Tuesday 30 September 2003

Soros calls for 'regime change' in US

Let's not forget that Mr Soros is simply another head of the Global Government/NWO Beast. This article is positively Hegelian in its intent!

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros has called for an end to the Bush administration ahead of next year's presidential elections.

Mr Soros - whose Foundations Network has given $1bn around the world to various causes to help tackle poverty and disease - told BBC Radio 4's United Nations Or Not? programme that the US would only stop pursuing "extremist" policies if there was a change at the White House.

"It is only possible if you have a regime change in the United States - in other words if President Bush is voted out of power.

"I am very hopeful that people will wake up and realise that they have been led down the garden path, that actually 11 September has been hijacked by a bunch of extremists to put into effect policies that they were advocating before such as the invasion of Iraq."

Mr Soros added that there was a "false ideology" behind the policies of the Bush administration.

"There is a group of - I would call them extremists - who have the following belief: that international relations are relations of power, not of law, that international law will always follow what power has achieved," he said.

"And therefore [they believe] the United States being the most powerful nation on earth should impose its power, impose its will and its interests on the world and it should do it looking after itself.

"I think this is a very dangerous ideology. It is very dangerous because America is in fact very powerful."

He added that he felt US actions in the build-up to the war on Iraq was evidence of an extremist element in the Bush administration.

Full story...

Arabs say world is ignoring Israel's nukes

All nations are equal, but some are more equal than others!

With the world pressing Iran and North Korea to give up nuclear programs, Arab states have criticised the West for allowing Israel to remain outside global nonproliferation regimes.

Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons capability but has not signed on to major agreements, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is aimed at curbing the spread of nuclear arms.

"What surprises us is that at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency is intensifying its efforts and monitoring (NPT) members countries ... we see that it continues to ignore the rejection of Israel in not joining the treaty," Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.

"This constitutes a serious threat to the security and stability of the whole region," he said.

Under U.S. pressure, the IAEA -- the U.N. nuclear watchdog -- has given Iran until October 31 to prove Tehran's claim that it has no intention of developing nuclear arms and it merely hopes to use nuclear technology to produce electricity.

Meanwhile, the United States, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan have been working to engage Pyongyang in a negotiating process aimed at persuading the North to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said: "It is unacceptable that Israel's possession of such weapons should remain a reality that some prefer to ignore or prevent the international community ... from facing it squarely and frankly."

Syria, accused by the United States of developing chemical and biological arms, took aim at both Washington and Israel.

Full story...

No wonder America has so many enemies

President Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-controlled Congress for lying about sex. President George W. Bush and aides lied the United States into a stupid, unnecessary colonial war that has so far killed more than 305 Americans and seriously wounded more than 1,400. It has also cost many thousands of Iraqi dead, and $1 billion US weekly.

Lying about sex is an impeachable offence; lying the nation into war apparently is not.

I was no Clinton fan, but give me his iffy morals any day over Bush's Mussolini-like strutting. Sen. Edward Kennedy is absolutely correct when he calls Bush's Iraq war a "fraud" concocted to win the next elections.

A fraud and an epic blunder.

Last week, Bush received a glacial and scornful reception at the United Nations that symbolized the world's contempt and disgust for his administration. Not since Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the speaker's rostrum has a major leader so embarrassed himself and his nation before the world body.

In his UN speech, Bush again claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and "ties" to terrorism. Days later, U.S. intelligence teams that scoured Iraq for four months reported no traces of weapons or terrorism links - the pretext used by Bush and his neo-conservative handlers for unprovoked war against Saddam Hussein.

The White House was left choking on its own grotesque lies.

Incredibly, VP Dick Cheney, a prime architect of the Iraq war, actually claimed recently that Iraq still had mobile germ labs, though U.S. and British inspectors debunked this claim last June. The "special" intelligence network created by neo-conservatives is still apparently feeding disinformation to America's leadership.

This latest humiliation came only days after Bush finally admitted Iraq was not, as most Americans were misled into believing, behind the 9/11 attacks.

Full story...

PD-16 and the constant blackouts

Something about these sudden power outages strikes me as very very fishy. In light of the article below they start to make a little more sense.

Are the neocons in the Pentagon targeting electrical grids?

Uncle Sam wants YOU to die for big business In July 2002, George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 16 (PD-16), a secret plan for the United States to wage cyber-warfare against other countries. Under the directive, the Pentagon—which is under the control of neoconservative zealots who make Dr. Strangelove seem relatively sane—is authorized to use electronic weaponry to bring down the electrical grids of enemy nations.

Since Bush's directive was signed, the world had witnessed more unexplained massive blackouts in the history of the modern age of electricity. Considering that the Pentagon, through manipulative schemers like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and retired Admiral John Poindexter, has championed such ideas as a stock market betting parlor for future terrorist attacks and an Internet-based personal information surveillance program (both fortunately killed off by Congress), it is not far-fetched to consider the possibility that the recent spate of blackouts around the world are the result of another harebrained operation cooked up by the necons to demonstrate America's superiority in cyber-warfare.

After all, the Pentagon has a very bad track record when it comes to using civilian populations as guinea pigs for its experiments. Witness the awful effects of nuclear bomb testing on the peoples of the western United States and the Marshall Islands, depleted uranium-hardened shells on innocent civilians in war zones, and Agent Orange on American troops and civilians in Southeast Asia.

Since PD-16 was signed, blackouts affecting hundreds of millions of people are occurring on an unprecedented scale.

On September 23, 2002, a massive power failure disrupted central Chile, including the capital city of Santiago. Some 3,500 passengers had to be rescued from stalled Metro trains in Santiago. The official reason was said to be "faulty programming" and a "technical failure" at a power station. On April 29, 2003, a power failure hit the airport in Melbourne, Australia, disrupting operations for 90 minutes.

Buenos Aires and La Plata, Argentina, were hit by a huge power failure on November 24, 2002. January 31, 2003, saw an unusual power failure hit Cambridge, Ontario. Buenos Aires was hit again by another sudden blackout on August 6, 2003. Power company officials blamed that outage on the collapse of three power lines but Argentine President Nestor Kirchner said he believed private power companies were engaged in a conspiracy to pressure the government to increase utility rates.

The first major blackout in 2003 occurred in the northeastern United States and Canada on August 14. NewYork City, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, Cleveland and smaller cities and towns in between lost power for hours at the height of the evening rush hour. Some 50 million people were affected. Canadian and U.S. officials pointed the finger at one another for causing the blackout but blame soon shifted to a power generation plant owned by Ohio's FirstEnergy Corp. President [sic] Bush, who was conveniently fundraising in California at the time, called the blackout a "wake-up call."

A few days later, the Republic of Georgia was plunged into darkness. On August 18, 4.5 million people in Georgia lost electricity; the Tblisi metro ground to a halt and the water supply was cut off. The Georgian energy minister blamed "sabotage" for the outage but he wasn't more specific.

Full story...

New inquiry in Italian banker's death

Suicide my ass! It's only taken them 20 years to figure it out? Yeah right! Interesting story but I really don't think it will lead anywhere important.

Police in the City of London have re-opened inquiries into the death of an Italian banker more than 20 years ago.

Roberto Calvi, chairman of a private bank which collapsed with spectacular losses, was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge across the Thames River.

At first he was thought to have commited suicide, but Italian police believe he was murdered by the Mafia as punishment for pocketing money they had asked him to launder.

Four people were charged earlier this summer and it is thought the aim of the new investigation in London is to help the Italian prosecutor.

Forensic tests

Calvi, nicknamed God's Banker because of his Vatican connections, fled Italy after the private bank he chaired, the Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed.

The suicide theory was questioned after forensic tests recently concluded in Germany suggested he had been murdered.

Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith, of the City of London Police, has been asked to begin inquiries into the case on behalf of Dr Luca Tescaroli, the Rome magistrate in charge of the Italian prosecutions.

The City of London Police confirmed the "circumstances surrounding Roberto Calvi's death are currently under active investigation".

Calvi's son, Carlo, told BBC News Online the news was "very encouraging" and he said he planned to travel to London from his home in Canada to help assist the police.

Full story...

Corporations are the main victors in Iraq

"It's not about oil. It's not about oil."

But we're taking their oil. And not just to finance reconstruction.

Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of the Iraqi occupation, made that clear back in July when he declared that Iraq needs to accept foreign investment and privatization of its oil before a permanent government is put in charge of the country. In other words, democracy is welcome only after the most important economic decisions regarding the future of Iraqis have been decided for them.

You'd think that such a blatant rejection of democracy and obvious grab at Iraq's oil would attract more notice. Bremer made it clear that corporations have priority over people in Iraq, and that the U.S. occupation plans to ensure that.

Our occupation of Iraq has an eerie similarity to another intervention in the Middle East that occurred 50 years ago -- the CIA-British coup that ousted Iran's democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed the infamous Shah of Iran.

So when Arab nations greet our rhetoric of creating democracy with suspicion or outright derision, we've earned it. Iranians struggled successfully for democracy and we promptly crushed their dream.

Then, as now, the U.S. and Great Britain used violence to prevent Iraq and Iran from controlling their own oil.

This set of priorities contrasts sharply with the U.S. occupation of Japan after WWII, when Americans sat down with Japanese scholars and collaboratively designed and implemented one of the most progressive democratic constitutions in the world. We can take pride for having helped Japan evolve into a peaceful, stable, and prosperous country that is one of our closest allies. Today, Iranian and Iraqi people resent our support of their previous corrupt regimes and, understandably, don't trust our intentions now.

The differences between the American occupations of 1945 Japan and 2003 Iraq reflect the rise of corporate power here and abroad, and within the Bush administration in particular. Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is already cashing in on Iraqi "rebuilding" contracts that it obtained from the U.S. government. The oil companies that donated so heavily to the Bush campaign will reap huge profits if they are allowed to take over oil production in Iraq. The weapons makers profit from Bush's policies as well, and even telecommunications companies stand to benefit, since Bremer intends to give foreign corporations license to operate mobile phone networks in Iraq.

It's no surprise that Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld have been advocating an invasion of Iraq since at least 1998 through the Project for a New American Century. It could be argued that Saddam Hussein has been a marked man since he nationalized Iraqi oil back in 1973, but that's another story.

Meanwhile, the American occupation of Iraq increasingly resembles the cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis: American soldiers are ambushed and killed, and the U.S. military retaliates by rounding up and imprisoning Iraqi "suspects," including civilians, women, and children as young as 11. More Iraqi violence results, and the cycle continues. Iraqis have little hope that American troops will withdraw anytime soon and have not been treated with dignity or afforded human rights by their occupiers.

How did the American ideals of liberty and justice become hollow slogans for presidents to use to justify military attacks abroad? Ever since Eisenhower warned us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, it has become steadily more powerful. Corporations should not be allowed to influence foreign policy.

Full story...

Monday 29 September 2003

Porton Down Sarin Death Witness

This is what the System does with their "Official Secrets Act" and "D-Notices" they cover-up the fact that they are murderous lying bastards!

Final agony of RAF volunteer killed by sarin - in Britain.

As the inquest into the death of a 'human guinea pig' at Porton Down opens, a witness breaks 50 years' silence to recount the horrors he saw...

Like most 19-year-olds, Alfred Thornhill had never seen anybody die. When the fresh-faced trainee engineer from Salford answered his call for National Service, he thought he could handle anything.

Dispatched to the ambulance service, the self-confident teenager arrived for a month-long posting at Porton Down, the Government's top-secret chemical weapons laboratory in Wiltshire. He was proud to be doing his bit for his country.

But nothing could have prepared the young Mancunian for the horrific events he witnessed on a May morning in 1953. Answering an emergency call, he witnessed scenes which would haunt him for half a century and thrust him to the centre of an inquiry into one of the darkest hours of British military history.

Until today Thornhill - now a 70-year-old pensioner - has never spoken publicly about what he saw. He feared the Ministry of Defence would send him to prison.

He has now broken his silence to tell of the day he arrived at Porton Down's gas chamber and saw the convulsing body of 20-year-old Ronald Maddison thrashing around on the floor, spewing substances from his mouth.

Thornhill's eyewitness testimony will form a key plank of the reopened inquest into Maddison's death, which is due to be heard in the next few weeks.

Maddison, an RAF engineer from County Durham, had been used as a human guinea pig by MoD scientists experimenting on the lethal nerve gas sarin. Like hundreds of others from the armed forces, Maddison had volunteered for the trials, believing he was going to Porton Down to take part in some 'mild' experiments to find a cure for the common cold. Instead, by dropping sarin onto Maddison's skin, they used him to help determine the dosage of the lethal nerve agents.

Thornhill's accounts of the agonising last hours of Maddison's life shines a light into the murky past of this secretive establishment and the shocking experiments carried out on volunteers. Hundreds are suspected of dying prematurely or going on to develop illnesses such as cancer, motor neurone disease and Parkinson's. Despite the grief and fury of survivors and their families, over the decades successive Governments have sought to bury the scandal. But Thornhill's testimony could change all that.

'I had never seen anyone die before and what that lad went through was absolutely horrific... it was awful,' he said. 'It was like he was being electrocuted, his whole body was convulsing. I have seen somebody suffer an epileptic fit, but you have never seen anything like what happened to that lad... the skin was vibrating and there was all this terrible stuff coming out of his mouth... it looked like frogspawn or tapioca.'

Thornhill recalls a number of scientists standing around Maddison. 'You could see the panic in their eyes - one guy looked as if he was trying to hold his head down. There were four of us who picked him off the floor and put him in the back of the ambulance. He was still having these violent convulsions and we drove him to the medical unit at Porton.'

By the time he reached the unit, it had been cleared of other casualties and there were men in white coats standing around a bed.

Thornhill was told to carry Maddison over and it was then that the young ambulance driver saw a second image that would haunt him for decades.

'I saw his leg rise up from the bed and I saw his skin begin turning blue. It started from the ankle and started spreading up his leg. It was like watching somebody pouring a blue liquid into a glass, it just began filling up. I was standing by the bed gawping. It was like watching something from outer space and then one of the doctors produced the biggest needle I had ever seen. It was the size of a bicycle pump and went down onto the lad's body. The sister saw me gawping and told me to get out.'

Full story...

Justice Probes Leak of CIA Agent's Name

It's clear to me now that BushBlair cares not one whit who has to suffer and die to validate their lies.

The Justice Department is investigating allegations that White House officials revealed the identity of a CIA agent whose husband had questioned President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The matter has been referred to the department, which "will now take appropriate action, whatever that is," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

She said she was unaware of any White House involvement in the matter.

"I know nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this, and it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect his White House to operate," Condoleezza Rice told "Fox News Sunday."

She pledged White House cooperation in the inquiry.

A senior Bush administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Justice Department has received a letter from CIA Director George Tenet to look into the matter.

The department and the FBI now are trying to determine whether there was a violation of the law and, if so, then whether a full-blown criminal investigation is warranted, the official said.

In July, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., sent a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller asking him to order an immediate criminal investigation into government leaks that might have unmasked the CIA agent.

"To reveal an agent's identity is a despicable and dastardly act ... that could endanger lives or the security of the country," Schumer said Sunday in a telephone interview. "There has to be a thorough and complete and fearless investigation that goes wherever it leads."

The flap began in January when Bush said in his State of the Union address that British intelligence officials had learned that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium in Africa.

Full story...

Final Judgement Reviewed by Mark Braver

If it's true that the Mossad is really an arm of the Rothschilds which many conspiracy researchers claim, the this makes a lot of sense when one considers that JFK was trying to kill the Federal Reserve by ordering the US Treasury to start issuing it's own currency based on the holdings of silver kept by the US government at the time. Kennedy pissed a lot of important people off and died for it... Classic "slaying of the King" stuff...

There seems to be a lot of misperception of what Final Judgment does and does not say about the JFK assassination. The book does not say that "the Jews killed JFK." That's horse manure.

What the book does say is that: When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison charged businessman Clay Shaw with participation in the JFK assassination conspiracy Garrison stumbled upon the Israeli Mossad connection to the murder of President Kennedy. Shaw served on the board of a shadowy corporation known as Permindex. A primary shareholder in Permindex was the Banque De Credit International of Geneva, founded by Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and financier for the Mossad.

What's more, the Mossad-sponsored Swiss bank was the chief "money laundry" for Meyer Lansky, the head of the international crime syndicate and an Israeli loyalist whose operations meshed closely on many fronts with the American CIA.

The chairman of Permindex was Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, a key figure in the Israeli lobby and an operative of the Bronfman family of Canada, long-time Lansky associates and among Israel's primary international patrons.

In the pages of "Final Judgment" the Israeli connection to the JFK assassination is explored in frightening--and fully documented--detail. For example, did you know:

* That JFK was engaged in a bitter secret conflict with Israel over U.S. East policy and that Israel's prime minister resigned in disgust, saying JFK's stance threatened Israel's very survival?

* That JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, immediately reversed America's policy toward Israel?

* That the top Mafia figures often alleged to be behind the JFK assassination were only front men for Meyer Lansky?

* That the CIA's liaison to the Mossad, James Angleton, was a prime mover behind the cover-up of the JFK assassination?

Why didn't Oliver Stone, in his famous movie "JFK" not mention any of this? It turns out the chief financial backer of Stone's film was longtime Mossad figure, Arnon Milchan, Israel's biggest arms dealer.

The very fact that the Israeli lobby has gone through such great lengths to try to smear Michael Collins Piper and to try to discredit Final Judgment gives the book great credibility. If the book was really so silly or so unconvincing, it doesn't seem likely that groups such as the Anti-Defamation League would go out of their way to try to suppress the book as they have.

The fact is that Piper demonstrates that Israel did indeed have a very strong motive to want to get JFK out of the way and that numerous people who have been linked in other writings to the JFK conspiracy were (as Piper documents) also in the sphere of influence of Israel's Mossad. Not only Clay Shaw in New Orleans, but also James Angleton at the CIA, who was Israel's strongest advocate at the CIA and also the CIA's liaison to the Mossad. The Israeli connection is indeed "the missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy."

The "Reader from Chicago" who wrote the review of Final Judgment posted here is really off the beam and I suspect he (or she) is deliberately distorting what Piper's book does say in order to try to discourage people from reading it.

Full story...

Media Censorship That Doesn't Speak Its Name

by Joihn Pilger

Reducing journalism to a branch of corporate and government public relations is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators, in Britain and America.

The Australian novelist Richard Flanagan was recently asked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to read a favourite piece of fiction on national radio and explain his reasons for the choice.

"I was unsure what fiction to read to you this morning," he said. "If we take the work of our most successful spinner of fictions in recent times, [Prime Minister] John Howard, I could have read from the varied and splendid tall tales he and his fellow storytellers have concocted..." He listed Howard's most famous fictions: that desperate refugees trying to reach Australia had wilfully thrown their children overboard, and that faraway Australia was endangered by Iraq's "weapons of hysterical distraction", as he put it.

He followed this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses, "because in our time of lies and hate it seems appropriate to be reminded of the beauty of saying yes to the chaos of truth..." This was duly recorded; but when the programme was broadcast, the entire preface about Howard was missing. Flanagan accused the ABC of rank censorship. No, was the response; they just didn't want "anything political". This was followed, he wrote, by "a moment of high comedy: would I, the producer asked, be interested in coming on a programme to discuss disillusionment in contemporary Australia?"

In a society that once prided itself on its laconic sense of irony, there was not a hint of it, just a managerial silence. "All around me," Flanagan later wrote, "I see avenues for expression closing, an odd collusion of an ever-more cowed media and the way in which the powerful seek to dictate what is and what isn't read and heard."

He may well be speaking for the rest of us. The censorship in Australia that he describes is especially virulent because Australia is a small media pond inhabited by large sharks: a microcosm of what the British might expect if the current assault on free journalism is not challenged. The leader of this assault is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, whose dominance in the land of his birth is now symptomatic of his worldwide grip. Of 12 daily newspapers in the capital cities, Murdoch controls seven. Of the ten Sunday newspapers, Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide, he has a complete monopoly. He owns everything, including all the printing presses. It is almost impossible to escape his augmented team of Pravdas.

Like all his newspapers, they follow the path paved with his "interests" and his extremism. They echo Murdoch's description of Bush and Blair as "heroes" of the Iraq invasion, and his dismissal of the blood they spilt. For good measure, his tabloid the Herald Sun invented an al-Qaeda terrorist training camp near Melbourne; and all his papers promote John Howard's parrot-like obsequiousness to Bush, just as they laud Howard's racist campaign against a few thousand asylum-seekers who are locked away in outback concentration camps.

Murdochism, disguised or not, is standard throughout the media he does not control. The Melbourne Age, once a great liberal newspaper whose journalists produced a pioneering charter of editorial independence, is often just another purveyor of what Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies", wrapped in lifestyle supplements. Flickering beacons are the visionary Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which was set up to serve Australia's multi-ethnic society, and the eternally battered ABC.

The ABC is different from the BBC, its model, in one crucial respect. It has no licence fee and must rely on government handouts. In Australia, political intimidation of the national broadcaster makes Downing Street's campaign against the BBC seem almost genteel. Howard's minister for communications, a far-right dullard called Richard Alston, recently demanded that the ABC reply to 68 counts of "anti-Americanism". What the government wants is no less than an oath of loyalty to the foreign power to which it has surrendered sovereignty.

Charges of "left-wing bias", familiar in Britain and just as ridiculous, drone out of both the Murdoch and non-Murdoch press. A Sydney Morning Herald commentator, a local echo of the far right's "monitoring" of the media in America, has attacked the ABC for years. With no guarantee of financial independence, the ABC has bent to the pressure; the censorship experienced by Richard Flanagan is not unusual. More seriously, current affairs investigations that might be construed as "left wing" are not commissioned. As one well-known journalist told me: "We have a state of fear. If you're a dissenter, you're out."

The despair felt by many Australians about this, and the cosmetic democracy in Canberra that it reflects, expresses itself in huge turnouts at public meetings. More than 34,000 attended the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, where, said the director, "anything political" and "any session that allowed people to express a view" was a sell-out.

Full story...

Friday 26 September 2003

Kelly Family Accuse Hoon Of Lies And Hypocrisy

I could say a few things about Geoff Hoon but I won't because they would be far too profane - even for a master of profanity like me.... Let's just say I agree with Jeremy Gompertz. We should also not ignore the role of Mr Hoon's boss in this whole affair, ultimately the buck stops with him.

Geoff Hoon was condemned as a liar, bully and hypocrite at the Hutton inquiry yesterday.

The Defence Secretary had denied there was a plot to name Dr David Kelly as a BBC mole.

But Jeremy Gompertz, the QC for the dead scientist's family, claimed former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell had proved Mr Hoon's denials were false.

"The hypocrisy of these denials has now been disclosed by some passages of Mr Campbell's diary," Mr Gompertz said. He accused Mr Hoon and No 10 of deliberately outing Dr Kelly as a BBC source.

They had used him as a pawn in their battle with the BBC over the corporation's claim that the Government dossier on Iraq's arms had been "sexed up".

Mr Campbell and Mr Hoon had also acted like "playground bullies" to try to nail BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, the inquiry heard.

Mr Gompertz summed up on the final day of the six-week London hearing: "No wonder Dr Kelly felt betrayed. In his despair he seems to have taken his own life."

Full story...

Thursday 25 September 2003

Edward Said Dies at 67

Why is it always the good ones who go? With all the little warmongering demons running amock on the planet Edward Said is the last person who should die.

Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor, literary critic and a leading advocate in the United States of the Palestinian cause, has died, his editor at Knopf publishers said Thursday. He was 67.

Said died Wednesday night at a New York hospital, said editor Shelley Wanger. He had suffered from leukemia at least since the early 1990s.

Born in 1935 in Jerusalem -- then part of British-ruled Palestine -- Said spent almost all his adult life in the United States. He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause but also on a variety of other subjects -- from English literature, his academic specialty, to music and culture.

His books ranged from "The Question of Palestine" in 1979 and "After the Last Sky" in 1986 -- both about the Arab-Israeli conflict -- to "Musical Elaborations" in 1991, and "Cultural Imperialism" in 1993.

Said was consistently critical of Israel for what he regarded as mistreatment of the Palestinians.

He prompted a controversy in 2000 when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.

He wrote two years ago after visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israel's "efforts toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs" had actually strengthened Palestinian determination.

"Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel's concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective," Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Cairo.

Full story...

The myth of Satan's web

The illuminati obviously realise that they've got an escaped Geni in the Internet and they are now trying desperately to put it back in it's bottle. I bet they would love it if the only thing you could find on the Net was corporate and government propaganda!

The internet isn't evil - and Microsoft's move to close chatrooms is more about profit than paedophilia

Microsoft's decision to close its online chatrooms yesterday for apparently providing a safe, social haven for paedophiles and their naive prey was universally praised by children's charities and campaigners. On the face of it, it was an act of supreme social responsibility - a company recognising that it could not control its forum for adolescent interaction in a safe way and therefore shutting it down.

But when businesses play the paedophile card, whether it is Microsoft or the News of the World, it always leaves a scintilla of suspicion lurking in the minds of those more cynical than Carol Vorderman. My suspicions were doubly aroused when Gillian Kent, of MSN UK, managed to slip in two mentions of Microsoft's alternative talk medium, its Messenger service, during an interview on the Today programme.

Microsoft's decision to close its unprofitable and potentially litigious chat rooms may have the halo effect of disappointing a number of paedophiles for whom the forum is a low-effort alternative to visiting the local swimming baths or joining the Scouts or becoming ordained into the Catholic church. But to pretend that it was a primary motivation for the move is disingenuous and, what's more, reinforces the disappointingly widely held belief that the internet is a tool of Satan.

Microsoft, like all those of us with free talk areas on their websites, is hosting an expensive online party from which it could never hope to turn a profit. When Microsoft launched its first internet browser, Explorer, I visited its Redmond "campus" where a rueful head of internet admitted: "I am running the division that Bill Gates said we would never have."

The open nature of the web, its unpredictable and uncontrollable proliferation of ideas and open source software was anathema to the world's leading operating systems company. But like all previous obstacles, Microsoft embraced the challenge and crushed the Netscape opposition to produce a democratic way of accessing the web which only the technocracy abhorred.

It is not therefore entirely surprising that a company which found the web a terrific threat should ham up some of the more startling dangers of the medium. It is true that if you let your children have unlimited and unmonitored access to the web they might encounter all the same unthinkably dreadful things they would if let loose in a strange city. But the parental strategy for dealing with this has to be to apply the same kind of vigilance and apocalyptic warnings which accompanied "stranger danger".

One could easily conclude from Microsoft's admission that their chatrooms are full of appalling pornographic spammers and that David Hope, the Archbishop of York, was right when, in 2000, he described the internet as "evil" and said it would "create a society without a soul".

Full story...

Indignant Arabs Say Bush Must Fix Iraq Mess Solo

I particularly like the part about the Egyptian lady wanting to beat Mr. Bush with her shoe. For the uninitiated hitting someone with your shoe in an Arab country is a grave insult.

Bush rejected any speedy transfer of power to Iraqis in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday and urged other nations to share the burdens of the postwar occupation and reconstruction of the country.

"He should admit that he's wrong because he killed a lot of people and made them homeless. He deserves a good beating with my shoes," said Egyptian cleaning lady Raga Mohamed. "He can't expect to destroy a country and then ask the world to help him."

Over half a year after Bush bypassed the United Nations (news - web sites) to launch the war that ousted Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), a guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation is inflicting mounting casualties and Iraqis complain basic services and security are inadequate.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Palestinian Islamic militant group Hamas which has carried out suicide bombings in Israel during a three-year-old uprising against Israeli occupation, accused Bush of declaring a "war on Islam under the pretext of terrorism."

"But he will be defeated, in Afghanistan (news - web sites), in Iraq, in Palestine and in all the Muslim land," he said in Gaza.

Egyptian state television delayed its evening news for a live feed of Bush's U.N. speech with Arabic dubbing.

But many Egyptians were unimpressed.

Full story...

Why did George Klein commit suicide?

This was news to me, I'm sure it will be to you as well... Disturbing stuff....

"On September 8, 2003, disturbing telephone calls were received. The callers were deeply involved in the Gold Collateral transactions which involved the $206 trillion and $400 trillion dollar "Unauthorized Gold Collateral transactions mentioned in September 8th, 2003 information posted here regarding the suicide of the former World Bank executive, Mr. George Klein, while golfing with former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger which was recorded in a following telephone call late yesterday afternoon. Whether the two issues are connected, is not now known.

In regards to the first caller. At first, I wanted to hang up on the caller, or get him off the line as fast as possible, until the caller started to identify transaction after transaction involving "Bonus 3392-181 Trust held Gold Collateral" which was used without authorization from the holder in due course i.e., "The Duly Constituted Owners."

At that time, it was realized something very important to the country and international community of nations, was being said by the caller. At that time, I asked the caller if the telephone conversation could be recorded. The caller said "by all means, it is time the truth is told. I am tired of running for my life." The telephone conversation was recorded, a copy was made to provide to the U.S. House of Representatives for inquiry and investigation.

The information went back to 1986, involving "Black Hole" Collateral Transactions which, in all probability , the U.S. House of Representatives never had any idea were going on. All were authorized and cleared through the U.S. Federal Reserve involving Paul Volker, Greenspan, Brady, Jim Baker, Mark Rich, Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank, and the list went on through European and Asian Banks, Latin American Banks, Panamanian Banks and the IraN-Contra Affair Banking. The Commodity Contract Bonus 3329-181 was authenticated by a Dr. Horn and Nicholas Brady, which led to the unauthorized 1990-1991 use of the Gold Collateral instruments held in Trust.

This perked up my attention as my late husband (Central Intelligence Agency) Russell Herrman also known as Herman, was the CONTRA ACCOUNT HOLDER for Bush, Bentsen, Baker, North and Greenspan. Originally, the CONTRA ACCOUNTS were opened in REPUBLIC NATIONAL BANK in Texas prior to Greenspan's appointment as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, while he was still in TEXAS.

Greenspan's telephone number in Texas was 713-780-1266. The Contra Accounts were moved from TEXAS to REPUBLIC NATIONAL BANK at 452 5th Avenue, New York, New York, then moved to ANSBACHER ACCOUNT 608103047 CI-LTD Account; for Russell Herman. Reference Code: "Woodbridge." Attention: D. Hughes. Bank Officer: "Teddy Lloyd."

This information is being made public, because the telephone lines "had visitors" on the "call waiting." Having "visitors" on the call waiting while the conversation was being recorded, denotes the necessity for making this information public at this time. The U.S. House of Representatives who "visit" RMNews can take down the CONTRA ACCOUNT INFORMATION. They have looked for these accounts since the Contra Hearings.

A mistake was made in yesterday's posting listing the pirated former U.S. Federal Government Corporation name. The correct name is THE INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION which was used in this Counterfeiting of Gold Collateral Instruments at the "WORLD COLLATERAL HOUSE CORPORATION" - i.e. The World Bank.

History on the INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION. This U.S. Corporation can be found in DEPARTMENT OF STATE "Treaties international agreements other than treaties (TIAS) 12087" documents, Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. This INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION became the "laundering arm" for the Contras pursuant to BANK RECONSTRUCTION ACT NUMBER TWO for the INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK (also pirated by the Counterfeiters) in a MULTILATERAL AGREEMENT done at Washington November 19, 1984; Entered into force March 23, 1986. The initial authorized capital stock of the Corporation "US$200,000,000. (GOLD)."

"The authorized capital stock shall be (was) divided into twenty thousand (20,000) shares having a par value of ten thousand dollars of United States of America (US$10,000) each. Any shares not initially subscribed by the funding members in accordance with Section 3(a) (of this Article) shall be available for subsequent subscription accordance with Section 3(d) hereof." 24 Latin American Countries subscribed to TIAS 12087 as did the United States of America holding 5,100 Capital Shares. Austria holding 100 Capital Shares. France holding 626 Capital Shares. Germany, Fed. Republic of holding 626 Capital Shares. Israel holding 50 Capital Shares. Italy holding 626 Capital Shares. Japan holding 626 Capital Shares. Netherlands holding 626 Capital Shares. Switzerland holding 310 Capital Shares. All of it was funded by the U.S. Congress with U.S. Tax Payer Dollars.

Each agreeing party "Subject only to their own Jurisdiction of Articles of Incorporation by Arbitration of the Capital Share Holders." They were subject to NO LAW other than the Law of this PRIVATE "INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION" which was pirated by the Global Alliance Investment Association Corporation, incorporated in the State of Nevada currently operating out of the Philippines issuing Counterfeit Gold instruments globally.

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Israel A Danger

What country in the Middle East occupies the lands of other people? What country in the Middle East is in violation of more than 60 United Nations resolutions? What country in the Middle East openly practices a policy of assassinating its political opponents? What country in the Middle East routinely violates international law? What country in the Middle East possesses nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow international inspection of its nuclear facilities?

The answer to all of the above is Israel.


And here's one more question: What country in the world poses the greatest danger to the future of the United States?

Same answer: Israel.

OK, I know that sounds shocking. How could a little country the size of New Jersey pose any threat to the United States? Well, how could a little country drain more than $100 billion from the U.S. Treasury? How could a little country attack and try to sink a U.S. Navy ship in international waters and avoid any kind of congressional investigation? How can a little country openly brag to third parties that it controls the U.S. Congress? And partner, Israel does.

In Queen Noor's recent book, she says that her husband was dismayed when Congress told Jordanians that they would definitely not be given the things promised to them in exchange for a peace treaty with Israel. Queen Noor said her husband called Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin and told him of the problem. "Don't worry about it," Rabin replied. "I'll take care of it." And he did.

Now, let's be clear about this. Here you have the prime minister of one foreign country telling the king of another foreign country that he can get the U.S. Congress to reverse its position. And he did it. Too bad American governors don't have that kind of influence. And, as a quick aside, why do American taxpayers have to pay for Israel's peace treaties?

There are many examples to cite, but let me refer you to a book, "They Dare to Speak Out," by former U.S. Rep. Paul Findley. The publisher is Lawrence Hill books.

The problem and danger to the United States is that Israel effectively dictates U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel supporters were the architects of the war against Iraq, and if they can, they will get us into wars with Syria and Iran, thus eliminating Israel's enemies. They would like nothing better than for the United States to be at war with the entire Muslim world.

Full story...

Fresh blow for Blair as Iraq weapons hunters 'find nothing'

When, in the name of all that is honest, are we going to kick these lying, warmongering GITS out of office??? The government has lost it's credibility, morality, integrity, honesty, decency and the respect of the people of this country, as such it has also lost it's right to govern! Blair, Straw, Hoon and the Attorney General should, in my humble opinion, be removed from office and put on trial for war crimes as defined at Nuremberg. By those standards these men are guilty as hell of engaging in aggressive warfare. War is ONLY justifiable under International Law when a country is invaded or in immediate danger of attack. The failure to find any WMD in Iraq proves that no such threat of attack existed, ergo the government has committed an act of agression against a sovereign state and should be held to account. Seems pretty clear-cut to me...

"They went to find the weapons of mass destruction cited as justification for the invasion. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. They didn't find them. Bush lied. Cheney lied. Powell lied. Blair lied. Asnar lied. Howard lied. Rice lied. Perle lied. Wolfowitz lied. Rumsfeld lied. Period, end of discussion." - Mike Rivero


Tony Blair's case for going to war against Iraq has taken another blow with claims that coalition weapons hunters have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction.

The BBC reported that a US administration source had told the Corporation that the Iraq Survey Group will publish an interim report next month saying that it has found no WMDs, delivery systems or laboratories.

The document will, however, include computer programmes, files, paperwork and pictures suggesting Saddam's regime was developing a WMD programme.

Downing Street described The Daily Politics programme's report as "speculation", though it acknowledged that the interim report was unlikely to reach firm conclusions about Iraq's alleged WMD.

A No 10 spokesman said: "People should wait. The reports today are speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report that has not even been presented yet. And when it comes it will be an interim report, the ISG's work will go on.

"The UK has played a significant role in the work of the ISG, including providing its deputy director, and our clear expectation is that this interim report will not reach firm conclusions about Iraq's possession of WMD."

Shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram said in a statement: "If this BBC report is accurate, this is another damaging blow to the Prime Minister's credibility.

"He has repeatedly used the Iraq Survey Group to stonewall criticism on weapons of mass destruction.

Full story...

Wednesday 24 September 2003

Another Day in the Bloody Death of Iraq

At Least 10,000 Civilians Gunned Down Since the End of the War

by Robert Fisk


click here to visit his website Ahmed Qasm Hamed was dumped in a black sack at the mortuary of the Yarmouk hospital last week. Taleb Neiemah Homtoush turned up at the city morgue with three bullets in his head. Amr Alwan Ibrahim's family brought him to the morgue five minutes later with a bullet through his heart. Amr was to have married his fiancee Naghem in a week's time.

There are flies around the mortuaries and the smell of death, and up at Yarmouk they had so many bodies the other day that I found them lying in the yard because the fridge was already filled with corpses. On stretchers with blankets thrown over them, on the hot concrete beneath the sun, the flies already moving to them in the 45 degree heat. At the city morgue, the morticians appear in dirty green overalls, scarcely glancing at the wailing relatives by the gate, slumped in tears beside a lake of sewage.

After a while--after hours, day after day at the mortuaries--you get to know the victims. Their fathers and wives and cousins tell you how they dressed, how they worked, how many children they have left behind.

Often the children are there beside the cheap wooden coffins, screaming and crying and numb with loss. The families weep and they say that no one cares about them and, after expressing our sorrow to them over and over again, I come to the conclusion they are right. No one cares. "Al baqiya fi hayatek," we tell them in Arabic which, roughly translated, means "May his lost life be yours in the future." But it is lost for ever--his life, and, by even the most conservative estimates, those of 10,000 other Iraqi civilians gunned down since we "liberated" Baghdad on 9 April.

Here, for the record, are just a few of last week's cull. Hassan Ahmed was 26. At the morgue, his cousin Sadeq produces a photograph of the young man for me. Hassan is smiling, he has a thin, slightly bearded face and is wearing a bright purple shirt. His father, a soldier, was killed in the Iran-Iraq war in 1982, when Hassan was just five years old. At 3pm last Wednesday, he was walking in the street in his home neighbourhood of Al-Biyar in Baghdad when someone--no one knows who or why--shot him twice in the head.

Old Sarhan Daoud is almost toothless and bespectacled and is standing outside the doors of the Baghdad city morgue in a long white "dishdash" robe. A few hours earlier, his only sons, 19-year-old Ahmed and 27-year-old Ali were gunned down outside their Baghdad home. There is talk of a revenge killing but the father isn't certain. "We are just trapped in this tragedy," Sarhan says. "There were very few killings like this before. Now everyone uses guns. Please tell about our tragedy." After half an hour, waiting beside the pool of sewage, shoved aside as other corpses are brought into the morgue--the coffins come from the mosques and are re-used day after day--Ahmed and Ali are brought out in their plywood caskets and roped to the top of a minivan into which cousins and uncles and the old father climb for the funeral journey to the family's home village near Baquba.

The family of Amr Ibrahim say they know who shot the 30-year-old construction worker on Wednesday. They even gave the name to the American-paid Iraqi police force. But the police did nothing. "It is anarchy that we live through," his uncle Daher says. "Then, when we get here, they charge us 15,000 dinars (lbs5) for the autopsy--otherwise we can't have a death certificate. First we are robbed of life. Then they take our money." For many in Iraq, lbs5 is a month's wages.

Twenty-six-year-old Fahad Makhtouf was knifed to death near his home on Tuesday night. His uncle speaks slowly. "No one cares about our tragedy. No one cares about us."

Full story...

Bush isolated as speech to UN falls flat

George Bush was increasingly isolated on the global stage yesterday as he defied intense criticism from a litany of world leaders at the United Nations over the war on Iraq.

Showing no contrition for defying the world body in March or the declining security situation in Iraq, the US president called for the world to set aside past differences and help rebuild the country: "Now the nation of Iraq needs and deserves our aid - and all nations of goodwill should step forward and provide that support," he said.

But the French president, Jacques Chirac, who spoke after Mr Bush, blamed the US-led war for sparking one of the most severe crises in the history of the UN and argued that Mr Bush's unilateral actions could lead to anarchy.

"No one can act alone in the name of all and no one can accept the anarchy of a society without rules," he said. "The war, launched without the authorisation of the security council, shook the multilateral system. The UN has just been through one of the most grave crises in its history."

Earlier the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, condemned the doctrine of preemptive military intervention, arguing that it could lead to the unjustified "lawless use of force" and posed a "fundamental challenge" to world peace and stability.

"My concern is that, if it were to be adopted, it could set precedents that resulted in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without credible justification," said Mr Annan. "This logic represents a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years."

The Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who also spoke before Mr Bush, said: "A war can perhaps be won single-handedly. But peace - lasting peace - cannot be secured without the support of all."

Mr Bush's speech was received with polite applause from the 191-member states, while his critics were given a far warmer reception.

The American president was not just under fire for his decision to wage war without international consent but also for his refusal to move more quickly towards handing control of the country back to the Iraqi people.

Full story...

Tuesday 23 September 2003

The Big Lie

JOHN PILGER REVEALS WMDs WERE JUST A PRETEXT FOR PLANNED WAR ON IRAQ

Exactly one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: "Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.

"The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now."

Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason for attacking Iraq. "It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior CIA analyst told me.

An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.

Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.

In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."

This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.

Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".

Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

So here were two of Bush's most important officials putting the lie to their own propaganda, and the Blair government's propaganda that subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq. The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops. There is no estimate of the countless thousands of wounded.

In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made headlines. In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11 2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities."

Taking over Iraq, the world's second biggest oil producer, was the first such opportunity.

Full story...

Monday 22 September 2003

Cheney's Role In 911 Put On Center Stage By British MP

Meacher for PM!!!

For the first time, a prominent British political figure has aired his suspicions, that the group around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney may have intentionally caused, or allowed to happen, the mega-terrorism in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, to set into motion an era of neo-imperial wars. Labour Party Member of Parliament Michael Meacher wrote a major feature focussing on Cheney's Project for a New American Century grouping, in the London Guardian on Sept. 6. Meacher had resigned in June as Environment Minister, a post he held in Tony Blair's government for six years. This Summer's political wars in Britain, as EIR forecast they would, are drawing ever closer to Cheney. This is the context in which Meacher took Blair to task for subordinating Britain's interests to Cheney and his neo-conservative gang in Washington.

Ever since Lyndon LaRouche first affirmed, early in the morning of 9/11, that the attacks were an "inside job," it has been taboo in Britain to publicly discuss this possibility, especially as Blair's Britain joined in the neo-conservatives' wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, becoming the Cheney-acs' main prop overseas. And although Meacher's polemic narrows the motive of Cheney et al. to an oil grab, his intervention is timely.

On Sept. 7, just ahead of the second anniversary of 9/11, London was the scene of huge "anti-terror exercises," including contingency plans for the mass evacuation of the city. During that week, there was heavy police presence and Londoners were very nervous. One European strategist warned EIR Sept. 9, that London is the most likely target for a new act of mega-terrorism. But a London insider cautioned EIR, on the same day, that Blair and his minions are determined to stoke alarm, to "justify" his war policies and to divert attention from his political woes.

Those woes are bound to get worse. The Lord Hutton inquiry into the July 17 death of weapons expert Dr. David Kelly had produced startling revelations by Sept. 8, blowing apart the case Blair made last year for war against Iraq. One informed source affirmed Sept. 8: "This is only the beginning, and when the inquiry resumes next Monday [Sept. 15], things are going to get a lot tougher, when the process of cross-examining leading officials begins."

Other Labourites are joining the attack on Blair, including former International Development Secretary Clare Short, and former Leader of the House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. On Sept. 8, Cook drew gasps from MPs, when he blasted Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon for having ignored the reservations of his own Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS), about the fraudulent September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) issued by Blair's 10 Downing Street. Hoon was then jeered, when he tried to pass off responsibility for the dossier to Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The next day, it was revealed that Hoon had given misleading evidence to the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee investigating the dossier in July, flatly denying that DIS experts had expressed such concerns. It is widely assumed that Hoon will soon bite the dust, closely following the Aug. 29 resignation of Downing Street chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell.

On Sept. 8, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw came into the Hutton inquiry fire, as documents were released, showing his role in bringing Kelly's name into the public light, as the source for a BBC report that intelligence experts had regarded the September 2002 dossier as "sexed up." Kelly's death followed shortly after his name was made public. It also came out that Hoon had played a role in "sexing up" that dossier, urging that references to Iraqi WMDs be strengthened and demanding a "killer paragraph" to make the case against Iraq stronger.

A U.K. intelligence expert told EIR Sept. 8, that these eruptions are creating a fertile environment, in which the issues Meacher has raised can now be "openly debated and considered.... The Hutton inquiry, and other factors, have raised enormous questions about why Tony Blair, in reality, wanted this Iraqi weapons dossier, and that, in turn, is focussing attention on the motives of the administration in Washington, in starting the war in Iraq."

Full story...

Friday 19 September 2003

BBC needs a Bullywatch

Auntie isn't perfect but if it's a choice between her and the right-wing, intellectually redundant shyte that is Murdoch and Sky then I know who I'll choose. Typical of Tony's Cronies really, they are not interested in truth or democracy or anything else, they are interested in fat pay-offs and luxury trips in private planes.

An unprecedented and vicious wave of attacks should serve as a rallying call to the corporation's supporters

by Polly Toynbee


The BBC is in graver danger than many of its friends may realise. Supporters need to be ready with a vigorous and vociferous defence. It has never come under such an ominous onslaught of attacks from so many directions.

To be sure, the BBC routinely falls out with every government, always accused of anti-government bias especially in wartime. Remember Tebbit's attacks on Kate Adie over the Libya bombings or Downing Street strafing the BBC during the Falklands war (the BBC said "British", instead of "our", troops). But Labour's sniper fire turned nuclear over BBC reporting on Iraq - despite independent academic evidence showing it was the most balanced. The BBC always takes a thrashing because, as the only national emblem, it gets the blame for all national failings - morals, illiteracy, dumbing down ... whatever.

But this multi-headed assault is something new. Gilligan's contrition this week unleashed an avalanche of BBC loathing from the rightwing press. The Telegraph's Beebwatch, mimicking the Daily Mail's Marrwatch, is bent on proving pink bias. Murdoch's press bellows out anti-BBC propaganda from every organ in the sonorously dishonest tones of his broadsheets or the bullying of his tabloids: "The BBC must sack the hopeless hack Gilligan ... he must not be allowed on the airwaves again," says the Sun. So the BBC should take lessons in journalism from the likes of these?

Here are the BBC's serious new threats: in the next four years, Sky's income will double the BBC's, and it will be able to make programmes on a big scale for the first time. Just as its cash dominated sport and film rights, it could sweep up all popular programming. Remember the recent MacTaggart lecture given by the Sky CEO Tony Ball, calling for the BBC to be forced to sell off all popular programmes, leaving just the public service broadcasting no one else wants - news, arts and education.

Without popular programmes, the licence fee would lose its justification. Even the BBC's public service broadcasting remit is threatened by those who want to share out licence-fee money with others. With history, science and arts channels, who needs a BBC at all? Can the government resist Murdoch pressure? Since the disgraceful communications bill was amended to weaken Murdoch's grip only by the force of the Lords, there is no reason to be sanguine about Labour's intentions.

As charter renewal approaches, all governments like to flex their muscles. This time the Gilligan affair has made the BBC governors dangerously vulnerable. Can they act as both regulators and defenders of the BBC, ask the BBC's enemies, disingenuously. Why not hand the BBC over to Ofcom to be regulated alongside the other broadcasters? This is far more lethal than it sounds, since, commercially, it will impose a level playing field. But the BBC is not in a "market" and must not be levelled. It belongs to the nation, and others can find their commercial niches around it where they can. Let it dominate if it can, in the name of citizens, for their good.

As for Ofcom, led by a CEO flush with a golden goodbye from the multibillion- pound wreckage of NTL, it already has 230 legal duties and already risks failing to improve the five weak regulators it replaces. Oftel's record in failing to protect ITN's quality against predators is an indicator of how little nurturing the BBC could expect against the buffetings of its commercial rivals in that shark pool. The BBC governors may represent a quaint institution - but their sole duty is to protect public service broadcasting. They are the BBC's champions in any conflict: Ofcom would just split the difference with its enemies.

For an indicator of what is to come, study Tessa Jowell's current review of the BBC's brilliant and world-beating online service. If she listens to false arguments about "unfair" online competition and cuts it back, then fear the worst for the BBC's future governance under its 2006 charter. Her promise of a "radical and wide-ranging review" of the charter was ominous in the context of these times. She hastened to deny any threat, but it lingers in the air none the less.

Full story...

Thursday 18 September 2003

When Will Americans Realize They've Been Had?

"If you want to know the truth, I blame the Bush campaign for the death of [Lars Erik] Nelson, one of the best journalists in America. . . Nelson saw what was going on in Florida early on, and he didn't see it with any equanimity: One of his colleagues at the Daily News called him on the day of his death, the afternoon of the televised Florida Supreme Court argument, and recalled Nelson crying out, 'I can't believe they said that!' over some outrageous assertion by the lawyers for Ms. Harris and Mr. Bush."

"A few hours later, he was found in front of his television set, dead of a stroke. No one will convince me it was unrelated." - Ron Rosenbaum LINK

It's been nearly three years now, and almost as many since we were told to just "get over it." And honestly, without Sept. 11 inconsistencies or Bush's pre-planned wars or assaults on civil liberties or the hubris and arrogance and embarrassing treatment of long-held allies, many of us would have accepted the Supreme Court's decision and learned to live with the temporary hand we'd been dealt.

Instead, however, the red flags raised three years ago foretold more ominous developments. The 2000 election wasn't merely a Constitutional crisis, it was an all-American coup designed to change the United States forever. And let's not delude ourselves. While Bill Clinton's impeachment was a prequel to this takeover, voting machine snafus, the California recall and Texas redistricting are all part of a plan to usurp democracy yet again.

Even before Sept. 11, the Florida fiasco was a wake-up call. If the election had not unraveled the way it did, many of us would have never comprehended the gravity of the situation. We would have thought of Clinton's impeachment as just insane partisan politics and would most likely not have discovered how, in the wee hours of that Wednesday morning, Jeb assured George that Florida was in the bag. "Let me explain something," Al Gore reportedly said. "Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this." But alas, America's preferred candidate didn't realize that Katherine Harris had hired Database Technologies to scrub 90,000 folks from Florida's voter rolls.

So, yes, Fate intervened in November 2000 to tell us that something is indeed very wrong and that unless we start paying attention, we might as well kiss our democratic illusions goodbye. As it stands now, however, the election outrage was just part of a saga which, if it were a movie, would not be believed.

"Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives," Hunter S. Thompson wrote on Sept. 12, 2001, predicting that the war would morph into a continuation of the first Gulf War, which our "goofy child-President, [had] been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish." LINK

A couple months later, an unnamed source told Greg Palast that, "There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government."

Full story...

Wednesday 17 September 2003

Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush

Four bereaved women take on the US government and Gee Dubya, and it looks like they're getting somewhere...

In mid-June, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III and several senior agents in the bureau received a group of about 20 visitors in a briefing room of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The director himself narrated a PowerPoint presentation that summarized the numbers of agents and leads and evidence he and his people had collected in the 18-month course of their ongoing investigation of Penttbom, the clever neologism the bureau had invented to reduce the sites of devastation on 9/11 to one word: Pent for Pentagon, Pen for Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the four planes that the government had been forewarned could be used as weapons—even bombs—but chose to ignore.

After the formal meeting, senior agents in the room faced a grilling by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow whose cohorts are three other widowed moms from New Jersey.

"I don’t understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn’t you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"

"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn’t have investigated them all and found these few guys."

"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

"We got lucky," was the reply.

Kristen then asked the agent how the F.B.I. had known exactly which A.T.M. in Portland, Me., would yield a videotape of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the attacks. The agent got some facts confused, then changed his story. When Kristen wouldn’t be pacified by evasive answers, the senior agent parried, "What are you getting at?"

"I think you had open investigations before Sept. 11 on some of the people responsible for the terrorist attacks," she said.

"We did not," the agent said unequivocally.

A month later, on the morning of July 24, before the scathing Congressional report on intelligence failures was released, Kristen and the three other moms from New Jersey with whom she’d been in league sat impassively at a briefing by staff director Eleanor Hill: In fact, they learned, the F.B.I. had open investigations on 14 individuals who had contact with the hijackers while they were in the United States. The flush of pride in their own research passed quickly. This was just another confirmation that the federal government continued to obscure the facts about its handling of suspected terrorists leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

So afraid is the Bush administration of what could be revealed by inquiries into its failures to protect Americans from terrorist attack, it is unabashedly using Kremlin tactics to muzzle members of Congress and thwart the current federal commission investigating the failures of Sept. 11. But there is at least one force that the administration cannot scare off or shut up. They call themselves "Just Four Moms from New Jersey," or simply "the girls."

Kristen and the three other housewives who also lost their husbands in the attack on the World Trade Center started out knowing virtually nothing about how their government worked. For the last 20 months they have clipped and Googled, rallied and lobbied, charmed and intimidated top officials all the way to the White House. In the process, they have made themselves arguably the most effective force in dancing around the obstacle course by which the administration continues to block a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the country’s defenses on Sept. 11 and what we should be doing about it. They have no political clout, no money, no powerful husbands—no husbands at all since Sept. 11—and they are up against a White House, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, a National Security Advisor and an F.B.I. director who have worked out an ingenious bait-and-switch game to thwart their efforts and those of any investigative body.

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The crusade against 'terrorism'

Bush and his handlers are not protecting Americans by pursuing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, they are protecting their own political skins

"If at first you don't succeed, lie and lie again" seems to be the watchword of the floundering Bush administration.

First, it was the ultimate evils, bin Laden and Mullah Omar. When they couldn't be found, evil forces "that hate our freedoms." Then Saddam's nuclear weapons, anthrax, mustard, and nerve gas, "drones of death," mobile germ labs, and links to al-Qaida, etc.

Now, in the latest change of sales pitch, the president insists his war on terrorism equals Iraq.

According to Bushthink, any Iraqi opposing U.S. occupying forces is a "terrorist." Ergo, growing Iraqi nationalist resistance will inevitably mean Bush's signature "war on terrorism" will be a growth industry.

Like the gigantic Enron swindle, it's a huge bubble, inflated by false claims and calculated deception.

Straining credulity even farther, the president claimed that waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan would spare America from another 9/11 that might otherwise happen at any moment - though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

It was the duty of the world community, Bush proclaimed, to "share the burden of occupation" of Iraq and Afghanistan - which the White House finally admitted will total at least $166 billion US for this year and next, an astronomical sum that could buy 39 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. By the end of 2004, Bush's wars could amount to 30% of the total cost of the equally misbegotten 17-year Vietnam War.

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US economic folly should worry us all

Think before gloating over Bush's spectacular fiscal incompetence

by Joseph Stiglitz


BUY THIS BOOK TODAY In 2001, President Bush misled the American people. He said that a tax cut that was not designed to stimulate the economy would stimulate it. But it did not. He told Americans that the large surpluses that were part of President Clinton's legacy meant the US could afford to cut taxes massively. Wrong again. He did not warn Americans how dubious such estimates can be.

This year President Bush again misled the American people about the economy. Weeks after persuading Congress to pass another tax cut - in some ways even more inequitable than the first - his administration revealed how bad the fiscal position had become. The $230bn surplus inherited from Clinton had turned into a $450bn deficit.

Now, after handing billions to rich Americans through tax cuts, the Bush administration is passing the hat around, asking for contributions from other countries to help to pay for the Iraq war. Even setting aside other dubious aspects of Bush's Iraq policy, the conjunction of misguided giveaways to America's richest people with an international US begging bowl is hardly likely to evoke an outpouring of sympathy.

Meanwhile, the US trade deficit is mounting. America, the world's richest country, evidently can't live within its means, borrowing more than a billion dollars a day. As the US thrashes around for someone to blame, it is inevitable that it will focus on China, with its large trade surplus, just as the deficits of the Reagan era led to a focus on Japan two decades ago.

But this is blame shifting, nothing more. America's fiscal and trade deficits are intimately linked. If a country saves less than it invests, it must borrow the difference from abroad, and foreign borrowing and trade deficits are two sides of the same coin.

National saving has two components - private and public. Reagan's irresponsible tax cuts, combined with America's paltry savings, meant the US had no choice but to borrow abroad. Now America is repeating that folly. Matters may get even worse once investment is rekindled, unless private savings increase in a way the US has not seen.

Some people abroad now tend to gloat at America's problems. For many, it is another reason to question America's ability to provide effective leadership. It took America a dozen years to work its way out of Reagan's fiscal mess. It may take just as long to clean up the mess Bush has created.

But the schadenfreude of non-Americans is misguided. Globalisation means that mistakes in one country - especially the world's largest economy - have powerful repercussions elsewhere.

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Friday 12 September 2003

Ministers Dismiss Police Arms Fears

Confirmation that this government and it's capitalist sponsors are nothing more than war-mongering quasi-totalitarian FASCISTS! How the fuck did my taxes start getting used for this shit?!?!? Talk about being lied to!

Arms dealers are selling bombs, guns and tanks illegally at a controversial arms fair sponsored by the Ministry of Defence.

Dozens of the 1,000 companies touting for business at the exhibition are unlicensed.

Scotland Yard has issued a blistering rebuke to the Government and handed out warning letters to the illegal exhibitors.

But the Government has ignored police concerns over security and insisted no action be taken against companies breaking the law.

It means hundreds of arms dealers from around the world, including notoriously unscrupulous companies from unstable regions, have been allowed to ply their trade without even cursory checks on their credentials.

And police have ignored the law being broken inside the Defence Systems and Equipment Inter- national exhibition in London's Docklands while outside they have arrested more than 130 anti-arms protesters.

An incredible array of weapons is on display, from tanks and rocket launchers to missiles and machine guns.

A senior Home Office source said: "It is staggering that at a time when a terrorist attack is considered inevitable, an unknown bunch of arms dealers can turn up and flog weapons without anyone knowing a thing about them.

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Blair's war

No shit Sherlock, tell me something I don't know!

PM ignored intelligence advice on Iraq

Another of Tony Blair's main justifications for war on Iraq was blown apart yesterday by the disclosure that intelligence chiefs had warned that deposing Saddam Hussein would increase the risk of terror attacks on Britain.

The Prime Minister told Parliament and the public earlier this year that the West had to act against Baghdad to prevent chemical and biological weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.

But exactly two years after al-Qa'ida's 11 September attack, a committee of MPs revealed that the Mr Blair had been told that the threat from Osama bin Laden "would be heightened by military action against Iraq". The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), chaired by the Labour MP Ann Taylor, also criticised the Government's dossier on the Iraqi threat, concluding that key claims should have been omitted or heavily qualified.

The ISC's report put further pressure on Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, accusing him of giving "unhelpful and potentially misleading evidence" on the extent of dissent within the MoD about the dossier.

But the political spotlight switched firmly to Mr Blair himself after the ISC revealed for the first time details of a briefing he received from intelligence chiefs in the run-up to the war.

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MPs' SHOCK REPORT: THE WARNINGS BLAIR IGNORED

Folly Taken To A Scale We Haven't Seen Since WWII

by Robert Fisk

click here to visit his website When the attacks were launched against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon two years ago today, who had ever heard of Fallujah or Hillah? When the Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have believed that President George Bush would be announcing a "new front line in the war on terror" as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq?

Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against "terrorism" in "Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza"? Gaza? What do the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania?

Nothing, of course. Neither does Iraq have anything to do with 11 September. Nor were there any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any al-Qa'ida links with Iraq, any 45-minute timeline for the deployment of chemical weapons nor was there any "liberation".

No, the attacks on 11 September have nothing to do with Iraq. Neither did 11 September change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a "world order" dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

The Iraqi "regime change", as we now know, was planned as part of a Perle-Wolfowitz campaign document to the would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. It beggars belief that Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising that it was no more nor less than a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.

But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan - its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now back as the world's number one export market, and its people being killed at up to a hundred a week (five American troops were shot dead two weekends ago) is a "success", something which Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld still boast about. Iraq - a midden of guerrilla hatred and popular resentment - is also a "success". Yes, Bush wants $87bn to keep Iraq running, he wants to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a "talking shop" last year, he wants scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to share the burdens of occupation - though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve.

What's more, the world is supposed to accept the insane notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the planet's last colonial war, although all mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza have been erased from the Middle East narrative in the American press - is part of the "war on terror", the cosmic clash of religious will that President Bush invented after 11 September. Could Israel's interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush?

The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies has now been set into this colossal struggle of "good" against "evil", in which even Ariel Sharon - named as "personally" responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel's own commission of inquiry - is "a man of peace", according to Mr Bush.

And new precedents are set without discussion. Washington kills the leadership of its enemies with impunity: it tries to kill Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and does kill Uday and Qusay Hussein and boasts of its prowess in "liquidating" the al-Qa'ida leadership from rocket-firing "drones". It tries to kill Saddam in Baghdad and slaughters 16 civilians and admits that the operation was "not risk-free". In Afghanistan, three men have now been murdered in the US interrogation centre at Bagram. We still don't know what really goes on in Guantanamo.

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Exploiting Anxiety

The Political Capital of 9/11

The Bush administration never hesitated to exploit the general public's anxieties that arose after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001.

Testifying on Capitol Hill exactly 53 weeks later, Donald Rumsfeld did not miss a beat when a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the need for the United States to attack Iraq.

Senator Mark Dayton: "What is it compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous actions?"

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: "What's different? What's different is 3,000 people were killed."

As a practical matter, it was almost beside the point that allegations linking Baghdad with the September 11 attacks lacked credible evidence. The key factor was political manipulation, not real documentation.

Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack got enormous media exposure in late 2002 for his book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." Pollack's book promotion tour often seemed more like a war promotion tour. During a typical CNN appearance, Pollack explained why he had come to see a "massive invasion" of Iraq as both desirable and practical: "The real difference was the change from September 11th. The sense that after September 11th, the American people were now willing to make sacrifices to prevent threats from abroad from coming home to visit us here made it possible to think about a big invasion force."

Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, with the London-based Independent newspaper, was on the mark when he wrote: "Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 11 September. If the United States invades Iraq, we should remember that."

But at psychological levels, the Bush team was able to manipulate post-9/11 emotions well beyond the phantom of Iraqi involvement in that crime against humanity. The dramatic changes in political climate after 9/11 included a drastic upward spike in an attitude -- fervently stoked by the likes of Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the president -- that our military should be willing to attack potential enemies before they might try to attack us. Few politicians or pundits were willing to confront the reality that this was a formula for perpetual war, and for the creation of vast numbers of new foes who would see a reciprocal logic in embracing such a credo themselves.

One of the great media cliches of the last two years is that 9/11 "changed everything." The portentous idea soon became a truism for news outlets nationwide. But the shock of September 11 could not endure. And the events of that horrific day -- while abruptly tilting the political landscape and media discourse -- did not transform the lives of most Americans. Despite all the genuine anguish and the overwhelming news coverage, daily life gradually went back to an approximation of normal.

Some changes are obvious. Worries about terrorism have become routine. Out of necessity, stepped-up security measures are in effect at airports. Unnecessarily, and ominously, the USA Patriot Act is chipping away at civil liberties. Yet the basic concerns of September 10, 2001, remain with us today.

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Tuesday 9 September 2003

September 11th And The Bush Administration

Compelling Evidence for Complicity

by Walter E. Davis, PhD


Clearly, one of the most critical questions of the twenty-first century concerns why the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not prevented. As I outline below, there are numerous aspects regarding the official stories about September 11th which do not fit with known facts, which contradict each other, which defy common sense, and which indicate a pattern of misinformation and coverup. The reports coming out of Washington do very little to alleviate these concerns.

For example, the Congressional report released on July 25, 2003 by a joint panel of House and Senate intelligence committees concluded that 9/11 resulted in C.I.A. and F.B.I. "lapses." While incompetence is frightening enough given a $40 billion budget, it is simply not consistent with known facts. It is consistent with the reports from other government scandals such has the Iran Contra Affair which produced damage control and cover up but not answers to the more probing questions. But perhaps a comparison to Watergate is more apropos since we now have twenty-eight pages of this report, which the Bush Administration refuses to release. The report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is believable unless you are seriously interested in the truth. Under more careful scientific scrutiny, it does not answer some very important questions.

Newspapers across the country call for an investigation into Bush’s lies about the reasons for war on Iraq. Many people may accept the fact of Bush’s false pretext for a war on Arab people in a distant place, especially after the fact. However, few people will be as accepting if it is shown that this Administration was complicit in acts of atrocities against its own people.

The magnitude of the crisis is readily apparent by noting that 9/11 serves as a pretext for a never-ending war against the world, including preemptive strikes against defenseless, but resource rich countries. It also serves as a pretext for draconian measures of repression at home, including the cabinet level Department of Homeland Security and Patriot Act I, and its sequel. September 11th has become the cause for numerous other acts from massive increases in military spending and to a Fast Track Trade Agreement for the President.

To date, investigations stop far too short, the public is left in the dark on too many questions easily answered, and no one in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for any actions surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001. The National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States, which was formed at the insistence of the family of some of the victims, is continuing to hold hearings and a final report is expected by May, 2004. It remains to be seen if, after a two-year lapse, they can come closer to the truth about September 11th. I believe that this would only happen if public pressure were brought to bear and accountability demanded from the Bush Administration. Accountability for any atrocity should attract the attention of serious investigative reporters, media critics and even news commentators. That is their chosen responsibility. Who is to raise the question of why journalists and others in the mass media are failing the people of the U.S. and the world?

In this article, I outline twenty-two items of evidence and questions, each one sufficient reason to demand an investigation into why September 11th was not prevented. Together, these items suggest that the most plausible explanation of events is that the Bush Administration was complicit in the terrorist attacks. This should be a national and international scandal. What is being discovered will shock many people, which is one of the reasons for deliberate corporate media coverup. But a significant number of people within the U.S. see (or will see) the consistencies in the events surrounding 9/11 as described below, and what they know about U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, the degree to which this Administration is pursuing a course of world domination at any cost is unprecedented. One of the best ways of putting a halt to this destructive course is to expose the Bush Administration and insist on their accountability to the American people. Thus, the intent of this article is to help fill the void in the media on the issue of the Bush Administration’s complicity in 9/11.

Here is the official story: On the morning of September 11, 2001 four Boeing passenger jets were hijacked within an hour by nineteen Arab terrorists armed with boxcutters. Pilots among these terrorists took control of the commercial planes and changed course toward targets in New York City and Washington D.C. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers, causing fires within the towers, which melted the steel support structures, thereby causing the buildings to collapse completely. A third plane was deliberately crashed into the Pentagon. Passengers on the fourth plane overpowered the hijackers and caused the plane to crash in Pennsylvania. This was an attack on America planned and directed by Osama bin Laden as the leader of Al-Qaeda, a previously obscure anti-U.S. international terrorist organization composed mainly of Arabs. This story cries out for further explanations, but nothing official is forthcoming. People are simply expected to believe the official version without question.

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