It's All News! Jester Scoops Wingnut!! OR Falling Down The Rabbit Hole Becomes A Distant Memory

[UPDATED BELOW]

As I mentioned the other day, I have been tracking news coverage of the mystery of Gareth Williams, the British intelligence worker whose body was found in a bathtub late last month, padlocked in a duffel bag in an MI6 "safe house".

Among the coverage I have been tracking, I have noticed a British site called "The Spoof" which has been running satirical items on the Williams case. These items are always short and nonsensical and would appeal to a person with a particular absurdist sense of humour -- not me, but perhaps somebody else. Nevertheless, since I have Google News Alerts set and I do periodic Google News searches for the topics that interest me, and since, for some unfathomable reason, Google News considers The Spoof a "news source", whenever The Spoof posts another bit of nonsense about Gareth Williams, I find out about it immediately. Such is the power of Google News.

On Wenesday, September 29, The Spoof posted an item saying

A new theory about the death of MI6 maths genius Gareth Williams claims he had worked on the Stuxnet cybermunition program.

The piece is short and it's obviously nonsense. It's not as obviously complete nonsense as the one that claimed the Queen's security men were worried she was going to lock herself into a travel bag as a form of "copycat suicide", but still...

Today, just two days later, [in a total coincidence, right?] the right-wing lunatic site World Net Daily, which for some other unfathomable reason Google News also considers a "news source", has this big hot scoop from security genius Joseph Farah:

Spy's death linked to Iran computer-virus attack?

Investigators looking into the still-shrouded details of the death of Government Communications Headquarter spy Gareth Williams have learned that in the last months of his life before being found dead in an MI6 safe house he was a member of a team tracking the first-ever computer virus designed to sabotage oil refineries and other industrial installations, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Of course you have to subscribe to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin if you want all the details. Personally I am not substantially interested.

[UPDATE! Two hours later]

[In another total coincidence, right?] Joseph Farah's piece, "Spy's death linked to Iran computer-virus attack?" is no longer available at its original link, and it is no longer mentioned on the front page of World Net Daily either.

Now the link I posted above gives you a "server error" instead. I should say so! Some "server"! Some "error"!!

[END UPDATE]

I can remember a time when if you said the news was nonsensical fiction, nobody would believe you.

Nowadays it's a full day's work just to separate the fiction from the so-called news of the day.

And apparently I am overloaded on that, because my "fictionalized account" of the Gareth Williams story continues, in the chapter-by-chapter style of the old magazine serials. At least two or three readers are waiting impatiently for the ninth chapter of the series, and I invite you to join them by [insert shameless plug here].

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Notes On The Greatness Of The American People

In the recent past, readers of the Winter Patriot community blog have been treated to two articles from a contributor calling himself "Truth Excavator", one extolling the virtues of non-violent resistance and the other urging a new awakening of American consciousness, or a new expression of American conscience, or something, and ending with the following words:

Only a great and virtuous people are capable of bringing justice to their deprived leaders, and correcting the wrongs endorsed by generations of government officials. But if there ever was a people in history who could pull off such a task, it is the American people.

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson

Unfortunately for "Truth Excavator" and those who find this line of reasoning attractive, the greatness of the American people is not only a myth but an extremely destructive one.

The myth is most notably promoted by your so-called leaders, who by its use demonstrate quite clearly that they know more about you than you know about them. In particular, they know that flattery will get them everywhere, because you are far too ignorant, far too arrogant, too inward-looking, too self-absorbed, too addicted to your daily fiction, to ever vote for anyone so bold as to tell you the truth about yourself, your country and its role in the world, or the body politic itself -- of which you are a vanishingly insignificant member.

Instead they talk about how proud they are to be American, and how proud you are to be American, and how they know the great people of this great nation will support them in their great campaign to become the next great president, senator, congressman, governor, attorney general, dog-catcher, or whatever. God Bless America, this great and wonderful country. Or something.

The myth of the greatness of the American people is -- to use Lincoln's famous words -- altogether fitting and proper under the circumstances, which is to say it is necessary to the American political landscape for several interconnected reasons. In addition to the most transparent of flattery, the myth provides invaluable support for American exceptionalism, the mass-murderous fiction according to which the United States is never obliged to acknowledge -- or apologize for -- or rectify -- the damage it does to the rest of the world, where it slaughters innocent people by the millions and poisons square miles of landscape by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of spreading democracy, or stability, or prosperity, or security, or whatever they think you'll believe next year.

As Sarah Palin stated when she was running for the Vice-Presidency:

"America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here [...] as a force for good in this world."

As I explained at the time: This is political code, very thinly veiled, which means:

"It doesn't matter that we have killed thousands of our own people, and millions of foreigners, in our quest for global empire, because we are exceptional, and immune to the laws that apply to ordinary nations.

It doesn't matter that we have turned millions of people into refugees, depriving them of what little they had before we decided to "liberate" them, because we are a beacon of hope.

We don't even have to apologize for destroying Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Somalia, and Pakistan, nor for the covert and proxy warfare we are currently waging against Iran, and Russia, and China, and Venezuela, and many other countries which have never attacked us, because we are God's chosen people, in His shining city, on His hill."

None of this nonsense would be even remotely plausible without the fundamental lie: that Americans are inherently so "good" that they can be collectively called "great", with no hint of irony whatsoever.

As if that weren't enough, the myth also obscures the reality of American prosperity: that it is not solely or even primarily the product of American ingenuity and the inherent greatness of the American people, but of brute force, brutally applied. The story of American wealth begins with a continent rich in natural resources, devoid of natural enemies and protected from the rest of the world by two oceans, conquered through genocide and developed by slavery, fed by the most rapid destruction of resources mankind has ever seen, and growing by hammering the rest of the world, murdering innocent people and stealing the resources to which the victims and their progeny should have been entitled. For this you congratulate yourselves, and your politicians congratulate you, as righteous Christians whose worldly wealth signifies your holiness. Or something.

But no, your so-called leaders will never tell you any of this, and neither will your so-called news media. And even though the plain and horrible truth is available -- and always has been -- in your local library, and -- relatively recently -- on the best (read: least-popular) internet sites, you mostly choose to avoid it. And this avoidance is altogether fitting and proper as well, since your continuing denial allows you to go on about your life in "peace" and "quiet", secure in the "knowledge" that regardless of whatever trouble awaits you and your country, your inherent greatness -- and that of your friends and neighbors -- will certainly come to the rescue, if only it can be awakened. Or something.

Chris Floyd, writing recently about "the gut-wrenching footage unearthed by Wikileaks", had a few kind words to say about the greatness of the American people:

The American people are simply too good, too just to let stand such a foul besmirching of their national honor. After all, didn't they rise up as one after the Abu Ghraib atrocities were revealed in 2004, and boldly oust the architects of these crimes in the ensuing presidential election? Didn't they take to the streets in their millions when first Bush and then Obama claimed the right to have any citizen put to death without charges or trial simply by declaring the victim a "suspected terrorist"? Didn't a great groundswell of public ire force Congress to open impeachment proceedings against George Bush and Dick Cheney for their Soviet-style gulag of concentration camps and systematic tortures -- and threaten similar justice for Barack Obama's continuation and cover-up of this system? Didn't the American people demand a national day of mourning and atonement when they realized that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis had been murdered in a war based on false pretenses and cynical manipulation?

So let us have faith in the American people. They have proven time and again in this last decade that they will not countenance crimes and atrocities being committed in their names. They will not abide leaders who unleash a war machine of blood money and blind fury against innocent people. When push comes to shove, when the truth is revealed to them, they will always -- always -- do the right thing.

To Floyd's summary, one might add ... um ... interminably. The mythical greatness of the American people goes on and on and on.

The "people of good conscience" Jefferson was talking about have remained silent -- or else they were falsely assumed to be "of good conscience". So much for American "greatness".

It might seem surprising to see this mythical quality extolled by a writer who opposes the endless wars of empire. But as Chris Floyd noted in a more recent post, this is the sort of analysis we often get from

... American "progressives" -- almost of all whom are deeply marinated in their own brand of American exceptionalism ...

We don't expect that sort of "marinated analysis" around here, though ... at least not usually. Usually we make it clear here that the greatness of the American people is on a par with the greatness of sharks.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

What Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri Do All Day, or Why I Cannot Talk About Politics With My Father

I have finally come to understand why I cannot talk about politics, terrorism or international relations with my father, not that it matters much, except as a glimpse of a much larger phenomenon.

It's not just my father. I can't talk about politics or terrorism or world affairs with anyone who has lived his or her entire life under the great umbrella of American propaganda.

They have insulated themselves under an enormous web of lies, and hidden themselves away from actual knowledge of their nation and its role in the world, both of which they see dimly, if at all: the world as a dark, dangerous, mysterious place, and their nation as the best of all nations -- nay, the best of all possible nations.

They have been content to collect the scraps tossed their way by the American War Machine, although they would never call it that. Nor would they ever consider themselves in any way complicit in America's endless war on the rest of the world, a war they never even acknowledge.

It's a war waged on multiple planes, of which the military, being the bloodiest, is easily the most visible. And it didn't start last week, or last year, or even eight years ago.

It's been going on all their lives -- or since they were little kids. For an ever-increasing percentage of America's population, it's always been there.

Like the land, the sea and the sky, it's the backdrop against which their lives take place.

Only a fool would question the sea and sky.

... or the notion that the American War Machine should be what it is, and is what it should be.

Except that it's not true. None of it is true. And even worse -- they know it's not true.

As long as every little lie stays in place, the umbrella stands, so to speak: the big lies remain sacred, so to speak. But once you start to pull and tug, and separate one lie from another, and expose them to the light of knowledge and reason ... well, that's where it gets intolerable.

And I guess I just love to pull and tug.

I came to this moderately interesting conclusion in the hospital room where I've been spending most of my weekends lately, sitting there with my father and reading the newspaper he read before I arrived.

He's so far from where I grew up that I have no connection with any of the local stories: I read them as if they were field reports from places I may never hear of again, much less visit.

One week there was a story about a guy who took some construction equipment and started blazing a trail through a state park. One week there was a story about a new McDonald's opening in one of the suburbs. This weekend there was a story about a schoolteacher who was sitting alone in her classroom doing paperwork when a buck burst through the window.

You just never know what you'll find in the local news, but all the stories share a common feature: they're verifiable. I could go see the damage to the park. I could eat at the new fast food restaurant. And I could visit the school, admire the new window, and meet the teacher who hid under her desk.

I haven't actually done any of these things, and it's not likely that I ever would. But I could. You could. Anyone could. And the same is true of virtually all the local news: you can't predict what you'll find, but you can certainly check it out.

On the other hand, with world news, and often with national politics, it's just the opposite. What there is to read -- what my father reads every day, what he's been reading for his entire adult life -- is utterly predictable, and completely unverifiable. And therefore, he doesn't have any reason not to believe it -- unless I start talking.

I've just had dental surgery and I wasn't doing much talking this weekend. But that's another story -- and one I'll spare you.

I've read a lot of predictable, unverifiable, manure over the years, but I have never seen it more concentrated and hilarious than in Sebastian Rotella's most recent piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Entitled "Setbacks weaken Al Qaeda's ability to mount attacks, terrorism officials say", it had me laughing so hard that I've preserved it for posterity at my "other blog".

I happened to read Sebastian Rotella's newest masterpiece, not because it was in the paper in my dad's room, but because it set off my Google News Alert with its mention of Rashid Rauf. As long-time readers will remember, I wrote extensively about Rashid Rauf and the so-called Liquid Bombers, beginning in August of 2006 when they were arrested, and continuing until I became unable to blog much (or at all). But even when I haven't been writing, I've still been reading, and collecting.

Over the past three years I have preserved more than 330 articles mentioning Rashid Rauf, and it has been fascinating (in an entirely predictable way) to watch his legend develop. (And you can read the word "legend" in either of two ways: it can mean either "a fable" or "an intelligence agent's cover story".)

In 2006, Rashid Rauf was merely a "key figure" in the so-called Liquid Bombing plot -- possibly a messenger of some kind. Then he was the al Qaeda connection. Then he was the bomb-making expert. Then he was the mastermind. Then he was an al Qaeda commander.

The latter was an interesting step in the growing legend. Not everyone gets to be an al Qaeda commander.

I first read that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander from Bill Roggio, who writes the aptly named "Long War Journal". Upon reading that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander, I immediately felt a sense of inadequacy -- having read everything I could find about Rashid Rauf, how could I not have known he was an al Qaeda commander?

Then I got a bit indignant: Why should Bill Roggio know that Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander when I don't know it myself? Later I simmered down a bit and became less emotional and more pragmatic. The question became: How does Bill Roggio know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?

Much to my astonishment, Long War Journal takes comments from unknown visitors. So I left Bill Roggio a comment, saying: "How do you know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?"

To my further astonishment, my comment appeared immediately. So I bookmarked the page and returned a day later, hoping for an explanation from Bill Roggio as to where and how he had learned that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander. Instead of such an explanation, I found -- to no astonishment at all -- that my comment had been deleted. "Aha!" I thought, "That's how we know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander." What a thing to have learned!

We also learned quite a bit about Bill Roggio and his "Long War Journal", none of which could have been news. (Long War Journal? Why do you think it's called that?)

Then Rashid Rauf was also named -- as always, by an unnamed source -- as the al Qaeda contact for the dozen Pakistani students arrested in the UK in April of 2009 under so-called "Operation Pathway". No criminal charges were filed against any of the students, who were released from police custody but nonetheless held pending "deportation hearings" which still haven't started -- and most of the students have now left the UK "voluntarily".

Shortly after the Operation Pathway arrests, Rashid Rauf's legend began to grow again. Soon he was was al Qaeda's Commander for European Operations. Then he was a facilitator for the London bombings of 7/7/2005.

How much more is there? I've been wondering: How long it will take before he was behind 9/11? Or the 1993 WTC bombing? Oklahoma City? Beirut? Who really killed JFK, anyway? Was it Rashid Rauf? Or to put it another way: How do we know it wasn't?

I may have been kidding about that last part but the rest is serious, and Rashid Rauf's legend continues to grow backwards. The most recent additions to the legend have proceeded despite (or because of) the death (or not) of Rashid Rauf in a drone-launched missile attack in Pakistan in November of 2008.

Sebastian Rotella's LAT piece hints -- for the first time of which I am aware -- at a connection between Rashid Rauf and a failed attempt to bomb London in 2004. This is a year earlier than the previous publicly hinted connection: the backward legend-building is only three years short of 9/11 now, and it won't be long ...

It's a sick laugh, and one I can't share with my father, but laughs are scarce in these days of bogus terror everywhere, and unspoken dangers everywhere else. And the people who make me laugh have an impossible job.

The task -- for somebody like Bill Roggio or Sebastian Rotella -- is to make the threat of terrorism appear to be diminishing and increasing at the same time. It has to be serious enough to justify spending hundreds of billions every year, and throwing your civil rights down the drain at the same time, and the results of such an enormous sacrifice must be tangible. And yet, despite the tangible success, the threat must never go away, or even be significantly diminished, because then the hundreds of billions of dollars per year would have to stop -- or at least stop growing. And we can't have that.

You might start clamoring for the return of your civil rights. We can't have that, either.

For all these reasons -- not to mention the oil -- we simply can't have an end to the War on Terror (by whatever name the president wants us to call it these days), and that means no president can ever declare it won and no president can ever declare it un-winnable.

Victory, while always getting closer, has to remain as far away as ever.

Very few writers manage it well, and Sebastian Rotella is a master of the art. But he exceeds even himself in his most recent piece. You have to read the whole thing to get the full sick belly laugh from it, but a few fragments may entice you to read more (at the LAT or at my home away from home).

Rotella leads with this give-and-take combination:

As Al Qaeda is weakened by the loss of leaders, fighters, funds and ideological appeal, the extremist network's ability to attack targets in the United States and Western Europe has diminished, anti-terrorism officials say.

Nonetheless, Al Qaeda and allied groups based primarily in Pakistan remain a threat, particularly because of an increasing ability to attract recruits from Central Asia and Turkey to offset the decline in the number of militants from the Arab world and the West.

Rotella even uses the words "diminished" and "increasing" in his opening paragraphs. The man is a wizard!

And he follows with another combination:

Al Qaeda's relative strength these days is of crucial importance in the complex debate in Washington over future U.S. troop levels and tactics in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although factions within the Obama administration differ on how best to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, all agree that the paramount priority is defeating Al Qaeda. Unlike the Afghan Taliban, the terrorist network Al Qaeda remains committed to a holy war against the West with a goal of matching or surpassing its devastating attacks in 2001.

Matching or surpassing whose devastating attacks in 2001? There's the rub, isn't it?

All chroniclers of the Terror War, from hacks like Bill Roggio to masters like Sebastian Rotella, must write as if 9/11 had been fully and impartially investigated and that the conclusions of said investigation had been accepted as final by all thinking people. The fact that only non-thinking people believe any of the 9/11 manure is routinely glossed over, by wizard and hack alike.

Rotella is not only a wizard himself but he also has some wizardly sources:

"Some pretty experienced individuals have been taken out of the equation," a senior British anti-terrorism official said in a recent interview.

"There is fear, insecurity and paranoia about individuals arriving from outside, worries about spies and infiltration," said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive topic. "There is a sense that it has become a less romantic experience. Which is important because of the impact on Al Qaeda the brand, the myth, the idea of the glorious jihadist."

"Taken out of the equation" is British math-talk for "killed along with hundreds of civilians in a series of drone attacks".

But "Al Qaeda the brand"?? And "the myth"?? This senior British anti-terrorism official has one foot in the grave and the other on the truth, does he not? Outrageous!!

But it gets better! Enter the president:

President Obama cited the debilitated condition of the terrorist network last week during a visit with U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

"Because of our efforts, Al Qaeda and its allies have not only lost operational capacity, they've lost legitimacy and credibility," he said.

I almost stopped laughing long enough to ask myself: How could this fiction lose "legitimacy and credibility"? Is Obama pulling our leg, too?

Next in line for Rotella: an "ex"-CIA man working for the NYPD (whom Rotella calls a "scholar") virtually confirms the long-simmering notion that the entire al Qaeda legend is built on entrapment:

The number of failed plots in the West, whether directed or inspired by Al Qaeda, also shows that the quality of operatives has declined, scholar Marc Sageman testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

"Counter-terrorism is working," said Sageman, a former CIA officer and New York Police Department expert. "Terrorist organizations can no longer cherry-pick the best candidates as they did in the 1990s. There is no Al Qaeda recruitment program: Al Qaeda and its allies are totally dependent on self-selected volunteers."

Self-selected volunteers, indeed. Knuckleheads of the world unite!

I won't make you wait any longer. Here's the bit you've been waiting for, and once again it's from the unnamed senior British official:

In several recent cases, Western trainees in Pakistan allegedly had contact with Mustafa Abu Yazid, also known as Said Sheik, a longtime Egyptian financial boss. Abu Yazid acts as the day-to-day chief of the network while Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, spend their time eluding capture, said the British official.

It's a thing of beauty, is it not?

Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, spend their time eluding capture.

As I was saying, it's a sick laugh. But it's a laugh all the same.

The pity is that my father (who reads three newspapers a day and has done so for the past 40 years) and millions of other mainstream media Americans believe every word of it. It doesn't matter to them if Osama bin Laden is obviously dead, or Ayman al-Zawahri (whose name is always misspelled as "Zawahiri" in the Western press) is obviously an agent of Israeli propaganda -- just the same as it doesn't matter whether Rashid Rauf is alive or dead: if he's dead, his death is a victory for the forces of good (the US military, of course) and if he's alive, then he's a threat that must be eliminated by the forces of good (ditto, ditto).

It's no wonder we can't catch bin Laden or al-Zawarhi.

And only a fool would question the sea and sky.

So I rubbed my jaw and tried to smile. Dental surgery is such a bitch!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

What Nobody Wants To Know About Somalia And Why; And What That Means

A huge war crime -- a massive crime against humanity -- is going on right now in Somalia, courtesy of (but only indirectly traceable to) the Bush administration and Washington's bipartisan power elite. But, aside from Chris Floyd and a few other internet madmen, nobody knows -- or even wants to know -- much about it.

What's happening? And why doesn't anybody want to know? These are troubling questions for anyone who cares about the soul of America, and even more troubling for anyone who's beginning to suspect that America has no soul at all.

Chris Floyd:

Somalia is the invisible third front of the Terror War, an American-backed "regime change" operation launched by the invading army of Ethiopia and local warlords in December 2006. In addition to helping arm, fund and train the army of the Ethiopian dictatorship, the United States has intervened directly into the conflict, carrying out bombing raids on fleeing refugees and nomads, firing missiles into villages, sending in death squads to clean up after covert operations, and [...] assisting in the "rendition" of refugees, including American citizens, into the hands of Ethiopia's notorious torturers.

Bombing raids on fleeing refugees? Oh, yes. And much more, too. These people look hungry. We'd better kill them!

And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

When Chris Floyd writes, "Somalia is the invisible third front of the Terror War", he's probably counting chronologically starting from 9/11: in this sense Afghanistan is #1 (we started attacking in October of 2001; let's forget about the summer of '79) and Iraq is #2 (officially March of 2003, but in reality January 1991, and long before then as a matter of fact), which would make Somalia #3 (December 2006, and long before then, too!) and the recently opened and more recently acknowledged, still partly-deniable war-against-our-ally Pakistan as #4. And then Iran would be #5, or maybe it already is? But -- oops! -- did we forget to count the Terror War against the Home Front?

It soon gets too complicated to sort out, and therein lies one of the problems. The world is too big and too chaotic; we are too small and too stupid; we will never be able to deal with all of it. (I've been blogging for almost four years now and there are still large parts of the world that I have never even mentioned! It doesn't mean I don't care; usually it means I don't know enough to say anything authoritative, in which case I prefer to remain silent. But still ... where's my coverage of Darfur? And that's just one example.)

We prefer good news to bad, especially when times are tough. And it doesn't take much to overload on bad news these days. But still ... How can we ignore things like this?

Together, the American Terror Warriors, the Ethiopians and the warlords (some of them directly in the pay of the CIA) have created the worst humanitarian disaster on earth. Thousands have been killed in the fighting. Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes, many fleeing to northern Kenya, where more than 215,000 people are languishing in a single refugee camp in Dadaab; 45,000 people have poured into the camp this year alone, says the UN. In some of the camps, Somali refugees are living without any shelter at all: "The BBC's Mark Doyle, who has recently visited the camps in Kenya, says some refugees do not even have a basic plastic sheet to protect them from the sun and rain."

In just the last two weeks, more than 18,500 people have fled the capital of Mogadishu, which has already been decimated by the warfare. Many were sent on the run by one of the Ethiopians' favorite tactics: mortar and artillery fire into civilian areas believed "sympathetic" to the insurgents.

The United States is not only backing the Ethiopians and the Somali transitional government (TGF) propped up by the occupation; Washington has also provided "robust financial and logistical support to armed paramilitaries resisting the command and control of the TGF," according to a major new study of the conflict by the human rights organization, Enough. In addition to these freebooters, it turns out that the wide-ranging Somali pirates -- who last week hijacked a shipload of heavy weapons being funneled into African conflicts by Ukrainian war profiteers -- are supported by "backers linked to the Western-backed government" in Mogadishu.

We're reading more from Chris Floyd, of course; who else? Floyd's writing is unique, both in its stylish command of the language and in its content: for instance, hardly anybody else ever bothers to write about Somalia. The big media -- mainstream and other -- avoid mentioning it at almost every opportunity, and most of what does get published is sanitized in one way or half a dozen, with writers and editors falling over each other to avoid placing the blame for this horrendous situation where it obviously belongs.

But not Chris Floyd: whenever he digs up news from "the invisible third front", he writes about it, and he counters the spin. He puts the news in context; he explains what it means in terms of the big picture, just like he always does, whether he's writing about Iraq or Afghanistan, or the Home Front, or any other place.

But -- remarkably, sadly, and altogether too revealingly, in my opinion -- when Chris Floyd writes about Somalia, his website traffic goes through a hole in the floor.

So hardly anybody bothered to visit Floyd's remarkable site, Empire Burlesque, on the day when he posted the passage quoted above, along with excerpts from a piece by Jennifer Beskal at Salon:

Ishmael, a 37-year-old shepherd from the Ogaden region in Ethiopia, looked at me with tears in his eyes. Ethiopian forces -- who had already killed his mother, father, brothers and sisters -- murdered his wife days after they were married. They then slaughtered his goats, beat him unconscious, and slashed his shoulder to the bone, he said.

In December 2006, Ishmael crossed through Somalia into Kenya, heading for the nearest refugee camp in search of medical care. But when he didn't have enough money to pay a 1,000 shilling ($15) bribe, the Kenyan police bundled him into a car and took him to Nairobi. Less than a month later, he was herded onto an airplane with some 30 others, flown to Somalia and handed over to the Ethiopian military -- the same forces that he previously fled.

Ishmael is a victim of a 2007 rendition program in the Horn of Africa, involving Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the United States. There are at least 90 more victims like him. Most have since been sent home. A few -- including a Canadian and nine who assert Kenyan nationality -- remain in detention even now. The whereabouts of 22 others -- including several Somalis, Ethiopian Ogadenis, and Eritreans -- remain unknown....

[In the immediate aftermath of the invasion], Kenyan authorities arrested at least 150 men, women and children from more than 18 countries -- including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada -- in operations near the Somali border, and held them for weeks without charge in Nairobi. In January and February 2007, the Kenyan government then unlawfully put dozens of these individuals -- with no notice to families, lawyers or the detainees themselves -- on flights to Somalia, where they were handed over to the Ethiopian military. Ethiopian forces also arrested an unknown number of people in Somalia....

An unknown number of them -- likely dozens -- were questioned by the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Addis Ababa. From February to May 2007, Ethiopian security officers daily transported detainees -- including several pregnant women -- to a villa where U.S. officials interrogated them about suspected terrorist links. At night the Ethiopian officers returned the detainees to their cells....

In addition to working with the U.S., the Ethiopians used the rendition program for their own ends. For years, the Ethiopian military has been trying to quell domestic Ogadeni and Oromo insurgencies that receive support from neighboring countries, such as Ethiopia's archrival, Eritrea. The multinational rendition program provided them a convenient means to continue this internal battle -- and get their hands, with U.S. and Kenyan support, on those with suspected insurgent links.

Ishmael was one of their victims.

The questions his Ethiopian interrogators asked were nonstop, and always the same: "Are you al-Qaida? Are you an Ogadeni rebel? Are you part of the Somali insurgency?" Each time he said no, he was beaten, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. When he resisted answering, they targeted his testicles.

Then, in February 2008 -- some 14 months after his original arrest -- the Ethiopians decided Ishmael was no longer worth the trouble. They dumped him, along with 27 others, just over the Somali border....Now Ishmael is back in the refugee camp, limping and urinating blood. He is still waiting for the healthcare he came searching for nearly two years ago.

Why do people read Chris Floyd? Because he's a fantastic writer; because he's a tireless researcher; because he always tells us the truth, no matter how horrible; because he directs our attention to vital stories we otherwise might have missed; and surely there are more good reasons.

Which of these reasons are negated when Chris writes about Somalia?

None, of course. That was a rhetorical question. Now here's a real one: Why does the whole world run away from Chris Floyd's articles about Somalia?

Is it because the victims of the war crime in Somalia are blacker than the victims of the war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Is it because the roots of the war crime in Somalia reflect badly on both Bill Clinton and George Bush?

Is it because we can't stand reading about more than two war crimes on the same day, and Iraq and Afghanistan fill our quota?

Is it because the war crime in Somalia is a proxy war crime, being fought under the flag of the invading Ethopians?

Are Americans are too lazy and too stupid to connect the dots -- the dots between funding, arming, supplying, motivating and supporting an invading army; and actually being responsible for the invasion?

Is it because no Americans are being killed there?

Or is it because the stories coming out of Somalia are so gruesome?

Floyd's newest post contains an update on renditions in the Somalia war crime, from the BBC:

Among [the fleeing refugees] were Salim Awadh, a Kenyan, and his Tanzanian wife, Fatma Chande. Both of them were arrested as they crossed the border [from Somalia to Kenya in January 2007].

"I was kept in a cell with other women. Then the Kenyan anti-terrorist police questioned me - they asked me why we went to Somalia," Fatma says.

I meet Fatma in her small two-room house in Moshi, northern Tanzania. She is quietly spoken and her voice falters as she explains what happened next.

"I told them my husband got a job repairing mobile phones in Somalia. But they tried to force me to admit that my husband was a terrorist. They said I had to tell them the truth or they would strangle me."

...In the first weeks of early 2007, news began to filter out that several hundred people - including children - had been arrested trying to enter Kenya.

Al Amin Kimathi, the head of Kenya's Muslim Human Rights Forum, sent volunteers to police stations across the capital, Nairobi, trying to collect information.

"Some very frustrated senior police officers told us point blank: it's not our operation, go and ask the Americans, just call the American embassy. We even saw the Americans bring in detainees and take them out of certain police stations in Nairobi," he said.

Many of the refugees were sent back to Somalia, and then "renditioned" onward to Ethiopia.

"A week after we arrived we were interrogated by whites - Americans, British, I was interrogated for weeks," Salim says....

Former detainees have also told the BBC they were questioned by US agents. One said he was beaten by Americans.

...Al Amin Kimathi believes Ethiopia was seen as the ideal destination.

"It was the most natural place to take anyone looking for a site to go and torture and to extract confessions. Ethiopia allows torture of detainees. And that is the modus operandi in renditions."

...More than a year and a half after the renditions, the US government still refuses to respond to questions on the alleged US role.

...Meanwhile Fatma is still waiting anxiously for news of her husband.

After Salim got access to a mobile phone, he was able to speak to her from his cell for the first time in more than a year.

Now the phone has stopped working, Salim has disappeared once again.

Chris appends this note:

I know that no one cares about this. I know that the fact that thousands of Somalis have been slaughtered and millions more driven into suffering and desolation by a vicious war being conducted at every step with American assistance, in America's name -- in your name, if you're an American -- is not nearly as important as whether or not Joe Biden strikes the proper tone in his "debate" with Sarah Palin tonight. I know that even to most true-blue "progressives," the Somalis are non-people -- except when they show up as wild-eyed beserkers on late-night re-runs of "Black Hawk Down." I know that every time I write about Somalia, the traffic for the site plummets like the stock of a clapped-out merchant bank just before it gets a government bailout. But I don't really care. With the full approval of the entire bipartisan political elite, America is breeding death, hate, extremism and a hellish storm of blowback through its actions in Somalia. You might not give a damn that this evil is being wrought in your name, but I do.

I applaud Chris Floyd for his persistence in paying attention to Somalia even though his readers have made it painfully obvious that they don't give a fig. But I still want to know: what combination of factors allows them not to care, or prevents them from caring?

Perhaps there's a question about whether these war crimes are really being committed in our names? Jennifer Deskal, the human rights advocate whose piece in Salon Chris Floyd quoted at length, writes:

Almost everyone I spoke with assumed -- whether true or not -- that the United States backed the arbitrary arrest and unlawful rendition of men like Ishmael and the still-detained Kenyans. Almost everyone assumed that the Ethiopians operate with America's blessing.

To which Floyd remarks:

They "assume" these things, of course, because they are true.

And Deskal continues:

Their stories have circulated, fueling anger and resentment. As one man, whose childhood friend became one of the rendition victims, told me, "Now when I go to the mosque, I pray to God to punish the Americans."

To be sure, the United States is not the main culprit when the Kenyans unlawfully render suspects or the Ethiopians torture them. But when U.S. officials interrogate rendition victims who are being held incommunicado, the United States becomes complicit in the abuse. The U.S. is funding the Ethiopian military, supporting its activities in Somalia and training Kenyan security forces in counterterrorism -- so as U.S.-backed military and police forces in the region brutalize their domestic opponents in the name of fighting terrorism, the United States is often blamed.

The United States could change those perceptions by demanding higher standards of its foreign partners and cutting off aid to abusers. It otherwise risks fueling the very problem -- anti-American militancy -- that it seeks to solve. For starters, the U.S. could demand the release or fair trial of any rendition victims still stuck in Ethiopian custody.

Chris Floyd again:

Daskal's story is marred by the same timidity which groups like Human Rights Watch (where she serves as senior counterrorism counsel) generally display when discussing American direction of and complicity in war crimes. These references are often couched in terms of "a perception" (or even misperceptions!) of American intentions. The latter are always given the benefit of doubt and qualification. Still, it requires little reading between the lines to see the confirmation of what every honest observer of the conflict can see: the Terror War operation is creating more of the violent extremism that it purports to combat.
...

In my opinion, Chris Floyd lets Jennifer Deskal off lightly for ridiculous spin and obvious distortion -- as well as some remarkably timid audacity! (or should I say audacious timidity?)

The notion that the USA is only complicit if its officials participate in the interrogation of rendition victims is bizarre and incomprehensible -- except as another part of the official deception. Welcome to the nightmare, where even defenders of human rights cut unrepentant torturers as much slack as possible.

Another bizarre and incomprehensible notion also comes to mind: perhaps most Americas are determined to know as little as possible about the war crime in Somalia because that's the only way their lives can make sense!

The war crimes against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran and the Home Front all have some "justifying" pretext, or several. Even though all the stories are false, they're there, part of the national crazy-quilt: all the obvious, transparent, politically viable lies about 9/11; campfire tales about Saddam Hussein and his non-existent WMD; the endless not-really hunt for Osama bin Laden; nuclear weapons that don't exist yet but are already an existential threat to Israel; and a nation crawling with FBI entrapment victims if not actually real terrorists.

But we don't have any story about Somalia.

We don't have a mythically famous villain.

We don't have any ruins we can point to while saying, "You see this? The Somalis did this!"

In other words, there is no reason -- not even a transparently false reason -- for the war crime against Somalia.

And yet there's no opposition to it, from either party. And this combination of facts, in my opinion, makes the story intolerable to almost everybody.

There's no way to cloak ourselves in denial this time, no fig leaf to hide behind. Somalia reveals all too clearly the real motives behind the Terror War, and they are not what we have been told -- by Democrats or Republicans.

Somalia also reveals some crucial aspects of the Terror War on the Home Front. Among them: America's bipartisan leadership has no qualms about attacking foreigners who pose no threat to us, even without a plausible pretext, if they think they can get away with it.

When you add in all the other reasons -- from the blackness of the victims to the gruesomeness of the stories -- you get a tangled mess of horror that is so ugly, only the most courageous among us can stand to look at it.

Chris Floyd has enough courage to do it. But most of his readers do not. And that's one of the reasons why I am becoming increasingly convinced that we are more screwed now than ever before.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Wrong Again! Twice! Another Look At Azizabad And Wall Street

I've made a few mistakes lately and it's time to 'fess up. I was wrong about the Azizabad massacre, and I was wrong about the Wall Street bailout, too. Oops.

The Azizabad Massacre

On August 22, an American airstrike killed more than 90 innocent people in Afghanistan. Most of them were sleeping children.

At the time, I assumed the Pentagon would write off the victims as "collateral damage" and I wrote a piece to that effect. But that didn't happen; instead our military spokesmen denied the story, saying that the airstrike had killed at least 25 "militants" and that at most five civilians had been killed.

Investigators from Afghanistan and the UN went to the scene, interviewed the survivors, looked at the graves, and confirmed the original reports. But the Pentagon stuck to its story. I wrote a second post on the attack in which I mentioned that the damage to civilians was even worse than what had been reported; I also mentioned that the word was being leaked: the Americans had been deceived. An unidentified spokesman blamed the attack on misinformation that the Americans had been given by the Taliban. But the US still didn't admit killing all those people.

Instead Pentagon spokesmen insisted that the UN and Afghan inspectors had been fooled by the survivors of the attack, who (according to the Pentagon) had made up the story about all their relatives being killed. The US even accused the survivors of fabricating evidence -- dead children in graves, and so on. No American investigator ever visited the scene, no Pentagon representative asked any questions on the ground. Instead they just told us what they wanted us to believe. And it was all a pack of lies, of course.

I say "of course" because this is only the latest in a long series of events in which Americans have killed innocent people on the ground in Afghanistan and then lied about it repeatedly. The civilian casualties and the lies intended to cover them have even caused a strain in the Afghan-US "relationship".

If this strain ever got serious it could jeopardize the entire US occupation of Afghanistan, which would be a very good thing in my opinion because the US has no business occupying Afghanistan. The bombing, invasion and subsequent occupation are war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as our crimes against Iraq have been -- though very few will say so.

But I'll say it: the war in Afghanistan would be entirely unjustified, even if the official story of 9/11 were true, which it obviously isn't.

I was still following the Azizabad story when my computer began to break down, and I didn't get a chance to follow up on my two early stories. But Carlotta Gall, veteran war reporter for the New York Times, traveled to the scene, looked at the evidence, talked to the people, and filed a report that left no doubt that the UN and Afghan investigators had been right all along, and that the Pentagon had been blowing smoke up our backsides once again -- with enormous assistance from the American "news" media.

The Times of London posted a graphic cell-phone video from the scene of the atrocity, and reported:

As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.

Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.”

The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.

These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21.

The Times has much more to say, including:

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

That's a C130 in the photo, and for the war-porn shot shown here it was shooting flares. For the sleeping children, they used live ammo.

Chris Floyd picked up on Carlotta Gall's report and wrote an excellent post about it, and Glenn Greenwald read Chris and wrote a good piece about it too. Here Greenwald quotes Floyd:

The mass death visited upon the sleeping, defenseless citizens of Azizabad encapsulates many of the essential elements of this global campaign of "unipolar domination" and war profiteering: the callous application of high-tech weaponry against unarmed civilians; the witless attack that alienates local supporters and empowers an ever-more violent and radical insurgency; and perhaps the most quintessential element of all -- the knowing lies and deliberate deceits that Washington employs to hide the obscene reality of its Terror War.

Greenwald drew attention to the amazing fact that the Pentagon's story had been broadcast into America's living rooms on a daily basis by FOX News, which was featuring reports from an "independent journalist".

It turned out that the "independent journalist" was none other than Oliver North, the convicted serial liar who was a useful tool of evil back in the days of the "Iran/Contra Scandal".

How quaint: a scandal!

To think there could even be one of those in these post-9/11 days. Sigh.

Greenwald also quoted Dan Froomkin quoting George Bush:

"Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths. This has been the case throughout the history of warfare. Our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life. Every grieving family has the sympathy of the American people."

Froomkin's comment:

It's a bit hard to convince people that our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life when we don't even acknowledge them.

He's playing on understatement, of course. It's not "a bit hard". It's impossible.

The photo of the injured Afghan boy comes to us courtesy of the AP via Froomkin's post at Nieman Watchdog.

Now I'm thinking back to the Bush quote:

Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths.

He didn't actually use the term "collateral damage" but he said virtually the same thing. So maybe I wasn't entirely wrong after all. But all those people are still dead.

And, unless I am much mistaken, they're dead because Americans called in an airstrike based on a tip they got from the "enemy". It's utterly preposterous, and despicable, and much worse than I originally thought it could be. Fool me once ...

The Wall Street Bailout

... fool me twice!

I was also wrong about the Wall Street bailout. On Sunday, I wrote a brief post congratulating my fellow citizens on our purchase of "toxic waste" "worth" $700 billion, and now it turns out that the purchase is off, or at least it has been delayed, after the House of Representatives refused to pass a bill backed by the President and the House leaders of both parties.

The vote was 228 to 205 against the bill, and the bipartisan breakdown is instructive: 65 Republicans and 140 Democrats voted for the bailout, while 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted against it.

In other words, more than 67% of the Republicans voted against the measure, while nearly 60% of the Democrats voted for it.

The Republicans have usually voted together, especially when the twice-unelected president has expressed firm views. And Bush has made his support of this bailout proposal very clear.

So there's no question that the president has been rebuffed by his own party on this matter. But -- as Chris Floyd points out -- this is not news; last month the big elephants didn't even let the little chimp speak at their convention.

Meanwhile, the donkey house leadership -- exemplified by Miss Impeachment-Is-Off-The-Table, Nancy Pelosi -- despite their best efforts, could only muster 60% of their "colleagues" in support of this obviously criminal president. So Pelosi has not only shown her truly treasonous colors once again; she's been rebuffed by a significant portion of her own party as well.

Nonetheless, House leaders and presidential mouthpieces say, they will try again to get this bill passed, perhaps later in the week. So the deal is not undone yet, and my reporting may have been more "premature" than "wrong".

Or it could be that, like the Azizabad story, the reality is much worse than my early reports indicated.

As it was becoming evident that the congress would not pass the bailout measure, the Federal Reserve announced that it

will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system...

There's no congressional vote on that, my friends, and we're not getting any toxic waste in return. It's just the first of many donations that will be made in rapid succession, unless I am very wrong.

The purpose of this particular transfusion is to

settle the funding markets down, and allow trust to slowly be restored between borrowers and lenders

as Bloomberg helpfully explains.

And that's the end of reality as a motive force, as far as I can tell.

The best way to restore trust between borrowers and lenders would be to resume the enforcement of laws against predatory lending practices, and to let the firms that have made too many bad investments disappear.

Arthur Silber, who has been digging very deeply into this story lately, reports that "the crisis" may cost as much as $5 trillion before they stop throwing money at it. Of course, by that time, things will be much worse than they are now.

And there's the rub.

The bailout is not a solution to the problem. It could never be a solution and it could never be taken seriously as a potential solution, for the simple reason that the problem is insoluble.

It's not even one problem. It's a tangled mess of problems, some of which were almost certainly created deliberately by our government and its best friends, primarily in order to separate us from our money.

The problems include: an insane level of military spending; repeated cuts to the funding of our social systems and physical infrastructure; excessive tax cuts, especially for the excessively rich; extreme deregulation, especially of the financial "industry"; the movement of formerly American industries to foreign countries; increasing global population; limited global resources; increasing destruction of our natural environment; and the strain of committing multiple war crimes simultaneously. All these forces acting together mean that things are getting more expensive, and that we are becoming less able to afford them.

We can't change any of this by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks that have done the worst job of managing their investments, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars we give them.

Thus the "solution" cannot work; it doesn't even begin to address the problem; its only possible purpose is to steal your money and give it to some of the people who are most responsible for the mess we're in today.

So why would we do it?

Gimme an "F". Gimme an "E". Gimme an "A". Gimme an "R". What's that spell?

Some of the details in this NYT piece could be classified under "blackmail" ... or "extortion" ... or "terrorism". Like this:

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., appearing at the White House late Monday afternoon, warned that the failure of the rescue plan could dry up credit for businesses big and small, making them unable to make payrolls or buy inventory. Vowing to continue working with Congress to revive the rescue plan, Mr. Paulson said it was “much too important to simply let fail.”

Supporters of the bill had argued that it was necessary to avoid a collapse of the economic system, a calamity that would drag down not just Wall Street investment houses but possibly the savings and portfolios of millions of Americans. Moreover, supporters argued, a lingering crisis in America could choke off business and consumer loans to a degree that could prompt bank failures in Europe and slow down the global economy.

And this:

Stock markets plunged as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat, and kept slumping into the afternoon when that appearance became a reality. By late afternoon the Dow industrials had fallen more than 5 percent, and other indexes even more sharply. Oil prices fell steeply on fears of a global recession; investors bid up prices of Treasury securities and gold in a flight to safety. [...]

House leaders pushing for the package kept the voting period open for some 40 minutes past the allotted time at mid-day, trying to convert “no” votes by pointing to damage being done to the markets, but to no avail.

and this:

The United States Chamber of Commerce vowed to exert pressure, warning in a letter to members of Congress that it would keep track of who votes how. “Make no mistake,” the letter said. “When the aftermath of Congressional inaction becomes clear, Americans will not tolerate those who stood by and let the calamity happen.”

I've got news for you: The calamity is already happening, Americans have stood by and watched it develop for years without doing anything about it, and it's going to continue regardless of whether or not the federal government gives a few criminal banks more of our money than anyone can possibly imagine.

I've got more news for you: a scoop before its time, if you will...

Electing John McCain won't solve the problem.

Electing Barack Obama won't solve it either.

Now What?

I can't shake the feeling that these two stories are tied together in ways that transcend the obvious "WP was wrong".

For instance, I wonder whether a nation which tolerates -- not to say thrives on -- deliberate lies about the people it has killed, could possibly deserve anything other than a full-spectrum economic meltdown.

The USA has been attacking defenseless countries for generations.

What goes around, comes around.

And it's been a long time coming.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

The Biggest Lie Of All

I happened to be walking through the living room while my wife was watching Laura Bush address the Republican National Convention, and I actually heard the First Lady say this:

George is using America's influence to lift up lives around the world. Millions of children are protected from malaria by mosquito nets the American people provide. In Afghanistan and Iraq, 50 million people are now living in freedom. And let's not forget President Bush has kept the American people safe.

Four simple clear sentences punctuated by lots of applause. Let's look more closely, shall we?

George is using America's influence to lift up lives around the world.

Indeed he is! Thanks to America's influence, George has lifted up more than a million people in Iraq and tens of thousands of others in Afghanistan -- and he has lifted them all straight up to heaven!

Millions of children are protected from malaria by mosquito nets the American people provide.

The generosity of the American people is astounding. Who'd a thunk we could spare all this mosquito netting? It's a testament to the goodness of America -- the world's greatest democracy. And George Bush's greatest foreign policy achievement, unless you count the GWOT:

In Afghanistan and Iraq, 50 million people are now living in freedom.

And they're loving every minute of it, too.

Let me tell you something about the freedom 50 million people are enjoying in Iraq and Afghanistan: It's a freedom most of my readers have never known, and the lucky ones never will.

I call it "Freedom from Worrying about the Future".

The Americans and their depleted uranium munitions have made Afghanistan and Iraq uninhabitable. This is most unfortunate for the people who are now living there.

But it won't bother them for very long, and once they're gone it won't bother anybody anymore.

And in the meantime, since they have no future, they have nothing to worry about.

They are free to develop radiation poisoning, suffer and die at their own convenience.

And let's not forget President Bush has kept the American people safe.

Right.

Above all, let's not forget -- let's never forget -- who was President of the United States on September 11, 2001.

Let us never forget about all the warnings he was given before the attacks of that day -- not one of which he heeded.

The White House's top counter-terrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, has testified that from the beginning of George W. Bush's presidency until September 11, 2001, Clarke attempted unsuccessfully to persuade President Bush to take steps to protect the nation against terrorism. Clarke sent a memorandum to then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on January 24, 2001, "urgently" but unsuccessfully requesting "a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack."

In April 2001, Clarke was finally granted a meeting, but only with second-in-command department representatives, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who made light of Clarke's concerns.

Clarke confirms that in June, July, and August, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warned the president in daily briefings of unprecedented indications that a major al Qaeda attack was going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. Yet, Clarke was still unable to convene a cabinet-level meeting to address the issue.

Condoleezza Rice has testified that George Tenet met with the president 40 times to warn him that a major al-Qaeda attack was going to take place, and that in response the president did not convene any meetings of top officials. At such meetings, the FBI could have shared information on possible terrorists enrolled at flight schools. Among the many preventive steps that could have been taken, the Federal Aviation Administration, airlines, and airports might have been put on full alert.

According to Condoleezza Rice, the first and only cabinet-level meeting prior to 9/11 to discuss the threat of terrorist attacks took place on September 4, 2001, one week before the attacks in New York and Washington.

On August 6, 2001, President Bush was presented a President's Daily Brief (PDB) article titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The lead sentence of that PDB article indicated that Bin Laden and his followers wanted to "follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 'bring the fighting to America.'” The article warned: "Al-Qa'ida members--including some who are US citizens--have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."

The article cited a "more sensational threat reporting that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft," but indicated that the CIA had not been able to corroborate such reporting. The PDB item included information from the FBI indicating "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” The article also noted that the CIA and FBI were investigating "a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

The president spent the rest of August 6, and almost all the rest of August 2001 on vacation. There is no evidence that he called any meetings of his advisers to discuss this alarming report. When the title and substance of this PDB article were later reported in the press, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice began a sustained campaign to play down its significance, until the actual text was eventually released by the White House.

New York Times writer Douglas Jehl put it this way: "In a single 17-sentence document, the intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush in August 2001 spells out the who, hints at the what and points towards the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later."

Eleanor Hill, Executive Director of the joint congressional committee investigating the performance of the US intelligence community before September 11, 2001, reported in mid-September 2002 that intelligence reports a year earlier "reiterated a consistent and constant theme: Osama bin Laden's intent to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States."

That joint inquiry revealed that just two months before September 11, an intelligence briefing for "senior government officials" predicted a terrorist attack with these words: "The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

Given the White House's insistence on secrecy with regard to what intelligence was given to President Bush, the joint-inquiry report does not divulge whether he took part in that briefing. Even if he did not, it strains credulity to suppose that those "senior government officials" would have kept its alarming substance from the president.

Again, there is no evidence that the president held any meetings or took any action to deal with the threats of such attacks.

Let us never forget how diligently he obstructed the investigation into those attacks.

Following September 11, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney took strong steps to thwart any and all proposals that the circumstances of the attack be addressed. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to renege on his public promise on September 23 that a "White Paper" would be issued to explain the circumstances. Less than two weeks after that promise, Powell apologized for his "unfortunate choice of words," and explained that Americans would have to rely on "information coming out in the press and in other ways."

On Sept. 26, 2001, President Bush drove to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stood with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and said: "My report to the nation is, we've got the best intelligence we can possibly have thanks to the men and women of the C.I.A." George Tenet subsequently and falsely claimed not to have visited the president personally between the start of Bush's long Crawford vacation and September 11, 2001.

Testifying before the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet answered a question from Commission member Timothy Roemer by referring to the president's vacation (July 29-August 30) in Crawford and insisting that he did not see the president at all in August 2001. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied, explaining that for much of August he too was "on leave." An Agency spokesman called reporters that same evening to say Tenet had misspoken, and that Tenet had briefed Bush on August 17 and 31. The spokesman explained that the second briefing took place after the president had returned to Washington, and played down the first one, in Crawford, as uneventful.

In his book, At the Center of the Storm, (2007) Tenet, refers to what is almost certainly his August 17 visit to Crawford as a follow-up to the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US" article in the CIA-prepared President's Daily Brief of August 6. That briefing was immortalized in a Time Magazine photo capturing Harriet Myers holding the PDB open for the president, as two CIA officers sit by. It is the same briefing to which the president reportedly reacted by telling the CIA briefer, "All right, you've covered your ass now." (Ron Suskind, The One-Percent Doctrine, p. 2, 2006). In At the Center of the Storm, Tenet writes: "A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure that the president stayed current on events."

A White House press release suggests Tenet was also there a week later, on August 24. According to the August 25, 2001, release, President Bush, addressing a group of visitors to Crawford on August 25, told them: "George Tenet and I, yesterday, we piled in the new nominees for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice Chairman and their wives and went right up the canyon."

In early February, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney warned then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that if Congress went ahead with an investigation, administration officials might not show up to testify. As pressure grew for an investigation, the president and vice president agreed to the establishment of a congressional joint committee to conduct a "Joint Inquiry." Eleanor Hill, Executive Director of the Inquiry, opened the Joint Inquiry's final public hearing in mid-September 2002 with the following disclaimer: "I need to report that, according to the White House and the Director of Central Intelligence, the president's knowledge of intelligence information relevant to this inquiry remains classified, even when the substance of the intelligence information has been declassified."

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was created on November 27, 2002, following the passage of congressional legislation signed into law by President Bush. The President was asked to testify before the Commission. He refused to testify except for one hour in private with only two Commission members, with no oath administered, with no recording or note taking, and with the Vice President at his side. Commission Co-Chair Lee Hamilton has written that he believes the commission was set up to fail, was underfunded, was rushed, and did not receive proper cooperation and access to information.

A December 2007 review of classified documents by former members of the Commission found that the commission had made repeated and detailed requests to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and had been told falsely by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had "produced or made available for review" everything that had been requested.

Let us never forget how heroically his administration protected the rescue and recovery workers by claiming the air in NYC was safe to breathe when it really wasn't.

The Inspector General of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) August 21, 2003, report numbered 2003-P-00012 and entitled "EPA's Response to the World Trade Center Collapse: Challenges, Successes, and Areas for Improvement," includes the following findings:

"[W]hen EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement. At that time, air monitoring data was lacking for several pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Furthermore, The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

"As a result of the White House CEQ's influence, guidance for cleaning indoor spaces and information about the potential health effects from WTC debris were not included in EPA- issued press releases. In addition, based on CEQ's influence, reassuring information was added to at least one press release and cautionary information was deleted from EPA's draft version of that press release. . . . The White House's role in EPA's public communications about WTC environmental conditions was described in a September 12, 2001, e-mail from the EPA Deputy Administrator's Chief of Staff to senior EPA officials:

"'All statements to the media should be cleared through the NSC [National Security Council] before they are released.'

"According to the EPA Chief of Staff, one particular CEQ official was designated to work with EPA to ensure that clearance was obtained through NSC. The Associate Administrator for the EPA Office of Communications, Education, and Media Relations (OCEMR) said that no press release could be issued for a 3- to 4-week period after September 11 without approval from the CEQ contact."

Acting EPA Administrator Marianne Horinko, who sat in on EPA meetings with the White House has said in an interview that the White House played a coordinating role. The National Security Council played the key role, filtering incoming data on ground zero air and water, Horinko said: "I think that the thinking was, these are experts in WMD (weapons of mass destruction), so they should have the coordinating role."

In the cleanup of the Pentagon following September 11, 2001, Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws were enforced, and no workers became ill. At the World Trade Center site, the same laws were not enforced.

In the years since the release of the EPA Inspector General's above-cited report, the Bush Administration has still not affected a clean-up of the indoor air in apartments and workspaces near the site.

Screenings conducted at the Mount Sinai Medical Center and released in the September 10, 2004, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of the federal Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), produced the following results:

"Both upper and lower respiratory problems and mental health difficulties are widespread among rescue and recovery workers who dug through the ruins of the World Trade Center in the days following its destruction in the attack of September 11, 2001.

"An analysis of the screenings of 1,138 workers and volunteers who responded to the World Trade Center disaster found that nearly three-quarters of them experienced new or worsened upper respiratory problems at some point while working at Ground Zero. And half of those examined had upper and/or lower respiratory symptoms that persisted up to the time of their examinations, an average of eight months after their WTC efforts ended."

A larger study released in 2006 found that roughly 70 percent of nearly 10,000 workers tested at Mount Sinai from 2002 to 2004 reported that they had new or substantially worsened respiratory problems while or after working at ground zero. This study showed that many of the respiratory ailments, including sinusitis and asthma, and gastrointestinal problems related to them, initially reported by ground zero workers persisted or grew worse over time. Most of the ground zero workers in the study who reported trouble breathing while working there were still having those problems two and a half years later, an indication of chronic illness unlikely to improve over time.

Why were the authorities in such a hurry to dismantle the wreckage and get it out of there?

Was destroying the evidence so important that they had to sacrifice the health of thousands of Americans to do it?

Absolutely! The evidence had to be destroyed so the "investigation" could begin!

How else could they fix the intelligence around the policy?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.