Stark For A Day: I'm Dreadfully Sorry

California Congressman Pete Stark, whose "incendiary comments" last week "offended" supporters of the president, his war, and his health care policy, survived a censure motion yesterday in the House but gave a teary apology nonetheless.

It reminded me of 2005, when Dick Durbin apologized for his remarks about Gitmo. Durbin's remarks were called "reprehensible" by the White House and the media echoed the line -- without ever bothering to mention how reprehensible was the policy Durbin had criticized.

Pete Stark's inflammatory comments were not especially lucid in my opinion -- he said the president sent troops to Iraq to have their heads shot off for his amusement -- but most Americans didn't consider them criminal. In a CNN poll, 88% of the respondents said they didn't think Stark should apologize. But he did anyway. With tear ducts wide open.

“I want to apologize to my colleagues — many of whom I have offended — to the president and his family and to the troops,” Stark said. He added that he hoped the apology would allow him to “become as insignificant as I should be” as the House moves forward on critical, divisive issues.

Stark then left the podium, wiping away tears as Democratic colleagues surrounded him with supportive handshakes.

Thanks, Pete. Thanks for standing up for the people who supported you! What's the matter, 88% isn't good enough for you? What do you need? 90? 95?

Here's the speech Pete Stark should have delivered but didn't:

Dear Fascists:

You want me to apologize. You want to censure me. You want me to take my words back.

Go screw.

I said what I said. Why should I pretend I didn't? What good would that do?

If you were offended, good. You deserve to be offended. More than that, you deserve to be hanged. We all do.

In 2000, we got a serial failure for president, and he was never even legitimately elected. We all knew it. Everybody in politics knew it! But we played along as if everything was just fine.

Less than a year later, our unelected president sat and listened to little children reading a book about a goat while "terrorists" hijacked airplanes and attacked us. Then he awarded Medals of Freedom to the heads of the national security agencies that had failed to protect us. And we smiled and nodded.

The administration has claimed for the past six years that it must have everything it wants, including the power to wage offensive war anywhere in the world, and the power to disregard the Constitution that we are all sworn to protect. And the administration tells us it needs these things in order to protect us. But it has never been held to account for failing to protect us six years ago.

And in those six years we have unearthed irrefutable evidence, proving in a hundred different ways that the story we've been told about those attacks must be false. But not a single member of this chamber has the courage to stand up and say so. May God have mercy on our yellow souls.

Our cruel and stupid unelected president declared limitless, endless war on the rest of the world and we gave him the money to do it -- hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, whenever he asked for it. And what's worse, we pretended we had no choice.

In 2002, in 2004, and again in 2006, we saw convincing evidence that our elections had been rigged, but we never said a word. Instead we carried on -- to our great shame -- as if our government were legitimately elected. And we kept on giving this criminal administration whatever it wanted.

We authorized warrantless surveillance, to be used against anyone, anywhere, for any reason, and with virtually no Congressional oversight. We claimed we had no choice; we had to do it, otherwise he would have canceled our summer vacation, or called us "soft on terror", or some such thing. It didn't matter that nobody would have believed him. But it did matter that we didn't want to fight. So we didn't. We had an excuse, it was a good excuse, and we used it shamelessly.

We legalized a new "definition" of torture under which the unelected president himself gets to decide what the word means, and a new system of "justice" under which people can be incarcerated indefinitely without charge or hearing or even a right of appeal. The correct word for this is "treason". And we are all guilty.

We allowed the president to claim that he could designate anyone anywhere an "enemy combatant" and have that person killed without any due process whatsoever. And when the president announced that "terrorists" had been dealt with in this way, we stood and cheered. We deserve to be hanged by the neck until dead.

Fortunately for me on this fine Beltway day, my political opponents, though they consider me their enemy, are not asking for my neck. All they're asking for is an apology. And they shall have one!

To Nancy Pelosi: The last time I checked, I didn't work for you. I work for the people of my district and the people of my state and the people of the nation, in that order -- but I do not work for you. I frankly don't give a damn what you think about my remarks, or what you think about anything else, either.

We could have had this criminal administration impeached by now if it weren't for you and your bootlicking. And I'm sorry, but you're one of the people who should be apologizing.

To George Bush: I've heard you lie so often and so hatefully about so many things that I have begun to disbelieve every single thing you say. For a moment last week I did actually believe you wanted our soldiers to get their heads blown off just for your own amusement. It is, after all, the only justification you haven't used, and I naturally assumed it was the real reason for the war.

But I was wrong about that, as so many good American citizens have informed me over the past few days. It's not only for your amusement, sir. It's also for your enrichment. And that of your "base". I'm sorry I didn't mention that last week, sir. And I apologize.

To 88% of America and 99% of the world: I am truly sorry for what America has done, for what America has become, and for what the Congress -- including me, sad and sorry Pete Stark -- have allowed this unelected president to do to this once-proud country, and to the world.

There's no way around it. We all deserve to hang. And I, for one, am dreadfully sorry.

Chris Floyd: The Winnowing Ground

Chris Floyd is usually so good that I could link to him every day, and I would hope that most of my regular readers are reading him regularly, just like I am. (And if not, what's keeping you?)

The piece he posted Monday quotes from Chris Hedges and Naomi Wolf, both of whom you should read too, of course, but it's this comment from Chris Floyd that has stuck with me:

It's been treason for a long, long time. And as we have said here over and over, the time has come to draw the line. Any public official, any politician who will not call this treason by its rightful name -- and will not dedicate themselves to the immediate removal of Bush and Cheney from power -- is not fit to hold office. Let them take action -- or if they cannot, let them resign from any association with the bloodstained wretches in the White House -- or let them be damned as accomplices to evil.

There is no third way, there is no accomodation or negotiation or compromise to be made with this kind of filth. We have come now to the winnowing ground. Choose where you will stand.

Please read all of Chris Floyd's "Home and Away: Spreading the Seed of Torture and Tyranny".

Cheney Doesn't Need To Attack In USA With WMD This Summer

While I've been watching the Kennebunkport Warning train wreck and wondering what's to become of the Anti-War and 9/11 Truth movements, Chris Floyd has been busy creating a monsterpiece which answers a few outstanding and seemingly unrelated questions on the way to making its main point.

Some "conspiracy theorists" say they see a "new 9/11" coming soon, and it's no surprise. They're reacting to what they hear from our "national security" establishment, and what they read in the papers. But is it real or is it propaganda?

In other words, is Dick Cheney really planning to attack us this summer? And, for that matter, why hasn't there been another terrorist attack on America since 9/11?

Cheney may be up to no good, but as Chris Floyd makes clear, there's no need for another attack.

The spoils of the first attack have been more than sufficient. The terrorists got everything they wanted, and they're now in a stronger position than ever, and likely to get whatever else they want -- without any meaningful opposition at all!

If they attack us again, it'll be out of spite and not necessity, because the terrorists have already won.

2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

The war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet -- more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus" on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for continuing the "surge" in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.

And that's not all.

Bush's power has only grown with each new outrageous claim of unchallengeable presidential authority. It is too little understood how vital -- and how fatal -- Congress' acquiescence in all of this has been. By continuing to treat the Bush Administration as a legitimate government, to carry on with business as usual instead of initiating impeachments or refusing to cooperate with a gang of usurpers, Congress instead confirms the New Order day after day. Some Democrats may grumble, whine or bluster -- but they DO nothing, and their very participation in the sinister farce ensures its continuance.

Again, look at the facts, the reality: Bush wants Congressional approval of his illegal surveillance; he gets it. Bush wants to launch spy satellites against the American people; he does it. Bush wants concentration camps and secret prisons with torture; he's got them. Bush wants to escalate a ruinous, murderous, unpopular war; he does it. He wants to declare people "enemy combatants" and imprison them indefinitely; he does it. Bush's spokesmen openly claim that the laws passed by the people's representatives are "just advisory" and "the president can still do whatever he wants to do," and there is no outcry, no action, no defense of the Republic against this overthrow of the Constitution.

So ... what's to be done?

In a land crawling with armed – and armored – SWAT teams, with operatives from innumerable federal agencies packing heat and happy to use it, a land where more than 2 million people languish in prison (many of them captives of an endless "war on drugs" that has done nothing to curb substance abuse but has greatly augmented the power of the state and the criminal gangs whose laundered money enriches Establishment elites), a land where almost every transaction is wired up to some national grid, where national ID cards are now being imposed – a land where you literally cannot exist without placing your liberty, your privacy, your very life at the mercy of a government apparatus besotted with violence, coercion and intrusion, there is no place left for the kind of action that Thoreau advocated. His way – and that of Gandhi and King, who took so much from him – envisions a state opponent which one could hope to shame into honorable action by the superior moral force of principled civil disobedience. But the very hallmark of the present regime is its shamelessness, its utter lack of any sense of honor or principle, its bestial addiction to raw power.

It is pointless – and counterproductive – to simply throw yourself under the wheels of such a monstrous machine in futile spasms of rage and despair. The machine doesn't care. It will gladly chew up your life and move on. For the action of the ordinary individual to have an effect, it must be amplified by a larger social movement. And it is difficult to imagine such a movement arising in America today...

No kidding.

Whatever we can do, we must do it ourselves. If we have no power or influence, if we cannot take large actions, then we must take small ones. Every word or action raised against the overthrow of the Republic will find an echo somewhere, from one person to another to another to the next -- each isolated, individual voice slowly finding its way into a swelling chorus of dissent.

It might be too late. It might not work. But failure – and much more horror -- is guaranteed if we don't even try.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote – in a context that is growing less dissimilar all the time: -- it is impossible that evil should not come into the world; but take care that it does not enter through you.

It's good advice, from somebody who should know.

But how do you do that?

I've been trying to round up some support for a general strike.

Of all the tactics we haven't tried, I think it's the most promising.

To learn more about a general strike, see "What's Not To Like About A General Strike?"

If you have any other ideas I'd like to hear about them.

My comments are always open.

A Whole New Form Of Government

Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, wanted to testify in Washington before Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose Commission was "investigating" the JFK assassination. Ruby felt intimidated in Dallas and repeatedly asked Warren to take him to Washington; Warren replied falsely that it was not in his power to do so.

Seeing that his chance had slipped away, that the Warren Commission was about to whitewash the JFK assassination, Ruby sounded a warning: "a whole new form of government is going to take over the country".

Warren thought Ruby was delirious, and many writers have sneered at this comment over the years. But it keeps coming to mind, much more often lately than ever before, and much more powerfully...

Take for instance the following excellent column, from Joe Galloway in the Salt Lake Tribune of May 17, 2007:

Hang in there, America: Only 613 more days of Bush

There are 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.

We HOPE they shuffle off!! ... and by the time you read this the number will be less than 613, but it's still a long, long time.

So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass.

That was all deliberate. Those were promises they never intended to keep.

So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our founding fathers, they never talked about.

Exactly. And this was deliberate too.

There are many here among us who've been saying so all along. We were mocked six or seven years ago; now that everyone can see we were right, is it too late?

Chris Floyd has touched on this point quite recently:

It's not a question of "spin," of "putting the best face on things," or being "clearer than truth," in Dean Acheson's sinister Cold War phrase -- gilding the lily, exaggerating for effect. Nor, conversely, is it a case of self-deception, of "true believers" unable to take off their blinders, of "idealists" unwilling to bend their dreams to mucky reality, or even of fourth-rate dullards too stupid to see the filth and ruin caused by their own cretinous policies. They are not just spinning, they are not deceiving themselves, they are not too stupid to know what's going on.

They are lying -- lying deliberately -- lying brazenly and cynically [...] They are lying because their causes are evil and cannot be spoken of openly: aggressive war for loot and domination; the callous rape and despoiling of their own nation for the profit and power of their wealthy cronies; the construction of a global gulag of secret prisons, eternal captives, carefully refined and officially approved torture; the deliberate, systematic destruction of the Constitutional system of government in favor of arbitrary, militarized tyranny; the deliberate, systematic sowing of division and rancor and hatred and fear among the people, to keep them disunited, weak, scattered, unable to resist the depredations of a small, criminal elite. If these be your gods, then of course you must lie to do them service.

Joe Galloway continues:

The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.

There are those who no longer believe the president ever had such a dream -- that it was all only a public relations strategy. And there are those who never believed it for a moment, even at the beginning. Let's see now, democracy for Iraq, did that come before or after human rights? I know it came after weapons of mass destruction. We've had so many different reasons for liberating these damned ungrateful Iraqis, it's no wonder nobody can keep all the justifications straight.

And yet, those who said so all those years ago were moonbats! Are you with us or against us now?

He's failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.

There are those who say this was intentional, and it's tough to argue with them. in my opinion, it's the vilest protection racket ever developed; Bush knows his war in Iraq makes the US weaker and generates more global terror, but that's fine with him; without more global terror, his chief political advisor would have to learn a new trick.

The president's approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.

Bush's numbers are three times as strong as Cheney's, for all the difference it makes. Cheney still struts around the world, telling America's allies what he expects of them, and his buddy Georgie has already accomplished what he set out to accomplish. And yet, somehow, most of America's best dissident writers still have not figured this out. So they write such as:

The war that was never ours to win by military means -- the only button this president who never learned war ever learned how to push -- is lost. Bush and Cheney and the rest of their cronies and co-conspirators are toast.

I disagree! In what sense are they toast?

Chris Floyd gets this right, too:

They have taken the measure of the Democratic "opposition" and now realize that no one is going to seriously hinder them in the pursuit of their sinister agenda. Oh, they may have to toss a few bodies overboard -- Gonzales himself is probably being fitted for a winding sheet even as we speak -- but it is now obvious that the leaders of the criminal organization are not going to be held legally accountable for their high crimes. They are not going to be impeached -- although the many causes for impeachment cry out to the heavens. They are not going to be tried; they are not going to be jailed. They are not going to suffer the slightest inconvenience. They can see already that they will retire to lives of staggering wealth and privilege.

Joe Galloway continues:

The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men -- seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing -- succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?

Actually, both the question and the transition itself were easy. And in both cases, the answer is the same: 9/11!

The attacks were false but the reaction was genuine. And they needed the reaction, so they didn't mind that the attacks were bogus -- so long as they were never properly investigated!

And by the way, they're not as incompetent as you might think. It's only a disguise.

They're very good at implementing their private agenda, and utterly incompetent at doing what they said they would do for us! How ironic!

With Congress in the hands of the Democrats, and the 2008 election looming dead ahead, the president can't even count on key figures in his own Republican Party to stand behind him as he embarks on a long and painful lame duckhood.

But it doesn't matter -- this particular president is the least lame of any duck in presidential history. The electoral system is wrecked -- not worn down and broken, but deliberately smashed! Vandalized for political gain! And the payoff hasn't even started to roll in.

His hopes of crafting meaningful immigration reform and fixing Social Security are dead on arrival.

Hang on a minute: Immigration reform was a campaign promise nobody ever intended to fill. And they were hoping to loot Social Security but that hasn't happened -- yet. So apparently you can't have everything, at least not all at once, even if you're a born to wear the chimperial visage, so to speak. But that was all a distraction, anyway. And the ship of crime sailed a long time ago.

The legacies that George W. Bush will carry into retirement are the war he started, lost and stubbornly refused to end, and the corruption that he and his team visited on our democracy and Constitution.

But he doesn't care about all that. He will have a retirement of wealth and privilege beyond measure, rather than the justice he deserves. And his extended crime family of despicable drunken evil pricks will roll on untroubled.

The president's lawyer, "mi abogado," Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, dangles in the wind as we learn, day by day, of how grotesquely this administration politicized the professional staff of the Justice Department.

The AG will be kept on as long as practicable, not a moment longer. When he's gone there will be another to take his place. And another, and another...

It was Gonzalez, as White House counsel, who provided legal cover for the torture and maltreatment of prisoners and suspects that led directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA's secret Kafkaesque prisons scattered around the world where "enhanced" interrogation methods were generously, if unproductively, employed.

It was Gonzalez, as attorney general, who hired and gave unprecedented hiring and firing powers to a 33-year-old attorney, Monica Goodling, who'd graduated from a TV evangelist's law school. It was Goodling who resigned and took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that hadn't even been asked. It was Goodling who was Justice's liaison to the White House and Karl Rove.

Meantime, the White House can't find 5 million e-mail messages involving official business and refuses to provide many of those it can find to the congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.

Right!

Helen Thomas explained it perfectly:

Picture this: Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was in intensive care at a local hospital where he is being treated for pancreatitis in March 2004. Comey, then the acting attorney general because of Ashcroft's illness, was in the hospital room with Ashcroft when Gonzales, then Bush's White House counsel, arrived and tried to pressure Ashcroft to approve the legality of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.

Ashcroft refused to do so. But Bush went ahead anyway with the illegal wiretapping, relenting later when Comey and others threatened to resign.

Bush later promoted Gonzales to attorney general.

I'm not making this up.

Helen Thomas rocks!

Joe Galloway continues:

The agencies of government - the CIA, FBI, Treasury, Department of Defense and who knows who else - use secret executive authority to suck up databases of personal information about ordinary Americans, without regard to their privacy rights, in a search for suspected terrorists.

Have they found any, using that information? Have they unearthed terror cells with more potential than the ones in Florida and New Jersey that were penetrated and perhaps manipulated by FBI informants?

No! They haven't, and we can strike the "perhaps". "Manipulated" it is! Hooray for Joe Galloway!

That sort of terrorist isn't half so frightening as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Half? A tenth!!

Over in Iraq, 150,000 American troops soldier on, attempting, at the cost of their own lives and limbs, to follow the orders of a president who still thinks he can pull victory out of defeat.

Ahh, but he can, he can!

It's called the Oil Law, and if he can get Congressional Democrats to endorse it as a benchmark (which they seem utterly and spinelessly willing to do) then he's a winner! No matter what Joe Galloway or anyone else says about it:

A democratically elected but hopelessly divided Iraqi parliament feuds and dithers and contemplates its summer vacation while Americans and Iraqis die in increasing numbers in the streets outside the Green Zone, and the mortar and rocket fire lands inside that sanctuary with increasing frequency.

The Iraqi government is neither as democratically elected nor as sovereign as one might suppose.

Six-hundred-thirteen days, and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn't seem possible or even bearable.

No possible, not bearable, and everyone knows it.

Major changes are afoot, methinks. Long before we see those nineteen moons, we will see indisputable evidence of what Jack Ruby would call "a new form of government tak[ing] over the country."

All the pieces are in place; they have been for some time now.

As the counter-terror experts keep telling us, it's not a question of "IF".

'Liberal' NYT Speaks To Its Upscale Readers About Domestic Tyranny

Here's a lovely piece for a Sunday Edition, in which the "liberal" New York Times discusses "tyranny" in a manner guaranteed to resonate with the rich.

After all, there's nothing quite like the sound of wealthy people whining.

The Tyranny of the 2nd Home

“We’re heavy on the despair right now,” said Conn Nugent, a foundation executive who found the perfect run-down farm on the highest hill in western Massachusetts 10 years ago. “I was high-minded but incompetent,” he said. “I decided I was going to resuscitate Summit Farm for my wife and children, that we’d raise bees and organic beef. All of those visions danced in my head — and worse: I decided I was going to be the architect!”

The Nugents figured they could design the new house that was needed by themselves. “After about 17 drafts of the plans, I sent it out to the contractors,” Mr. Nugent said. “They saw me coming.” He thought it could be built for under $200,000. They said it would cost three times that.

Yikes!! Six hundred grand for an escape from reality! Cry me a river!!

Surely tyranny can't get any worse than that.

Can it?

A relative of a mortar attack victim grieves outside Imam Ali hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, May 15, 2007.

The attack killed four and wounded 11 at a market on the edge of Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite district.

British Government Employees Jailed For Trying To Protect Journalists

Remember when Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera? Remember how Tony Blair talked him out of it? It was a big story in November of 2005, but we're not supposed to write about it anymore.

Larisa Alexandrovna is still writing about it, and Chris Floyd is still writing about it, and so are lots of other people. Hooray for all of them. If I were feeling half-decent, I'd be writing about it too. Instead I'm reduced [?] to editing.

The Mirror broke the story on November 22, 2005:

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

A source said: "There's no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it." Al-Jazeera is accused by the US of fuelling the Iraqi insurgency.

The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.

A source said last night: "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.

"He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.

"There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."

A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been "humorous, not serious".

But another source declared: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

The Brits wouldn't revoke freedom of the press to protect a joke, would they? Of course not! And their reaction spoke louder than any words in support of the claim that Bush was serious.

Larisa at Raw Story, November 23, 2005:

The Mirror, a UK publication which reported Tuesday on an alleged US plan to bomb an Arab TV station seen as anti-US, has been gagged from reporting any further on the memo and its contents by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith...

The publication reported on the contents of a five page memo, stamped Top Secret, alleging that President Bush had threatened to undertake military action against al-Jazeera, a TV station located in the country of Qatar. While al-Jazeera is seen by some in the Bush administration to be largely anti-West, Qatar is an American ally.

According to sources familiar with the case, it was the recent attack on Fallujah that had Bush concerned about what al-Jazeera might report.
...

The allegations of how the memo came to be leaked focus on three players, former Foreign Office official in the Cabinet, David Keogh, former Labor MP for Northampton South, Tony Clarke, and Clarke's then researcher Leo O'Connor.

It is alleged that Keogh, who has been charged under section 5 of the Official Secrets Act, sent the memo to O'Connor sometime between April 16 and May 28 of last year. O'Connor, also charged, then took the document to his boss, Clarke, who dutifully handed it back to the government. O'Connor and Keogh were arrested in August of last year; the charges have just recently been filed.
...

According to the Guardian, in reaction to the article in the Mirror, the International Federation of Journalists is demanding complete disclosure with regard to the death of 16 journalists and media staff, including al-Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayoub, who was killed when the station's Baghdad office was hit during a US air strike in April of 2003.

All media outlets had to provide the US military with their locations in Baghdad and neighboring cities. Al-Jazeera provided the location of its Baghdad office to Washington prior to the bombing on its Baghdad office.

Here's Larisa again, yesterday:

We now learn that both Keogh and O'Connor have been found guilty.
...

Murdering journalists is like killing the people they represent, because journalists are the true representatives of a nation and its people. Journalists, are, therefore given safe passage as a matter of policy by all civilized countries. But when the so-called leader of the free world targets journalists as a matter of policy, plans to bomb the headquarters of a network, and is allowed to walk free, then there is no freedom to be had, not anywhere...

Are you sick yet? Too soon! We're just getting started.

Chris Floyd hit all these notes and more in his masterful essay, "Parting Shot: Blair Jails Two to Shield "Madman" Bush". With his kind permission I reproduce it below, in its entirety. I urge you to read it carefully, and to click the links and read them carefully too. As thorough and as daunting as the following piece may seem, it's really an overview. The devil -- and the details -- are in the links.

These are days of troubled sleep. As in a dream, you walk familiar streets, living out your ordinary life -- going to work, having love affairs, watching sports, getting the car fixed, worrying about bills, fighting a toothache, taking kids to school, listening to music -- and everything seems as it was before, as it always was; you seem to be what you always were: a free person in a free country. Then some discordant noise reaches your mind; you stir, you open your eyes, and you remember: that's not how it is here anymore.

For citizens in the world's two "leading democracies," the United States and Britain, these rude awakenings come at regular intervals now, piercing through the incessant roar of static from the media engines of sell and spin. A story catches your eye -- usually something buried beneath the "big news" of the day -- and once again you're tumbled from your private concerns into a dreadful realization of where history has taken you: into a strange hybrid world of unfree freedom, where you can say what you want, do what you want -- unless those in power arbitrarily decide that you can't. In 99 cases out of 100, they'll leave you alone (as long as you're white and look non-threatening; if not, that ratio drops considerably). But this liberty is illusory; it no longer has a physical reality, or even a statutory one. It is now a "gift" of the authorities, one which they can bestow -- or revoke -- according to their own, ever-shifting needs and desires.

The idea of arbitrary power beyond all check of law or outside supervision is the sum total of the so-called "Unitary Executive" theory of the Bush Administration, which has put this radical and barbaric idea into practice. It is also undergirds the "crown prerogative" of British governance, where the ancient immunities of the sovereign ("The king can do no wrong" -- or as that proto-unitary executive Richard Nixon once put it: "If the president does it, it's not illegal") have "devolved" upon the prime minister as head of the government. In neither of these endlessly self-celebrating democracies is the consent of the governed or the rule of law the basis for the exercise of power. Otherwise, the leaders of these countries -- the dual lame ducks Bush and Blair -- could not have launched an illegal war or maintained this criminal enterprise year after blood-soaked year. And many of their exercises of arbitrary power have been in aid of masking the true nature of this war.

Thus we come to the latest shaking of our troubled sleep. While the media world gaped and gabbed about Tony Blair's long-belated announcement of his long-overdue retirement yesterday, a more revealing story was buried beneath the fold or in the back pages -- except in the dogged Independent, which put it on the front page:

Two jailed for trying to leak details of Blair's talks with Bush
Tony Blair's ill-fated war with Iraq claimed two more victims yesterday when a civil servant and an MP's researcher were convicted of disclosing details of a secret conversation between the Prime Minister and President George Bush. Last night, MPs, lawyers and civil rights groups described the prosecution as a "farce" and accused the Government of misusing the Official Secrets Act to cover up political embarrassment over the war.

David Keogh, 50, a Cabinet Office communications officer, was today jailed for six months. He passed on an "extremely sensitive memo" to Leo O'Connor, 44, a political researcher who worked for an anti-war Labour MP, Anthony Clarke. O'Connor was today sentenced to three months in jail after an Old Bailey jury found them guilty yesterday of breaching Britain's secrecy laws.

Their trial was carried out under extraordinary secrecy, clamped down even tighter than Britain's continuing series of terror plot trials. The judge wouldn't even allow the press to report Keogh's response "when he was asked in open court what preyed on his mind when he first saw the document," the Guardian reports. What's more, the British press were also forbidden from referring to stories they had previously published about the memo when it first came to light and reports of its contents were being freely discussed. The attorney general -- Blair's old friend Peter Goldsmith, the same legal eagle who infamously reversed his stand on the illegality of the Iraq invasion after a talking to from the Beltway boys, and who most recently quashed a years-long probe into a sex-car-cash bribery scheme between the Saudi royals and the UK's top arms merchant -- draped a retroactive veil of secrecy over the case -- much like the one the Bush gang has used on fired FBI truth-teller Sibel Edmonds after she threatened to expose a nest of high-level treason and corruption. The only thing the British press could tell the British people about the trial yesterday -- beyond the sentences handed down -- was the reaction Keogh had given to the police when he was first arrested in 2005. He told them that what he had seen in the memo convinced him that "Bush was a madman."

But what was this document whose very existence posed such a dire threat to the life of the nation that its contents could not even be hinted at in public? It was a four-page record of a White House meeting between George W. Bush and Tony Blair on April 16, 2004. It is known in the trade as the "al-Jazeera Bombing Memo" because in those early news reports -- after Keogh had leaked the document in May 2004 to O'Connor, in the hopes that it would be brought before the people's representatives in Parliament -- at least one part of its contents became widely known; to wit, that Bush had proposed to Blair that they bomb the headquarters of the independent Arabic news agency al-Jazeera in Qatar, as well as agency offices elsewhere.

The context of this criminal proposal is important. In April 2004, the grand Babylonian Conquest was turning into a nightmare. The tortures at Abu Ghraib had just been exposed. (Outrages which, as we now know, were just the barest tip of a massive iceberg: the vast gulag of secret prisons, "disappeared" captives, and "strenuous interrogation techniques" specifically approved by Bush and Rumsfeld.) But beyond that scandal -- which was being successfully fobbed off with the "bad apple" defense, and would never be in an issue in the coming presidential election -- there was also, more glaringly, the ongoing bloodfest in Fallujah: the Guernica of the Iraq War.

The attack was launched in retaliation for the killing of four American mercenaries from the politically-wired firm of Blackwater on March 31, 2004 -- another PR hit for the "Mission Accomplished" team in the White House. Fallujah -- a once quiet city whose citizens had rebelled against Saddam Hussein -- had been turned into a hotbed of unrest over the course of the previous year by a heavy-handed American occupation, which included several civilian deaths after occupation troops fired into crowds exercising what they believed was their liberated right to protest. Anger and insurgency took hold in the city, leading to the "Black Hawk Down" style despoliation of the dead mercenaries a year later.

Against the advice of military commanders on the scene, Bush ordered the "pacification" of the city a few days later. But the L'il Commander's attack turned into yet another PR nightmare, spreading death and destruction through civilian areas, causing hundreds of deaths, launching airstrikes into residential areas, closing the city's main hospitals while thousands were suffering -- and failing to dislodge the insurgents who were the ostensible target of the operation. (There were two other main targets, of course: the American people, who were meant to be seduced by the man-musk of the War Leader, and the Iraqi people, who were meant to be terrorized into submission by the shock-and-awe of Fallujah's decimation.)

In addition to the lack of progress on the battleground, Bush was beset by the presence of al-Jazeera correspondents in the city. The agency -- headquartered in Qatar, a staunch U.S. ally -- was a rare independent voice in the Arab world, reporting from all sides and offering a platform for all sides, including Israeli and American officials. It was, in fact, the very kind of thing that Bush claimed he wanted to instill in the Middle East through his invasion of Iraq. But of course, this was just another lie. Al-Jazeera's independence proved inconvenient for the Bushists, who in both Iraq and Afghanistan had sought to impose the greatest degree of message control (and "psy-ops" spin) ever seen in an American war. For both the Bushists and the Blairites, truth was not the first casualty of war; it was a deadly enemy -- an enemy combatant, in fact, to be rendered, disappeared, tortured, killed, like any other gulag captive.

So it was no surprise at all that Bush and Blair would be discussing al-Jazeera during that fretful confab in April 2004. Nor is it any surprise that Bush's answer to the "problem" of an independent Arab news agency would be to kill the ragheads where they stand. He had already demonstrated that wanton violence and mass murder was his preferred option for dealing with problems in the Middle East.

The contents of the controversial memo were actually well-known after it came to light -- and before Blair's buddy Goldsmith lowered the boom. The Daily Mirror, for example, had this report in November 2005:

President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals. But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash...The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.

A source said last night: "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush. He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem. There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."

A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been "humorous, not serious". But another source declared: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

Al-Jazeera's HQ is in the business district of Qatar's capital, Doha. Its single-storey buildings would have made an easy target for bombers. As it is sited away from residential areas, and more than 10 miles from the US's desert base in Qatar, there would have been no danger of "collateral damage".

Dozens of al-Jazeera staff at the HQ are not, as many believe, Islamic fanatics. Instead, most are respected and highly trained technicians and journalists. To have wiped them out would have been equivalent to bombing the BBC in London and the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War itself.

The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors. In 2001 the station's Kabul office was knocked out by two "smart" bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station's Baghdad centre. The memo, which also included details of troop deployments, turned up in May last year at the Northampton constituency office of then Labour MP Tony Clarke.

This is the kind of thing that filled British papers for weeks. But now, in the brave new world of unfree freedom that Bush and Blair have bestowed upon their subjects, Britons can no longer mention any of this in public. Indeed, the judge in the Keogh case reinforced Goldsmith's earlier ban with a new gag order, decreeing "that allegations already in the public domain could not be repeated if there was any suggestion they related to the contents of the document," the Guardian reports. Anyone who does so can be jailed for contempt. Yes, jailed for repeating in public what has already been published.

During the trial, Blair's top foreign policy wonk, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, offered this notable justification for jailing faithful government servants whose consciences had been shocked into action by the discovery of a plot for mass murder by the "leader of the free world":

In evidence at the trial, Sir Nigel Sheinwald..said private talks between world leaders must remain confidential however illegal or morally abhorrent aspects of their discussions might be.

Quite right, too. After all, if a memo of, say, a summit meeting between Hitler and Mussolini had come to light in, say, 1938, detailing how Hitler had told Mussolini that he was going to, say, kill a few million Jews just as soon as he could lay his hands on them, then obviously such confidences between statesmen should be respected -- and any civil servant who tried to warn the world about this "madman" should obviously be prosecuted.

Blair -- who in his lachrymose and self-pitying resignation speech yesterday again reiterated his pride in standing "shoulder-to-shoulder" with Bush in the slaughter of more than 600,000 innocent human beings in Iraq -- obviously talked his pal down from his murderous rage at al-Jazeera, which is now so respectable that it appears on American cable TV systems. But there was no such consideration for the people of Fallujah. Bush soon called off the attack as the bad PR mounted, but promised that the city would be "pacified" in the end -- after the election. And so it was, without demur from Blair. Just days after Bush had procured office again in November 2004, a second assault -- even more savage than the first, was launched, destroying the city with bombs, shells and chemical fire.

It is entirely typical of our strange days that the arbitrary, draconian power that now characterizes the Anglo-American "democracies" would be used here in an attempt to suppress a political embarrassment -- the revelation of a barbaric idea that never came to fruition -- while the actual physical slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people is openly and unashamedly embraced -- even championed as an act of moral courage, as in Blair's unctuous parting bromide, "Hand on my heart, I did what I thought was right."

So did Pol Pot. So did Stalin. So did Osama bin Laden. So does every madman who vaunts himself beyond the law, and kills in the name of a "higher cause."

Once again, Larisa:

The fact that two UK government officials have been found guilty for making something this illegal public and UK publications are banned from reporting on the documents requires the public to stand up and all over the world.

Support your journalists, people, because that is the last and most sacred front left protecting the people from their government.

Will the public stand up?

Will the public ever stand up?

It's up to you -- it's up to everyone who reads these words -- to answer Larisa's plea, and my question:

Will the public ever stand up?

On The David Hicks Case And The Mainstreaming Of Modern American Insanity

Under the insane headline Some Bumps at Start of War Tribunals at Guantánamo, William Glaberson writes even more insanity for the New York Times (and the emphasis is mine):

As the first of the war crimes cases under a new law began here a few days ago, a military law specialist said it was a test run “to show that this plane will fly.”

If I'm writing it, I'm asking: What sort of nonsense is this? Is this your new public diplomacy "proving ground"?

You notice the pentagon never has "testing" anymore, just "proving". They never want to find out whether the plane will fly, only to show that it will.

And sometimes it won't, of course. What insanity! But it's a traditional military insanity, and of only slight import compared to the horrendous new insanity initiated in the immediate wake of 9/11.

From the start, Guantánamo, its detainees and the legal proceedings here have provided enough grist to support the competing views of the detention center: a necessary mechanism for dealing with a new kind of enemy, or the embodiment of the war on terror gone awry.

What a bald-faced lie!

From the start?? Guantánamo has never provided any "grist" to support the view that it is "a necessary mechanism for dealing with a new kind of enemy", if by "grist" one means actual legitimate palpable and/or verifiable evidence.

Or, as Chris Floyd points out,

Only a self-deluded fool [...] could believe that the hideous regime of concentration camps, secret prisons, torture, kidnapping and "extrajudicial killing" established by Bush is anything but "the embodiment of the war on terror gone awry."

But oh! no! the Times also tells us:

Military officers quickly began to refer to Mr. Hicks as the “convicted war criminal” in the not-so-subtle battle of competing words here.
...
To the prosecutors and the extensive public relations apparatus assembled by the military here, Mr. Hicks’s case proved, as one spokeswoman regularly repeated, that the military commission system offers a “fair, legitimate and transparent forum.”
...
The chief military prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force, told reporters ... it was ... a victory for a much maligned system that he said had been unfairly criticized before it was given a chance to prove it could deliver justice.

“There’s a notion that this is a rigged system,” he said when asked if he was disappointed by the outcome. “I think this shows that’s not true.”

But then you look at the case, and how it was settled, and there's just so much more nonsense, all interleaved with reasons why the David Hicks case shows exactly the opposite of what the five-sided demons claim. Listen:

The military commissions being convened here are special war crimes tribunals to try terrorists that do not offer the legal protections of civilian courts. One justification for the looser rules is that they will deal with the worst of the worst.

But the first man through the double doors of the heavily secured courtroom here was no Osama bin Laden. He was David Hicks, a 31-year-old Australian whose lawyer described him as a ninth-grade dropout and “wannabe soldier” who ran away when the shooting started in Afghanistan.

Glaberson doesn't quite get around to mentioning the fact that before the shooting started in Afghanistan, the Taliban and al-Q'aeda were supported by the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, which in turn was supported by the CIA. Not for nothing is al-Q'aeda sometimes called "al-CIA-duh".

Of course the New York Times doesn't call it that.

In the somber, makeshift courtroom, the lead prosecutor of the Hicks case, Lt. Col. Kevin Chenail of the Marines, tried to portray Mr. Hicks as public enemy No. 1.

“Today in this courtroom, we are on the front lines of the global war on terror,” Colonel Chenail told a panel of military officers assembled from around the globe Friday to hear arguments on the appropriate sentence. Mr. Hicks pleaded guilty on Monday to providing material support to Al Qaeda. “The enemy is sitting at the defense table,” Colonel Chenail added, gesturing to Mr. Hicks. “We are face to face with the enemy” who was “trying to kill Americans,” he said.

Killing Americans how? By running away when the shooting started?

He admitted training with Al Qaeda, guarding a Taliban tank and scouting a closed American embassy building. But there is no evidence he was considering a terrorist attack or capable of carrying one out. Yet he was held five years and four months before he got his day in court. And at the end of a very long day at the tribunal Friday, his actual sentence was only nine months...

The worst of the worst? The first "detainee" to be tried? Held for sixty-four months before he could even get a sham hearing, and then sentenced to nine months more? Doesn't he get credit for time served? He's done the nine months already, plus fifty-five more. For what? For being tortured?

To some in the courtroom, the proceedings proved only that the system was rigged to show detainees that the only way out of Guantánamo was to give the prosecutors what they wanted. Not only did Mr. Hicks plead guilty, but he also signed a plea bargain in which he recanted his accusations about being abused in detention and promised not to speak to reporters for a year.

In the courtroom, the military judge had Mr. Hicks acknowledge each of the contentious provision[s] of his deal. Mr. Hicks, the judge read, agreed that he had “never been illegally treated” while in American captivity, including “through the entire period of your detention by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” Mr. Hicks agreed to that statement.

Doesn't it all depend on what you mean by "illegal"? And if a twice-unelected president of a former democracy says some "interrogation technique" is "legal", then it's legal. That's the new rule, isn't it? So the statement Mr. Hicks agreed to is not so far-fetched after all.

It's the system that's far-fetched.

Mr. Hicks’s lawyer, Maj. Michael Mori of the Marines, said he was speaking for his client, who he said was too nervous to speak for himself. “He wants to apologize to Australia and to the United States,” Major Mori said during the proceedings, adding that Mr. Hicks wanted to thank members of the armed services who, he said, had treated him professionally.

OMG! This is too thick to scrape off your shoes without power tools! And the New York Times reports it straight.

Is this the same David Hicks who, according to another NYT article of less than two weeks ago,

alleges in court document that he was beaten several times during interrogations and witnessed abuse of other prisoners during more than five years in American custody; Hicks, an Australian seeking British citizenship, says abuse began during interrogations in Afghanistan, where he was captured in late 2001...

Sometimes I wonder whether the old grey bitch is afraid of being charged with treason or whether that's just a ploy to make it seem like she's a Bush opponent. After all, the wingnuts can't claim the media is left-biased if the NYT licks Bush's shoes all day every day, can they?

In fact they can and they do say anything they like, regardless of whether it has any truth to it at all, or just a smidgen.

But in reality, and as expressed by

observers from advocacy and human rights groups here to monitor the proceedings, the plea deal Mr. Hicks reached was fresh evidence of the coercive power of this place. The plea bargain included a provision that will get Mr. Hicks out of detention here and into an Australian prison to serve the rest of his sentence within 60 days.

It takes that long to arrange transportation? What are all the unmarked planes doing? Isn't one of them free sometime in the next month, or six weeks, anyway? Or is Mr. Hicks' accommodation down under a problem?

Actually the whole Hicks case has been a problem down under, and one can't avoid the thought that this is why they dealt with him first.

There had been growing diplomatic pressure on the Bush administration to return Mr. Hicks to Australia, where his case has drawn wide attention and where Prime Minister John Howard, one of President Bush’s most stalwart supporters, is facing a tough re-election fight.

David Hicks has become a cause celebre in Australia. How many prisoners are held hostage at Guantánamo? And how many of them have the weight of an entire country -- an allied country at that -- behind them? And it goes without saying that an allied country which happens to be a so-called democracy must be led by an insane warmonger who is facing a re-election bid soon. Ah ha ha!

Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who is one of the regular observers in the courtroom here, said the deal showed that the military commission was intended to bring cases to the conclusion the government wants. “A person here, in order to have any hope of going home,” he said, “has to play by whatever rules the government sets.”

Jennifer Daskal, an observer for Human Rights Watch, said after the sentencing that the unusual rule silencing Mr. Hicks for a year showed that the government’s primary goal was “the protection against the disclosure of abuse.”

The most sensible comment came from Hicks himself, through his attorney:

Other than a few muted words in court, Mr. Hicks was not heard from directly. But as developments unfolded, David H. B. McLeod, an Australian lawyer working with the defense, provided insight into Mr. Hicks’s thoughts.

“He says that if he is the worst of the worst, and the person who should be put before a military commission first,” Mr. McLeod said, “then the world really hasn’t got much to worry about.”

Well that's insane too because the world has a great deal to worry about.

If I were a worrier I would worry about the way the national discourse has been shifted so far into the pro-torture realm that anyone, anywhere -- much less the NYT -- could possibly write a "fair-and-balanced" piece on such a heinous subject.

Fair and balanced now appears to be everywhere -- except the blogs with axes to grind -- but what it means in practice is that the wingnut insanity: indefinite detention without charge or hearing, much less a speedy trial; various forms of torture -- up to and including murder; "military tribunals" where confessions obtained under extreme duress are considered acceptable, and this is not to mention the sort of debacle we saw with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, where the pentagon released a "transcript" of an alleged hearing, with no video, no audio, not even a current photograph, and a "confession" that reads like a laundry list.

In the very midst of describing the horrors, is it really necessary to include the defense department's mantra?

Mr. Hicks’s case proved, as one spokeswoman regularly repeated, that the military commission system offers a “fair, legitimate and transparent forum.”

Yeah, sure it does.

Hey spokesman: You ever hang from the ceiling by your wrists while the guards smash your legs with baseball bats? No? You should try it sometime.

The fact that we are even discussing such a thing would have come as a shock to most Americans -- I would hope -- not all that long ago. But now, as Chris Floyd reads the not-so-subtle message just behind the lines:

This view -- the open acceptance of concentration camps, indefinite detention and unconstitutional judicial processes -- can actually be "supported" by the workings of the kangaroo court thus far, the venerable Times informs us. Check out this classic case of accomodation with evil masquerading as journalistic objectivity: "From the start, Guantánamo, its detainees and the legal proceedings here have provided enough grist to support the competing views of the detention center: a necessary mechanism for dealing with a new kind of enemy, or the embodiment of the war on terror gone awry."

Only a self-deluded fool -- either blinded by the cowardly panic that is the hallmark of the Bootlicker Brigade (Malkin, Limbaugh, Beck, etc.) or dulled by the well-wadded cozy "insider" status of our media barons (recently on such sickening display at the Gridiron Club Dinner love-in with all the adorable Bushies) -- could believe that the hideous regime of concentration camps, secret prisons, torture, kidnapping and "extrajudicial killing" established by Bush is anything but "the embodiment of the war on terror gone awry." Yet these mindsets -- the bootlickers and the well-wadded barons -- control our national discourse...and will continue to do so, as we noted yesterday, long after George W. Bush has retreated to his bunker in the Texas scrub, leaving a scorched earth behind.

At this point I'm not sure which is more dangerous -- the hideous regime of concentration camps, secret prisons, torture, kidnapping and "extrajudicial killing" established by Bush or the extent to which it is being "mainstreamed".

This isn't hard to figure out, folks. If David Hicks is among the worst of the worst, the whole system stinks on ice!

And if William Glaberson gets paid for this bootlicking blather -- by the New York Times, no less -- while Chris Floyd blogs ...

Left/Right Coalition Petitions House For Hearings In Sibel Edmonds Case

Transpartisan Coalition Calls for Whistleblower Hearings

Petition with strong left-right support headed to Capitol Hill

The Liberty Coalition, a transpartisan public policy group dedicated to preserving the Bill of Rights, personal autonomy and individual privacy today sent a petition signed by 30 liberal, libertarian and conservative groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizen Outreach, OMB Watch, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Government Accountability Project, Electronic Freedom Foundation, and the National Coalition Against the Censorship to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform urging prompt hearings on the case of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.

Edmonds, a former FBI Language Specialist, brought charges of wrongdoing, criminal activity, cover-ups and national security threats inside the agency following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Edmonds was promptly fired, which she asserts was an act of retaliation. The Department of Justice (DOJ) then used the State Secrets Privilege to shut down court proceedings in her case and prevent Congress from exploring the matter. Civil Liberties advocates argue that Edmonds’s case in an example of other instances where whistleblowers who tried to inform Congress and taxpayers about national security threats were intimidated silenced and retaliated against.

“Mrs. Edmonds is not a national security threat but a national hero and the American public deserves to hear the truth of her case. Congress must act and act now by having public hearings. Without them, the cover-ups and criminal activities will just continue.” Said Michael Ostrolenk, National Director of the Liberty Coalition.

Mr Ostrolenk was supported in his contentions by Liberty Coalition partner Stephen Kohn, President of the National Whistleblower Center who said “Congress must hear from Mrs. Edmonds and others who corroborated her case - we cannot wait until after another attack to learn about threats to our security."

This popular position is echoed by Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project On Government Oversight, a watchdog group that signed the appeal brief in Mrs. Edmonds case who said "The issues surrounding the Edmonds case are so significant that Congress must hold hearings to investigate the government's actions.”

The issues reported by Ms. Edmonds include:

· Espionage activities within the FBI, DOD, and the Department of State.

· Cover-up of information and leads pre and post 9/11, under the excuse of protecting certain diplomatic relations.

· Deliberate mistranslation of crucial intelligence by FBI translators and management.

· Foreign entities bribing government officials and elected representatives.

Civil Liberties advocates assert that these issues point to an abuse of power, a criminal conspiracy and attempts to cover-up wrong doing by using the coercive power of the state.

In regards to abuse of power, Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director, ACLU National Office, and Lead Counsel in Mrs. Edmonds case said. “The government abused the state secrets privilege to deny Sibel Edmonds her day in court, and to prevent accountability in other cases for illegal spying and rendition. It is high time for Congress to intervene.”

Dr. William Weaver, Senior advisor and Board Member of the National Security Whistleblower’s Coalition, who is an expert on the state secret privilege agreed with Mrs. Beeson when he said, “In Edmonds' case tyranny comes in the form of the state secrets privilege, a foolproof mechanism of the federal government to hide executive branch corruption, incompetence, and illegal activity. This is a practice more at home with Czars and nabobs, and should have no place in the United States."

Ostrolenk continued by saying “This is worse than Watergate in that American lives have been lost and our national security has been compromised. Mrs. Edmonds case has been vindicated by the Justice Department office of Inspector General, and several congressional offices. The public has a right to know. The excuse of protecting national security is fallacious. They are protecting their own power and not the American people. Mrs. Edmonds must be heard.”

I couldn't agree more, of course.

I think you should contact your "elected" representatives and ask them to take this issue seriously for once. And I don't ask for much, do I? So how about doing this one little thing for your frozen friend?

Does it seem futile? Futile is over if you want it. In other words, maybe one voice won't really make much difference, but what if we all started doing it?

Here's the House of Representatives (find your rep using the search box at the top left corner).

Here's the Senate (find your senators using the box at the top right).

While you're at, it you might remind them that we do not want to see an attack on Iran.

Thank you very much.

BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Continues

LOOKOUT AGAIN!

Here comes another load of manure from the BBC!

We wondered what kind of documentary the BBC was making about 9/11, and it's becoming clearer by the day. Guy Smith, producer of the upcoming BBC "Conspiracy Files" episode on 9/11, laid the groundwork in a piece called "We're all conspiracy theorists at heart" which was published by the BBC on Friday. In that piece, Smith claims conspiracy theories persist because people are natural story-tellers who instinctively look for elaborate tales to describe events beyond their control. Your nearly frozen correspondent replied with "BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins". I urge you to read both pieces if you have any doubts about our respective positions, or motivations.

On Saturday the BBC laid the next layer of infrastructure for its coming propaganda barrage, under the curiously misleading headline: Q&A: What really happened

In BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins, I half-jokingly claimed the upcoming documentary would be "nothing more nor less than Popular Mechanics on skates". Imagine my surprise, then, to see the current BBC offering taking the same approach used by PM.

The BBC purports to explain the events of 9/11 by asking and answering 10 questions, and I will deal with each of them, briefly or otherwise, below. But first let's talk about why this approach -- the attempted "debunking" of selected "conspiracy theories" -- is an unsatisfactory approach to the problem.

The Madness In The Method

The common approach taken by both BBC and Popular Mechanics consists of a series of vignettes. In each one, they pick out an anomaly between the official story and the available evidence of what really happened, they detail one possible explanation for that anomaly (which both BBC and Popular Mechanics helpfully refer to as a "conspiracy theory"), and then they allegedly debunk the "conspiracy theory" using one means or another.

It's a three-step process and it's vulnerable to corruption at every step. We'll talk about this more below. But here I want to mention a very important limitation on the method. Even if this approach were carried out with rigorous logic, even if no corruption were allowed at any stage of the process, it would still prove unsatisfactory for the following reasons:

[1] There's a vast difference between proving that a so-called "conspiracy theorist" is wrong on a given point and proving that the official story is right on that point.

Here's a concrete example: I happen to disagree with Alex Jones, Jim Fetzer and Dylan Avery on key points and yet I still do not believe the official story. So nobody -- not Guy Smith, not anybody else -- is going to make me believe the official story by pointing out places where Alex or Jim or Dylan has allegedly gone astray. In other words, even if all these so-called "conspiracy theorists" are "wrong", and even if BBC demolishes all of them, that still doesn't prove that the official story is correct.

And for that matter, even the use of the term "conspiracy theorist" is overloaded with spin, because the official story -- the story that Guy Smith is trying to protect -- talks of at least 20 people -- Osama bin Laden and 19 hijackers. Anyone who believes that those 20 people conspired to pull off this enormous crime is also, by definition, a "conspiracy theorist". And anyone who believes they did it without conspiring -- that they just happened to work together without any prior planning or communication -- is flat-out crazy.

To be blunt about it, anyone who thinks the attacks of 9/11 could have been done without a conspiracy is crazier than anything Alex Jones and Jim Fetzer and Dylan Avery and Guy Smith have ever said all combined.

[2] Even if the BBC's answers to all 10 questions were sound and solid, their sum total would barely begin to explain the differences between the attacks of 9/11 and the official version of same, because the number of unanswered questions about 9/11 runs into the hundreds.

Therefore the selection of 10 key questions in effect amounts to a ruling that all the hundreds of others are beyond the pale, and this is the necessary first step in the ongoing propaganda campaign to get you to believe lies about what really happened.

First they get you thinking it all boils down to 10 easy questions, and then they lie to you about the questions -- and then they lie to you about the answers, and kaboom! ... or should I say "Zzzzz" ... you're sound asleep!

1: Could the US Air Force have prevented the attacks?

This is certainly a good question and answering it in the "politically correct" manner requires serious obfuscation, so it's surprising to see it first. However, if the BBC is going to lie to you through all 10 questions, it doesn't really matter which comes first, so they may as well dive in the deep end.

Well, let's go with them:

To sceptics of the official account of 9/11, the idea of 19 fundamentalists hijacking commercial airliners and outsmarting the world's most advanced air defence system seems simply incredible.

Some 9/11 conspiracy theories argue that the US Air Force should have succeeded in intercepting at least some of the hijacked planes, and that someone, therefore, must have prevented them from doing so.

The official version - 9-11 Commission Report - holds that on the morning of 11 September, 2001 a major defence training exercise was taking place.

What an understatement! What was taking place was the most heavily concentrated set of training exercises ever scheduled!

The BBC can roll out any number of explanations as to why these exercises were sufficient to derail the air defense in the Northeastern US that day, but they don't dare approach the next logical question: Who scheduled those wargames?

Did Osama bin Laden send key components of the US Air Force to places like Alaska and Greenland that day? And if not, who did?

BBC quotes Popular Mechanics reporter David Coburn pushing the "incompetence" theory, which simply doesn't wash in the face of so much deliberately sown confusion, and then deals with an issue that's been hanging over the "official investigation" for quite some time:

Following the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report it emerged that the Commissioners were concerned they might have been deliberately misled by the military about the timeline of their response to events on the day.

Suspicions of a cover up by the military were recently addressed by a report from the Pentagon Inspector General.

The report found that there had been no deliberate attempt to mislead the 9/11 Commission, and that the discrepancies in their testimony to the Commission were the result of "a lack of capabilities and thoroughness" within the military.

The next logical question should be: Why is the Pentagon investigating whether the US military colluded in the coverup of 9/11?

But instead the BBC allows the suspects the final word on this issue. It's a ploy we'll see again and again.

Did anybody at the BBC notice that their link to the 9/11 Commission report is broken? (I've fixed it in the quoted passage.)

2: Were the Twin Towers deliberately demolished by explosives?

Of course they were. Anybody watching on TV knew that right away. But the official story doesn't account for Osama bin Laden getting access to the WTC in order to plant explosives there, so now we have to have all these transparent lies.

Was it a "pancake collapse" or a "progressive collapse" or in fact what kind of collapse was it? The official story has changed, but not the official wording.

All the talk about "why the towers collapsed" is absurd because the clear and visible fact -- perhaps the most notable fact of the day -- is that the towers didn't collapse at all; they disintegrated!

BBC prefers to obfuscate these very inconvenient facts in the following manner:

After 9/11, investigations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) determined that the collapse of the Twin Towers was due to the impact of the planes and the large quantities of exploding jet fuel released into the buildings.

Those questioning this account point to the lateral puffs of smoke that emerged from the towers just ahead of their collapse. Could these be explosive devices planted as part of a conspiracy?

They also argue that jet fuel, which has a far lower burning temperature than the melting point of steel, is unlikely to have weakened the steel supporting framework sufficient to prompt the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Jet fuel burns at 800 degrees Celsius whereas temperatures must reach 1,500 degrees Celsius for steel to melt.

Those questioning this account raise a lot of other questions as well, such as why so many firemen and emergency workers testified to hearing bombs going off all around them just before the towers fell, or why the steel beams appear to have been cut rather than having buckled, and why there was molten steel in the basements of the towers so long after the "collapse". But the BBC is not prepared to admit these questions, much less deal with them. Instead, we get a rehash of the official line (which still makes no sense!)

The explanation for the puffs of smoke offered by the authors of the Popular Mechanics study is that as the floors crashed down of top of one another, a pressure wave forced dust and smoke out of the windows.

As for the fuel temperature - the official explanation holds that whilst steel does indeed melt at 1,500 degrees Celsius, it loses half its strength at a much lower temperature of 650 degrees Celsius.

The fuel might not have melted the steel columns, but it weakened the structure, and especially the trusses that supported each floor, to the point that they could no longer support the weight on the building.

So BBC supports the "truss failure" theory. The supports couldn't hold up the floors.

Unfortunately this "explanation" is hugely at variance with the evidence.

If trusses had failed the floors may have come tumbling down but the steel exterior walls and the central steel columns would have been left standing, or at worst would have fallen over, or buckled and fallen partway over, or at any rate the result would have been very different than what we saw that day. The NIST report says the steel buckled but doesn't provide any photos of buckled steel. In some photos of WTC damage the steel appears to be cut. And then there's the issue of molten steel in the basements, or the reports of "rescue workers" working at Ground Zero having to change their boots all the time, because the soles were melting. How could a truss collapse generate that much heat? And why do we have eyewitness reports of underground explosions in the towers before the planes hit?

The BBC doesn't go near any of these questions either. They just pick one detail they like (the puffs of smoke coming from the buildings) and they work that detail into the official story in one way or another (i.e. the puffs of smoke were compressed dust and smoke being squeezed out of the buildings by the collapse) and they move on to the next narrowly framed question, as if the entire issue were settled.

It's a ploy we'll see again and again. But in the meantime ...

Here's a good way for you to evaluate the "steel weakened and buckled" theory at your own convenience: Go out and start your car. Watch what happens when burning fuel heats the steel around it -- in this case the steel is your engine block. Let it run for a while and you'll find that your engine block actually buckles -- because the heat from the burning fuel is so intense that, even though it's not hot enough to melt the steel, it's hot enough to weaken the steel, and this combined with the intense pressures in your engine, make the steel of the engine block lose its strength and buckle. And that's why you can't drive your car for long distances, because the heat from the burning fuel weakens the steel and your engine sags and the next thing you know it loses its compression.

You see this happening to other people all the time, don't you? Cars and trucks broken down by the side of the highway, no longer able to move because their engine blocks are so deformed from the heat of the burning fuel... You see them every day, do you not?

No? Well ... Maybe I'd better go back and check my facts, then!

3: Was WTC7 deliberately demolished by explosives?

Well, yes, it appears it was. In the last week we've had an emergency worker speak out and say yes, bombs were going off, yes, we had a twenty-minute warning to evacuate, and yes, it was what it looked like -- a controlled demolition.

He was using an alias and saying he'd lost his job because he spoke the truth and within a few days other emergency workers started talking and saying "yes, he's right, that's what happened" ... So what does the BBC have?

In the afternoon of 11 September 2001, World Trade Centre Building 7, a 47 storey office block close by the Twin Towers collapsed without even being hit by the planes.

The building had been evacuated and there were no casualties and with so much else happening that day, its collapse was barely reported.

That's another understatement. And it's something skeptics find a bit sinister!

WTC 7 was home to local offices of the CIA, Department of Defense, the United States Secret Service and the city's Office of Emergency Management, among others.

Sceptics of the official account, including those at Scholars for 9/11 Truth argue that the building was deliberately destroyed in a controlled demolition, perhaps in order to conceal important information about a pre-9/11 plot by the authorities.

Some even argue that the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania was intended to crash into Building 7.

The collapse of WTC has been investigated by FEMA. Their interim report found that when the North Tower collapsed, debris crashed into Building 7.

This was the likely cause of fires which quickly took hold. The sprinkler system did not work effectively because the water main in Vesey Street had been knocked out when the Twin Towers came down.

With the intense fires burning unabated, the steel structure supporting the building was fatally weakened. But the FEMA investigators conceded that this hypothesis had a low probability of occurring.

Say again?? "This hypothesis had a low probability" and yet it's being offered as an official explanation? Or is it?

In their final report, due to be published later in 2007, FEMA is expected to back its original hypothesis substantially - the collapse of WTC7 was accidental, not deliberate.

This is supposed to explain anything? This is supposed to make those questions go away?

The two propaganda techniques we see at play here are [1] pretending that the questions which have drawn replies have been answered, and [2] pretending that the questions that haven't been answered don't exist. Sneaky debating tricks. Underhanded but not evil.

This is a pattern which you may see change very soon.

Note the links in this passage. The BBC link to the FEMA interim report leads to "page not found". How convenient. Or how sloppy. Either way, BBC looks ... well, I'm sorry but I can't bring myself to say it. But I have fixed the link in the quoted passage.

4: Were Jews forewarned about the attacks?

The headline alone gives me hives. We'll talk about that in a minute. But first, here's the BBC's take on this aspect of the story:

Shortly after the attacks a rumour started in the Middle East and spread around the world which claimed that 4,000 Jewish employees at the World Trade Centre had not turned up for work on 11 September. Were they warned to stay away?

One conspiracy theory suggests that 9/11 was an Israeli plot to discredit the Arab world; another that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, found out about the attacks beforehand and warned the Jewish community in New York.

The rumour started after the Jerusalem Post reported that roughly 4,000 Israelis were believed to be living or working in New York and Washington.

Crucially it did not say they were dead or missing - just people in the immediate areas of the attacks who might have been affected.

This report was picked up by Arabic media outlets, including Al Manar, the Beirut satellite TV station linked to the Islamic militant group Hezbollah.

Al Manar TV added a spin to the story. It reported that 4,000 Israelis working at the World Trade Centre had not shown up for work on 9/11. As the anti-Semitic rumour spread, the details became embellished - like in a game of Chinese whispers.

According to official figures, of the 2,749 victims of the World Trade Centre attacks, 2,071 were occupants of the buildings.

Research by The Conspiracy Files shows that of these 2,071 victims, 119 were confirmed Jewish and a further 72 were believed to be Jewish.

This would make a total of 191 - or 9.2% of victims. This figure is broadly in line with the 9.7% of New York's commuting population which is believed to be Jewish.

This is a straw-man attack of the highest order, and it requires delicate surgery to take it apart.

First of all there may have been a report in the Jerusalem Post saying Jews had been forewarned of the attacks; if so it would clearly be to everyone's benefit to hide that report as quickly as possible. You will notice the BBC has linked to the Jerusalem Post website and the Al Manar website rather than to the two reports in question. Why?

If I wanted to refer you to a particular news report, I would point you to the article I wanted you to read, rather than the publisher's website. Unless I didn't really have anything...

But that's a minor point. Everything we've just read from the BBC about this story could be perfectly true. And yet...

Yesterday Guy Smith wrote that he has spent nine months researching, and today we find out that he doesn't have a link to the Jerusalem Post report he claims started the whole story. If I had spent nine months researching I think I would have come back with a link.

And the use of this one anecdote to dismiss all claims about foreknowledge is not very convincing. In fact, of all the stories I heard shortly after 9/11, this one wasn't even among them. The stories I heard had to do with Israelis, not Jews, and I know there's a lot of overlap, but the two groups are not identical by any means.

The most dramatic story circulating shortly after 9/11 said that employees of the Israeli company Odigo had received text messages early on the morning of 9/11, warning them of the impending attacks. The BBC has done nothing to ease my mind about this story.

But even more chilling are the stories about alleged Israeli foreknowledge that weren't circulating shortly after 9/11. And the BBC hasn't even tried to deal with them!

By speaking of "Jews" rather than "Israelis", the BBC follows in the Popular Mechanics tradition and muddies the waters considerably.

After framing it as a story involving "the Jews", supporters of the official story often move on to play the "anti-Semitism" card, and pretty soon after that the "Holocaust-denial" card, and even though these cards are quite irrelevant, they do derail an awful lot of discussions. The last time I checked, there was nothing anti-Semitic about wanting to know who attacked your country, and there was no hint of Holocaust-denial in asking whether certain highly-placed Israelis knew about the attacks before they happened.

The Odigo story is only one example. Far more serious, in my view, is the story from NYC about the three Israelis who were seen celebrating the attacks by exchanging high-fives, holding up their lighters as if at a rock concert, frolicking for their cameras against the backdrop of the burning towers. These men were later arrested along with two other Israelis; the five were held for 71 days during which they repeatedly failed lie detector tests. Eventually they were released and whisked home, but not before it was established that two of the five were agents of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

Why would Mossad agents be cheering the burning towers?

According to Christopher Ketcham:

After the first plane hit, no one really thought that this was a terrorist attack. I mean, most people thought -- and I was there, you know, on the Brooklyn waterfront watching this whole thing. Everyone thought it was an accident. These guys, when they were interrogated by FBI, told them that -- essentially said that they immediately knew it was a terrorist attack. And they actually told the FBI that the reason they were celebrating was because the attacks would be beneficial to Israel, that it was, quote, “a good thing for Israel” -- that's according to the FBI spokesman who spoke on the record about this -- and that it would bring sympathy for Israel's political agenda in the Middle East.

And there you have it in a nutshell. Israel's political agenda in the Middle East, is, of course, a euphemism, but we can't fault Christopher Ketcham, who has brought so much of this story into the light.

9/11 works to enable Israel's military agenda in the Middle East, and that's what this is about -- not the Jewish people of New York City, who comprise nine point something percent of the population and suffered nine point something percent of the deaths. This is not about them at all, nor is it about anti-Semitism nor Holocaust denial, nor any of the other charges that get thrown at 9/11 skeptics with nauseating regularity.

In fact -- come along with me here for a moment and let's think like a conspirator, shall we? -- if 9/11 was an Israeli black op, a warning to the Jewish workers of NYC would have defeated the purpose. If the plotters hoped to generate sympathy for Israel, and planned to do it by killing a huge number of people, surely they would have realized that if there were no Jewish victims, this might reflect badly on Israel and could cause a backlash rather than an increase in sympathy. So they wouldn't have done it that way. If they did it at all.

5: Did a commercial airline hit the Pentagon?

What difference does it make? Some people think a commercial airliner did hit the Pentagon, but they still don't believe the official story. Some think that whatever hit the Pentagon couldn't have been a commercial airliner, and of course none of them believe the official story.

Some people on each side of the argument think the entire issue has been inflamed by disinformation that's been deliberately injected in order to split the 9/11 truth movement into hostile bickering camps. Whether or not that was the intention, the existence of this split is used by some official conspiracy apologists to discredit all who ask questions about 9/11.

For its part, the BBC says:

At 09:37 on 11 September, the Pentagon, headquarters of the American military, was rocked by a huge explosion.

According to the official account American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the building, killing all passengers on board and 125 military personnel and civilians on the ground.

But some people argue that AA 77 could not have hit the building, as there is little visible wreckage, and the hole in the wall caused by the impact is too small to have been inflicted by a Boeing 757 airliner.

The first photographs taken before the front wall of the Pentagon collapsed show the hole appears to be some 18-20 feet across at its narrowest point.

Conspiracy theories argue that a remote controlled drone or missile struck the Pentagon.

The official explanation is that the fuselage - which is 12 feet wide - punctured the building, but the two engines and the wings largely broke up on impact.

US Defense Department photographs taken shortly after the attack show fragments of aircraft wreckage, some with the distinctive American Airlines livery.

The black box recorders and engine parts were found amongst the wreckage, and many eyewitnesses described seeing the plane hit the building.

Engineers and computer scientists at the Rosen Centre for Advanced computing at Purdue University, Indiana have built a computer model to recreate the crash.

Their research suggests that it was the exploding jet fuel which caused the worst damage inside the Pentagon.

None of this proves anything to me; most telling of all in my estimation is that the BBC chose to link to the US military multimedia site -- rather than to any specific photographs -- on the phrase "US Defense Department photographs". It's as if they're saying:

Photographs proving our point exist -- find them if you can!

6: Can CCTV footage prove what happened at the Pentagon?

BBC says:

Conspiracy theorists argue that the Pentagon, America's military headquarters, was not hit by a commercial airplane.

They say the initial hole in the outer wall is too small and there is no evidence of visible wreckage. Instead they believe the Pentagon was hit by something smaller, such as an unmanned drone or a cruise missile.

For Professor Jim Fetzer, of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, the evidence is clear-cut. "Whatever hit the building was not a Boeing 757," he told The Conspiracy Files. "Anyone that tells you a Boeing 757 hit the building is saying something that is probably false, that cannot possibly be true."

The Pentagon and the FBI have released some footage taken from CCTV cameras in the vicinity of the Pentagon.

Judicial Watch.

Some of that footage - from the nearby CITGO petrol station and the Doubletree Hotel - does not shed any light on what hit the building.

Frames taken from two cameras at a car park in front of the Pentagon appear to show the silver nose cone and tail fin of a Boeing 757 moments before the explosion, but the footage is of very poor quality and not conclusive.

The FBI will not confirm whether or not it holds other security camera footage of the attack. Its lack of openness has fuelled further conspiracy theories.

There are many reports that security cameras at the nearby Sheraton Hotel captured images of the attack, but the hotel manager told The Conspiracy Files that none of their cameras were pointing in the direction of the Pentagon and no such footage exists.

The Conspiracy Files interviewed rescue workers who said they clearly identified wreckage from a passenger jet in and around the building. And photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and shown in the documentary, identify parts of a Boeing 757 including a piece of fuselage with the distinctive livery of American Airlines.

And what difference does this make? No matter what hit the Pentagon, the official story is still patently false.

A better question might be: Why did the FBI confiscate all the videotapes from all the area cameras that might have been able to show us what happened? You'd think if they were really interested in catching the terrorists they'd have better things to do than intimidating employees at the local gas stations.

And if you stop to see what they have at Judicial Watch you may find yourself shaking your head in astonishment that anything so vague could be considered evidence of anything.

7: Did a military transport plane control the attack on the Pentagon?

Again it doesn't matter -- and that makes three questions in a row here of the wedge-driver variety.

According to the BBC:

As the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 approached Washington DC, a military transport C-130 aircraft took off from Andrews Air Force Base, en route to Minnesota.

Conspiracy theories suggest that the C-130 may have been controlling the attack that morning as part of a secret government plot, or even fired a missile which downed the Boeing.

The C-130's pilot, Lt Colonel Steve O'Brien, tells a different story. He told The Conspiracy Files that he and his crew were alerted by Air Traffic control to the presence of an unidentified jet approaching the capital.

O'Brien describes seeing a Boeing passenger jet with the distinctive silver and red colours of American Airlines crossing their flight path in an unusually steep bank.

His first reaction was that the aircraft was in trouble and trying to make an emergency landing at the nearby Reagan National Airport. Moments later the Boeing crashed into the Pentagon.

Lt Colonel O'Brien points out the C-130 is not capable of carrying missiles.

This is a wild tale and makes no difference to anything. It amounts to an allegation by the BBC that some unnamed conspiracy theorists are wrong on this point. But so what? I knew 9/11 was a black op long before I heard this story about a C-130.

On the other hand, if you were trying to think of 10 relatively safe questions to ask and answer, the question about the C-130 would be far more appealing than questions about foreknowledge or obstruction of justice, to name but two sorely neglected areas of great concern.

8: Was United 93 shot down?

Here's another question that really doesn't matter.

I was watching the events unfold on television and I knew it was a false flag attack while flight 93 was still in the air. Whatever happened with that flight was not going to make the official story -- as told so far -- any more believable.

Quoth the BBC:

United Airlines 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, and the only one not to reach its target.

The official account of the day, as told in the 9/11 Commission Report holds that Flight 93 crashed into open ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, apparently as passengers tried to seize back the controls from the hijackers. But 9/11 conspiracy theorists are suspicious of this account.

Some argue that substantial wreckage from the aircraft was found at Indian Lake, a reported 6 miles from the crash site in Shanksville. If this would true, it would lend weight to the theory that the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air after being hit by a missile.

Leading conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of infowars.com argues that planes generally leave a small debris field when they crash, and that this is not compatible with reports of wreckage found further afield from Shanksville.

The reports of wreckage at Indian Lake were accurate in so far as small, light fragments of insulation material and paper from United 93 were found by residents at the lake, having blown there from the crash site on the prevailing wind.

However, the distance between the two locations was misreported in some accounts. In fact, in a straight line, Indian Lake is just over a mile from the crash site. The road between the two locations takes a roundabout route of 6.9 miles - accounting for the erroneous reports.

Also, the fragments of debris which were found at Indian Lake were downwind of the crash site and east of the plane's flight path. Had United 93 started to disintegrate in mid-air, wreckage would have fallen below the flight path - to the west of Shanksville.

Wally Miller, the local coroner at Somerset, Pennsylvania is at the centre of another debate about the crash of United 93. In his film Loose Change, Dylan Avery quotes Miller as saying: "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes because there were no bodies there."

However, interviewed for The Conspiracy Files, Wally Miller says he was misquoted.

"I said that I stopped being a coroner after about 20 minutes because it was perfectly clear what the manner of death was going to be.

"It was a plane crash, but yet it was a homicide because terrorists had hijacked the plane and killed the passengers."

He says it is technically correct that there were no complete bodies at the crash site, but the recovery operation found many body parts and DNA to identify all the passengers and crew on board.

So here the BBC's claim amounts to saying that Alex Jones was wrong about how far-scattered the debris from Flight 93 was, and Dylan Avery used a quote from Wally Miller who later said he was misquoted. And these two claims of the BBC may very well be true. But even if they are true, so what?

The "crash site" still doesn't look like a crash site, the stories of cellphone calls being made from high altitude didn't make any sense, and we have all sorts of reasons to believe the official story is full of holes (if not full of lies, or something even more aromatic!) on this point, even if Alex and Dylan are both wrong!

And that's not to say that they are wrong. I don't know. It's possible Wally Miller was misquoted. It's also possible Wally Miller changed his tune after speaking a bit too freely. If that's what happened, it wouldn't be the first time a key witness in a key story had changed his tune. Perhaps a shady character drew up alongside Wally Miller one day and alerted him to the fact that he had spoken too freely. It wouldn't be the first time for that, either.

The BBC's link to infowars.com doesn't work, but I've fixed it for you. ;-)

9: Did United 93 crash?

Here's another side of the previous question. But this time it's framed in such a way as to discredit Loose Change specifically. Loose Change has become increasingly popular lately, especially in Britain, and as the defenders of the official story see it, Loose Change needs all the discrediting it can get.

Here the BBC says:

Photographs taken at the crash site near Shanksville show a small crater and fragments of clearly identifiable aircraft wreckage along with personal possessions from some of those on board.

But the size of the crater and the absence of large pieces of wreckage have led some to question whether UA93 actually crashed there at all. This question is examined at the following website:

Killtown: Hunt the Boeing II

Dylan Avery, director of the hugely popular internet film Loose Change, argues that Flight 93 landed elsewhere, with the passengers abducted as part of an elaborate government plot.

Loose Change

Avery's film quotes reports from a local TV station in Ohio saying that two planes had landed at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport because of a bomb threat. Avery suggests that one of these was Flight 93.

In fact, there was one plane diverted to Cleveland that morning, with a suspected bomb on board.

But this was a different flight: Delta Airlines Flight 89, which had been proceeding along the same westward air corridor as United 93. In the chaos of that morning, Air Traffic Control had confused the two flights and ordered the Delta to land.

Local TV stations covered a press conference by the local mayor in which he referred to the Delta flight landing because of a suspect bomb, but later amended their stories when it became clear that Delta 89 had not been hijacked.

So what do we have here? A "crash scene" that doesn't look much like a crash scene, and BBC not even attempting to deny it.

Instead they point to an assertion in Loose Change that's been denied. And what can that mean? First, of course, just because something's been denied that doesn't make it false. Look: Two plus Two isn't Four! Do you believe me?

Secondly, even if Dylan Avery is completely wrong on this one, the "crash scene" still doesn't look like a crash scene, and the BBC still doesn't deny it. Click that Killtown link if you don't believe me.

Really. Check out that Killtown link and tell me a commercial airliner crashed in that field. And watch Loose Change sometime if you haven't done so already. It's not perfect but it asks a lot of good questions.

Thanks to BBC for two good links here. ;-)

10: Could the attacks have been prevented?

Here we have an example of a very broad question being addressed as if it were very narrow. The BBC says:

Were there chances to stop the attacks prior to 9/11? If so, was this failure deliberate?

The CIA knew that two al-Qaeda terrorists had entered the United States as early as January 2000. But the CIA never passed on this information to the FBI - so the FBI did not know to look for them.

The two future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar settled in San Diego, where they started to take lessons at a local flying school. They used their real names in official documents and one of them - al-Hazmi - was even listed in the local phonebook.

Had the CIA tipped off the FBI that two known al-Qaeda operatives had travelled to America, it would have been easy to track them down - and possibly the 9/11 attacks could have been thwarted.

But Dale Watson, who led the FBI's investigation of 9/11, told The Conspiracy Files that there was no deliberate CIA plot to keep information from the FBI.

He said: "In large organisations you do have breakdowns in communications at the lower end. There was never any top down orders either by the FBI or the CIA. And anybody that believes that - they're wrong."

Dale Watson might just be telling us a tall tale there. We've heard all sorts of stories about agents in the field starting investigations that could have foiled the plot but who were called off the hunt by their superiors. Perhaps there was never any all-encompassing top-down orders from central headquarters in either the FBI or the CIA. But the right people knew that certain sorts of leads ought not to be investigated! We could talk to Coleen Rowley about that, but we'd do most of the listening!

The story of one instance where the CIA had information that could have led somewhere if only the FBI had known of it (1) doesn't begin to cover the question of whether the attacks could have been prevented, and (2) conveniently places the blame on an intelligence agency the administration has been trying to intimidate and eviscerate for years -- first in the pressure to find intelligence that would support the administration's bid to sell their long-planned war in Iraq, later in a reshuffling that eliminated all serious opposition to the unitary executive, based on the pretext that the CIA had been wrong in their assessment that Iraq did in fact have WMD. Oh what a tangled web these professional mass murderers do weave!

After the attacks, government officials were summoned to give evidence before a Congressional Inquiry set up to investigate the intelligence failure before 9/11.

It seems that the CIA information about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar was "lost in the system".

BBC doesn't want to talk about the other things that were lost in the system, or buried by the system, as the case may be.

But at least they're willing to quote Bob Graham.

But Co-chairman Senator Bob Graham told The Conspiracy Files of his frustration at the lack of co-operation from the FBI in that inquiry, and by the government's decision to censor over 30 pages of his report which related to Saudi Arabia.

"Within 9/11 there are too many secrets," he said, "and that withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their government as it relates to their own security."

Interestingly, the BBC has left the last word with a skeptic. And the quote, coming from a US Senator, deserves to be taken seriously.

Within 9/11 there are too many secrets, and the doubts they engender certainly cannot be dispelled by 10 narrow questions.

The Questions They Don't Ask

Some of the questions the BBC doesn't ask are even more interesting than those they do. And perhaps there's a good reason for this.

What about president Bush, sitting there in the classroom doing a deer-in-the-headlights impersonation after being told the country was under attack? If he was a target, why didn't the Secret Service whisk him away? And if he wasn't a target, how could they have known that? And why didn't he do anything? He's Commander-In-Chief, right? Or only during campaign season?

What about the hijackers? How did they get into the country? How did they get their flight training? Why did they seem to be leaving deliberately conspicuous trails? Or do fanatical Muslims usually snort cocaine and pick fights at strip clubs?

What about the bin Laden family? Why were so many members of the alleged ringleader's extended family collected and ushered out of the country so soon after the attacks that the FBI didn't even get a chance to talk to them? And speaking of the FBI, it doesn't list Osama bin Laden as a 9/11 suspect because, it says, it has no hard evidence implicating him.

Why is Sibel Edmonds gagged? She knows things about money, and drugs, and Turkey, which the administration is deathly afraid of. So she's under a State Secrets gag order which prevents her from telling us certain things which we're told would be very detrimental to sensitive diplomatic and business arrangements. I'll say they would! If you take a look at the amount of poppy being grown in Afghanistan and shipped through Turkey you can get a sense of how sensitive it really is!

Why was the steel from the WTC collected as quickly as possible and shipped to China for recycling? Why wasn't the world's greatest-ever crime scene preserved? Why did it take so long for an investigation to be set up? And then why was it run by an administration insider with a specialty in public perception and myth-making?

Don't get me started! There are a zillion and one other unanswered questions, and by not even admitting that those questions are out there, and that we're still waiting for answers, the BBC shows quite clearly that it's not interested in the truth, and hardly interested in supporting the official story, but primarily interested in discrediting those who would question the very absurd official account of that very absurd day.

There's hardly any journalism involved in such an effort. Baby, what a big surprise!

The Method In The Madness

Realistically speaking, it seems crazy to go to air with a case this weak. But circumstances have forced Guy Smith's hand. They've spent money on this. It's been scheduled and advertised for quite a while now. He can't back out at the last minute.

So now it's a question of production. When the propaganda special airs on Sunday night, with all the magic of modern audio/video behind it, spellbound viewers will allow themselves to be put to sleep on the pablum of officially sanctioned lies, with no hint of the tyranny creeping up around them.

But you won't be among them, will you? Nor your friends, nor your families.

I don't usually encourage people to email my articles to others, but if you ever wanted to do something like that, this would be a good time to try it. ;-)

The truth shall set us all free, my friends. But only if we share it!