Monday, May 29, 2006

[911TruthAction] Digest Number 1310

There are 7 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

1. Re: Well oh my golly my GOSH!
From: "Kevin Hammond" sir_oglaigh@yahoo.com
2. Re: NIST Says No to Debate On 9/11 Science
From: "James Patton" james_patton@yahoo.com
3. Motives For 9-11 And The War -was: Killing Arabs and burning down th
From: "Mark S Bilk" mark@cosmicpenguin.com
4. Re: Well oh my golly my GOSH!
From: "Scott Legere" sledger911@yahoo.com
5. Re: Well oh my golly my GOSH!
From: "President, USA Exile Govt." prez@usa-exile.org
6. 9/11 update - 5/29
From: "reggie501" reggie501@optonline.net
7. What will it take to wake people up?
From: "James Patton" james_patton@yahoo.com

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Message 1
From: "Kevin Hammond" sir_oglaigh@yahoo.com
Date: Sun May 28, 2006 8:27pm(PDT)
Subject: Re: Well oh my golly my GOSH!

Thank you my brother. It is the thought of NOT doing so that unnerves me.

DOUGLAS CLARK <bushsept11mastermind@yahoo.com> wrote: BOAST...BRAG...AND MAY "GOD" BLESS YOUR EFFORTS!!

Kevin Hammond <sir_oglaigh@yahoo.com> wrote: Awe geee shux!

Jamie Welsh <jamie@xenic.com> wrote: it's ok boast away kevin! you make me proud.
-jamie

On May 28, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Kevin Lee Hammond wrote:

As I was on my way out the door from work fri eve. my boss stopped me and asked if I knew where he could get a copy of loose change! Could it be perhaps because I have given a copy to each of my co-workers and made sure that they watched it?! Could it be also, That I have woken up damn near every shop owner and worker on the block where I work?! With copies of not only Loose Change, but also of martial Law and other such dvds!. One woman in turn took them to her church and woke up her entire congregation! Please do not take this as boasting bu t as just informing you all of the fact that folks are WAKING UP!

Kevin
www.fightthenwo.org


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PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT MY WEBSITE (911again.tripod.com) TO OTHER GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS.

AS ALWAYS, THE BEST OF HEALTH AND TIMES TO YOU AND YOURS.

DOUGLAS CLARK
7320 HERMITAGE ST
PITTSBURGH PA 15208

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Message 2
From: "James Patton" james_patton@yahoo.com
Date: Mon May 29, 2006 1:51am(PDT)
Subject: Re: NIST Says No to Debate On 9/11 Science

I had to laugh when I read this paragraph:

When I mentioned to Newman that we´re not talking about nutcases from Kooksville,
but rather credentialed scientists such as BYU Physics Professor, Stephen E. Jones,
Claremont Professor Emeritus, David Ray Griffin, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Engineer, Jeff King, he said, "Just because a person is from MIT doesn´t mean
that they know what they´re talking about."+ Assuming that Newman is right, then it must
be noted that the Lead Technical Investigator for the NIST National Construction Safety Team
for WTC Investigation is a gentleman named Shyam Sunder, who incidentally, received
his doctoral degree in structural engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 1981.[1]+

Ha ha ha. When Newman said:
> "Just because a person is from MIT doesn´t mean that they know what they´re talking about."
he should have added: "unless, of course, they're on the payroll of the federal government." !!!

And another thing. So Silverstein's comment:
> maybe the smartest thing to do is `pull it'.
meant
> "they decided to pull the firefighters and emergency rescue workers from World Trade Center Building Seven." ?
Maybe Silverstein doesn't have much command of English? Why didn't he say "pull them" if he was referring to the people?
How could 'pull it' refer to people?

And consider the context of the statement:
> We´ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is `pull it.´+
> And they made the decision to `pull´ and we watched the building collapse.
'pull it' - they made the decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.'
Surely in this context the 'it' which is 'pulled' is referring to the building which collapsed,
and not the people who were in it?

Furthermore consider the 'pulling' of WTC building #6.
We know that the term 'pull it' means to bring a building down by means of explosives because in
the same documentary a cleanup worker (in December 2001) refers to the demolition of WTC Building 6
when he says, "...we're getting ready to pull the building six."
http://www.prisonplanet.com/011904wtc7.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/011704wtc7.html

. . .

So NIST will have no debate? Surprise, surprise. No debate in the "mainstream government-mouthpiece media",
no debate by the government 'experts' (even if they do have degrees from MIT, it doesn't mean they
know what they're talking about!), no debate about phoney "weapons of mass destruction",
bogus intelligence, "dodgy dossiers", "Downing Street memos", uranium from Niger,
shredding machines, babies tossed out of incubators, Iraqi troops massing on the border
with Saudi Arabia, depleted uranium, the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It seems the government will brook
no debate about nothin' - it's all just "trust us - be good sheep and pay your taxes, let us tap your phonecalls,
'remember the Maine' and get on with the job of extending Amerikkkan Empire on behalf of the plutocracy".

And they wonder why people don't believe them? I don't think these people could lie straight in bed!

kind regards,

James.
====

From: "Cathy Garger" savorsuccesslady@yahoo.com
Date: Sun May 28, 2006 4:59am(PDT)
Subject: NIST Says No to Debate On 9/11 Science

As many of you have already read, Philip Berg, Esq., Dr. James Fetzer, Dr. David Ray Griffin, Dr. Steven Jones, Dr. Morgan Reynolds, Col. George Nelson, USAF (ret.) and Dr. Judy Wood are planning to participate in the National 9/11 Debate on September 16, 2006 in Charleston, South Carolina.

Members of the 9/11 Commission, government scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other supporting experts were invited to participate and represent the government´s debate team.

I received this document (below and attached) from Dr. Griffin last night. It states that NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is not interested in a debate with these 9/11 experts.

One can hardly blame NIST. After all, how can NIST hope to go up against expertly presented technical and scientific proof?

Also, here is an Open Letter to the 9/11 Commission that sure packs a punch. http://www.teamliberty.net/id264.html

The fact that NIST is unwilling to defend the claims it has made to the American public - must be spread far and wide. They are gallinas - and for good reason. NIST and the rest of the federal workers can say whatever they want to the controlled media, but when it comes down to being able to defend their case in front of learned experts with hard science? Of course NIST fully realizes that their efforts can only turn to ultra-fine particulate GZ dust.

Cathy Garger
http://mytown.ca/garger/




Ed Haas, "Government spokesman says, `I don´t understand the public´s fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven,´" Muckraker Report, March 21, 200 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id235.html).
+

March 21, 2006 - Michael E. Newman, Public and Business Affairs spokesman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in a phone interview with the Muckraker Report on Monday, March 20th, said that he didn´t "understand the public´s fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven."+ Newman was contacted by the Muckraker Report to discuss when the National Institute of Standards and Technology anticipated releasing its report regarding how World Trade Center Building Seven collapsed onto its footprint at 5:20p.m. EST on September 11, 2001.
+
What I found so interesting about my 30-minute conversation with Newman was how easily he discounted as unfounded conspiracies, the findings and opinions of scientists who are operating outside of the government´s payroll.+ He frequently used analogies to conspiracy theories and urban legends such as Bigfoot and UFO´s.+ At one point Newman said that he has joked with members of his Public and Business Affairs that they might as well conduct press conferences wearing "Bigfoot" costumes because "no matter what we say, some people will not believe the government".+ Newman continued, "For some people, no matter what the government says about 9/11, they will still believe that the government is lying.+ Some people still believe the world is flat and there are UFO´s.+ There´s nothing the federal government can say to convince these people otherwise."+
+
When I mentioned to Newman that we´re not talking about nutcases from Kooksville, but rather credentialed scientists such as BYU Physics Professor, Stephen E. Jones, Claremont Professor Emeritus, David Ray Griffin, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Engineer, Jeff King, he said, "Just because a person is from MIT doesn´t mean that they know what they´re talking about."+ Assuming that Newman is right, then it must be noted that the Lead Technical Investigator for the NIST National Construction Safety Team for WTC Investigation is a gentleman named Shyam Sunder, who incidentally, received his doctoral degree in structural engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981.[1]+
+
I asked Newman whether his agency had a compelling interest to produce a report regarding the collapse of the Twin Towers that substantiated the 9/11 Commission Report.+ He indicated that NIST had no such interest.+ When asked if NIST would produce and release a report on World Trade Center Building Seven, even if the Institute´s conclusions reveal that WTC-7 did in fact collapse as the direct result of a controlled demolition, Newman said that NIST would release such a report if that turns out to be its findings.+
+
Intrigued by Newman´s ability to maintain a persona of impartiality and claimed dedication to truthfulness while he simultaneously scoffed, if not ridiculed any scientist who disagrees with the government´s scientists and their findings, I decided to test his dedication to impartiality and whether NIST had any predisposition towards finding a cause of collapse of WTC Building Seven that will coincide with the government´s account of 9/11. I asked him about the now infamous public statements made by Larry Silverstein, the controller of the World Trade Center Complex.+ Recall that on a PBS documentary that aired in September 2002, Silverstein said that he and the New York Fire Department decided jointly to "pull" WTC-7.+ Here is the exact Silverstein quote from the 2002 PBS documentary.+
+
"I remember getting a call from the ER, Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, `We´ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is `pull it.´+ And they made the decision to `pull´ and we watched the building collapse."+
+
Almost immediately after I finished referencing Silverstein as saying that the "smartest thing to do is pull it", Newman responded with a condescending chuckle to remind me that the federal government is always right, and the people, always wrong.+ He then said, "Silverstein already explained that what he meant was that they decided to pull the firefighters and emergency rescue workers from World Trade Center Building Seven."+ One can only hope that NIST doesn´t consider its investigation into what Silverstein meant by his usage of the words, "pull it" as complete, solely on an ambiguous clarification offered years later by a man (Silverstein) that certainly has a financial and personal interest in the government´s official account of 9/11 prevailing.+++
+
After Newman finished minimizing the value of the Silverstein comment as essentially worthless, I pointed out to him the fact that organizations such as Scholars for 9/11 Truth and 9/11 Revisited certainly seemed to be presenting thoughtful and scientific information that refuted much of the work by the government´s scientists at NIST.+ I expressed to him my concern that more than half of all Americans now believe the U.S. government has some complicity if not culpability regarding 9/11, with many people now believing that 9/11 is nothing more than a massive government cover-up; a public perception Newman did not refute. However, when I suggested that a possible method to reconcile the division in the United States between the government and its people might be for a series of televised national debates between his thirty scientists assigned to investigate how World Trade Center Buildings - 1, 2, & 7 collapsed onto their footprints on September 11, 2001, I was
abruptly
interrupted and told that none of the NIST scientists would participate in any public debate.+
+
Curious, I asked why the National Institute of Standards and Technology would avoid public debate, particularly if it was confident in its work.+ Newman responded, "Because there is no winning in such debates."+ When I pointed out that such a debate between the thirty scientists who worked on the NIST 9/11 Investigation and thirty equally-qualified scientists who dispute, and claim to be able to refute the NIST findings; that such a public, televised debate might actually help answer many of the public´s questions and possibly restore some national unity, the NIST spokesman emphatically insisted that such a debate will never occur.
+
As precociously as Michael E. Newman presented himself as a government man, and therefore trustworthy, the inconsistencies in his agency´s work pertaining to how the Twin Towers collapsed will persist if NIST and its lot of government scientists don´t publicly debate with non-government scientists that are presently and publicly disputing the government´s findings.+
+
Glaring evidence of a fallible, if not predisposed government agency is found on the National Institute of Standards and Technology web site.+ For example, NIST lists as one if its main 9/11 investigation objectives as to determine:
+
* Why and how World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft [2]+
+
Note: In the event that NIST changes the aforementioned misleading language on its web site, go here http://teamliberty.net/id236.html to see how the web page read as of March 20, 2006.+
+
Why is the false statement on the NIST web site?+ The National Institute of Standards and Technology knows, along with the rest of the world, that no aircraft impacted WTC-7.+ Yet on its web site, it uses language that suggests that WTC-7 was also collided into by an aircraft.+ Is it any wonder why Americans are struggling to accept the government´s 9/11 story when a federal agency intended to set the standard is demonstrating to the world that its own standard of accuracy regarding the dissemination of information is woefully inadequate?+
+
This lack of standards is demonstrated again in the National Institute of Standards and Technology - Executive Summary, which is a portion of its report regarding how the Twin Towers collapsed.++ Listed as Finding 59, NIST reported:
+
* NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001.+ NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers.+ Instead, photographs and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward, until the dust clouds obscured the view.+

Amazingly, the government sees the dust clouds produced during the collapse of the Twin Towers as an obstruction of view, while scientists, outside the government´s control, see the volume, density, and speed of outward projection from the buildings during the collapse that the dust clouds demonstrated, as evidence of secondary explosive devices.++ Whether secondary explosive devices caused or assisted the collapse of the Twin Towers or not, the dust clouds were and remain compelling evidence that the government, by their own admission, missed or ignored.
+
Seeing as NIST scientists couldn´t see the fact that the dust clouds were themselves, evidence, and not obstructions, is it possible for the National Institute of Standard and Technology to be taken seriously, let alone, trusted?+ Why is the public so fascinated with WTC-7 Mr. Newman?+ We are so fascinated by it because the events of September 11, 2001 were a national tragedy with many valid and unanswered questions remaining in the public mind.+
+
If there is a weak link in a government cover-up, World Trade Center Building Seven is it.+ If WTC-7 is found to have collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition, than the NIST report on the Twin Towers will be aggressively scrutinized because the question of how and when explosive devices were wired into WTC-7 would have to be answered. By answering that question, a new truth regarding WTC-1 and WTC-2 might be revealed.++
+
Does NIST have a compelling interest to report that WTC-7 defied the laws of physics also on September 11, 2001 and miraculously collapsed at freefall speed as the result of office fires?+ You bet it does!+ Can the National Institute of Standards and Technology be trusted as a competent federal agency that will deliver an untainted, truthful analysis of WTC-7 regardless of what that truth might be?+ I´ll leave the answer to that question up to you.+

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] National Institute of Standards and Technology, Project Leaders, National Construction Safety Team for WTC Investigation, Shyam Sunder, http://wtc.nist.gov/pi/wtc_profiles.asp?lastname=sunder, [Accessed March 20, 2006]
[2] NIST & The World Trade Center, Fact Sheets, http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs.htm, [Accessed March 20, 2006]

#############################################################################

If the crazies and the psy ops aren't after you, then you're barking up the wrong tree.

~ S.P. ~

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Message 3
From: "Mark S Bilk" mark@cosmicpenguin.com
Date: Mon May 29, 2006 4:47am(PDT)
Subject: Motives For 9-11 And The War -was: Killing Arabs and burning down th

In a previous message you (Yaacov - jewish_from_brooklyn) wrote:

>Arabs are getting murdered with US taxpayer dollars.
>This is turning out to be a war of racial genocide against the Sunni Arabs.
>
>I would like to know who_exactly is behind all of this carnage and who_exactly
>is benefitting from it.

And now,

>Is this really about fighting "terrorism" ... or is this really about
>killing and destroying the enemies of Israel ?

Bingo! The Neocons (and their partners the DLC in the "Democratic"
Party) have been working with and financing the Israeli Zionists
(basically Jewish Nazis) for decades.

Spot the Neocons who signed this paper about destabilizing the
Arab nations for Israel:

http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm

And here's how Israel urged the U.S. to attack Iraq:

http://cosmicpenguin.com/911/JaredIsraelZionistPropaganda.html#D

Other motives for the war:

o Enrich the owners of U.S. oil companies, who would rather steal
Iraq's oil than pay for it.

o Enrich the owners of U.S. weapons companies -- murder for profit
on a huge scale -- plus construction companies like Cheney's
Halliburton that are given no-bid contracts to rebuild what they
told the U.S. Air Force to destroy. They control the U.S.
government; we sure don't.

o Create more military bases in the area, to help the U.S.
ultra-wealthy elite rule the world.

o Enrage Moslems all over the world, in the hope that some of
them will attack the U.S. and provide the pretext for even
more wars. Somewhere in the world there must be a few real
"terrorists" (desperate victims fighting back with improvised
weapons), who aren't trained, armed, and financed by the U.S.
or Israel.

o Justify the destruction of the remnants of democracy and
freedom that still exist in the U.S., which will make it much
easier for the ultra-wealthy to enslave and perhaps kill us.
We're the "useless eaters" now.

________________________________________________________________________
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Message 4
From: "Scott Legere" sledger911@yahoo.com
Date: Mon May 29, 2006 7:28am(PDT)
Subject: Re: Well oh my golly my GOSH!

Great Job Kev :)

Kevin Lee Hammond <exposethenewworldorder@yahoo.com> wrote: As I was on my way out the door from work fri eve. my boss stopped me and asked if I knew where he could get a copy of loose change! Could it be perhaps because I have given a copy to each of my co-workers and made sure that they watched it?! Could it be also, That I have woken up damn near every shop owner and worker on the block where I work?! With copies of not only Loose Change, but also of martial Law and other such dvds!. One woman in turn took them to her church and woke up her entire congregation! Please do not take this as boasting bu t as just informing you all of the fact that folks are WAKING UP!

Kevin
www.fightthenwo.org


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Message 5
From: "President, USA Exile Govt." prez@usa-exile.org
Date: Mon May 29, 2006 8:17am(PDT)
Subject: Re: Well oh my golly my GOSH!

Great work, Kevin. I wonder if we're together enough now to take this
a step farther and get into two-person Truth Teams going door-to-door
with "Loose Change" and several other relevant videos and CDs--not all
of them necessarily on the 9/11 theme. Greenpeace used to do this
extensively (I was one of their canvassers briefly around 15 years ago)
in a manner which not only spread their word rather effectively but
also provided livelihoods (austere ones, though) for hundreds of
extremely well-intentioned people. --- Regards, Pondo

On May 28, 2006, at 10:27 PM, Kevin Hammond wrote:

> Thank you my brother.  It is the thought of NOT doing so that
> unnerves me.
>
> DOUGLAS CLARK <bushsept11mastermind@yahoo.com> wrote:
> BOAST...BRAG...AND MAY "GOD" BLESS YOUR EFFORTS!!<image.tiff>
>
> Kevin Hammond <sir_oglaigh@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Awe geee shux!
>
> Jamie Welsh <jamie@xenic.com> wrote:
> it's ok boast away kevin! you make me proud.
> -jamie
>
>
> On May 28, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Kevin Lee Hammond wrote:
>
>
> As I was on my way out the door from work fri eve. my boss stopped me
> and asked if I knew where he could get a copy of loose change!  Could
> it be perhaps because I have given a copy to each of my co-workers and
> made sure that they watched it?!  Could it be also, That I have woken
> up damn near every shop owner and worker on the block where I work?! 
> With copies of not only Loose Change, but also of martial Law and
> other such dvds!.  One woman in turn took them to her church and woke
> up her entire congregation!  Please do not take this as boasting bu t
> as just informing you all of the fact that folks are WAKING UP!
>  
>                       Kevin
>   www.fightthenwo.org
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and
> 30+ countries) for 2¢/min or less.
>
>
> SPONSORED LINKS
>
> United state army
> United state grant
> United state government grant
>
> United state patent
> United state flag
> United state citizenship
>
>
> YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
>
>
>
> â–ª  Visit your group "911TruthAction" on the web.
>  
>
> â–ª  To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
>  911TruthAction-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>  
>
> â–ª  Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
> Service.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Saoirse go deo! www.fightthenwo.org
> Sneak preview the all-new Yahoo.com. It's not radically different.
> Just radically better.
>
>
> SPONSORED LINKS
>
> United state grant
> United state patent
> United state flag
>
> Trademark united state
> United state coin
> United state citizenship
>
>
>
>
> PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT MY WEBSITE (911again.tripod.com) TO OTHER
> GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS.
>  
> AS ALWAYS, THE BEST OF HEALTH AND TIMES TO YOU AND YOURS.
>  
> DOUGLAS CLARK
> 7320 HERMITAGE ST
> PITTSBURGH PA 15208
> How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger´s low PC-to-Phone call
> rates.
>
>
>
> Saoirse go deo! www.fightthenwo.org
>
> Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+
> countries) for 2¢/min or less.
>
>
> SPONSORED LINKS
>
> United state military
> United state army
> United state coin
>
> United state government grant
> United state flag
> United state patent
>
>
> YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
>
>
> â–ª  Visit your group "911TruthAction" on the web.
>  
> â–ª  To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
>  911TruthAction-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>  
> â–ª  Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
> Service.
>
>
>
>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message 6
From: "reggie501" reggie501@optonline.net
Date: Mon May 29, 2006 8:24am(PDT)
Subject: 9/11 update - 5/29

9/11 News : http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#911

· AFTER SIX YEARS, BIN LADEN SUDDENLY DECIDES TO TAKE A DIVE FOR
911? - Apparently the Bush Regime seems to think very little of the
mental "prowess" of the American people. They claim to have a
thoroughly "authentic" tape from Bin Laden who, despite the fact could
have said a limitless number of things, decided to take credit for 911.

· Petrified of the ramifications, Americans adopt denial as primary
strategy to ignore 9/11 Scam - Pyschologists call it cognitive
dissonance when there are beliefs that threaten your previous beliefs
that you find it impossible to reconcile, and denial becomes the role
that you adopt.

· Turn 911 Rubble Into A Killing Machine? Hello? - Whoever said that
irony was dead in America clearly hadn't heard about the assault ship
USS New York

· Business as usual -- 9/11 and the fall of America - Under the guise
of business as usual, consider the huge improprieties in the
securities markets that went unnoticed before and immediately after
9/11/2001, contributing to the attacks' awful success and America's
subsequent decline.

________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message 7
From: "James Patton" james_patton@yahoo.com
Date: Mon May 29, 2006 8:42am(PDT)
Subject: What will it take to wake people up?

At the risk of offending anyone out there, I really need to ask a question here: what the hell is the matter with you people? And by "you people," I don´t mean specifically the regular readers of these newsletters, but rather the American people in general. So to all you John and Jane Q. Publics out there, let me rephrase the question: what the hell does it take to get a reaction out of you?

I realize, of course, that there has been a serious dumbing-down of American society and culture over the years. And I realize that government operatives have virtually complete control over the flow of information, so that virtually every thing you read, hear or see is, at best, an approximation of reality. And I realize that you have been systematically conditioned, over the course of many decades, to revere the institutions of this society - the very same institutions whose spokesmen are routinely called upon to serve you up a nice steaming platter of lies.

None of that, however, fully explains the near complete paralysis of the American people as a whole. So let me ask the question once again: what the hell does it take to get a reaction out of you? Let's quickly run through a partial list of things that, thus far, have failed to inspire you to summon your inner Howard Beales: two consecutive stolen presidential elections; back-to-back wars, both of them unprovoked and brazenly illegal, with more on the horizon; the deaths of well over two thousand of your sons and daughters in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the maiming and disfiguring of thousands more; the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis; countless corporate/political scandals directly tied to the Bush mob; diligent efforts by a veritable army of 9-11 skeptics (including a growing list of people (http://www.st911.org/) that some of you might find more credible than us wacky Internet 'conspiracy theorists') to convince you that the
official story of the `terrorist´ attacks of September 11 is a nothing more than a fairy tale; passage of the Patriot Act, and various other attacks on your civil, privacy, and due process rights; the entirely preventable deaths of an unknown number of people in New Orleans; military occupation of southern Louisiana; sanctioning of secret military tribunals; revelations of the widespread use of, and official sanction of, various forms of torture; getting slapped in the face with the Abu Ghraib photos; indefinite, warrantless detentions without access to legal counsel; illegal domestic surveillance; open witch-hunting of `liberal´ members of academia (though it is perfectly acceptable for a former Phoenix Program assassin and torturer ( )to educate your children); gross invasions of your privacy - at airports, at sporting events, when entering many public buildings, even when sitting at home on your computer; massive cuts in social spending, even while hundreds of
billions of dollars are spent waging war and militarizing domestic law enforcement; massive tax cuts that primarily benefit corporate America; the steady erosion of the nation´s education and healthcare systems; trashing of the environment and environmental protections; the accumulation of an almost unfathomable level of debt; and the act of grand theft masquerading as Medicare `reform.'

Through all of this and more, you have sat silently by. So again I must ask: what the hell will it take? How much worse does it have to get? How much worse will you allow it to get? And if you continue to sit by and do nothing, who do you think is going to save you from the increasingly bleak future we face? Who do you think is going to stop all the madness for you?
. . .

None of the outrages committed by this administration, either individually or collectively, have awakened you from your slumber, so I seriously doubt that there is anything that I could reveal here that would provide the necessary wake-up call. Nevertheless, I will give it my best shot.

What if I were to tell you, for starters, that our benevolent leaders have already got the ball rolling on an ambitious plan to build concentration camps? Right here on American soil! You would, of course, laugh heartily as you dismissed such sensational claims as the product of the overactive imagination of some Internet crackpots - which is exactly why I'm not going to tell you any such thing. Instead, I'm going to let Halliburton break the news to you, in the form of a press release issued on January 24, 2006. You can read it for yourself if you like; it's posted on the company's website. If you stop by for a visit, this is what you'll find:

ARLINGTON, Virginia - KBR announced today that its Government and Infrastructure division has been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to support the Department of Homeland Security´s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency. KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton (NYSE:HAL).

With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District ... The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster.
(http://www.halliburton.com/default/main/halliburton/eng/news/source_files/news.jsp?newsurl=/default/main/halliburton/eng/news/source_files/press_release/2006/kbrnws_012406.html)

Since there is little indication that America is about to be bum-rushed by "an emergency influx of immigrants," it seems safe to say that the real purpose of these 'detention centers' is to "support the rapid development" of these mysterious, unspecified "new programs." It doesn't take much reading between the lines to recognize that the "new programs" will involve mass detentions following the next disaster to strike the country, whether it be real or imagined, and whether it be of natural or unnatural origins.

The good news here is that, should you find yourself suddenly occupying a room at Guantanamo on the Pacific, you won't have to worry about having a lot of idle time on your hands. That's because the U.S. Army has an ambitious Civilian Inmate Labor Program in effect that you can read all about right here: http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r210_35.pdf. As you can see, this report, direct from the Headquarters of the Department of the Army, "provides guidance for establishing and managing civilian inmate labor programs on Army installations. It [also] provides guidance on establishing prison camps on Army installations."

[ You can read full newsletter here:
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr81.html ]

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Fake News Stories from the Bush Admin

Independent Online Edition > Americas

AlterNet: The Burial of the 9/11 Story that Got Away

AlterNet: The Burial of the 9/11 Story that Got Away

[911InsideJobbers] A spanner in the works.

You know, the more I read of the mounting speculation against
President George Bush and the mounting case against the CIA and
al-Qaida [as if they were both under the same roof] the more I think
of how stupid it was to plan an inside job. The aforementioned,
including the most often accused 9/11 suspect, Mossad were either to
remain after the event [those Mossad agents being caught in the glare
of the head lamps, so to speak, and under go a grilling for over a
month and then a deportation which must have caused great
embarrassment in the light of their well known motto] and yet no one
has considered that may be those people who did 9/11 used cut outs and
needed patsies. There is always a for a patsy. You think al-Qaida was
used as a patsy? Do you think Mossad was used as a patsy. Well, they
both acted like super-star patsies. Didn't they. Have you thought that
you might be suffering with the Lee Harvey Oswald syndrome? 9/11 could
not be the only time when a patsy, or two were not essential.

You see the more you hammer away on President George Bush and the
CIA - al-Qaida "partnership" the more you demonstrate how bloody
stupid they would have been to have sanctioned an inside job. From
which it follows that they could not have been capable of such a pitch
black op. because they were not in their right mind to have predicted
the outcome and the pressure they would be under for what could be the
length of their life times.

Some 9/11 observers throw everything they have at President Bush and
the CIA and/or other mysterious US agencies but it's too easy. It's
been made too easy because these guys were "at home" on 9/11 and they
are still at home today. They are in fact residents of the United
States. They have to face the music and it has become heavy rock
music. They are between a rock and a hard place for the duration. And
like fish in a barrel easy for 9/11 truth seekers to take pot shots at
with no where to go.

It's too easy. You should always suspect something that comes too easy
because you might have the patsies and not the real killers. Patsies
are easy to find and you could be wasting your time.

You have heard of plausible denial. The more you hammer away at
President George Bush and the CIA and these other mystery US agencies
you deny this very concept of any pitch black op. because you are
creating a case where there was no possibility of a plausible denial.
It was just utter madness to have sanctioned a major "terrorist" act
in your own back yard.

Re: [911InsideJobbers] he REAL 9/11 Judith Miller connection

She's famous now for stories she didn't get round to writing.
Got imprisoned in the Plame affair but didn't leak the story because she didn't write one. Perhaps they locked her up so she got the time to write a story.
----- Original Message -----
From: Nico Haupt
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 1:09 AM
Subject: [911InsideJobbers] he REAL 9/11 Judith Miller connection


http://team8plus.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?3048.0
The REAL 9/11 Judith Miller connection
Fri May 19 2006

The recently released story about Judith Miller's alleged prior warning on 9/11, is a limited hangout and a plant to delay the truth about 9/11.

It claims:
http://www.alternet.org/story/36388/

"...In 2001, an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to reporter Judith Miller that Al Qaida was planning a major attack on the United States. But the story never made it into the paper..."

The real 9/11 connection is, that Miller is actually in cohut with the real perpetrators of 9/11.



During June 2001, Judith Miller participated in the DARK WINTER anti terror drill,
which exercised the post 9/11 Sep11th anthrax attack, in that scenario 'replaced' with Smallbox.

DARK WINTER was originally executed and produced by ANSER Institute for Homeland Security:

http://www.mipt.org/darkwinter06222001.asp



Then right after 9/11, Judith Miller (who allegedly 'dated' Lewis 'Scooter' Libby at one point) continued her payroll gig for the neocons by hooking up
with Ahmed Chalabi to promote the lies about WMD in NY TIMES.

The new Judith Miller story is therefore just a recycling of the “missed warnings” scandal of early 2002.

At the time a lot of people got very excited about it as the thin end of
the wedge, people like, Bill Douglas and Kyle Hence.

Here is Gerard Holmgren with an additional take:
"....For those who haven’t been in this right from the beginning, I’ll
summarize the development. Up until about March 2002, the Govt claimed
that it never had the slightest inkling that the attacks were coming. It
was a complete surprise.

Most of the well developed evidence at that time was LIHOP. The stand
down and Bush’s complicit behavior were well researched and established,
the demolition was well researched but still too cutting edge and new
for most people, and the pentagon thing was only just about to break. No
WTC planes was completely unknown. I think Rosalee was on to the first
strike by then, but hadn’t yet realized that Cartoon 175 was a fake, and
her work on Blobs 11 was pretty much unknown. Naudet foreknowledge
research was still in the distant future. So was BTS, although the no
Arab hijacker eveidence was fairly well known.

There was strong but not yet conclusive evidence already available that
the attack on Afghanistan had already been planned prior to S11, and the
Bin laden confession tape had been debunked since Dec 2001.

So the idea of ignoring warnings was still fairly close to the front
line...."


SCENARIO OVERVIEW DARK WINTER
http://www.mipt.org/darkwinter06222001.asp

On 22-23 June, 2001, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention Terrorism, hosted a senior-level war game examining the national security, intergovernmental, and information challenges of a biological attack on the American homeland.

DARK WINTER was an exercise designed to simulate possible US reaction to the deliberate introduction of smallpox in three states during the winter of 2002.

KEY PLAYERS
President The Hon. Sam Nunn
National Security Advisor The Hon. David Gergen
Director of Central Intelligence The Hon. R. James Woolsey
Secretary of Defense The Hon. John White
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Tilelli (USA, Ret.)
Secretary of Health & Human Services The Hon. Margaret Hamburg
Secretary of State The Hon. Frank Wisner
Attorney General The Hon. George Terwilliger
Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency Mr. Jerome Hauer
Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation The Hon. William Sessions
Governor of Oklahoma The Hon. Frank Keating
Press Secretary, Gov. Frank Keating (OK) Mr. Dan Mahoney
Correspondent, NBC News Mr. Jim Miklaszewski
Pentagon Producer, CBS News Ms. Mary Walsh
Reporter, British Broadcasting Corporation Ms. Sian Edwards
Reporter, The New York Times Ms. Judith Miller
Reporter, Freelance Mr. Lester Reingold
--


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[911InsideJobbers] Something which has been totally missed.

TV cameras were kept away from the Pentagon and there are pictures of
where they were set up some distance away.

But what was not kept away from public view involving FBI forensic
teams? We saw them walking in line picking up small pieces of
something, right.

What material was those small pieces?

A witness from over at Reagan National saw white stuff falling from
the sky [and there were photos taken of the towers where white stuff
was amongst the explosive clouds which some would argue to be American
"A4" sheets of paper of which there were many sheets on the ground in
the dust.

What the FBI was collecting was not sheets of paper though. Was it
chaff? It could well have been but would they have collected it in
front of the public, in broad day light? Was there any good reason why
the Pentagon should be open asap at the expense of giving away a clue
as to what struck the Pentagon. Chaff, is of course part of a missile
defence system which either distracts or attracts a missile in flight.
And it has other purposes too.

Even ibm's may release it too to fend off anti-missile missiles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(radar_countermeasure)

Chaff wouldn't ordinarily have been released, by a friendly, around
the Pentagon for the obvious reason but would an ibm? But would the
FBI have been intent on collecting up this material if it had been
chaff laid by the enemy?

The next possibility is the material was the drone "757" and what was
left of it.

The next possibility is Flight 77 after it had been zapped by whatever
brought down the twin towers.

But whatever it was the FBI didn't have any hesitation about
collecting it up in broad daylight and in front of the public.

Were they collecting up diamonds or other precious stones? Now, that
we would understand.




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[911InsideJobbers] Anger at the 7/7 official version.

These two quotes appear in the Metro [a regular free newspaper] close
together in the same article which is titled "Anger at 7/7 'whitewash'

"Until we get a full public inquiry, I won't be happy. I am sure there
is more behind it all than this".

["this" is a reference to the scenario depicted in two official
reports - hence the whitewash in the title which we always get with
official reports]

You would not be wrong if you thought the above quote was from a
victim's family member. I would not have used the word "happy" - may
be "satisfied" but not happy - but here is a father who lost a
daughter in the bombings and my heart goes out to this guy.
We all can feel for his loss.

But you will have difficulty in guessing who is responsible for this
second quote:-

The second:-

"If a person is prepared to kill themselves and harm others, I don't
think anyone can do something to prevent it."

A police official? A security officer? A private security consultant?
[there are hundreds of 'em about]. No. It is none of these
professional types.

This is the guy who thought he had hit the kerb when he was driving
the bus. The bus had almost blown apart and yet despite the bus having
large tyres which mounting a kerb would have no discernible effect
upon and despite the fact the bus must have been travelling along the
sidewalk and in the road proper - he thought he had hit the kerb.

This guy is Mr. Cool. If he was driving that bus at the time it
exploded I would be totally amazed. Just like I was totally amazed
when I saw a dozen people standing up on the upper deck, seconds after
the explosion, no worse for where and no subsequent reports of hearing
problems.

Driving a bus is good honest work but when has it become a career
where you become an expert on suicide bombers and think you are in a
position to educate the public on suicide bombers. The very first
"suicide bombers" the UK has ever had.

And just like I am totally amazed how the main entrance to the BMA
building could be splattered with blood when the bus was yards away
down the road.

13 people are reported to have died on the No.30 bus. 13. It just had
to be 13.

Hasib Hussain, the "bus bomber" was seen on a No. 91 bus 'looking
nervous and pushing past people' [I suppose the No.91 does go to
Euston] but perhaps the No. 911 doesn't] and evidently he went into WH
Smith at King's Cross to buy a nine-volt battery. It is speculated
that the original battery for "his device" didn't work. How on earth
would he know the battery didn't work and so late in the day?

Wonder if either official report speaks of the drill that was on for
7/7.

Yeah, Power was quite chuffered with that coincidence. Well, what do
you know.

56 people are reported to have been killed on that day and the drill
was just like any other day on the underground and so it probably
doesn't merit even a mention.

I'd like to be proven wrong on this latter point.





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[911InsideJobbers] Is McKinnon, another who is alegedly prosecuting himself?

Was British hacker Gary McKinnon a cyber-terrorist, using relatively low-tech methods, when he is alleged to have "brought down 300 computers at a naval weapons station in New Jersey shortly after 9/11/01 and "apparently" left 2000 government machines in Washington inoperable?

He is accused of hacking into thousands of American military computer systems between 2001 and 2002 [according to a UK press article]

In another report the figures don't look so bad.

"McKinnon accessed 53 U.S. Army computers, 26 U.S. Navy computers, 16 NASA computers, and one U.S. Department of Defense computer,"

Or was he looking for information on UFO's as he says?

His QC said "The US Government wants to exact some kind of specious administative revenge because he exposed their security systems to be as weak and helpless as they were."

That being the case I suppose anyone could have done the same thing using low-tech methods. Perhaps you were lucky it was a Brit and not someone who wanted NOT to merely do damage but just to remain at the "back door" and gather intelligence and seek out your volneribility.

I'm surprised that someone as good as Mr. McKinnon at getting into all the places he is alleged to have done, got caught. Interesting point here is that a system that traced him was not efficient enough to have blocked his alleged attacks.

Particularly so, when he could have been right on the ball in looking for information on UFO's "shortly after the attacks" on 9/11/01. What with all these mysterious flying objects that we have seen in 9/11 videos. Was he right on the UFO trail before 9/11 researchers were.

In this other report it states:-

"McKinnon, speaking in an interview with Bloomberg after the verdict, said he didn't feel comforted by U.S. diplomatic assurances that he will be tried in a federal court in Virginia rather than by the U.S. military. McKinnon, an unemployed computer systems administrator, said he fears he will be indefinitely imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba if extradited.

``I don't believe America is a just democracy,'' McKinnon told Bloomberg.

McKinnon has admitted leaving a note on one U.S. Army computer reading: ``U.S. foreign policy is akin to government sponsored terrorism ... it was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11th last year ... I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels,'' Mark Summers, a lawyer representing the U.S. government, has said."

Notice that McKinnon is quoted directly in one short sentence but note the longer passage quoted by Mark Summers. Did McKinnon really say what he is aleged to have said. Only, that is "fighting talk" and is bound to enrage all of America.

This is a second guy who has prosecuted himself [here it is in the press] - there was Zacarias Moussaoui who did a good job on his own prosecution and put himself away for life. Is Gary McKinnon going to do another good job of putting himself away for a long time? Has Mr. McKinnon been talking to people here in the UK who have gone direct to US government prosecutors?

Is this guy almost saying he was responsible for disruption to US systems on 9/11/01 and his cyber-terrorist name is SOLO?

Strangely enough this passage alegedly spoken by McKinnon speaks of 9/11 being "last year". This article, updated 10/5/06 therefore resurrects something that he might have said in 2002. Four years ago.

If Gary McKinnon was a bad arse, as it is aleged I'm surprised he has been free as long as he has. It's taken a long time for the UK to get into extradition proceedings, proper [the case is being heard now at Bow Street magistrates court].

Is it just a coincidence that the Zacarias Moussaoui case has closed in the US just recently and now the UK proceedings on McKinnon's extradition is now going forward?

I'm wondering if McKinnon is another one of these western Islam converts?


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[political-researchp] Bloglines - 9/11 Whistleblower Andrew Grove Comes Forward


9/11 Blogger - Blogging 9/11 Related Alternative News
All comments are welcome! but please avoid hate speech and profanity, and use references when possible.

9/11 Whistleblower Andrew Grove Comes Forward

By somebigguy

Download (21 MB) MP3 WMV

The Meria Heller Show - http://www.Meria.net

This man, Richard Andrew Grove, a whistleblower who worked for the big boys and money people behind 9/11 has come out with information to set the 9/11 movement on fire.

Although many have rejected his work (too busy, big egos, whatever) including the IRS, Treasury Dept and SEC, what he exposes on Marsh & McLellan, AIG, Dyncorp, Spitzer, Stewart Air Force Base, Fitzgerald, Bremer, missing gold and bucks of 9/11, software that predicts the future and more will ASTOUND YOU as it did me. I will be having him live on the show in June, but wanted you to hear this urgent information immediately. That is why I worked on it all day.

If you are a journalist, blogger, etc., DO NOT think this is a ruse. I expect you to LISTEN intently to what this man is presenting and act on it.

If you are a friend, subscriber, past guest, listen and then relisten. Pass it on to every outlet and every email list, group you have. This information is EXPLOSIVE. The more of us that know this information, the greater the chances I won't be killed for presenting it, and the greater the chances for a real revolution in America's thinking processes. Go beyond the explosions, destruction of evidence, etc., and learn who BENEFITTED and HOW on 9/11 to find out who the Corporate Fundamentalists are that were behind it all.

Thank you for trusting me with this one, it's well worth it.
Love,
Meria

"We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore".
"THE MERIA HELLER SHOW"

Thanks to Wayne for this submission.




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Comparison of Destruction Theories

Morgan Reynolds - No More Games � Net

[political-researchp] Bloglines - The Central Front in the War on Terrorism


Eschaton

The Central Front in the War on Terrorism

By Atrios

Drum:


Indeed they do. But here's the funny thing about that. I read The Good Fight a couple of weeks ago, and Beinart is pretty clear that he now believes he was wrong about a whole host of things back in 2003. He was wrong about WMD, wrong about containment, wrong about the need for international legitimacy, etc. etc. If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't have supported the war.

What's more, his prescription for how liberals should approach foreign policy going forward is distinctly non-martial. He believes we need a sort of modern-day Marshall plan for the Middle East; a willingness to work with international institutions even if that sometimes restrains our actions; an acceptance that we should abide by the same restrictions that we demand of others; greater patience in foreign affairs; and a rededication to social justice both at home and abroad.

In other words, I think he could give the keynote address at YearlyKos and not really say much of anything the audience would disagree with. If Beinart really is the standard bearer for a new incarnation of liberal hawkishness, then we're almost all liberal hawks now.

There's a little more to it, of course, and Beinart remains critical of liberals who have gotten so disgusted with George Bush's approach to terrorism that they've decided the whole war on terror is just a sham. Still, it's an interesting transformation, and many of the differences that remain within liberal circles strike me as more rhetorical than substantive.



"The war on terror" was always a sham, in the sense that it was a hideously inappropriate metaphor which provided cover for a bunch of hideously inappropriate policies. As for these magical straw liberals who think terrorism isn't an issue, I imagine they're hiding out in Beinart's barn along with the rest of his straw monsters. As for the real issue, which is "George Bush's approach to terrorism," well, yes, that's a sham as I imagine even Beinart would acknowledge.

Perhaps someone just needs to sit Beinart down and tell him that a tendency to argue with invisible adversaries is not a sign of a deep and important thinker, something he so desperately wants to be.

P.S. According to Bush, it's Iraq. And we're not supposed to think it's all a sham?




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[political-researchp] Bloglines - *R.Dreyfuss: Cheney's control of US gov't -- the enforcers


DysBUSHtopia

*R.Dreyfuss: Cheney's control of US gov't -- the enforcers

By Ronald

Friends:
Is there anyone reading this who didn't realize from even before day 1 that Cheney was running this country? Robert Dreyfuss brilliantly provides the documentation and it's even worse than some of us naifs might have imagined: it turns out that with remarkable efficiency it gets down to every single policy decision Cheney desires. Read and weep. As if we couldn't tell: we've got the most vicious, most ruthless, most twisted extremist running the most powerful country in the world.

Some details: Here's an intro into how Cheney's group did what they could to make things as bad as possible in Israel/Palestine.

Last February, for example, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, King Abdullah of Jordan visited Washington to discuss the implications of the vote. With the support of some officials in the State Department, the young king suggested that Washington should bolster beleaguered President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to counter the new power of Hamas

Here's how they control policy.

“The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those [committees] didn’t key anything up that wasn’t what the vice president wanted,” says Wilkerson. “Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn’t going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they’d say: ‘We totally disagree. Meeting’s over.’” At that point, policymakers from the nsc, the State Department, the Defense Department, and elsewhere would have to go back to the drawing board. And if a policy option that Cheney opposed somehow got written up as a decision memorandum and sent to the Oval Office, he showed up to kill it. “The vice president’s second or third bite at the apple was when he’d walk in to see the president,” says Wilkerson. “And things would get reversed, because of the vice president’s meeting in the Oval Office with no one else there.”

And here's their answer to the need for an enemy, in case we get bored with the bogus war on terror.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China. Several of Cheney’s highest-ranking national security aides came out of Congresswoman Christopher Cox’s rather wild-eyed 1990s investigation of alleged Chinese spying in the United States, tied to the overblown allegations about Chinese contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Cox, a California Republican, chaired a highly partisan committee that issued a scathing report about China. According to The New York Times, his 700-page report portrayed China as “nothing less than a voracious, dangerous, and fully-equipped military rival of the United States.” ...

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China’s appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor to the United States in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China’s role in the region. In particular, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American regime in Baghdad was, for at least 10 years before 2003, a top neoconservative goal, one that united both the anti-China crowd and far-right supporters of Israel’s Likud. Both saw the invasion of Iraq as the prelude to an assault on neighboring Iran.

(It's not exactly clear from this last that Dreyfuss understands that these guys actually want a nuclear war with China.)

See also the details on Cheney's shadow NSC and Cheney's control of foreign policy.

Incredible article. Very revealing. This is how power works, and nobody knows how to play it better than Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Thanks to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now for featuring this article a few weeks ago.

--Ronald

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11423
American Prospect
Vice Squad
From our May issue: They terrorize other government officials, and they’re so secretive that their names aren’t even revealed to a harmless federal employee directory. And they’ve helped ruin the country. Meet Dick Cheney’s staff.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Web Exclusive: 04.17.06


Bad heart, errant shotgun, and Halliburton stock options in tow, Dick Cheney has ruled the White House roost for the past five years, amassing enough power to give rise to the joke that George W. Bush is “a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Yet, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of words have been written on Cheney’s role in the Bush administration, most of what’s been written fails to explain how the vice president wields his extraordinary authority. Notoriously opaque, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is very difficult for journalists to penetrate. But a Prospect investigation shows that the key to Cheney’s influence lies with the corps of hard-line acolytes he assembled in 2001. They serve not only as his eyes and ears, monitoring a federal bureaucracy that resists many of Cheney’s pet initiatives, but sometimes serve as his fists, too, when the man from Wyoming feels that the passive-aggressive bureaucrats need bullying. Like disciplined Bolsheviks slicing through a fractious opposition, Cheney’s team operates with a single-minded, ideological focus on the exercise of American military power, a belief in the untrammeled power of the presidency, and a fierce penchant for secrecy.

Since 2001, reporters and columnists have tended to refer to Cheney’s office obliquely, if at all. Rather than explicitly discuss the neoconservative cabal that has assumed control of important parts of U.S. policy since September 11, they couple references to “the civilians at the Pentagon” with “officials in the vice president’s office” when referring to administration hard-liners. But rarely do the mainstream media provide much detail to explain who those people are, what they’ve done, and how they operate.

At the high-water mark of neoconservative power, when coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, the vice president’s office was the command center for a web of like-minded officials in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies, often described by former officials as “Dick Cheney’s spies.” Now, thanks to a misguided war and a bungled occupation, along with a string of foreign-policy failures that have alienated U.S. allies and triggered a wave of anti-American feeling around the globe, the numbers and influence of those Cheneyites outside the office have receded. No longer quite so commanding, the office seems more like a bunker for neoconservatives and their fellow travelers in the administration. Yet if only because of Dick Cheney’s Rasputin-like hold over the president, his office remains a formidable power indeed.

Still, for the first time, nervous Republicans are raising serious questions about Cheney. With his public approval plummeting to previously unknown depths for a major U.S. politician -- by late February he had fallen to just 18 percent -- he has lost all but the most reflexive of knee-jerk conservatives. With the vice president increasingly seen as a liability, there is a quiet murmur among GOP insiders about dumping him. The Moonie-linked Insight magazine, wired into right-wing Republicans, last month reported that moves are afoot to “retire” Cheney in 2007. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former Bush Senior speechwriter Peggy Noonan gave full voice to the dump-Cheney idea. “I suspect what they’re thinking and not saying is, ‘If Dick Cheney weren’t vice president, who’d be a good vice president?’” she wrote. “And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one top guy will turn to another top guy and say, … ‘wouldn’t you like to replace Cheney?’”

More often than not, from policy toward China and North Korea to the invasion of Iraq to pressure for regime change in Iran and Syria, and on issues from detentions to torture to spying by the National Security Agency, the muscle of the vice president’s office has prevailed.

Usually, that muscle is exercised covertly. Last February, for example, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, King Abdullah of Jordan visited Washington to discuss the implications of the vote. With the support of some officials in the State Department, the young king suggested that Washington should bolster beleaguered President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to counter the new power of Hamas.

Then John Hannah intervened. A former official at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Zionist think tank founded by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, Hannah is a neoconservative ideologue who, after the resignation of Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, moved up to become Vice President Dick Cheney’s top adviser on national security.

Hannah moved instantly to undermine Abdullah’s influence. Not only should the United States not deal with Hamas, but Abbas, Fatah, and the entire Palestinian Authority were no longer relevant, he argued, according to intelligence insiders. Speaking for the vice president’s office, Hannah instead sought to align U.S. policy with the go-it-alone strategy of Israel’s hard-liners, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his stricken patron and predecessor, Ariel Sharon. Olmert soon stunned observers by declaring that Israel would unilaterally set final borders in the West Bank, annexing large swaths of occupied land, by the year 2010. His declaration precisely mirrored Hannah’s argument that Israel should act alone.

Whether that viewpoint will prevail in the United States is unclear, but early indications are that the Bush administration is swinging in that direction. Hannah’s intervention is typical of how the OVP staff has engaged at all levels of the U.S. policy-making process to overcome opposition from professionals in the State Department, the intelligence community, and even the National Security Council (NSC) itself.

Richard Perle, who formerly served on the Defense Policy Board, insists that the power of those who share his worldview is exaggerated. “The myth of the power of the neoconservatives in the administration is exactly that,” says Perle. “The president holds the views that he holds. And the people you’re talking about are much closer to the president’s view than the people they are arguing against.” But officials who have opposed Cheney believe that President Bush has “views” only about basic principles, and that in making dozens of complex decisions he relies on pre-determined staff papers. Says one insider deeply involved in U.S. policy toward North Korea: “The president is given only the most basic notions about the Korea issue. They tell him, ‘Above South Korea is a country called North Korea. It is an evil regime.’ … So that translates into a presidential decision: Why enter into any agreement with an evil regime?”

Last fall, when U.S. envoy Christopher Hill was planning to visit North Korea to try to resolve the impasse over that country’s nuclear weapons, Cheney’s staff intervened to kill Hill’s mission, according to sources involved in planning his trip. That the Office of the Vice President can kill a major initiative by the State Department and the NSC, on an issue of the highest priority, is stark testament to the sustained power of the vice president’s office. And despite Cheney’s unpopularity -- and the parallel decline of neoconservative influence -- it remains a potent force.


* * *
Devoid of well-known names and faces, the OVP was nearly invisible to the public until last fall. That’s when “Scooter” Libby was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, focusing the media spotlight on the vice president’s chief of staff and top national security adviser, who resigned immediately. Aside from Libby, however, virtually none of Cheney’s current aides has endured any scrutiny. Outside the Washington cognoscenti, it’s a safe bet that not one in a hundred Americans could name a single Cheney aide. Since 2001, the list has included David Addington, who replaced Libby; top national security advisers such as Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland; radical-right Middle East specialists such as Hannah, William J. Luti, and David Wurmser; anti-China, geopolitical Asia hands like Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich; an assortment of conservative apparatchiks and technocrats, often neoconservative-connected, including C. Dean McGrath, Aaron Friedberg, Karen Knutson, and Carol Kuntz; lobbyists and domestic policy gurus, such as Nancy Dorn, Jonathan Burks, Nina Shokraiil Rees, Cesar Conda, and Candida Wolf -- and a host of communications directors, flacks, and spokespeople over the years, notably “Cheney’s angels”: Mary Matalin, Juleanna Glover Weiss, Jennifer Millerwise, Catherine Martin, and Lee Anne McBride.

It is the latter, especially Cheney’s press secretaries -- he has run through seven of them -- whose job is saying nothing, and saying it often. His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no -- nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president’s office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. “We just don’t give out that kind of information,” says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney’s “angels.” She won’t say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. “It’s just not something we talk about.” The notoriously silent OVP staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory. “They’re tight-lipped about the kind of information they put out,” says Albert Ruffin, senior editor at Carroll, who fumes that Cheney’s office doesn’t bother returning his calls when he’s updating the limited information he manages to collect.

The OVP’s enduring obsession with absolute secrecy first became obvious during the long court battle early in Bush’s first term over the energy task force chaired by Cheney. Neither the coalition of watchdog and environmental groups that sued the ovp nor members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office discovered much about the workings of the task force. Addington, then Cheney’s general counsel, enforced the say-nothing policy ultimately upheld by federal courts. “He engineered an extraordinary expansion of government power at the expense of accountability,” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the conservative gadfly group that sued Cheney. “We got a terse letter back from Addington saying essentially, ‘Go jump in the lake.’”

Addington, 49, has spent almost exactly half of his life working for or working alongside Dick Cheney, from an impressionable youngster in his early 20s to the hard-nosed ideologue that he is today. They first met in the early 1980s, when Addington served as a counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Iran-Contra Committee, and then the House Intelligence Committee, when Cheney was a member of the committee. When Cheney became secretary of defense, Addington was his special assistant and then the Defense Department’s general counsel. When Cheney toyed with running for president in the 1990s, Addington ran his political action committee. In the ovp, Addington has emerged as the single most militant advocate for the unfettered power of the presidency. “Early on, with the detainee issues, the torture issues, even before Abu Ghraib, people [would say] that David Addington is the source of all this stuff,” says a senior national security lawyer in Washington. “This stuff” includes the spectrum of controversial counterterrorism powers, from military tribunals for captured terror suspects, to justifying torture of prisoners, to detention of alleged terrorists without access to courts or counsel, to the legal rationale for ignoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. “He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives,” is how Congresswoman Jane Harman, the intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, described Addington to The Washington Post. “Those views have extremely dangerous implications.”

Addington is typical of the staffers brought on in 2001, when Cheney began assembling what was dubbed, even then, a “shadow NSC.” Unlike previous administrations, including Bill Clinton’s, Cheney’s office was loaded for partisan bear from day one. Leon Fuerth, who led Al Gore’s office of national security affairs for eight years, says that their far smaller operation was led by nonpolitical or military staffers who weren’t vetted for political loyalties or ideology.

“The people who worked for me were all seconded from federal agencies, every one of them. They were uniformed officers from all three branches, people from the Department of Commerce, from the CIA, but all of them were professionals and civil servants,” says Fuerth. “I was the only politically appointed person. My deputy was at first an Air Force colonel, and after he retired, an Army colonel.” He recalls that one appointee, settling into an office in Fuerth’s shop, hung a portrait of Ronald Reagan.

There probably aren’t any portraits of Bill Clinton or FDR on the walls of Cheney’s OVP, which sprawls throughout the executive office building across the street from the White House. Instead, the staff -- hand-picked by Libby -- was drawn from the ranks of far-right think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and WINEP, and from carefully screened Cheney loyalists in law firms around town -- all of whom hit the ground running.

Larry Wilkerson, formerly a top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is a no-nonsense, ex-military man who has spoken out bluntly about what he calls a “cabal” led by Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their top aides. Time after time, in various interagency meetings, all the way up to the Cabinet-level “principals committee,” Wilkerson would watch in astonishment as Cheney’s staffers muscled everyone else.

“The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those [committees] didn’t key anything up that wasn’t what the vice president wanted,” says Wilkerson. “Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn’t going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they’d say: ‘We totally disagree. Meeting’s over.’” At that point, policymakers from the nsc, the State Department, the Defense Department, and elsewhere would have to go back to the drawing board. And if a policy option that Cheney opposed somehow got written up as a decision memorandum and sent to the Oval Office, he showed up to kill it. “The vice president’s second or third bite at the apple was when he’d walk in to see the president,” says Wilkerson. “And things would get reversed, because of the vice president’s meeting in the Oval Office with no one else there.”

According to Fuerth, such a skewed modus operandi was unthinkable in the Clinton-Gore administration. “There is no doubt that we exercised a great deal of influence, but it was never in the form of a peremptory, you-may-not-go-down-this-path, or you-must-go-down-this-path,” he says. “It was advisory.”

Former Cheney aides tend to confirm Wilkerson’s version of how the OVP operates. Dean McGrath, who served as Cheney’s deputy chief of staff under Libby from 2001 until last year, says he didn’t hesitate to express the vice president’s views during the policy-making process. “I tried to convey at meetings where he would come down on issues,” says McGrath. An important mission of the OVP was to do battle with a resistant bureaucracy. “Often you’d have the permanent bureaucracy that was not on board, especially on all of the issues where you’re trying to change things,” he says.

Aaron Friedberg, who served as Cheney’s director of policy planning for three years, agrees that the bureaucracy was often an obstacle. “It’s not an active resistance. It’s a passive skepticism about the whole direction of policy.” Friedberg, who says that he worked on issues of “terrorism, Asia, Europe, Russia, North Korea, Iran, just about everything outside of Iraq,” suggested that the biggest issue on which Cheney had to confront the bureaucracy was over the administration’s push for democracy, especially in the Middle East. That program’s overseer is his daughter Liz Cheney, a top State Department official.

Wilkerson portrays the vice president’s office as the source of a zealous, almost messianic approach to foreign affairs. “There were several remarkable things about the vice president’s staff,” he says. “One was how empowered they were, and one was how in sync they were. In fact, we used to say about both [Rumsfeld’s office] and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy … They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government -- and the rest of the government is all confused.”

Often the rest of the U.S. government -- including even the NSC -- would operate outside the normal interagency process to prevent the OVP from interfering, according to officials who asked to remain anonymous. Perhaps most startling is the sidetracking of the NSC, which is by statute the ultimate arbiter for policy options and recommendations that go to the president’s desk.

According to Wilkerson, Cheney’s office and the NSC were completely separate on foreign policy. Cheney, says Wilkerson, “set up a staff that knew what the statutory nsc was doing, but the NSC statutory staff didn’t know what his staff was doing. The vice president’s staff could read the statutory NSC’s e-mail, but the NSC couldn’t read their e-mail. So, once someone on the statutory NSC figured it out, they used various work-arounds. Like, for example, they would walk to someone’s office, rather than send an e-mail, if what they were going to talk about they didn’t want to reveal to the vice president’s very powerful staff.” But that was difficult because of Cheney “spies” within the bureaucracy, including people like John Bolton at the State Department, Robert Joseph at the NSC, certain staffers at WINPAC (the arms control shop at CIA), and various Pentagon officials, he adds.

Two of the people most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney’s Asia hands, Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney’s foreign policy -- which linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the Middle East -- can be traced. The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the OVP’s broad outlook.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China. Several of Cheney’s highest-ranking national security aides came out of Congresswoman Christopher Cox’s rather wild-eyed 1990s investigation of alleged Chinese spying in the United States, tied to the overblown allegations about Chinese contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Cox, a California Republican, chaired a highly partisan committee that issued a scathing report about China. According to The New York Times, his 700-page report portrayed China as “nothing less than a voracious, dangerous, and fully-equipped military rival of the United States.” Among the top Cheney aides who joined the OVP in 2001 from Cox’s staff were Libby, who served as legal adviser to the committee; McGrath, a key staffer for Cox; and Jonathan Burks, a senior Cox aide who became Cheney’s special assistant. Yates, who joined the team from The Heritage Foundation, is a China specialist who has long urged a more confrontational policy. In 2000, he wrote a Heritage paper offering advice to the Bush administration, and slamming Clinton for accommodating China. He urged a stronger, pro-Taiwan policy while predicting a Chinese attack. Charles W. Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to China and has known Yates for many years, puts him in the same category as former Defense Department officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who “all saw China as the solution to ‘enemy deprivation syndrome.’”

Yates, who left Cheney’s office recently to join the ultraconservative lobbying and law firm of Barbour, Griffith, Rogers, had an important impact on Asia and Middle East policy. Says Wilkerson: “Generally Steve was quiet. But when there came a time for him to speak, the room grew very silent, and that did it. We weren’t going any further in that discussion item if Steve said that the vice president didn’t like it. And it didn’t take too long to understand that the real power in the room was sitting there from the vice president’s office.” Yates declined to comment for this story, but in an interview with National Journal he pooh-poohed the idea that Cheney’s office had set itself up as a shadow NSC. “The idea that 10 or 15 people can replicate or supplant the work of the 100 to 200 people on the NSC … is a bit unrealistic,” he said.

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China’s appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor to the United States in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China’s role in the region. In particular, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American regime in Baghdad was, for at least 10 years before 2003, a top neoconservative goal, one that united both the anti-China crowd and far-right supporters of Israel’s Likud. Both saw the invasion of Iraq as the prelude to an assault on neighboring Iran.

Several of Cheney’s top aides, as well as the vice president himself, were early supporters of the neoconservative flagship Project for a New American Century, whose founding statement called for a return to a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” Among them were Libby, Friedberg, and Robert Kagan, who is married to Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO who served as national security adviser in the OVP. She, in turn, succeeded Eric Edelman, another neoconservative who left the vice president’s office to serve as ambassador to Turkey before taking over Douglas Feith’s job as chief of policy for the Department of Defense.

The pivotal role of Cheney’s staff in promoting war in Iraq has been well documented. Cheney was the war’s most vocal advocate, and his staff -- especially Libby, Hannah, Ravich, and others -- worked hard to “fit” intelligence to inflate Iraq’s seeming threat. William J. Luti, a neoconservative radical, left Cheney’s office for the Pentagon in 2001, where he organized the war planning team called the Office of Special Plans. David Wurmser, another neoconservative from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), joined the Pentagon to found the forerunner of the OSP, the so-called Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which then manufactured the evidence that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were allies. To that end, Wurmser worked closely with Hannah, Libby, Luti, and Harold Rhode, a Defense Department official in Andy Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. Ravich, along with Zalmay Khalilzad, a neoconservative Middle East analyst and now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, worked hard to build the Iraqi National Congress–linked opposition forces under Ahmad Chalabi. Libby and Hannah produced key propaganda for the war, including the most inflammatory and inaccurate speeches delivered by Cheney and Bush. The Libby-Hannah team also authored a 48-page speech for Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations appearance so extreme that Powell trashed the entire document. That version has never been released.

David L. Phillips, the author of Losing Iraq, was a State Department consultant during the prelude to the war in 2003, and he watched Ravich operate. His account provides a perfect paradigm for the OVP’s role in interagency meetings, in this case involving the most important decision of the administration’s tenure: the decision to go to war in Iraq. During meeting after meeting in London, in Brussels, or in Washington with Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and the rest of the Iraqi opposition (including its Shiite fundamentalist component), the youthful, inexperienced Ravich dominated the course of events because of her association with Cheney. “The State Department officials showed extraordinary deference to her,” says Phillips. “It was almost a sense that their efforts would be judged by Ms. Ravich and reported to the OVP.” The INC and Chalabi “would run to Samantha when there were disagreements.” In those meetings, the INC “would hold forth on their ties to the OVP as a form of threat over U.S. officials or other Iraqis. And U.S. officials felt that if there was a misstep, the Iraqis would go running to the OVP and they would have their chains yanked,” says Phillips. In Washington, Hannah served as the INC’s chief political point of contact, according to Entifadh Qanbar, an INC official who is serving as defense attaché at the Iraqi embassy.

Like Hannah, who came to the OVP from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Wurmser traipsed a roundabout path to Cheney’s staff: He worked with Hannah at WINEP in the 1990s, and then went to AEI, where he directed Middle East affairs, to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department, and then to the OVP. Even among ardent supporters of Israel, Wurmser -- and his wife, Meyrav, who runs the Hudson Institute’s Middle East program -- is considered an extremist. In 1996, the Wurmsers, Perle, and Feith co-authored the famous “Clean Break” paper for then–Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, which called for radical measures to redraw the map of the entire Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine) to benefit Israel. Later, in a series of papers and a book, Wurmser argued that toppling Saddam was likely to lead directly to civil war and the breakup of Iraq, but he supported the policy anyway: “The residual unity of [Iraq] is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq will “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.” Later, with former CIA director James Woolsey and others, Wurmser proposed restoring the Jordan-based Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. While Wurmser’s OVP allies may share his neoconservative fantasies of the willy-nilly reorganization of the Middle East, few experts do. “I’ve known him for years, and I consider him to be a naive simpleton,” says a former U.S. ambassador. Adds Wilkerson, “A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn’t open their wallet and find a card, but I often wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much that they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Israel’s interest than our own.”

Today Wurmser, Hannah, Liz Cheney, and her father are pushing hard for confrontations with both Iran and Syria. Liz Cheney, who exercises enormous power inside the State Department, has secured millions of dollars to support opposition elements in both countries, and she has met with Syria’s version of Ahmad Chalabi, a discredited businessman from Virginia named Farid al-Ghadry. Hannah sat in on the meeting with Ghadry, which was arranged through Meyrav Wurmser, a friend of the would-be Syrian leader. Hannah and Wurmser’s boss, the vice president, talks freely about the need for a military showdown with Iran to destroy its alleged nuclear program. The true measure of how powerful the vice president’s office remains today is whether the United States chooses to confront Iran and Syria or to seek diplomatic solutions. For the moment, at least, the war party led by Dick Cheney remains in ascendancy.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent.

© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.




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