Tuesday, November 15, 2005
The RNC has just released a video chronicling Democrat hypocrisy.
Myopic Zeal :: RNC Video :: November :: 2005
Blogger Thoughts: The "War on Terrorism" has morphed into the "Propaganda War on Demoncrats."
Blogger Thoughts: The "War on Terrorism" has morphed into the "Propaganda War on Demoncrats."
Salon.com News | Gulf Coast slaves
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/15/halliburton_katrina/print.html
Gulf Coast slaves
Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.
By Roberto Lovato
Nov. 15, 2005 Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.
Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.
Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.
"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.
He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.
Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers.
Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers. These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and political cover.
Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO. Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions when performing this work."
Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up, chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.
I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport -- where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.
Cintra and other critics say there's been no accountability from the corporate leaders who signed on the dotted line when they were awarded multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contracts. "The workers may be hired by the subcontractors," Cintra says, "but KBR is ultimately responsible."
"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the proper conditions to protect them," adds Cintra, who recently provided tents to Martinez and several other unpaid Mexican workers who fled Belle Chasse for Gulfport after being dismissed by Tovar. Cintra, a Cuban exile and born-again Christian, has since seen a small tent city of homeless immigrants spring up in the yard of her church, Pass Road Baptist, in Gulfport. "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil," she says. "The Bush administration and Halliburton have opened up a Pandora's box that's not going to close now."
Halliburton/KBR is the general contractor with overarching responsibility for the federal cleanup contracts covering Katrina-damaged naval bases. Even so, there is an utter lack of transparency with the process -- and that invites malfeasance, says James Hale, a vice president of the Laborers' International Union of North America. "To my knowledge, not one member of Congress has been able to get their hands on a copy of a contract that was handed out to Halliburton or others," Hale says. "There is no central registry of Katrina contracts available. No data on the jobs or scope of the work." Hale says that his union's legislative staff has pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts because of "national security" concerns.
"If the contracts handed out to these primary contractors are opaque, then the contracts being let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible," Hale says. "There is simply no ability to ascertain or monitor the contractor-subcontractor relationships. This is an open invitation for exploitation, fraud and abuse."
Congress has heard a number of complaints recently about Halliburton/KBR's hiring practices, including the alleged exploitation of Filipino, Sri Lankan, Nepalese and other immigrant workers paid low wages on military installations in Iraq. And KBR subcontractor BE&K was a focus of Senate hearings in October, for the firing of 75 local Belle Chasse workers who said that they were replaced by "unskilled, out-of-state, out-of-country" workers earning $8 to $14 for work that typically paid $22 an hour.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has been an outspoken critic of the use of undocumented workers at Belle Chasse and on other Katrina cleanup jobs, said in a recent statement, "It is a downright shame that any contractor would use this tragedy as an opportunity to line its pockets by breaking the law and hiring a low-skilled, low-wage and undocumented work force."
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., is also against the practice, citing its "serious social ramifications." As he told Salon, it devastates "local workers who have been hit twice, because they lost their homes."
Seventeen-year-old Simitrio Martinez (no relation to Arnulfo) is another one of the dozens of workers originally hired by Tovar, the North Carolina job broker working under KBR. "They were going to pay seven dollars an hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing," says the thin Zapotec teenager. Simitrio spent nearly a month at the Seabee base. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else," he says.
Simitrio, his co-workers, and the dozens of KBR subcontractors that employ them operate under public-private agreements like federal Task Order 0017, which defines the scope of work to be fulfilled under the contracts. Under the multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contract, KBR is supposed to provide services for "Hurricane Katrina stabilization and recovery at Naval Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Air Station Gulfport, Stennis Space Center and other Navy installations in the Southeast Region," according to a Defense Department press release.
But the details of the agreements remain murky. "Not only is it very difficult to see the actual signed DoD contracts, but it is nearly impossible to see the actual task orders, which assign the goods or services the government is buying," says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. The military can ask for goods and services on an as-needed basis, he says, which means that the contracts, which add up to tens of millions of dollars, can remain open ended. According to DoD press statements, the contracts call for considerable manual labor, including "re-roofing of most buildings, barracks, debris removal from the entire base, water mitigation, mold mitigation, interior and exterior repairs to most buildings, waste treatment plants, and all incidental related work."
Simitrio and any other workers on the high-security military bases must get permission before entering the guarded gates, where they get patted down by M-16-wielding military police. Responsibility for getting private-sector construction and cleanup workers on the bases rests with the general contractor -- in KBR's case, security chief Kevin Flynn. One of Flynn's responsibilities is to negotiate passes and entry for KBR subcontractors -- and their hires -- to do the work stipulated by the task order.
Yet, following several complaints by Landrieu, and just a few days after President Bush visited the Belle Chasse base, agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency raided the facility and detained 10 workers who ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback said had "questionable" documentation.
Representatives of Halliburton/KBR do not acknowledge the existence of undocumented workers providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast bases. Flynn suggested speaking to the U.S. military, who he said "has real strict control" and would know whether there were undocumented workers. "We have workers from all ethnic groups on the base," Flynn said. "To the best of my knowledge, there are no undocumented workers."
Steve Romano, head of housing on the Belle Chasse base, said, "We have no relationship with [KBR] at all. I have no idea what that's about." A similar response was given by an official at the base's health facility when asked about undocumented workers who complained about health issues and injuries sustained on the KBR sites. The only military person to acknowledge seeing Latino workers was a watch commander who greeted me at an entry to the base. The commander estimated there were 100 such workers there. Meanwhile, representatives with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance say they received calls from undocumented workers at Belle Chasse who estimated there were more than 500, or "about eight busloads" of immigrant workers on-site.
Texas-based DRS Cosmotech is another subcontractor that provided cleanup crews to Halliburton/KBR in the Gulf. Roy Lee Donaldson, CEO of the company, refused to respond to accusations of non-payment and exploitation leveled at his company by several workers, including 55-year-old Felipe Reyes of Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. (Donaldson hung up the phone when I identified myself as a reporter.)
"Mr. Donaldson promised us we'd live in a hotel or a house. We lived in tents and only had hot water that smelled like petroleum," Reyes said. The city of Belle Chasse has been identified in recent years as one of the most toxically polluted areas in the entire region, with several major energy companies operating there. A wide range of advocacy groups have warned about serious health risks facing Katrina cleanup workers.
"They didn't want to pay us for two weeks of work. So we stopped working. We started a huelga [strike] on the base" added Reyes, who along with other workers, says he was later paid $1,100 -- only part of what he says he was owed.
Another KBR subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, says it is not responsible for keeping track of the workers. BE&K spokesperson Susan Wasley said, "I can't say that we require our subcontractors' employees to produce documentation for us, because that's what our subcontractor as employer has to do. That's his responsibility."
At the bottom of the KBR subcontracting pyramid are job brokers like Tovar and Gregorio Gonzalez, who helped hire laborers for Florida-based On Site Services, another subcontractor that reportedly failed to pay wages owed to workers in the Gulf Coast. The job brokers find workers by placing ads in Spanish-language newspapers like La Subasta and El Dia in Houston; the ads typically promise room, board and pay in the range of $1,200 a week. Job brokers also run television ads on Spanish-language stations like Univision. And they attend job fairs in places like Fresno, Calif.
Not all subcontractors refuse to discuss their links to KBR. Luis Sevilla is pretty open about it if you can get to the crowded hangar on the restricted premises of the Seabee naval base where he and his crew sleep and work. Sevilla put together crews for KBR subcontractors to remove asbestos and do other construction work; his workers told me they are paid and treated well. Asked about the people who own the R.V. with a "KBR" logo outside the hangar where his workers crowd into small tents, Sevilla says, "They contract with many, many companies." Interviews with members of Sevilla's crew revealed a number of undocumented workers.
Despite the evidence of undocumented workers cleaning up after Katrina, Halliburton/KBR maintains that it runs its operations within the bounds of the law. "KBR operates under a rigorous Code of Business Conduct that outlines legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors are expected to follow in every aspect of their work," spokesperson Norcross said by e-mail. (She did not respond to several requests for a phone interview.) "We do not tolerate any exceptions to this Code at any level of our company."
Standing in spitting distance of the KBR-branded R.V., which is parked as if it were guarding the hangar, Jose Ruiz of Nicaragua knows that his role in the Katrina cleanup is anonymous at best. "I don't have any papers, kind of like in that song by Sting -- 'I'm an illegal alien,'" says Ruiz, who lived in the United States for many years before arriving to work for Sevilla at the Seabee base. "That's the way it is."
-- By Roberto Lovato
Salon Media Group, Inc101 Spear Street, Suite 203San Francisco, CA 94105Telephone 415 645-9200Fax 415 645-9204
Gulf Coast slaves
Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.
By Roberto Lovato
Nov. 15, 2005 Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.
Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.
Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.
"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.
He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.
Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers.
Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers. These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and political cover.
Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO. Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions when performing this work."
Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up, chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.
I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport -- where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.
Cintra and other critics say there's been no accountability from the corporate leaders who signed on the dotted line when they were awarded multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contracts. "The workers may be hired by the subcontractors," Cintra says, "but KBR is ultimately responsible."
"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the proper conditions to protect them," adds Cintra, who recently provided tents to Martinez and several other unpaid Mexican workers who fled Belle Chasse for Gulfport after being dismissed by Tovar. Cintra, a Cuban exile and born-again Christian, has since seen a small tent city of homeless immigrants spring up in the yard of her church, Pass Road Baptist, in Gulfport. "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil," she says. "The Bush administration and Halliburton have opened up a Pandora's box that's not going to close now."
Halliburton/KBR is the general contractor with overarching responsibility for the federal cleanup contracts covering Katrina-damaged naval bases. Even so, there is an utter lack of transparency with the process -- and that invites malfeasance, says James Hale, a vice president of the Laborers' International Union of North America. "To my knowledge, not one member of Congress has been able to get their hands on a copy of a contract that was handed out to Halliburton or others," Hale says. "There is no central registry of Katrina contracts available. No data on the jobs or scope of the work." Hale says that his union's legislative staff has pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts because of "national security" concerns.
"If the contracts handed out to these primary contractors are opaque, then the contracts being let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible," Hale says. "There is simply no ability to ascertain or monitor the contractor-subcontractor relationships. This is an open invitation for exploitation, fraud and abuse."
Congress has heard a number of complaints recently about Halliburton/KBR's hiring practices, including the alleged exploitation of Filipino, Sri Lankan, Nepalese and other immigrant workers paid low wages on military installations in Iraq. And KBR subcontractor BE&K was a focus of Senate hearings in October, for the firing of 75 local Belle Chasse workers who said that they were replaced by "unskilled, out-of-state, out-of-country" workers earning $8 to $14 for work that typically paid $22 an hour.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has been an outspoken critic of the use of undocumented workers at Belle Chasse and on other Katrina cleanup jobs, said in a recent statement, "It is a downright shame that any contractor would use this tragedy as an opportunity to line its pockets by breaking the law and hiring a low-skilled, low-wage and undocumented work force."
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., is also against the practice, citing its "serious social ramifications." As he told Salon, it devastates "local workers who have been hit twice, because they lost their homes."
Seventeen-year-old Simitrio Martinez (no relation to Arnulfo) is another one of the dozens of workers originally hired by Tovar, the North Carolina job broker working under KBR. "They were going to pay seven dollars an hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing," says the thin Zapotec teenager. Simitrio spent nearly a month at the Seabee base. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else," he says.
Simitrio, his co-workers, and the dozens of KBR subcontractors that employ them operate under public-private agreements like federal Task Order 0017, which defines the scope of work to be fulfilled under the contracts. Under the multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contract, KBR is supposed to provide services for "Hurricane Katrina stabilization and recovery at Naval Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Air Station Gulfport, Stennis Space Center and other Navy installations in the Southeast Region," according to a Defense Department press release.
But the details of the agreements remain murky. "Not only is it very difficult to see the actual signed DoD contracts, but it is nearly impossible to see the actual task orders, which assign the goods or services the government is buying," says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. The military can ask for goods and services on an as-needed basis, he says, which means that the contracts, which add up to tens of millions of dollars, can remain open ended. According to DoD press statements, the contracts call for considerable manual labor, including "re-roofing of most buildings, barracks, debris removal from the entire base, water mitigation, mold mitigation, interior and exterior repairs to most buildings, waste treatment plants, and all incidental related work."
Simitrio and any other workers on the high-security military bases must get permission before entering the guarded gates, where they get patted down by M-16-wielding military police. Responsibility for getting private-sector construction and cleanup workers on the bases rests with the general contractor -- in KBR's case, security chief Kevin Flynn. One of Flynn's responsibilities is to negotiate passes and entry for KBR subcontractors -- and their hires -- to do the work stipulated by the task order.
Yet, following several complaints by Landrieu, and just a few days after President Bush visited the Belle Chasse base, agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency raided the facility and detained 10 workers who ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback said had "questionable" documentation.
Representatives of Halliburton/KBR do not acknowledge the existence of undocumented workers providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast bases. Flynn suggested speaking to the U.S. military, who he said "has real strict control" and would know whether there were undocumented workers. "We have workers from all ethnic groups on the base," Flynn said. "To the best of my knowledge, there are no undocumented workers."
Steve Romano, head of housing on the Belle Chasse base, said, "We have no relationship with [KBR] at all. I have no idea what that's about." A similar response was given by an official at the base's health facility when asked about undocumented workers who complained about health issues and injuries sustained on the KBR sites. The only military person to acknowledge seeing Latino workers was a watch commander who greeted me at an entry to the base. The commander estimated there were 100 such workers there. Meanwhile, representatives with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance say they received calls from undocumented workers at Belle Chasse who estimated there were more than 500, or "about eight busloads" of immigrant workers on-site.
Texas-based DRS Cosmotech is another subcontractor that provided cleanup crews to Halliburton/KBR in the Gulf. Roy Lee Donaldson, CEO of the company, refused to respond to accusations of non-payment and exploitation leveled at his company by several workers, including 55-year-old Felipe Reyes of Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. (Donaldson hung up the phone when I identified myself as a reporter.)
"Mr. Donaldson promised us we'd live in a hotel or a house. We lived in tents and only had hot water that smelled like petroleum," Reyes said. The city of Belle Chasse has been identified in recent years as one of the most toxically polluted areas in the entire region, with several major energy companies operating there. A wide range of advocacy groups have warned about serious health risks facing Katrina cleanup workers.
"They didn't want to pay us for two weeks of work. So we stopped working. We started a huelga [strike] on the base" added Reyes, who along with other workers, says he was later paid $1,100 -- only part of what he says he was owed.
Another KBR subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, says it is not responsible for keeping track of the workers. BE&K spokesperson Susan Wasley said, "I can't say that we require our subcontractors' employees to produce documentation for us, because that's what our subcontractor as employer has to do. That's his responsibility."
At the bottom of the KBR subcontracting pyramid are job brokers like Tovar and Gregorio Gonzalez, who helped hire laborers for Florida-based On Site Services, another subcontractor that reportedly failed to pay wages owed to workers in the Gulf Coast. The job brokers find workers by placing ads in Spanish-language newspapers like La Subasta and El Dia in Houston; the ads typically promise room, board and pay in the range of $1,200 a week. Job brokers also run television ads on Spanish-language stations like Univision. And they attend job fairs in places like Fresno, Calif.
Not all subcontractors refuse to discuss their links to KBR. Luis Sevilla is pretty open about it if you can get to the crowded hangar on the restricted premises of the Seabee naval base where he and his crew sleep and work. Sevilla put together crews for KBR subcontractors to remove asbestos and do other construction work; his workers told me they are paid and treated well. Asked about the people who own the R.V. with a "KBR" logo outside the hangar where his workers crowd into small tents, Sevilla says, "They contract with many, many companies." Interviews with members of Sevilla's crew revealed a number of undocumented workers.
Despite the evidence of undocumented workers cleaning up after Katrina, Halliburton/KBR maintains that it runs its operations within the bounds of the law. "KBR operates under a rigorous Code of Business Conduct that outlines legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors are expected to follow in every aspect of their work," spokesperson Norcross said by e-mail. (She did not respond to several requests for a phone interview.) "We do not tolerate any exceptions to this Code at any level of our company."
Standing in spitting distance of the KBR-branded R.V., which is parked as if it were guarding the hangar, Jose Ruiz of Nicaragua knows that his role in the Katrina cleanup is anonymous at best. "I don't have any papers, kind of like in that song by Sting -- 'I'm an illegal alien,'" says Ruiz, who lived in the United States for many years before arriving to work for Sevilla at the Seabee base. "That's the way it is."
-- By Roberto Lovato
Salon Media Group, Inc101 Spear Street, Suite 203San Francisco, CA 94105Telephone 415 645-9200Fax 415 645-9204
Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials - New York Times
Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials - New York Times
November 15, 2005
Editorial
Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials
To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.
Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.
It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.
•
Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.
Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.
It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.
The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.
The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.
Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.
Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.
Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.
•
The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.
Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.
November 15, 2005
Editorial
Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials
To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.
Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.
It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.
•
Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.
Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.
It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.
The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.
The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.
Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.
Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.
Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.
•
The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.
Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.
[Professors:]...Demolition Most Likely Brought Down the WTC and Further Investigation Is Needed
Articles, government corruption, freedom of speech, truth
Professor Steven E. Jones is another in the long line of conservatives in the political and academic world joining the 9/11 truth movement and asking to open up further investigations on the true cause of 9/11.13 Nov 2005
By Greg Szymanski
The BYU physics professor who believes the WTC collapsed from a controlled demolition isn’t alone in the academic community, as a group of more than 60 colleagues from two universities also agreed with Professor Steven E. Jones’ conclusions.
Jones told the Arctic Beacon Saturday in a telephone conversation from Provo, Utah, he first presented his explosive conclusions at Brigham Young University (BYU) on September 22, to 60 people from the BYU and Utah Valley State College faculties, including professors of Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Mathematics and Psychology.
After presently scientific arguments in favor of the controlled demolition theory, Jones said everyone in attendance from all backgrounds, conservative and liberal, were in total agreement further investigation was needed.
“I was quite surprised how my conclusions were received,” said Jones, adding he plans to give two continue telling the public how he came to his startling conclusions essentially ripping apart the official government story that jet fuel brought down the towers, including Building 7.
“In fact, after I researched how Building 7 fell, I am certain there existed pre-positioned explosives to bring down the three buildings.”
Jones added that the contingent of faculty members at the September seminar were all in agreement that the government needed to “come clean” and release more that 6,900 photographs and close to 7,000 segments of video footage, now being held from independent investigation by the FBI and other agencies.
Since day one, the Bush administration has safely guarded much of the 9/11evidence, including the WTC steel hauled away by FEMA and eye-witness testimony of basement explosions censored by the 9/11 Commission and the state sponsored press, as well as discrediting many other scientists or academics like Jones who have disagreed with the official story.
“We are calling for the release of all the data, including the videos and photos, in order that a cross-disciplinary, preferably international team of scientists and engineers can reach an independent conclusion,” said Jones, adding all 60 professors in attendance agreed with this course of action.
“Since I decided to come forward with my findings, I have found the people in the 9/11 community very supportive and helpful. I hope my contribution will one day help get at the truth of what really happened and specifically how the towers collapsed.”
Jones’ theory on the way the towers collapsed was presented in a 9,000 word formal paper already approved for publication in an upcoming academic journal. The following is a partial explanation of how and why he came to his conclusions that the WTC most likely collapsed due to pre-positioned explosives. He writes:
“In writing this paper, I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned explosives.
“I consider the official FEMA, NIST, and 9-11 Commission reports that fires plus damage alone caused complete collapses of all three buildings. And I present evidence for the explosive-demolition hypothesis, which is suggested by the available data, testable and falsifiable, and yet has not been analyzed in any of the reports funded by the US government.
And the reasoning behind his conclusions can be summed up as follows:
• The three buildings collapsed nearly symmetrically, falling down into their footprints, a phenomenon associated with "controlled demolition" — and even then it's very difficult, he says. "Why would terrorists undertake straight-down collapses of WTC-7 and the Towers when 'toppling over' falls would require much less work and would do much more damage in downtown Manhattan?" Jones asks. "And where would they obtain the necessary skills and access to the buildings for a symmetrical implosion anyway? The 'symmetry data' emphasized here, along with other data, provide strong evidence for an 'inside' job."
• No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns, he says.
• WTC 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes, collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. "Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?" he asks. "That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors — and intact steel support columns — the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass. . . . How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?" The paradox, he says, "is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses." These observations were not analyzed by FEMA, NIST nor the 9/11 Commission, he says.
• With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattering concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling, he says. "How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing — and demanding scrutiny since the U.S. government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon."
• Horizontal puffs of smoke, known as squibs, were observed proceeding up the side the building, a phenomenon common when pre-positioned explosives are used to demolish buildings, he says.
• Steel supports were "partly evaporated," but it would require temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaporate steel — and neither office materials nor diesel fuel can generate temperatures that hot. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in any given location, he says.
• Molten metal found in the debris of the World Trade Center may have been the result of a high-temperature reaction of a commonly used explosive such as thermite, he says. Buildings not felled by explosives "have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal," Jones says.
• Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck, he says.
Jones will also be appearing on Greg Szymanski’s radio show called “The Investigative Journal” on the Republic Broadcasting Network at www.rbnlive.com on Monday at 12 noon central time.
For Jones’ full report go to www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.
Professor Steven E. Jones is another in the long line of conservatives in the political and academic world joining the 9/11 truth movement and asking to open up further investigations on the true cause of 9/11.13 Nov 2005
By Greg Szymanski
The BYU physics professor who believes the WTC collapsed from a controlled demolition isn’t alone in the academic community, as a group of more than 60 colleagues from two universities also agreed with Professor Steven E. Jones’ conclusions.
Jones told the Arctic Beacon Saturday in a telephone conversation from Provo, Utah, he first presented his explosive conclusions at Brigham Young University (BYU) on September 22, to 60 people from the BYU and Utah Valley State College faculties, including professors of Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Mathematics and Psychology.
After presently scientific arguments in favor of the controlled demolition theory, Jones said everyone in attendance from all backgrounds, conservative and liberal, were in total agreement further investigation was needed.
“I was quite surprised how my conclusions were received,” said Jones, adding he plans to give two continue telling the public how he came to his startling conclusions essentially ripping apart the official government story that jet fuel brought down the towers, including Building 7.
“In fact, after I researched how Building 7 fell, I am certain there existed pre-positioned explosives to bring down the three buildings.”
Jones added that the contingent of faculty members at the September seminar were all in agreement that the government needed to “come clean” and release more that 6,900 photographs and close to 7,000 segments of video footage, now being held from independent investigation by the FBI and other agencies.
Since day one, the Bush administration has safely guarded much of the 9/11evidence, including the WTC steel hauled away by FEMA and eye-witness testimony of basement explosions censored by the 9/11 Commission and the state sponsored press, as well as discrediting many other scientists or academics like Jones who have disagreed with the official story.
“We are calling for the release of all the data, including the videos and photos, in order that a cross-disciplinary, preferably international team of scientists and engineers can reach an independent conclusion,” said Jones, adding all 60 professors in attendance agreed with this course of action.
“Since I decided to come forward with my findings, I have found the people in the 9/11 community very supportive and helpful. I hope my contribution will one day help get at the truth of what really happened and specifically how the towers collapsed.”
Jones’ theory on the way the towers collapsed was presented in a 9,000 word formal paper already approved for publication in an upcoming academic journal. The following is a partial explanation of how and why he came to his conclusions that the WTC most likely collapsed due to pre-positioned explosives. He writes:
“In writing this paper, I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned explosives.
“I consider the official FEMA, NIST, and 9-11 Commission reports that fires plus damage alone caused complete collapses of all three buildings. And I present evidence for the explosive-demolition hypothesis, which is suggested by the available data, testable and falsifiable, and yet has not been analyzed in any of the reports funded by the US government.
And the reasoning behind his conclusions can be summed up as follows:
• The three buildings collapsed nearly symmetrically, falling down into their footprints, a phenomenon associated with "controlled demolition" — and even then it's very difficult, he says. "Why would terrorists undertake straight-down collapses of WTC-7 and the Towers when 'toppling over' falls would require much less work and would do much more damage in downtown Manhattan?" Jones asks. "And where would they obtain the necessary skills and access to the buildings for a symmetrical implosion anyway? The 'symmetry data' emphasized here, along with other data, provide strong evidence for an 'inside' job."
• No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns, he says.
• WTC 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes, collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. "Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?" he asks. "That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors — and intact steel support columns — the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass. . . . How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?" The paradox, he says, "is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses." These observations were not analyzed by FEMA, NIST nor the 9/11 Commission, he says.
• With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattering concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling, he says. "How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing — and demanding scrutiny since the U.S. government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon."
• Horizontal puffs of smoke, known as squibs, were observed proceeding up the side the building, a phenomenon common when pre-positioned explosives are used to demolish buildings, he says.
• Steel supports were "partly evaporated," but it would require temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaporate steel — and neither office materials nor diesel fuel can generate temperatures that hot. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in any given location, he says.
• Molten metal found in the debris of the World Trade Center may have been the result of a high-temperature reaction of a commonly used explosive such as thermite, he says. Buildings not felled by explosives "have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal," Jones says.
• Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck, he says.
Jones will also be appearing on Greg Szymanski’s radio show called “The Investigative Journal” on the Republic Broadcasting Network at www.rbnlive.com on Monday at 12 noon central time.
For Jones’ full report go to www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.
BYU NewsNet - Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation
BYU NewsNet - Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation
BYU NewsNet
Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation
Photo by Dana Tanner
Steve Jones, a BYU physics professor, explains his ideas on the September 11 attacks. He hypothesized, based on the evidence he has researched, explosives were planted in the buildings, casing them to crumble. Daily Universe
14 Nov 2005
By Ryan McIlvain
BYU Physics Professor Steven E. Jones doesn't look like a conspiracy theorist. Sitting in his office in the Eyring Science Center, he's wearing a button-up shirt, dress slacks, matching socks. He's soft-spoken, polite — the picture of the mild-mannered professor.
What's more, Jones doesn't sound like a conspiracy theorist. He won't try to tell you about second gunmen on grassy knolls or trick photography with the Apollo 11 mission. Nothing like that has really swayed him before.
But now, what he will try to tell you, in his quiet, confident way, is that official explanations of what happened on Sept. 11 — that the World Trade Center buildings collapsed from damage and superheated fires — are shaky, if not unscientific.
"It just does not add up," says Jones, referring specifically to the 47-story building known as WTC 7. "It doesn't add up that this [collapse] was caused by planes hitting the other buildings."
Jones, who studies fusion and solar energy at BYU, has lately turned his attention to Sept. 11 research and has turned more than a few heads in the process.
In a paper posted online Tuesday, Jones suggests that "pre-positioned explosives," not planes, were what brought down the three World Trade Center buildings — the two Twin Towers and WTC 7. Jones' article, which has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.
Two days after Jones' article appeared, The Deseret Morning News ran a front-page story on it. Later that night it made the evening news.
The media attention is welcome, Jones says, especially as it drums up interest in the scientific community, from which Jones hopes to cull an independent, international investigative team that would consider his "explosive demolition hypothesis."
"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes in his article. "Muslims are (probably) not to blame after all."
Jones says previous government investigations, including those by FEMA, the 9/11 Commission and NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology), failed to address even the possibility of pre-planted explosives. This, despite the fact that WTC 7 wasn't even hit by a plane and that fire damage has never brought down a steel building before or since Sept. 11, he says.
"[WTC 7] is the most mysterious collapse and it does suggest an inside job," Jones says. "If the explosive hypothesis…" He corrects himself: "If the explosive demolition hypothesis — it is rather explosive — if this hypothesis is correct, that would imply an inside job because to bring a building down symmetrically using explosives … takes a lot of planning."
Pressed about the implications of his hypothesis, Jones leans back in his chair and says, "Okay, let me back up."
He mentions a few lesser-known details about the Sept. 11 attacks, appending little comments like "and that's a fact" or "and that's on tape" at several points along the way:
Larry Silverstein, WTC leaseholder, insured the buildings against terrorist attack for billions of dollars less than two months before Sept. 11, Jones says.
The towers were loaded with asbestos — "not anymore," Jones adds, "but they were. There was discussion for a long time: 'We've got to either get rid of the asbestos in these buildings or take them down and start over.'"
In the aftermath of the buildings' collapse, Silverstein said of WTC 7, "We decided to pull it." Jones says "pull" is a common demolition term. "To pull a building means you initiate the demolition."
Much of the steel from the collapsed towers was shipped to Asia for recycling, Jones says. "This was done over the objections of serious scientists and engineers, saying, 'Look, you're destroying evidence. We want to know how fire and damage could have possibly caused these buildings to collapse.'"
"You didn't know that, did you?" Jones says. He leans back farther in his chair. "We need an investigation," he says again.
When asked if he's afraid of getting brushed aside as a conspiracy theorist, Jones says, "Brushing things aside without reading a serious paper, well, that would be an unfortunate thing."
The professor says he's content to let stock labels like "conspiracy theorist" and "fringe author" fly where they will. As a scientist, his responsibility is to the truth, he says.
At this Jones swivels his chair around to face the computer, accesses his paper online, and brings up several video clips of WTC 7's collapse.
One clip is from the CBS Evening News. You watch the 47-story tower tremble, dip slightly in the middle, then drop beneath the cityscape. You hear Dan Rather's distinctive voice: "It's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen of buildings that are deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite …"
Jones replays the clip. "That's a perfect demolition," he says. "It's just what they shoot for. Middle goes down, they pull the core supports, the sides lean in, and then it goes straight down at near free-fall speed.
"And again, I'm not saying this proves it," he adds. "There's just a lot of evidence, and so it needs to be investigated."
Now Jones shows a different clip, from a different angle. The building trembles, dips, falls again.
"See that fall?" Jones says. "It's symmetric. Notice it dips in the middle. Did you see that? It dips in the middle first, which implies that the core supports there in the middle were pulled before the other supports. And that's common for demolition."
In his paper, Jones says the Twin Towers dipped in a similar way. He includes video footage of the north tower's antenna dropping some 10 feet before the rest of the tower begins to move.
"We look at the collapse of the tower's themselves," Jones says, "and there are a number of mysteries there as well."
Given the implications of Jones' research, the professor says he was extra careful in preparing it. He stresses how the paper was peer-reviewed and then explains something of that rigorous, anonymous process.
"If it hadn't been peer-reviewed," he says, "I wouldn't be talking about it now."
He also mentions the seminar he gave — on Sept. 22, as it happened — to a group of colleagues from the BYU Physics and Astronomy Department. It was a sort of dry-run test for how his research would be received, a final behind-closed-doors check before he went public with his provocative suggestions.
After the seminar, all but one of Jones' colleagues said they agreed an investigation was in order, Jones says. And the lone dissenter, physics professor Harold Stokes, came around the next day.
BYU NewsNet
Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation
Photo by Dana Tanner
Steve Jones, a BYU physics professor, explains his ideas on the September 11 attacks. He hypothesized, based on the evidence he has researched, explosives were planted in the buildings, casing them to crumble. Daily Universe
14 Nov 2005
By Ryan McIlvain
BYU Physics Professor Steven E. Jones doesn't look like a conspiracy theorist. Sitting in his office in the Eyring Science Center, he's wearing a button-up shirt, dress slacks, matching socks. He's soft-spoken, polite — the picture of the mild-mannered professor.
What's more, Jones doesn't sound like a conspiracy theorist. He won't try to tell you about second gunmen on grassy knolls or trick photography with the Apollo 11 mission. Nothing like that has really swayed him before.
But now, what he will try to tell you, in his quiet, confident way, is that official explanations of what happened on Sept. 11 — that the World Trade Center buildings collapsed from damage and superheated fires — are shaky, if not unscientific.
"It just does not add up," says Jones, referring specifically to the 47-story building known as WTC 7. "It doesn't add up that this [collapse] was caused by planes hitting the other buildings."
Jones, who studies fusion and solar energy at BYU, has lately turned his attention to Sept. 11 research and has turned more than a few heads in the process.
In a paper posted online Tuesday, Jones suggests that "pre-positioned explosives," not planes, were what brought down the three World Trade Center buildings — the two Twin Towers and WTC 7. Jones' article, which has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.
Two days after Jones' article appeared, The Deseret Morning News ran a front-page story on it. Later that night it made the evening news.
The media attention is welcome, Jones says, especially as it drums up interest in the scientific community, from which Jones hopes to cull an independent, international investigative team that would consider his "explosive demolition hypothesis."
"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes in his article. "Muslims are (probably) not to blame after all."
Jones says previous government investigations, including those by FEMA, the 9/11 Commission and NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology), failed to address even the possibility of pre-planted explosives. This, despite the fact that WTC 7 wasn't even hit by a plane and that fire damage has never brought down a steel building before or since Sept. 11, he says.
"[WTC 7] is the most mysterious collapse and it does suggest an inside job," Jones says. "If the explosive hypothesis…" He corrects himself: "If the explosive demolition hypothesis — it is rather explosive — if this hypothesis is correct, that would imply an inside job because to bring a building down symmetrically using explosives … takes a lot of planning."
Pressed about the implications of his hypothesis, Jones leans back in his chair and says, "Okay, let me back up."
He mentions a few lesser-known details about the Sept. 11 attacks, appending little comments like "and that's a fact" or "and that's on tape" at several points along the way:
Larry Silverstein, WTC leaseholder, insured the buildings against terrorist attack for billions of dollars less than two months before Sept. 11, Jones says.
The towers were loaded with asbestos — "not anymore," Jones adds, "but they were. There was discussion for a long time: 'We've got to either get rid of the asbestos in these buildings or take them down and start over.'"
In the aftermath of the buildings' collapse, Silverstein said of WTC 7, "We decided to pull it." Jones says "pull" is a common demolition term. "To pull a building means you initiate the demolition."
Much of the steel from the collapsed towers was shipped to Asia for recycling, Jones says. "This was done over the objections of serious scientists and engineers, saying, 'Look, you're destroying evidence. We want to know how fire and damage could have possibly caused these buildings to collapse.'"
"You didn't know that, did you?" Jones says. He leans back farther in his chair. "We need an investigation," he says again.
When asked if he's afraid of getting brushed aside as a conspiracy theorist, Jones says, "Brushing things aside without reading a serious paper, well, that would be an unfortunate thing."
The professor says he's content to let stock labels like "conspiracy theorist" and "fringe author" fly where they will. As a scientist, his responsibility is to the truth, he says.
At this Jones swivels his chair around to face the computer, accesses his paper online, and brings up several video clips of WTC 7's collapse.
One clip is from the CBS Evening News. You watch the 47-story tower tremble, dip slightly in the middle, then drop beneath the cityscape. You hear Dan Rather's distinctive voice: "It's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen of buildings that are deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite …"
Jones replays the clip. "That's a perfect demolition," he says. "It's just what they shoot for. Middle goes down, they pull the core supports, the sides lean in, and then it goes straight down at near free-fall speed.
"And again, I'm not saying this proves it," he adds. "There's just a lot of evidence, and so it needs to be investigated."
Now Jones shows a different clip, from a different angle. The building trembles, dips, falls again.
"See that fall?" Jones says. "It's symmetric. Notice it dips in the middle. Did you see that? It dips in the middle first, which implies that the core supports there in the middle were pulled before the other supports. And that's common for demolition."
In his paper, Jones says the Twin Towers dipped in a similar way. He includes video footage of the north tower's antenna dropping some 10 feet before the rest of the tower begins to move.
"We look at the collapse of the tower's themselves," Jones says, "and there are a number of mysteries there as well."
Given the implications of Jones' research, the professor says he was extra careful in preparing it. He stresses how the paper was peer-reviewed and then explains something of that rigorous, anonymous process.
"If it hadn't been peer-reviewed," he says, "I wouldn't be talking about it now."
He also mentions the seminar he gave — on Sept. 22, as it happened — to a group of colleagues from the BYU Physics and Astronomy Department. It was a sort of dry-run test for how his research would be received, a final behind-closed-doors check before he went public with his provocative suggestions.
After the seminar, all but one of Jones' colleagues said they agreed an investigation was in order, Jones says. And the lone dissenter, physics professor Harold Stokes, came around the next day.
Kate/A/blog: Ceiling Bomb
Kate/A/blog: Ceiling Bomb
Monday, November 14, 2005
Ceiling Bomb
Bomb in ceiling caused Jordan hotel blast. Amman-A blast at the Radisson hotel in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday was caused by a bomb placed in a false ceiling, police sources at the scene told Reuters. I suppose this story will disappear down the memory hole?AMMAN - The Iraqi wife of a suicide bomber made a chilling confession on Jordanian state TV Sunday, saying she also tried to blow herself up during a hotel wedding reception last week but the explosives concealed under her denim dress failed to detonate.Al-Rishawi was shown on state television wearing a white head scarf, a buttoned, body-length dark denim dress, and belts packed with explosives and ball bearings. Still wearing her bomb on Sunday's TV confession - and look how she utilizes duct tape.
posted by Kate-A 11/14/2005 09:54:00 PM PermaLink
1 Comments:
Anonymous said...
wife of suicide bomber story...reminiscent of Hill and Knowlton's pr extravaganza with fake Kuwaiti nurse telling stories of babies being hurled from incubators onto floors by evil Iraqi soldiers pre-Iraq 1? yeah, those staged photo ops really convince me now....NOT!peace kate, et al...
Monday, November 14, 2005
Ceiling Bomb
Bomb in ceiling caused Jordan hotel blast. Amman-A blast at the Radisson hotel in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday was caused by a bomb placed in a false ceiling, police sources at the scene told Reuters. I suppose this story will disappear down the memory hole?AMMAN - The Iraqi wife of a suicide bomber made a chilling confession on Jordanian state TV Sunday, saying she also tried to blow herself up during a hotel wedding reception last week but the explosives concealed under her denim dress failed to detonate.Al-Rishawi was shown on state television wearing a white head scarf, a buttoned, body-length dark denim dress, and belts packed with explosives and ball bearings. Still wearing her bomb on Sunday's TV confession - and look how she utilizes duct tape.
posted by Kate-A 11/14/2005 09:54:00 PM PermaLink
1 Comments:
Anonymous said...
wife of suicide bomber story...reminiscent of Hill and Knowlton's pr extravaganza with fake Kuwaiti nurse telling stories of babies being hurled from incubators onto floors by evil Iraqi soldiers pre-Iraq 1? yeah, those staged photo ops really convince me now....NOT!peace kate, et al...
wingtv.net 11/11/05 - Google Video: WTC Demolition Steven E. Jones
wingtv.net 11/11/05 - Google Video
Tags: wingtv.net 11/11/05 - Google Video: WTC Demolition Steven E. Jones 9/11 Cover-Up
Tags: wingtv.net 11/11/05 - Google Video: WTC Demolition Steven E. Jones 9/11 Cover-Up
Joe's Dartblog: Does Senator John Kerry Read Newspapers?
Joe's Dartblog: Does Senator John Kerry Read Newspapers?
Blogger Thoughts: Of course, there is very little I agree with in Joe's Post. However, Kerry's performance at a persuasive politician is subject to criticism on any number of issues over the past years.
If the Dems wanted to have a strong case, why wouldn't they prepare a joint statement that a large number signed on to? I certainly don't want to jump to the conclusion that it's Harry Reid's fault, or that it's Howard Dean's fault. It is certainly disappointing.
I think it's fair to ask anyone who knows the heinous crimes that our Nation is committing: How can you imagine supporting the Republican or the Democratic Party?
Blogger Thoughts: Of course, there is very little I agree with in Joe's Post. However, Kerry's performance at a persuasive politician is subject to criticism on any number of issues over the past years.
If the Dems wanted to have a strong case, why wouldn't they prepare a joint statement that a large number signed on to? I certainly don't want to jump to the conclusion that it's Harry Reid's fault, or that it's Howard Dean's fault. It is certainly disappointing.
I think it's fair to ask anyone who knows the heinous crimes that our Nation is committing: How can you imagine supporting the Republican or the Democratic Party?
911 Dutch Treat? One must also ask, if the 9/11 surveillance tapes at these airports do in fact exist, why haven't we seen them?
911 Dutch Treat?
By Stephen M. St. Johnmetatron.metatron@verizon.net11-15-5
Why haven't we seen the routine video surveillance tapes of ANY of the passengers alleged to have boarded the ill-fated 9/11 flights at Boston's Logan, Newark's Liberty and Washington's Dulles international airports?
Will two lips in Holland end the 9/11 coverup?
NEW YORK -- Those who have bothered to read the 9/11 skeptics know about the extraordinary "coincidences" that took place that fateful morning. One of them happens to be the lack of routine video surveillance tapes of ANY of the passengers alleged to have boarded the ill-fated flights at Boston's Logan, Newark's Liberty and Washington's Dulles international airports.
The 9/11 Commission simply ignored this issue even though it can be fairly said that not only did the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington originate at these airport gates, but so did the resulting invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Why haven't we seen these video tapes? Why has the Fourth Estate failed to ask, Why haven't we seen these video tapes? Why the conspiracy of silence?
Well, the answer may very well lie in Holland. You see, security at some if not all of these airport gates of 9/11 was in the hands of an American minimum-wage subsidiary of a Dutch corporation called ICTS-International. What is most remarkable about this arrangement is that the Dutch corporation ICTS-International was, as of 9/11, Dutch in name only. An early 2003 check of its web-site showed a Board of Directors consisting entirely of nationals of the Zionist state with the single exception of the Comptroller, who apparently was the nominal Dutchman. And if I need to clue in the clueless, the Zionists were hellbent on finding a reason for the USA to invade Iraq. And it would be fair to say that these Zionists of ICTS-International were the gatekeepers of 9/11 and all that followed, such as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Interesting, eh?
But the story gets even wilder. Not long after 9/11, the chairman of ICTS, Ezra Harel, whose surname is famous in the annals of the Mossad, died suddenly of a heart attack in his early 50s on his yacht off the coast of Palestine. Talk about not being available for comment!
But that's not the kicker. Hours before the House version of the first Patriot Act went to a vote, "technical corrections" were inserted into the body of the legislation whereby foreign security companies such as ICTS-International would be immune from lawsuits related to the events of 9/11. Talk about not being available for deposition! This "Patriot" act legislative sleight of hand occurred before the inception of the 9/11 Commission when Fearless Leader George W. Bush was still resisting the very IDEA of an investigation into 9/11. Hence, in the face of an institutional cover-up, citizens were denied the possibility of a discovery process which is normally afforded to litigants. Without such discovery process, ICTS-International would never be compelled by a court of law to give testimony and show evidence related to the missing airport video surveillance tapes of 9/11 or any other aspect of security measures in place on 9/11.
The legal situation has since changed and ICTS-International is now a co-defendant in a lawsuit in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. (see www.sept11tortlitigation.com) More about this will follow.
And so, we are supposed to believe that even as multiple NORAD drills were underway, video surveillance tapes from multiple cameras at multiple locations in three different "Category X" high security international airports just happened to fail to capture images of ANY of the passengers - the good, the bad and the ugly - about to board the ill-fated flights of 9/11! As many 9/11 skeptics already know, what I have just described here is just one aspect of the BIG LIE about 9/11. Some of the answers to our national security problem will be found in Holland. That is for sure!
But there are those who will insist that they have seen on television video surveillance tapes of the hijackers of 9/11 and are satisfied with the official explanation of what happened on that fateful day.
However, these people are confused by the tape repeatedly shown on TV of two of the alleged hijackers (Mohammad Atta being one of them) passing through a security checkpoint at Portland Maine International Airport to take a connecting flight to Boston on the morning of 11 September 2001.
This Portland tape has no timestamp, which makes it suspect. Also, even IF the tape were genuine, it does not place either of the two young Arabs at Logan International Airport.
Nearly all Americans were lulled into believing that the Portland, Maine tape was sufficient proof when it was not. People were mesmerized by the repeated showing of this tape on TV and in their emotional state did not realize exactly what they were looking at and what they weren't looking at.
Also, yet another tape was shown in the 24 hour interval leading to the official release of the 9/11 Commission Report; however, this tape, released to the news media by the South Carolina law firm Motley Rice LLC, was almost immediately withdrawn because it quickly became apparent that it was bogus. This Motley Rice surveillance tape purportedly showed two young Arabs boarding flight 77 at Dulles International Airport on the morning of 9/11. But again, just like the Portland Maine tape, there is no timestamp, which makes it suspect. Beyond that, as pointed out by the late, great Internet researcher/writer Joe Vialls, who some believe is really Ari Ben-Menashe (see www.judicial-inc.biz), the shadows appearing just outside the terminal door are those you would expect to see at midday rather than in the early morning. Moreover, the surveillance camera is no ordinary surveillance camera; for the tape reveals a panning camera focused on the two young Arabs and then zooming in on them and then moving left as they move left instead of following the pretty blonde lady who was going to the right. Clearly, some person unknown at some time unknown was filming these young Arab men for a specific but unknown reason.
This Motley Rice film was never shown again because of the critical eyes of researchers, many of whom preserved copies of the mysterious tape in their computers.
In consideration of the foregoing, one must conclude that no tape has EVER been shown that reveals ANY of the passengers boarding the 9/11 flights out of Boston's Logan, Newark's Liberty and Washington's Dulles international airports.
One must also ask, if the 9/11 surveillance tapes at these airports do in fact exist, why haven't we seen them? And if they do not even exist, how can this be explained?
By Stephen M. St. Johnmetatron.metatron@verizon.net11-15-5
Why haven't we seen the routine video surveillance tapes of ANY of the passengers alleged to have boarded the ill-fated 9/11 flights at Boston's Logan, Newark's Liberty and Washington's Dulles international airports?
Will two lips in Holland end the 9/11 coverup?
NEW YORK -- Those who have bothered to read the 9/11 skeptics know about the extraordinary "coincidences" that took place that fateful morning. One of them happens to be the lack of routine video surveillance tapes of ANY of the passengers alleged to have boarded the ill-fated flights at Boston's Logan, Newark's Liberty and Washington's Dulles international airports.
The 9/11 Commission simply ignored this issue even though it can be fairly said that not only did the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington originate at these airport gates, but so did the resulting invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Why haven't we seen these video tapes? Why has the Fourth Estate failed to ask, Why haven't we seen these video tapes? Why the conspiracy of silence?
Well, the answer may very well lie in Holland. You see, security at some if not all of these airport gates of 9/11 was in the hands of an American minimum-wage subsidiary of a Dutch corporation called ICTS-International. What is most remarkable about this arrangement is that the Dutch corporation ICTS-International was, as of 9/11, Dutch in name only. An early 2003 check of its web-site showed a Board of Directors consisting entirely of nationals of the Zionist state with the single exception of the Comptroller, who apparently was the nominal Dutchman. And if I need to clue in the clueless, the Zionists were hellbent on finding a reason for the USA to invade Iraq. And it would be fair to say that these Zionists of ICTS-International were the gatekeepers of 9/11 and all that followed, such as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Interesting, eh?
But the story gets even wilder. Not long after 9/11, the chairman of ICTS, Ezra Harel, whose surname is famous in the annals of the Mossad, died suddenly of a heart attack in his early 50s on his yacht off the coast of Palestine. Talk about not being available for comment!
But that's not the kicker. Hours before the House version of the first Patriot Act went to a vote, "technical corrections" were inserted into the body of the legislation whereby foreign security companies such as ICTS-International would be immune from lawsuits related to the events of 9/11. Talk about not being available for deposition! This "Patriot" act legislative sleight of hand occurred before the inception of the 9/11 Commission when Fearless Leader George W. Bush was still resisting the very IDEA of an investigation into 9/11. Hence, in the face of an institutional cover-up, citizens were denied the possibility of a discovery process which is normally afforded to litigants. Without such discovery process, ICTS-International would never be compelled by a court of law to give testimony and show evidence related to the missing airport video surveillance tapes of 9/11 or any other aspect of security measures in place on 9/11.
The legal situation has since changed and ICTS-International is now a co-defendant in a lawsuit in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. (see www.sept11tortlitigation.com) More about this will follow.
And so, we are supposed to believe that even as multiple NORAD drills were underway, video surveillance tapes from multiple cameras at multiple locations in three different "Category X" high security international airports just happened to fail to capture images of ANY of the passengers - the good, the bad and the ugly - about to board the ill-fated flights of 9/11! As many 9/11 skeptics already know, what I have just described here is just one aspect of the BIG LIE about 9/11. Some of the answers to our national security problem will be found in Holland. That is for sure!
But there are those who will insist that they have seen on television video surveillance tapes of the hijackers of 9/11 and are satisfied with the official explanation of what happened on that fateful day.
However, these people are confused by the tape repeatedly shown on TV of two of the alleged hijackers (Mohammad Atta being one of them) passing through a security checkpoint at Portland Maine International Airport to take a connecting flight to Boston on the morning of 11 September 2001.
This Portland tape has no timestamp, which makes it suspect. Also, even IF the tape were genuine, it does not place either of the two young Arabs at Logan International Airport.
Nearly all Americans were lulled into believing that the Portland, Maine tape was sufficient proof when it was not. People were mesmerized by the repeated showing of this tape on TV and in their emotional state did not realize exactly what they were looking at and what they weren't looking at.
Also, yet another tape was shown in the 24 hour interval leading to the official release of the 9/11 Commission Report; however, this tape, released to the news media by the South Carolina law firm Motley Rice LLC, was almost immediately withdrawn because it quickly became apparent that it was bogus. This Motley Rice surveillance tape purportedly showed two young Arabs boarding flight 77 at Dulles International Airport on the morning of 9/11. But again, just like the Portland Maine tape, there is no timestamp, which makes it suspect. Beyond that, as pointed out by the late, great Internet researcher/writer Joe Vialls, who some believe is really Ari Ben-Menashe (see www.judicial-inc.biz), the shadows appearing just outside the terminal door are those you would expect to see at midday rather than in the early morning. Moreover, the surveillance camera is no ordinary surveillance camera; for the tape reveals a panning camera focused on the two young Arabs and then zooming in on them and then moving left as they move left instead of following the pretty blonde lady who was going to the right. Clearly, some person unknown at some time unknown was filming these young Arab men for a specific but unknown reason.
This Motley Rice film was never shown again because of the critical eyes of researchers, many of whom preserved copies of the mysterious tape in their computers.
In consideration of the foregoing, one must conclude that no tape has EVER been shown that reveals ANY of the passengers boarding the 9/11 flights out of Boston's Logan, Newark's Liberty and Washington's Dulles international airports.
One must also ask, if the 9/11 surveillance tapes at these airports do in fact exist, why haven't we seen them? And if they do not even exist, how can this be explained?
Mark Bingham phoned his mother and said, "Hi Mom, This is Mark Bingham"
e107 powered website: Article / Something Strange about Flight 93
Tags: 9/11 Flight 93 something strange
Tags: 9/11 Flight 93 something strange
Are war critics "irresponsible" for saying the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence?
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Joe's Dartblog: International Law Scholars & the Islamist Threat
Joe's Dartblog: International Law Scholars & the Islamist Threat
Blogger Thougths: Joe and Dan Drezner on the trail of another BS story. How unusual!
Blogger Thougths: Joe and Dan Drezner on the trail of another BS story. How unusual!
Corporate Media and Amman Bombings: Nothing Here, Move On
Another Day in the Empire
It is simply amazing how the corporate media can ignore the obvious fact there were no suicide bombers at the hotels in Amman, how photo evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt (see images linked in this previous post) the bombs were placed in the ceiling of the hotels, and how it makes absolutely no sense for supposed Iraqi resistance fighters to kill innocent civilians in a neighboring state. Instead of pointing out these glaring inconsistencies, the corporate media zooms in on Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, the Iraqi patsy alleged to have participated in suicide bombings that never occurred, as the photo evidence reveals.
Meanwhile, like a ghoulish circus barker, Secretary of State Condi Rice “said in a speech in Israel, where she tried to revive Arab-Israeli peace hopes, that she was very encouraged so many Jordanians had spoken out against terrorism since the attacks, which killed 54 mostly Jordanians. Thousands have held rallies and candle-light vigils in recent days,” according to Reuters.
Once again, the corporate media fails to mention the obvious, taking us for fools and chumps—there is no such thing as “Arab-Israeli peace hopes,” since Israel has no intention of ever engaging in peace with Arabs, either in occupied Palestine or anywhere else, and are more than likely responsible for the Jordan “suicide bombings.” Finally, the corporate media pretends Arabs are attending “rallies and candle-light vigils” en masse, when in fact most Arabs believe Israel and the United States are responsible for these increasingly frequent and deadly terrorist attacks, thus proving Arabs living under authoritarian governments (supported by the United States) are more intelligent than the average American.
It is simply amazing how the corporate media can ignore the obvious fact there were no suicide bombers at the hotels in Amman, how photo evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt (see images linked in this previous post) the bombs were placed in the ceiling of the hotels, and how it makes absolutely no sense for supposed Iraqi resistance fighters to kill innocent civilians in a neighboring state. Instead of pointing out these glaring inconsistencies, the corporate media zooms in on Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, the Iraqi patsy alleged to have participated in suicide bombings that never occurred, as the photo evidence reveals.
Meanwhile, like a ghoulish circus barker, Secretary of State Condi Rice “said in a speech in Israel, where she tried to revive Arab-Israeli peace hopes, that she was very encouraged so many Jordanians had spoken out against terrorism since the attacks, which killed 54 mostly Jordanians. Thousands have held rallies and candle-light vigils in recent days,” according to Reuters.
Once again, the corporate media fails to mention the obvious, taking us for fools and chumps—there is no such thing as “Arab-Israeli peace hopes,” since Israel has no intention of ever engaging in peace with Arabs, either in occupied Palestine or anywhere else, and are more than likely responsible for the Jordan “suicide bombings.” Finally, the corporate media pretends Arabs are attending “rallies and candle-light vigils” en masse, when in fact most Arabs believe Israel and the United States are responsible for these increasingly frequent and deadly terrorist attacks, thus proving Arabs living under authoritarian governments (supported by the United States) are more intelligent than the average American.
Iron Fisted America
Iron Fisted America
NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN
Iron Fisted America By Charles Sullivan 11/14/05 "ICH " -- -- Understanding the collective American psyche is no easy task. To those living in other lands we Americans are an enigma. Indeed, we are an enigma unto ourselves. To others we appear foolish, dim-witted, cowardly and morally bankrupt. To allow the rise of a fascist regime to take power is compelling evidence for those views. Let me try to explain why. Nothing in America is what we are told it is. Whenever the president speaks—it matters little which president we are talking about—we can be reasonably certain that they do not utter truth as we know it. During the past fifty years America has not had a socially progressive president. The Clinton presidency was under siege from day one by the power hungry ideologues fueled by Christian evangelicals. Bill Clinton certainly was no progressive, as his detractors would have us believe. At his most liberal Clinton was nothing more than Bush lite. He twice won the presidency by out righting the right. Clearly, this was no victory for progressives. No modern era American president represents the interest of the people. They represent the rich and powerful. The same is true of Congress. Every branch of the American government is awash in corporate money in sums so vast as to boggle the mind. Little wonder that the American government does not serve the interest and needs of the people. It serves the wants of soulless corporate entities whose only concern is unbridled bottom line capitalism. To further complicate matters, the vast majority of the media is under the control of the same corporate oligarchy that direct the government. The corporate media, as the name implies, serves the corporate interest. Little that the corporate media tells us has any relevance to truth as most of us know it. The corporate media are purveyors of lies and distortions that are used to subdue and control the public mind, often for sinister purposes. Seek alternative channels of information that flow from non corporate sources. There you will find what you need to know to be free. Every branch of government and ninety nine percent of the media operates in the corporate interest—not in the public interest, as we all too willingly assume. America is not even close to resembling a democracy, as the national myth proclaims—it is a corporate oligarchy. It is a deeply class divided society in which the rich prey upon the poor. Here it is the poor who do the bidding of the rich. It is the poor who fight the wars for the economic gains realized by the power elite. It is the antithesis of Robin Hood. Here the rich routinely steal from the poor. They rob them senseless and call it democracy! America is a land of contradictions. Under the edicts of unrestrained capitalism, the people serve primarily as drones and producers of capital for the wealthy. The majority of the people are mindless consumers of goods. They are automatons at the service of the unscrupulous gods of finance and material power. Their needs do not matter to those in power. They exist to cheer the captains of commerce on in their joyful work of consuming the planet. The world knows only too well that America is a violent nation. They know, many of them first hand, that America preys upon the poor and the defenseless. The manner in which the corporate oligarchy that drives American politics treats its own down trodden is a microcosm of how it treats the rest of the world. The extermination of the indigenous people of North America by pious Anglo invaders is an atrocity that makes the Nazi liquidation of the Jews pale in comparison. America has yet to come to grips with its initial episode of genocide and ethnic cleansing that may be at the root of its pathological behavior. The annihilation of the American Indian was just the beginning of what capitalism could do. Multinational corporations view the earth as a vast aggregation of commodities and markets to be exploited for profit. They do not regard the world’s citizens as human beings. They are sources of cheap labor and consumers, to be exploited by those in power. Ecosystems and the biological systems that promote life are summarily ignored by corporatism. Global capitalism is a malignancy intent upon devouring the world. It seeks to commodify everything and every one. It intends to privatize the entire planet, effectively placing the world’s resources into the smooth, grasping, white hands of a few wealthy individuals. This explains the existence of the Bilderbergers, an annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people who meet to determine the course of global capitalism. Along with the World Bank and the IMF it sets the world’s financial and political agenda. It also represents the establishment of a world government—George Herbert Walker Bush’s ‘New World Order.’ From cradle to grave the collective American mind is under the all pervasive assault of corporatism. This is all we have ever known; it is all most of us will ever know. It explains our combined failure to see the world in terms that can only be described as Disneyesque. Every day in America is an adventure in the implausible Land of Oz As a people we have no conception of reality. We have been carefully insulated from the pain and suffering we have inflicted and continue to inflict upon the world. Quite literally, we not know not what we do. But even more tellingly, we don’t want to know. When we invade sovereign nations we are told that we are liberating its oppressed people from the throes of tyranny. When we enslave and torture Islamic people we are told that they are terrorists who mean us harm. In true Machiavellian terms, the ends justify the means. This also explains why we cannot come to grips through honest reckoning with the horrors of the national tragedy we call history. We have unelected leaders who lie, maim and murder and we call them Christian. Isn’t that strange? We target nations with left wing leaders like Venezuela’s popular president Hugo Chavez and call them threats to democracy, when we ourselves have no conception of what democracy looks like. The only threat that Hugo Chavez poses to the United States is that he places the needs of the people above the profits of multinational corporations; and that is as un-American as it gets. Anti-capitalist equates to un-American in the diseased mind of corporatism. This is why the U.S. has deposed not only Chavez but Aristeed in Haiti, and a whole litany of South American pro people, pro environment, pro democracy, and pro labor leaders. That is why CIA operatives have routinely instigated coups against the hemisphere’s most popular democratically elected leaders. That is why so many of them have been assassinated by bullets paid for by our tax dollars. Countless others have been beaten, tortured, and disappeared, courtesy of U.S. tax dollars. The corporate oligarchy loathes democracy because democracy demands the evenhanded distribution of wealth. It demands accountability. It requires justice. It seeks to know truth. No matter what pretensions we may make to the contrary, the U.S. has a long history of opposing democracy throughout the world. The undeniable proof lies hidden in our national history; a history that has been carefully thrust down the memory hole of an Orwellian nightmare we have unwittingly helped to forge through unfettered complacency. From North Korea, Viet Nam, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, the Philippines, Cambodia, the former Soviet Union, Iran, Syria, Eastern Europe, Haiti, and Jamaica—I could go on indefinitely—America’s military might has always opposed and snuffed out fledgling democracies. Every U.S. military intervention during the past fifty years and longer acted to put down insurrections of popular movements of the people. A thoughtful examination of the evidence makes it clear that the obvious and only possible conclusion is that our military might is used not to promote liberation, democracy, and freedom. It serves as the iron fist of capitalism to smash the face of people’s movements for social justice and autonomy. U.S. militarism is the arm of corporatism that invades and plunders sovereign nations to rob them of treasure and resources. Its purpose is to open new markets to capitalism; to create pools of slave labor and a constant stream of cheap goods for American consumption. It is Wal-Mart amplified a hundred thousand times and projected across the globe. None of this is news. We are simply witnessing the unrestrained avarice of the rich and powerful running rough shod over the principles of democracy and social justice. It is the continuation of Manifest Destiny. It is the sound of the rich and powerful preying upon the poor and the innocent. None of it is what we have been told. We must open our eyes and our minds to see it for what it really is. We must come to grips with our own sordid history and all that it has wrought. Only then we can begin to do something about the present and the future. Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer living in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net
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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN
Iron Fisted America By Charles Sullivan 11/14/05 "ICH " -- -- Understanding the collective American psyche is no easy task. To those living in other lands we Americans are an enigma. Indeed, we are an enigma unto ourselves. To others we appear foolish, dim-witted, cowardly and morally bankrupt. To allow the rise of a fascist regime to take power is compelling evidence for those views. Let me try to explain why. Nothing in America is what we are told it is. Whenever the president speaks—it matters little which president we are talking about—we can be reasonably certain that they do not utter truth as we know it. During the past fifty years America has not had a socially progressive president. The Clinton presidency was under siege from day one by the power hungry ideologues fueled by Christian evangelicals. Bill Clinton certainly was no progressive, as his detractors would have us believe. At his most liberal Clinton was nothing more than Bush lite. He twice won the presidency by out righting the right. Clearly, this was no victory for progressives. No modern era American president represents the interest of the people. They represent the rich and powerful. The same is true of Congress. Every branch of the American government is awash in corporate money in sums so vast as to boggle the mind. Little wonder that the American government does not serve the interest and needs of the people. It serves the wants of soulless corporate entities whose only concern is unbridled bottom line capitalism. To further complicate matters, the vast majority of the media is under the control of the same corporate oligarchy that direct the government. The corporate media, as the name implies, serves the corporate interest. Little that the corporate media tells us has any relevance to truth as most of us know it. The corporate media are purveyors of lies and distortions that are used to subdue and control the public mind, often for sinister purposes. Seek alternative channels of information that flow from non corporate sources. There you will find what you need to know to be free. Every branch of government and ninety nine percent of the media operates in the corporate interest—not in the public interest, as we all too willingly assume. America is not even close to resembling a democracy, as the national myth proclaims—it is a corporate oligarchy. It is a deeply class divided society in which the rich prey upon the poor. Here it is the poor who do the bidding of the rich. It is the poor who fight the wars for the economic gains realized by the power elite. It is the antithesis of Robin Hood. Here the rich routinely steal from the poor. They rob them senseless and call it democracy! America is a land of contradictions. Under the edicts of unrestrained capitalism, the people serve primarily as drones and producers of capital for the wealthy. The majority of the people are mindless consumers of goods. They are automatons at the service of the unscrupulous gods of finance and material power. Their needs do not matter to those in power. They exist to cheer the captains of commerce on in their joyful work of consuming the planet. The world knows only too well that America is a violent nation. They know, many of them first hand, that America preys upon the poor and the defenseless. The manner in which the corporate oligarchy that drives American politics treats its own down trodden is a microcosm of how it treats the rest of the world. The extermination of the indigenous people of North America by pious Anglo invaders is an atrocity that makes the Nazi liquidation of the Jews pale in comparison. America has yet to come to grips with its initial episode of genocide and ethnic cleansing that may be at the root of its pathological behavior. The annihilation of the American Indian was just the beginning of what capitalism could do. Multinational corporations view the earth as a vast aggregation of commodities and markets to be exploited for profit. They do not regard the world’s citizens as human beings. They are sources of cheap labor and consumers, to be exploited by those in power. Ecosystems and the biological systems that promote life are summarily ignored by corporatism. Global capitalism is a malignancy intent upon devouring the world. It seeks to commodify everything and every one. It intends to privatize the entire planet, effectively placing the world’s resources into the smooth, grasping, white hands of a few wealthy individuals. This explains the existence of the Bilderbergers, an annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people who meet to determine the course of global capitalism. Along with the World Bank and the IMF it sets the world’s financial and political agenda. It also represents the establishment of a world government—George Herbert Walker Bush’s ‘New World Order.’ From cradle to grave the collective American mind is under the all pervasive assault of corporatism. This is all we have ever known; it is all most of us will ever know. It explains our combined failure to see the world in terms that can only be described as Disneyesque. Every day in America is an adventure in the implausible Land of Oz As a people we have no conception of reality. We have been carefully insulated from the pain and suffering we have inflicted and continue to inflict upon the world. Quite literally, we not know not what we do. But even more tellingly, we don’t want to know. When we invade sovereign nations we are told that we are liberating its oppressed people from the throes of tyranny. When we enslave and torture Islamic people we are told that they are terrorists who mean us harm. In true Machiavellian terms, the ends justify the means. This also explains why we cannot come to grips through honest reckoning with the horrors of the national tragedy we call history. We have unelected leaders who lie, maim and murder and we call them Christian. Isn’t that strange? We target nations with left wing leaders like Venezuela’s popular president Hugo Chavez and call them threats to democracy, when we ourselves have no conception of what democracy looks like. The only threat that Hugo Chavez poses to the United States is that he places the needs of the people above the profits of multinational corporations; and that is as un-American as it gets. Anti-capitalist equates to un-American in the diseased mind of corporatism. This is why the U.S. has deposed not only Chavez but Aristeed in Haiti, and a whole litany of South American pro people, pro environment, pro democracy, and pro labor leaders. That is why CIA operatives have routinely instigated coups against the hemisphere’s most popular democratically elected leaders. That is why so many of them have been assassinated by bullets paid for by our tax dollars. Countless others have been beaten, tortured, and disappeared, courtesy of U.S. tax dollars. The corporate oligarchy loathes democracy because democracy demands the evenhanded distribution of wealth. It demands accountability. It requires justice. It seeks to know truth. No matter what pretensions we may make to the contrary, the U.S. has a long history of opposing democracy throughout the world. The undeniable proof lies hidden in our national history; a history that has been carefully thrust down the memory hole of an Orwellian nightmare we have unwittingly helped to forge through unfettered complacency. From North Korea, Viet Nam, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, the Philippines, Cambodia, the former Soviet Union, Iran, Syria, Eastern Europe, Haiti, and Jamaica—I could go on indefinitely—America’s military might has always opposed and snuffed out fledgling democracies. Every U.S. military intervention during the past fifty years and longer acted to put down insurrections of popular movements of the people. A thoughtful examination of the evidence makes it clear that the obvious and only possible conclusion is that our military might is used not to promote liberation, democracy, and freedom. It serves as the iron fist of capitalism to smash the face of people’s movements for social justice and autonomy. U.S. militarism is the arm of corporatism that invades and plunders sovereign nations to rob them of treasure and resources. Its purpose is to open new markets to capitalism; to create pools of slave labor and a constant stream of cheap goods for American consumption. It is Wal-Mart amplified a hundred thousand times and projected across the globe. None of this is news. We are simply witnessing the unrestrained avarice of the rich and powerful running rough shod over the principles of democracy and social justice. It is the continuation of Manifest Destiny. It is the sound of the rich and powerful preying upon the poor and the innocent. None of it is what we have been told. We must open our eyes and our minds to see it for what it really is. We must come to grips with our own sordid history and all that it has wrought. Only then we can begin to do something about the present and the future. Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer living in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net
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