canadian government’s “unequivocal” position that “Canada is not and will not become a safe haven for persons involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity or other reprehensible acts.”¹

The video conference featuring Canadian academics Anthony Hall, Michael Keefer, Graeme MacQueen and John McMurtry has been edited and the audio enhanced significantly. The result is very good, and is here in two parts;

Part 1

(Part 2 below the fold)

The original podcast from the Canadian TVO is no longer streaming, so here is a re-post at video.google;

Part 1

Part 2

Rethinking 9/11 - June 29 & 30
Walkerton ON - Jubilee Hall

Speakers
Barrie Zwicker - Graeme MacQueen - Tony Szamboti - Michael Keefer - Michael Truscello - John Gorman

The events of September 11, 2001 have changed the course of history, launching and sustaining the Global War on Terror.

Iraq and Afghanistan wars of aggression have caused the deaths of over one million civilians and thousands of soldiers, caused millions to flee their homes and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

These events have from the beginning been shrouded in controversy and a growing movement of people around the world have been bravely calling for a serious and thorough investigation.

WERE WE DECEIVED? COMPLACENT? APATHETIC? . . .COMPLICIT?

Please join us at Walkerton's Jubilee Hall on June 29th and 30th as peace loving and truth seeking academics critically examine the events of 9/11.

Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence

by Michael Keefer - 11-17-2006

The first thing to say by way of preliminaries—and I’d better get it in quickly before someone suggests that I’ve turned up late or over-weight for a pre-match weighing-in—is that I’m not overjoyed with the pugilistic metaphor of my title.

But some sort of response to the volley of attacks on 9/11 researchers and activists with which the Counterpunch website marked the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 seems called for.

Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn set the tone of these pieces with an article describing theologian and ethicist David Ray Griffin, the author of The New Pearl Harbor (2004) and of The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), as a “high priest” of the “conspiracy nuts”—whom Cockburn denounces as cultists who “disdain all answers but their own,” who “seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant,” and who “pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, [….] contemptuously brush[ing] aside” evidence that contradicts their own “whimsical” treatment of “eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence.”

It’s a characteristically forceful performance, if at times slipshod. (One small sign of carelessness may be the manner in which Cockburn slides from calling 9/11 skeptics a “coven” to comparing them, a few sentences later, to “mad Inquisitors […] torturing the data—as the old joke goes about economists—until the data confess.” Readers brought up to think that the victims and perpetrators of witch-crazes have not customarily been the same people may find this unintentionally amusing.)

Continued...
http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/IntoTheRingWithCounterpunchOn911...

Link found at: DemocraticUnderground.com