"Venus shines [shone] brightly to the right of the crescent moon in twilight and for a short while after. Coincidentally, the Moon is at perigee, its closest to Earth for the month."
I liked how the camera picked up that outline, it wasn't as evident to the naked eye
hope your all having a fine weekend ~
I've been battling with Christmas lights haha :)
Sunday, December 11, 2005
On the hunt for a conspiracy theory | csmonitor.com
On the hunt for a conspiracy theory csmonitor.com: "The simplistic worldview of conspiracy thinking"
Blogger Thoughts: The ridiculous conspiracy theory of 9/11 is the official story.
Tags: 9/11 wtc september 11 2001 09/11/2001 pentagon facts reopen
Blogger Thoughts: The ridiculous conspiracy theory of 9/11 is the official story.
Tags: 9/11 wtc september 11 2001 09/11/2001 pentagon facts reopen
Commercial Pilot And Aeronautical Engineer Explains Why Official 911 Story About Pentagon Is Bogus
Commercial Pilot And Aeronautical Engineer Explains Why Official 911 Story About Pentagon Is Bogus
- Nila Sagadevan sets the record straight about Pentagon crash while 9/11 fringe movement meets Dec. 7 in Tampa for beginning of five-day rally.
By Greg Szymanski
12-6-5- It's impossible to fit a square peg in a round hole. It's equally as impossible to fit a large 757 airliner through a small hole like left in the Pentagon wall after 9/11.
- And this is just one of the many examples that the official 9/11 story makes no sense. In fact, it makes about as much sense as trying to keep jamming that square peg into that proverbial round hole.
- However, while the feds fiddle with pegs that don't fit, the 9/11 debate rages on across the country, mainly among the fringe truth movement groups whose numbers are small.
- And this is precisely where politicians want the debate to remain, away from the public's ear, since so far they have been dealt a winning 9/11 hand, knowing any serious measure to bring justice has been effectively cut-off.
- So this week the fringe 9/11 movement takes its "forces and soldiers of truth" to Tampa and Miami, Florida, staging a five day assembly starting Dec 7 with the intent to spark a larger public debate and bring the "enemy within" to justice.
- Millionaire Jimmy Walter is footing the bill and hosting the event with speakers to include Dave von Kleist, Joyce Riley, Morgan Reynolds, Eric Hufschmid, William Rodriguez and others. There is an $11 entry fee and it will be interesting to see the turn-out, including the media coverage which in the past has been sporadic at best for 9/11 truth events.
- Although the speakers bring to the table interesting facts discounting the official story, Rodriguez will be the most compelling, telling his tale of hearing explosions in the basement prior to the airplane hitting the North Tower.
- But one person in attendance not on the speaker's list is commercial pilot and aeronautical engineer, Nila Sagedevan. And the reason he should be speaking, at least about the Pentagon crash, is because once he gives his technical rendition of why the government story is bogus, it's like someone finally held up, for the whole world to see, the round peg fitting perfectly into the round hole.
- In the past, many pilots and other experts have tried to communicate the impossibility of the flight pattern taken by an inexperienced Arab terrorist in the cockpit, but none have done a better job than Sagedevan, telling the story from an expert's pint of view but communicating so the layman has no trouble understanding.
- Recently, Sagadevan spent two hours on Greg Szymanski's radio show, The Investigative Journal, on the Republic Broadcast Network at
- www.rbnlive.com, leaving the audience nodding their heads in agreement that the Pentagon crash couldn't have happened the way the government contends.
- "Let's look at it plain and simple," said Sagadevan in an extended telephone conference this week from his home near San Diego. "The government wants us to believe that a person who couldn't even solo a small Cessna took over the controls of a Boeing 757 jetliner and performed complicated maneuvers even myself or other experienced pilots could have never performed.
- "It's just not going to happen and, from my point of view, is impossible. If this was fabricated by the government so was the rest of the 9/11 story."
- But staying on point, Sagadevan wanted to further illustrate the absurdity of a small, inexperienced 5'8" Arab terrorist, taking over the controls of the jetliner from a burly, well-trained former military pilot.
- "You mean to tell me, the supposed terrorist overpowered the pilot, who weighed more than 185 lbs and trained in the military. And then after that overpowered the co-pilot in the same manner, a person who also weighed upwards of 185 lbs," said Sagadevan, emphasizing experts aren't needed to explain the absurdity of this portion of the government story.
- "I am not sure if anyone has been in the cockpit of one of one of these big jets, but I will tell you there isn't much space. How in the world would one man pull out two big pilots in cramped quarters while, at the same time, maintaining control of the airliner. Again, it's just not going to happen.
- "In the beginning right after 9/11, like most people, I believed most of what I heard about 9/11, not really giving much thought to a government conspiracy. However, about a year ago when I began gathering information related to my expertise as an aeronautical engineer and pilot, I began to see clearly how the government story regarding the four flights, their paths and their pilots didn't make sense.
- "Now I am firmly convinced after looking at an enormous amount of evidence, as well as using well-establishing aviation principles, that something else crashed into the Pentagon since it couldn't have been a commercial jetliner."
- Besides calling attention to the impossibility of a untrained pilot performing complex flight maneuvers and navigation, Sagadevan said the flight path taken near the Pentagon was also impossible for a large jetliner to perform without crashing before reaching the Pentagon.
- "First of all, the supposed pilot would have been overwhelmed just looking at the complexity of the cockpit controls," said Sagadevan. "He would have had no idea what to do, but we are led to believe that he was able to turn the jet around, head back to Washington D.C. and then bank at high speeds and at a low altitude, hitting a target which would have looked as small as thimble from the air. Again, it's impossible and you don't really need an expert to make this final determination."
- Sagadevan was quick to point out one of the main problems with the government story is the low trajectory of the airplane, flying at high speeds and roughly only 20 feet off the ground for a long distance, another impossibility defying the standard principles of aviation.
- "The evidence indicates that the airplane was flying low before it reached the Pentagon lawn since several light poles were sheared off several hundred yards away form the building," explained Sagadevan. "With that in mind, the plane was traveling at about 400 knots at about 20 feet off the ground for a long distance prior to hitting the Pentagon.
- "This in itself is an impossibility since the airplane would have been kept from hitting the ground by a cushion of air termed 'ground effect.' No pilot in the world would have been able to control the plane while maintained that air speed at 20 feet off the ground for that long a distance. Again, it's just impossible but here I will admit that an expert is needed in order to explain the standards of lift and drag associated with flying a large airliner.
- From the beginning of the supposed hijacking of Flight 77 and to its eventual crash into the Pentagon wall, Sagadevan presents a compelling case, essentially crushing the official story. He also mentioned the what's also overlooked is the 'jet wash' from the airplane would have caused tremendous ground damage on the approach, something not evident in the aftermath of the Pentagon crash.
- "I really don't understand how anyone could give the government's story any credibility after seeing the original pictures taken of the small hole left in the Pentagon wall by whatever flew into it," said Sagadevan. "I am not totally sure what the military used but one thing for sure, it wasn't a 757 jetliner."
- Sagadevan is referring to the tiny circumference of the hole left in the Pentagon wall, illustrated on pictures taken right after the crash scene, but immediately taken out of circulation and never widely distributed by the news media to the American people.
- "I think if someone just looks at the hole left and then looks at the size of 757, experts aren't needed to determine it was an impossibility that a big jet hit the Pentagon wall, especially when there was very little wreckage visible after the crash," added Sagadevan.
- Regarding the Pentagon crash, as Sagadevan aptly points out, there are "so many holes in the story" that it becomes, as the English say, rather a laughing matter, making one believe even the bungling Inspector Clouseau, made famous by Peter Sellers, could crack the case wide open if given half a chance.
- But the problem is Inspector Clouseau, Sagadevan and every other independent investigator haven't been given the chance, leaving the case to be investigated and tried in the court of public opinion, a place where politicians like it and know they are safe from prosecution.
- For more informative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com
When William Rodriguez was a young man, the Amazing Randi hired him as an assistant....
THE BEAST - Buffalo's Best Fiend
Magical Realism
9/11 Survivor Detects Sleight of Hand
Russ Wellen
Two decades later Rodriguez's life has come full circle and once again he's taken on the task of unmasking what he sees as the truth behind a spectacle. This time it's the grand opera that was 9/11--along with its libretto, the 9/11 Commission Report. Yes, Rodriguez is among the legions that question its conclusions. But before attempting to transform himself into a truthteller, Rodriguez had established his credentials with a fearsome display of physical courage.
A custodian at the World Trade Center, Rodriguez shepherded a number of those who worked there out of the basement. Also, accompanying firefighters up the stairs, he unlocked doors for the firefighters until they turned him back. He may, in fact, have been the last man out of the North Tower.
However, not content to bask in his 9/11 hero status, he had to go and muddle matters by morphing into a gadfly. Still, whether in spite of or because of the twin sets of tracks on which his courage travels, Rodriguez stands poised to break out in 2006.
An eloquent man with an outsized personality, he recently completely a European tour of speaking engagements in Europe. Back home, Emmy-winning Irish documentary maker Pat O'Mahony ("Reporters at War") has pitched HBO about making a documentary about him. Another film, entitled "The Keymaster," by Mario Diaz, is slated for a fall 2006 release by Brooklyn's Cinemar Films. Also, already his de facto biographer, Greg Szymanksi of the American Free Press is writing a book about him.
After emigrating from Puerto Rico, where he'd been featured on TV escaping from a chained straight jacket while hanging from a burning rope, Rodriguez found himself a small fish in the big pond of New York magicians. While struggling to catch on, he took a day job as a custodian at the World Trade Center.
But when his responsibilities expanded to not only caring for the office Governor Cuomo kept at WTC, but organizing his press conferences, his show biz aspirations fell by the wayside. After Cuomo left office, keeping the staircases of the North Tower clean became Rodriguez's new assignment. While a less-challenging job, in retrospect, it paved the way for what life had in store for him next.
Szymanski describes how Rodriguez usually clocked in at eight a.m. and rode an elevator to the 106th floor, where Latino employees of Windows on the World fed him a free breakfast. On 9/11, however, he was a half hour late. While checking in at an office on sub-level one, he heard and felt, along with 20 others, a massive explosion--from below. Seconds later, he heard another--from above (Flight 11).
While Rodriguez was wondering if the first explosion was an electrical generator, a co-worker burst into the office covered with third-degree burns he suffered when flames burst from an elevator shaft. After helping him out of the building, Rodriguez returned and pulled out two men trapped in an elevator shaft filling with water from the sprinkler system. He led them and others to safety.
Then, wielding a master key, he ascended the stairs with the struggling firemen and unlocked doors (every fourth floor) that were equipped with locks. As he climbed from the twentieth to the thirtieth floors, he heard yet more explosive sounds. They also resounded from the South Tower when, turned back at the thirty-ninth floor, he descended and, for the last time, exited the North Tower.
When it began to collapse, Rodriguez took refuge under a car. Once safe, he was interviewed by CNN and became the designated Spanish-speaking eyewitness for Spanish TV like Telemundo and Univision and newspapers like Hoy and El Diario. When the families of Spanish victims who'd seen him on TV later reached out to him, he was driven by frustration over his inability to reach his Windows of the World friends to help.
Rodriguez soon established the Hispanic Victims Group and, with the help of Senator Clinton and Governor Pataki, secured an amnesty for undocumented Hispanic workers who perished. Their families were thus able to apply for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund--with Rodriguez translating and helping them fill out the intimidating forms.
Confident the explosions he'd heard on 9/11 would get their day in court, Rodriguez had no qualms about being honored at the White House and posed for a picture with Bush. What then made him later do an about-face and step forward with concerns that the administration's negligence in dealing with terrorists may have crossed the line to enabling them?
First Rodriguez watched as his interviews were manipulated and edited by the English-speaking (but not the Spanish-) media. After all, since he'd been one of those pushing for the creation of the 9/11 Commission along with the Jersey Girls, he looked forward to his appearance at a closed-door hearing. "Up to that moment," Rodriguez told us, "I was thinking that they were going to do the right thing."
But when the commission didn't answer his questions and avoided the issues he was presenting, "it raised flags." Then, when he realized the administration was using 9/11 as one of the pretexts for invading Iraq, he felt "manipulated and used."
Rodriguez also sought out the National Institute of Safety and Technology, which was investigating the collapse of the WTC, but was rebuffed. Neither was the FBI interested in his contention that he'd encountered one of the hijackers casing out the buildings several months before 9/11.
"You have two options," Rodriguez declares. "Stand for the truth or be part of the game. I didn't want to be part of the game."
Not only wasn't Rodriguez playing the game, but, like 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani, he signed on with lawyer Phil Berg to file a suit against the entire administration. The government normally uses the RICO Act to nail organized crime as a conspiracy. However, in a daring display of turnabout-is-fair-play, Berg accused the government of conspiring against the people.
Then, when the government filed a motion to dismiss, or at least transfer, the case on grounds of national security, Berg filed an affidavit that goes beyond the usual aggressive legalese, races past bold, and flies off into the realm of courting disaster.
It alleges that the defendants "had knowledge that the attacks were impending. . . but they failed to [take countermeasures], not by reason of mere negligence, confusion, or ineptitude, but because they affirmatively desired such attacks to occur [author's italics]." The progress of the case, which awaits discovery and depositions, can be followed at 911fortheTruth.com. Rodriguez, meanwhile, is spokesman for Reopen911.org.
When asked if he ever dreamt he'd become what some might call a conspiracy theorist, Rodriguez replied, "I never expected to be in the middle of this whole thing." In his travels he's heard what he calls, "really far-out theories, crazy." He explains that some become involved "just because of the theory." He's content to present his experience "exactly like I presented it to the 9/11 Commission and let the people draw their own conclusions."
Nevertheless, we tried to lure him into theorizing about his description of loud sounds he heard from the floor above while on the thirty-third floor. They sounded to him "like a dumpster with steel wheels scratching a bare cement floor."
"I was like," Rodriguez says, "'Oh my God, that's an empty floor, what's going on?'" No construction had been underway and, in fact, a special access key was needed to make an elevator stop at that floor. Fearing "somebody was there with a gun or something," he bypassed the floor.
But he stands by his vow: "I won't speculate because I'm not a theorist." However, it's surprising that the more, uh, creative minds of the 9/11 Truth Movement haven't latched onto the thirty-fourth floor. It could be positioned as both controlled-demolition-central and a munitions dump, where the largest bombs awaited detonation by a suicide crew manning the floor.
Still, in a picturesque analogy, Rodriguez concedes that the administration and 9/11 Commission "are giving you a whole recipe and soup, but in reality the stock inside is totally different from what you expected."
The media-savvy Rodriguez is careful to avoid being lumped in with the likes of those who believe passengers were spirited away pre-flight, the doomed planes guided to their destinations by remote control. It's apparent, however, that he and Berg tacitly support the controlled demolition scenario.
On April 5, 2005, the National Institute of Safety and Technology finally issued its report, "NIST Response to the World Trade Center Disaster." To summarize, it concluded that the impact of the jets and intense fire weakened structural components, damaging fireproofing materials. The buckling that ensued allowed the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.
However the NIST report has taken some mighty salvos. Writing for LewRockwell.com, Morgan Reynolds, ironically the chief economist for the US Department of Labor during President Bush's first term, provided a guide to those who stand in opposition to the official version of the WTC collapse. It's as comprehensive as an oft-cited March 2005 Popular Mechanics article debunking alternate theories is sketchy.
Reynolds describes the government’s collapse "theory," as he called it, "highly vulnerable [in] its blinkered narrowness and lack of breadth [compared to] its principal scientific rival--controlled demolition."
Even more devastating to the empirical-minded is a paper just presented by Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University. Regarding the collapse of the three WTC buildings, he writes that, "as upper-falling floors strike lower floors--and intact steel support columns--the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass." In other words, not only was the collapse "in-their-footprints," but way too fast.
Between Reynolds and the experts he cites and Jones, it's as if scientists and engineers are putting their foot down. "If you wanted us to remain quiet for the nation's well-being," they seem to be saying, "you should have seen to it that whoever pulled this off resisted the expert's natural impulse to make it look like a piece of cake."
Meanwhile, reporters and commentators, concerned Rodriguez antagonized people in high places, advised him to back off. As if to lend credence to them, his apartment was broken into and, among other things, his laptop was stolen. It failed to scare Rodriguez, however, because he feels that by all rights he should have died on 9/11 and is now living on borrowed time.
"I'm alive because of the miracle," he says. "This is a second chance. The William Rodriguez who was here before 9/11 has disappeared completely. Gone, gone."
As for his future, Rodriguez declares that "my mission is to help as many people as possible. I have a big sign on the wall in front of my bed that I wrote on 9/11. It's been there ever since and it says, 'Who did you help today?' It just gives me the motivation. . . to pick up the phone and call someone." He maintains that he's become addicted to helping. "It's an addiction. It really is."
Rodriguez has also assisted victims, and their families, of the Madrid bombings, as well as the Paraguay supermarket fire, in which 399 died. In the latter instance, he appointed a contact person and helped raise funds and set up rallies. "Once [they're] organized I gave them the tools so they become activists to change the laws in terms of building construction, fire regulations, prosecution of the people who locked the [supermarket] doors. All the pressure points."
At times, Rodriguez seems too good to be true. Losing himself in service, he neglected his own needs and, briefly homeless, actually lived out of his car. Most telling though was his refusal to submit an application to the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund.
A cynic might maintain that he was reserving the right to the lawsuit Berg subsequently filed on his behalf. But Rodriguez had to know, as Kenneth Feinberg, special master of the 9/11 Victims Fund, made clear in his book, What is Life Worth? (Public Affairs, 2005), that those who opted out of the fund to file suit on their own had little chance of a substantial financial settlement.
To indulge in armchair psychoanalysis, Rodriguez's self-denial makes him look like a martyr who's thrown himself on the funeral pyre of survivor guilt. Of course, this does nothing to diminish what he's done.
Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, fear being smeared with the dreaded conspiracy-theorist label. Even a glancing acknowledgment that the administration not only nonchalanted warnings about 9/11, but actually turned a blind eye to incipient terrorism, is out of the question. However, our reluctance to conceive of the inconceivable only reveals our ignorance of history.
In writing Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press, 2001), Robert Stinnett used the Freedom of Information Act to dredge up documents from World War II that go a long way toward proving a thesis long suspected. You know--the one in which Franklin Roosevelt, to galvanize an isolationist nation behind an undeniable threat, both provoked the Japanese and refrained from mobilizing defenses despite knowledge of the attack.
Should there be any truth to the charge the administration greased the wheels for 9/11, it would be ironic. The Neocons, of course, profess to despise Roosevelt and everything he stood for. But according to this scenario, they used a page out of his playbook.
Their repudiation of him would then be but a smokescreen. But one with a thin spot through which could be glimpsed the Project for a New Century's famous statement that what was needed to rally the nation around their program was a "new Pearl Harbor."
Culpable or not, if this is what 9/11 represented to the administration, how, we asked Rodriguez, would he describe 9/11 to a child? He responded without hesitating.
"I was a magician for thirty years. . . It is very easy to do misdirection, to make you look into one place while you're doing the magic with the other hand." He's obviously inferring that in plain sight, the planes struck; out of sight, bombs exploded. "It's just a big magic trick," Rodriguez concludes. "It's an illusion."
Guess it would take an illusionist to know one.
(In)Justice Dept:.Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases
Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases
Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases
Criticism of Justice Dept.'s Rights Division Grows
Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases
Criticism of Justice Dept.'s Rights Division Grows
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005; A03
The Justice Department has barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics, congressional aides and current and former employees familiar with the issue said.
Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in both cases.
The policy was implemented in the Georgia case, said a Justice employee who, like others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retaliation. A staff memo urged rejecting the state's plan to require photo identification at the polls because it would harm black voters.
But under the new policy, the recommendation was stripped out of that document and was not forwarded to higher officials in the Civil Rights Division, several sources familiar with the incident said.
The policy helps explain why the Justice Department has portrayed an Aug. 25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post as an "early draft," even though it was dated one day before the department gave "preclearance," or approval, to the Georgia plan. The state's plan has since been halted on constitutional grounds by a federal judge who likened it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.
The policy shift's outlines were first reported by the Dallas Morning News. Sources familiar with the change said it was implemented by John K. Tanner, the voting section chief, who is a career employee.
In response to a request to comment yesterday, Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland wrote in an e-mail: "The opinions and expertise of the career lawyers are valued and respected and continue to be an integral part of the internal deliberation process upon which the department heavily relies when making litigation decisions." He declined to elaborate.
Tensions within the voting section have been rising dramatically, culminating in an emotionally charged meeting last week in which Tanner criticized the quality of work done by staff members analyzing voting rights cases, numerous sources inside and outside the section said. Many employees were so angered that they boycotted the staff holiday party later in the week, the sources said.
Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Georgia, Texas and other states with a history of discriminatory election practices are required to receive approval from the Justice Department or a federal court for any changes to their voting systems. Section 5 prohibits changes that would be "retrogressive," or bring harm to, minority voters.
For decades, staff attorneys have made recommendations in Section 5 cases that have carried great weight within the department and that have been passed along to senior officials who make a final determination, former and current employees say.
Preventing staff members from making such recommendations is a significant departure and runs the risk of making the process appear more political, experts said.
"It's an attempt by the political hierarchy to insulate themselves from any accountability by essentially leaving it up to a chief, who's there at their whim," said Jon Greenbaum, who worked in the voting section from 1997 to 2003, and who is now director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "To me, it shows a fear of dealing with the legal issues in these cases."
Many congressional Democrats have sharply criticized the Civil Rights Division's performance, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said this week that he is considering holding hearings on the Texas redistricting case. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a statement yesterday: "America deserves better than a Civil Rights Division that puts the political agenda of those in power over the interests of the people its serves."
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other Justice officials have disputed such criticism, saying that politics play no role in civil rights decisions. In a letter to Specter this week, Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella criticized The Post's coverage and said the department is aggressively enforcing a range of civil rights laws.
"From fair housing opportunities, equal access to the ballot box and criminal civil rights prosecutions to desegregation in America's schools and protection of the rights of the disabled, the division continues its noble mission with vigor," Moschella wrote.
BBC NEWS | UK | UK 'covered up' Israeli nuke deal
BBC NEWS | UK | UK 'covered up' Israeli nuke deal
UK 'covered up' Israeli nuke deal
The government has been accused of covering up the sale of 20 tonnes of heavy water to Israel for its nuclear programme in the early 1950s.
The BBC's Newsnight says fresh evidence shows the UK knew the ingredient it sold to Norway would be subsequently sold on to Israel for nuclear weapons.
Government officials insist they knew nothing of Israel's nuclear ambitions or Norway's intentions.
The Foreign Office has declined to comment, amid calls for an inquiry.
'Cover-up'
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell is asking Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for clarification.
He said: "The trouble with this cover-up is that this is not a cover-up, it simply flies in the face of the known facts, now that we have access to previously classified documents."
Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn wants the Commons' foreign affairs select committee to investigate.
We had no idea at that stage, nobody suspected ... that the Israelis hoped to manufacture nuclear weapons
Donald Cape
He said: "Right back to the late 1950s we were a party to the transfer of nuclear technology to Israel.
"We were party to the development of a nuclear facility in Israel that could and has been used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Norway was always a smokescreen."
New claims
In August, Newsnight uncovered papers which revealed details of the deal.
But Foreign Office minister Kim Howells insisted Britain had simply negotiated the sale of surplus heavy water to Norway.
He said the UK knew nothing of Norway's intentions or Israel's desire to start a nuclear weapons programme.
But Newsnight says it has new evidence that casts doubt on these claims.
It says the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) had written to Foreign Office official Donald Cape, who approved the sale.
In the letter, the energy authority said too much heavy water had been bought from a Norwegian firm and another company from the country wanted to buy it back and sell it on to Israel.
'Sham' denied
Newsnight also has a copy of the company's contract with Israel, which stated it would provide heavy water from the UKAE.
Mr Cape denied the sale back to Norway was a "sham".
But Newsnight says confidential letters he wrote suggest the Foreign Office knew Israel had been trying to buy uranium from South Africa.
One letter quotes CIA reports from 1957 and 1958 that say Israel will try and establish a nuclear programme when it has the means.
Other secret government documents apparently say: "It has been, and remains our opinion, that Israel wanted an independent supply of plutonium so as to be in a position to make a nuclear weapon if she wished."
Mr Cape told Newsnight: "We had no idea at that stage, nobody suspected - not only in Britain but in the US - that the Israelis hoped to manufacture nuclear weapons."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4515708.stm
UK 'covered up' Israeli nuke deal
The government has been accused of covering up the sale of 20 tonnes of heavy water to Israel for its nuclear programme in the early 1950s.
The BBC's Newsnight says fresh evidence shows the UK knew the ingredient it sold to Norway would be subsequently sold on to Israel for nuclear weapons.
Government officials insist they knew nothing of Israel's nuclear ambitions or Norway's intentions.
The Foreign Office has declined to comment, amid calls for an inquiry.
'Cover-up'
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell is asking Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for clarification.
He said: "The trouble with this cover-up is that this is not a cover-up, it simply flies in the face of the known facts, now that we have access to previously classified documents."
Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn wants the Commons' foreign affairs select committee to investigate.
We had no idea at that stage, nobody suspected ... that the Israelis hoped to manufacture nuclear weapons
Donald Cape
He said: "Right back to the late 1950s we were a party to the transfer of nuclear technology to Israel.
"We were party to the development of a nuclear facility in Israel that could and has been used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Norway was always a smokescreen."
New claims
In August, Newsnight uncovered papers which revealed details of the deal.
But Foreign Office minister Kim Howells insisted Britain had simply negotiated the sale of surplus heavy water to Norway.
He said the UK knew nothing of Norway's intentions or Israel's desire to start a nuclear weapons programme.
But Newsnight says it has new evidence that casts doubt on these claims.
It says the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) had written to Foreign Office official Donald Cape, who approved the sale.
In the letter, the energy authority said too much heavy water had been bought from a Norwegian firm and another company from the country wanted to buy it back and sell it on to Israel.
'Sham' denied
Newsnight also has a copy of the company's contract with Israel, which stated it would provide heavy water from the UKAE.
Mr Cape denied the sale back to Norway was a "sham".
But Newsnight says confidential letters he wrote suggest the Foreign Office knew Israel had been trying to buy uranium from South Africa.
One letter quotes CIA reports from 1957 and 1958 that say Israel will try and establish a nuclear programme when it has the means.
Other secret government documents apparently say: "It has been, and remains our opinion, that Israel wanted an independent supply of plutonium so as to be in a position to make a nuclear weapon if she wished."
Mr Cape told Newsnight: "We had no idea at that stage, nobody suspected - not only in Britain but in the US - that the Israelis hoped to manufacture nuclear weapons."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4515708.stm
Capitol Hill Blue: Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'
Capitol Hill Blue: Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'
Blogger Thoughts: Capitol Hill Blue seems not to be trusted by this Blogger.
Blogger Thoughts: Capitol Hill Blue seems not to be trusted by this Blogger.
Defeatists In Our Midst -- Oliver North -- GOPUSA
Defeatists In Our Midst -- Oliver North -- GOPUSA
Blogger Thoughts: What kind of monsters fund O. North and think he deserves a forum for these putrid thoughts?
Blogger Thoughts: What kind of monsters fund O. North and think he deserves a forum for these putrid thoughts?
Predictions for Iraq
Predictions for Iraq
Blogger Thoughts: When with LeBoutillier speak up for 9/11 Truth?
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Predictions for Iraq
John LeBoutillier
Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005
1) Next week's elections will go off with minimal trouble. We have upped our troop strength to 165,000 to ensure a peaceful Election Day. We have already successfully run two nationwide Iraqi elections this year, so we have that drill down pretty well. So look for a peaceful Election Day next Thursday, December 15.
2) It is after the election that things will get interesting. What will this new Iraqi government look like? Will the Sunnis participate – peacefully – or will they renew their role in the insurgency? Will the Shia dominate the new Iraq?
Prediction: Iran will wield huge influence after the elections, especially in the southern – Shia – region (where most of the oil is). And the new government will be predominantly fundamentalist Shia – not good for the USA.
3) The insurgency will not abate one bit after the election. The Iranians, the Syrians and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida agents all want to ‘defeat' America and humiliate us there, so they will escalate the violence.
4) The new Iraqi army will not prove to be effective enough to handle the internal strife. More and more it will be seen that many Iraqi troops are also members of the insurgency – thus confirming the typical behavior of "playing both sides" in that part of the world. They are untrustworthy soldiers.
5) The Kurds will soon make noise – again – about seceding from Iraq and creating an independent new Kurdistan – which the Turks are violently against. (The current Iraqi president is a Kurd, and in the constitution they have the ability to leave at a future date.)
6) Militias will be the new Flavor of the Month: All the Shia clerics have their own private militias who are already running around doing ‘ethnic cleansing' and ‘score settling.' But once this election is over and we know the final composition of the new parliament, these militias will escalate their ethnic rivalries; there are many scores to settle from the 35 years of Ba'ath Party rule.
The Shia have long memories and will do to Saddam's followers what he did to them. (This has already begun in the Interior Ministry basement, where the Shia have now been torturing Sunnis in the very same torture devices Saddam's thugs used.)
7) American troop levels will come down a bit – but not too much – by next spring. Perhaps 30,000 troops will be withdrawn – about the amount we added to get ready for next week's elections. But no one today knows what the future will hold on the ground in Iraq. We can't withdraw too many troops if there is mayhem on the ground. President Bush doesn't want to look as if we were driven out.
8) Something weird will happen with Saddam before he is executed. Perhaps a major attempt by Sunni insurgents to break him out of jail, or perhaps a major suicide bomber attack on the trial and jailhouse. His followers are crazy – and will do something crazy to try to free him or to make him a heroic Muslim martyr. Watch for this.
9) Iraq will continue to dominate the American political scene for all of 2006 – with those who oppose the war growing by the month.
10) More people will be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald.
11) The anti-war Left will give Hillary a tough time; they already are picketing her office and harassing her. She has reacted by trying to play both sides of the issue, and that has only exacerbated her truthfulness problems.
12) In the end, the War in Iraq will go down as one of America's biggest foreign policy blunders.
Blogger Thoughts: When with LeBoutillier speak up for 9/11 Truth?
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Predictions for Iraq
John LeBoutillier
Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005
1) Next week's elections will go off with minimal trouble. We have upped our troop strength to 165,000 to ensure a peaceful Election Day. We have already successfully run two nationwide Iraqi elections this year, so we have that drill down pretty well. So look for a peaceful Election Day next Thursday, December 15.
2) It is after the election that things will get interesting. What will this new Iraqi government look like? Will the Sunnis participate – peacefully – or will they renew their role in the insurgency? Will the Shia dominate the new Iraq?
Prediction: Iran will wield huge influence after the elections, especially in the southern – Shia – region (where most of the oil is). And the new government will be predominantly fundamentalist Shia – not good for the USA.
3) The insurgency will not abate one bit after the election. The Iranians, the Syrians and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida agents all want to ‘defeat' America and humiliate us there, so they will escalate the violence.
4) The new Iraqi army will not prove to be effective enough to handle the internal strife. More and more it will be seen that many Iraqi troops are also members of the insurgency – thus confirming the typical behavior of "playing both sides" in that part of the world. They are untrustworthy soldiers.
5) The Kurds will soon make noise – again – about seceding from Iraq and creating an independent new Kurdistan – which the Turks are violently against. (The current Iraqi president is a Kurd, and in the constitution they have the ability to leave at a future date.)
6) Militias will be the new Flavor of the Month: All the Shia clerics have their own private militias who are already running around doing ‘ethnic cleansing' and ‘score settling.' But once this election is over and we know the final composition of the new parliament, these militias will escalate their ethnic rivalries; there are many scores to settle from the 35 years of Ba'ath Party rule.
The Shia have long memories and will do to Saddam's followers what he did to them. (This has already begun in the Interior Ministry basement, where the Shia have now been torturing Sunnis in the very same torture devices Saddam's thugs used.)
7) American troop levels will come down a bit – but not too much – by next spring. Perhaps 30,000 troops will be withdrawn – about the amount we added to get ready for next week's elections. But no one today knows what the future will hold on the ground in Iraq. We can't withdraw too many troops if there is mayhem on the ground. President Bush doesn't want to look as if we were driven out.
8) Something weird will happen with Saddam before he is executed. Perhaps a major attempt by Sunni insurgents to break him out of jail, or perhaps a major suicide bomber attack on the trial and jailhouse. His followers are crazy – and will do something crazy to try to free him or to make him a heroic Muslim martyr. Watch for this.
9) Iraq will continue to dominate the American political scene for all of 2006 – with those who oppose the war growing by the month.
10) More people will be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald.
11) The anti-war Left will give Hillary a tough time; they already are picketing her office and harassing her. She has reacted by trying to play both sides of the issue, and that has only exacerbated her truthfulness problems.
12) In the end, the War in Iraq will go down as one of America's biggest foreign policy blunders.
Dean and Kerry 'Pearl Harbor' Our Troops
Dean and Kerry 'Pearl Harbor' Our Troops
Blogger Thoughts: Dean and Kerry are betraying our Country. The reason I write is because they are covering up the Truth of 9/11, not because they would like to save lives from this ongoing Murder for Imperialism sometimes called the Iraq War.
Tags: 9/11 09/11/2001 Lies Democrats Pundits Controlled Demolition Inside Job idiot partisan rhetoric
Blogger Thoughts: Dean and Kerry are betraying our Country. The reason I write is because they are covering up the Truth of 9/11, not because they would like to save lives from this ongoing Murder for Imperialism sometimes called the Iraq War.
Tags: 9/11 09/11/2001 Lies Democrats Pundits Controlled Demolition Inside Job idiot partisan rhetoric
Saturday, December 10, 2005
European governments make their peace with Washington on abductions, torture
European governments make their peace with Washington on abductions, torture
By Chris Marsden
European governments make their peace with Washington on abductions, torture
By Chris Marsden
9 December 2005
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author
European ministers have signalled an end to any pretence of opposing America’s practice of rendition, which involves shipping detainees abroad to be tortured—using European airports and even CIA bases located in eastern Europe.
Following a formal dinner in Brussels on December 7, in advance of the next day’s meeting of NATO foreign ministers, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium all proclaimed themselves satisfied with reassurances by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the US abides by the Geneva Convention in its treatment of prisoners.
Speaking earlier in Ukraine, Rice said, “As a matter of... policy, the United States’ obligations under the [United Nations Convention Against Torture], which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, extends to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the US or outside the US.”
At the dinner Wednesday, she is reported to have made similar statements. The response from the NATO and European officials was gushing.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said that the NATO allies had “received assurances” from Rice that the US fully conforms to its international agreements and has “full respect for the sovereignty” of other nations. He welcomed Washington’s “adherence to international rules,” particularly the UN Convention Against Torture, stating, “The US, they are our friends. I repeat, they are our friends.”
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters, “I think NATO and EU ministers were able to raise their concerns that we should not diverge from one another on the interpretation of international law.
“Secretary Rice promised that international agreements are not interpreted any differently in the United States than they are in Europe.”
The meeting was “very satisfactory for all of us,” he added.
Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot said he left Wednesday night’s dinner “very satisfied” by Rice’s comments.
Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht said that Rice had reassured him that “at no time did the US agree to inhumane acts or torture, that they have always respected the sovereignty of the states concerned, and even if terrorists are not covered by the Geneva conventions, they have still applied the principles governing those Geneva conventions... I’ve the impression all ministers generally welcomed that.”
NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer was similarly effusive. Rice had “cleared the air. You will not see this discussion continuing.”
He was as good as his word. The next day NATO foreign ministers met to discuss increasing the organisation’s military presence in Afghanistan to allow Washington to reduce the number of US troops stationed there. The issue of covert prisons and detainee treatment was not even discussed.
These statements from key European Union member nations make clear that the EU as a whole has no intention of seriously investigating, let alone opposing, Washington’s defiance of international law and its practice of abducting alleged terrorists and shipping them either to secret CIA prisons or to third countries, where they are held indefinitely and without legal recourse, and subjected to legally proscribed, brutal interrogation methods.
Human rights groups rejected Rice’s reassurances. The US-based Human Rights Watch said that the Bush administration’s definition of torture was so narrow that it left open the possibility of US personnel employing a range of abusive and illegal techniques, such as “waterboarding,” deprivation of food, sleep or heat, and other supposedly non-fatal forms of physical and psychological duress.
“We need to know whether they are defining torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment in the way that most people have defined it for many, many years,” said Tom Malinowski. “My impression is that, for them, only something that leaves physical scars counts as torture.”
Rice never defined what she meant by cruel and degrading treatment. In any event, her claim that US personnel are not involved in torture counts for nothing given what is already known about the sordid practices at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It is all the more cynical given that renditions are carried out as a means of avoiding directly implicating the US in torture by utilising private contractors or interrogators in foreign countries to do Washington’s dirty work.
Even as Rice was making her statements in Kiev and Brussels, the Bush administration and congressional Republicans were opposing a resolution that would bar the use of torture against detainees held by the US. Moreover, Rice never said, nor did anyone demand that she say, that the US would stop doing anything it is presently doing in the name of the so-called “global war on terror.” Rice admitted nothing and pledged to do nothing. She simply made bald and utterly non-credible pro forma assertions of US fidelity to international law.
It should also be noted that under international law, a country must allow the International Red Cross access to detention facilities, so as to check official claims about the treatment and condition of prisoners. The US has flatly denied the International Red Cross any information about, let alone access to, its secret prisons, and all but blocked the international body from inspecting known facilities such as Guantánamo Bay and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For much of this year, reports have appeared in the media and on the Internet of hundreds of flights by CIA planes to detention facilities of foreign governments or secret “black sites” run by the CIA.
Several former detainees have made public how they were tortured, including European citizens. Only this week, Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who was abducted and tortured, took out a legal case against the US government. Italian prosecutors are still seeking the extradition of 22 CIA operatives they say were involved in snatching Egyptian political refugee Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from the streets of Milan.
More than eight countries, as well as the European Union, had begun investigations into CIA flights, kidnappings and black sites. Yet, all of this supposedly counts for nothing in the face of evasive statements by Rice.
The stance taken by Germany’s foreign minister follows that of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who also pronounced her satisfaction with Rice’s hollow assurances earlier this week. At least one investigation in Europe, that by Spanish authorities on the island of Mallorca into the use of its airports to transfer terror suspects, has already been abandoned. Investigators proclaimed that they had found no “relevant evidence of a crime,” following which Spain’s attorney general, Candido Conde-Pumpido, said he did not believe that the issue would be taken up by the national court in Madrid.
Amnesty International estimates that the CIA made 800 flights over Europe in the 2001—2005 period. And the American TV network ABC reported this week that the CIA only closed its secret prisons in Romania and Poland last month.
The scale of what has been revealed excludes any possibility that the European powers were ignorant of America’s criminal actions. There are already reports in the public domain of how the Swedish and German governments have worked with the CIA in order to gain access to evidence extracted through torture. The British government of Tony Blair has unsuccessfully been seeking the right to use evidence extracted through torture overseas to detain terror suspects in the UK.
However, Europe’s response is not determined solely by whether they directly collaborated in renditions. All of the European powers—whatever the position they adopted over the Iraq war—are full participants in the so-called war on terror, of which renditions are a key feature. Like Washington, their concern is to legitimise their predatory ambitions in the Middle East and internationally, while strengthening their repressive powers in order to deal with domestic opposition to the destruction of living conditions and vital social provisions.
Throughout the continent, governments are mounting a sustained offensive against democratic rights—a shift towards authoritarian forms of rule that finds its most developed expression in the state of emergency that remains in effect in France. That is why they have no intention of challenging the lawlessness of the Bush administration and why Paris chooses this moment to proclaim Europe as “America’s friend.”
See Also:
German chancellor Merkel covers up for illegal CIA practices
[9 December 2005]
Britain: Former law lord says US “guilty of lawlessness on a truly grand scale”
[8 December 2005]
Bush, Rice defend US abductions, torture, secret prisons
[7 December 2005]
Halabja: Iraq, Saddam, Talabani, Iran, U.S. and Zyklon-B
Halabja: Iraq, Saddam, Talabani, Iran, U.S. and Zyklon-B
§1. Due to present circumstances around the Iraq war I’m unfortunately able to use only my nick-name and virtual home address (jouna, iraq-war.ru) for reasons I’m sure you understand. Unable to find your e-mail address and having nothing to hide what comes to the contents of this letter I’m publishing it now right here in the internet.
You were the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. I’ve became to know your name some time ago, when I read your book "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf." (hereafter IIOS).
I’ve also read your article ‘A War Crime or an Act of War?’ (hereafter WCAW), available in http://uruknet.info/?p=12256. In addition I’m familiar with your video representations in http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2097.htm and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2098.htm and some discussion around your views around these.
From the timing of my approach you must already have guessed that I’m writing about the events at Halabja, in March 1988. As I was aware your expertise on this issue, I now turn to you with some issues that have been troubling me for some time on.
Not wanting to take your time more than necessary, I will proceed straight to the happenings around Halabja, 1988.
§2. At this very moment Dutchman Frans van Anraat is accused in a Hague trial, being charged for delivering chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. These weapons are claimed to have killed thousands of Kurds at Halabja in 1988. As we both, like many others already know this is absolute rubbish, since the mustard gas delivered by van Anraat did not kill the Kurds at Halabja, I won’t waste our time any more with this (for the proof of these claims, cf. the section §7, further google for Frans van Anraat if you are interested in the latest developments of his trial). The trial is in its final week, with a verdict expected on December 23, 2005).
§3. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein is at the present charged in a illegal trial in Baghdad for the very same charges (cf. http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m18569). In this connection it is necessary to introduce some facts concerning the Halabja incidents. The substance believed to have killed the Kurds at Halabja is a ‘blood agent’, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), better know as ‘Zyklon B’ of the Germans in WWII.
Among many others you tell (passim) that it was not the Iraqis, who zyklonb’d the Kurds at Halabja, and besides of this that Saddam Hussein is not guilty of the accused genocide as the use of gas occured in a battle action.
Your claim that the Iraqis would have used cyanide gas would not make sense anyway, just because of the following points:
(1) the Iraqis did not have nor did they use the cyanide gas at the time (rather: any time).
(2) why would the Iraqis have attacked their own city and own people?
(3) why did they not use the gas against the attacking Iranians instead?
The innocence of Frans van Anraat, Iraqis and Saddam Hussein to the gassing of the Kurds leaves us with several open questions. One of them is who then used cyanide gas against the civilian inhabitants of Halabja? Before looking an answer to, I would like to go deeper in the details of this murky event.
§4. First, I would like to highligth the involvement of Jalal Talabani:
(1) In IIOS (p. 188) you write: “The rebel Kurdish Leader, Jalal Talabani facilitated the introduction of the Iranian forces into Halabja by night so that the Iraqi commander was unaware of the penetration.”
(2) Before proceeding further, I would like to have few words on the character of Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, the rebel force leader in March 1988. In the events around Halabja he obviously deceives his own people, the Kurds, as he first exposes them to Iranian attack, and right after causes them to be gassed with cyanide. Not very nice from him, or what do you think?
(3) Instead of his own people, Talabani is admittedly siding with the Iranians, but on the other hand Talabani deceives the Iranians too: he entangles them to a very serious international crime, the use of chemical weapons with no profit whatever for the Iran (the attack turned a failure). Guilty or not, the Iranians have been under very serious suspicions after this event, made possible by nobody else than Jalal Talabani.
(4) Later on, in the second Iraq war (the one still raging), Mr. Talabani resurfaces as one of the leading allies of the United Stated, waging an illegal war (by UN standars) against Iraq and Iraqi people. As a reward for his contributions he is chosen (rather: seated) as the president of the New Iraq, fitting very well among other scum gathered by the U.S. as the puppet ‘government’ of Iraq.
From this and the difficult Iran-U.S. relationship, one is seemingly not mistaken in thinking that Mr. (if such an epithet can be used of him) Talabani completed his well-started treason of the Iranians (back in 1988), now finding new friends from the United States.
(5) However, the latest deception of Mr. Talabani, perhaps widest in its scope so far, took place in this autumn, when he deceived the United States by selling the Kurds in Iraq to the Iranian regime in Teheran.
With this action he gave the final death-blow to all U.S. hopes to win the war in Iraq: with Sunni support lost right from the beginning due to U.S. own conscious plan to wipe the Sunnis off the earth, the Shia loyalty shifting little by little towards Iran, now the Kurds are also lost, thanks to Mr. Talabani. Squarely, this that the U.S. has no local support whatever in Iraq. These are the ‘deadly circumstances’, where the defeat of any occupier is inevitable and inavoidable. If you are unaware of these latest developments, I recommend you the following articles:
a) ‘When U.S. needed victory strategy for Iran, Bush recycled an used one for Iraq’, in http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/72116. The same core facts are now also stated in
b) ‘Baath Party Statement’, http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/72475 and furthermore
c) Iraq: is Iran the real winner?, http://www.ww4report.com/node/1367).
The U.S. defeat and Iranian victory are now actually described and claimed in the articles
d) U.S. will suffer bigger defeat in Iraq than in Vietnam: Iran’, http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4749 and
e) Rafsanjani says Iran won in the U.S.-led war on Iraq, http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4772)
To put it short, Jalal Talabani, a truly fine personality, has deceived not only the Kurds, the Iranians, the United States, the Iraqi people but in fact, the entire world. As at the same time a wholly innocent man, Saddam Hussein is charged for the crimes of Mr. Talabani. Besides as a recognition of these merits (and several other, not mentioned here due their encyclopedic scope), Mr. Talabani has been appointed as the “president” of Iraq, although the legal president of Iraq is still Saddam Hussein. Viewing all this together, one can well say that Mr. Talabani most likely holds the world record of the successive deceptions ever. If not otherwise, then because he may still have a future in Iraq due to his new alliance with the Iranian regime.
§5. Before going back to the happenings at Halabja, let’s have a general view on the context of the gassing of the Kurds.
In 1986-1988 Iraq was already winning the war between Iraq and Iran. As you quite correctly mention, “the U.S. did not expect Iraq to win, and when it did (rather: was doing so), U.S. leaders were ‘dumbfounded’.” In this final phase of the war the U.S., wanting to prevent Iraqis from winning, started secretly support Iran, delivering her both sophisticated weapons and intelligence to subvert the Iraqis’ defences (IIOS, 195-198, actions which – after their revelation became known as Iran-Contra scandal.
From the involvement of ‘Mr.’ Talabani, a friend – if this word can be used of him at all – of both U.S. and Iran, it looks clear that the U.S. sided with the Iranians with the help of Jalal Talabani at Halabja. This means that the United States and ‘Mr.’ Talabani go much further back than the Iraq war now waging. If you or anybody else doubts this, the proof that ‘Mr.’ Talabani ‘worked’ at Halabja both as an Iranian and U.S. ally are included in your own narrative. In WCAV you write:
“And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report.”
Let’s stop right here: “Immediately?”
This makes me wonder is it not so that the DIA could not have been “immediately” on the spot, had it not been cooperating either with the Iranians or Jalal Talabani – or both. Taken that the U.S. itself did not bombard the Halabja with the Zyklon B, and taken that it was (as the U.S. study claims) the Iranian, not Iraqi gas that killed the Kurds, at least the U.S. military intellligence was well aware of what would happen at Halabja long before it actually happened. Unlike Saddam Hussein. And did nothing to stop this.
§6. I’m contacting now you on this matter, because you tell us being ”privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.”
Wanting to be very straightforward concerning your knowlegde on this issue, I would like now to ask you the following questions:
1) Was it Iran, who used cyanide gas against Iraqi Kurds, and were the Iranians assisted in this by the U.S. either with recommendations, delivering the gas, intelligence or what so ever, connecting the U.S. to the gassing of the Kurds? Or
2) Was it U.S. itself (or some its ally, for example Israel), who used the cyanide gas at Halabja, but pointed the finger on Iran after this? Or
3) Was U.S. using Jalal Talabani, an agent for them and ally of Iran, who – without Iranian knowledge of this – made the Iranians to use its own, home-made cyanide gas against the Kurdish civilians at Halabja? Or
4) Was it so that, the DIA originally planned the operation at Halabja against both Iraq and Iran as follows: in first phase ‘the Halabja genocide’ was intended to be used as a justification for a war against Iraq, as actually happened in 2003?
5) Was it further intended that after the Iraq war was won and Saddam convicted, the DIA investigation, showing that ‘actually’ it was the Iranians, (“Oops, sorry Iraq, we made a little mistake here...”), who used cyanide gas? Which was, according to the plan, to be now used to start an successive war against Iran? (For a sketch for such a “radical right-wing agenda, cf. Iraq: The War To Start All Wars, http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/07/war-to-start-all-wars/)
6) Was it further so that Jalal Talabani double-crossed the Americans just few weeks ago, because he had by then understood that the second phase of war, the planned attack against Iran was not to happen, as actually the Iranians had already won the Iraq war?
7) Is it so that after Mr. Chalabi turned his coat once again, he arrived to the Iranian camp with the proofs of the U.S. involvement, or possibly with the conclusive proof of U.S. initiative in the use of the cyanide gas at Halabja?
8) Is this one of the reasons for the Iranians claiming now victory over the United States in Iraq, simply because the Iranians know that as they have a solid evidence against U.S., they’ve also gained an absolute immunity against any U.S. forgery aimed at starting a war against Iran, giving them also a guarantee against Israel?
9) Is it so that the U.S. must be very nice to Iran from now on, since it fears that Iran could (and would) leak the U.S. involvement at Halabja?
10) Is it so that the U.S. is now being blackmailed by Tehran? Wouldn’t it be much better to bring all the evidence out before the U.S. is gotten into a very big trouble because of it’s position in this?
If you are not able to answer these questions on your own name, I fully understand you. In that case I would however hope that you choose a nick-name and drop both the answers and the proofs of these question to the internet through channels that can not be tracked back to you.
Not only me, but the entire world will be most thankful to you for doing this favor. My sincerest thanks to you already,
Yours Truely,
jouna, iraq-war.ru
§7. LITERATURE:
1. Did Iraq attack Halabja with chemical weapons in 1988?, http://uruknet.info/?p=770
2. A Glimpse of The Past: A War Crime or an Act of War?, http://uruknet.info/?p=880
3. Saddam Hussein Did Not Commit Genocide, http://uruknet.info/?p=1454
4. Saddam never gassed his own people, http://uruknet.info/?p=3943
5. In Defense of Saddam Hussein, http://uruknet.info/?p=4009
6. Defending Saddam, Not President Bush, http://uruknet.info/?p=4249
7. What Happened at Halabja?, http://uruknet.info/?p=8446
8. What do Fallujah and Halabja have in Common?, http://uruknet.info/?p=8541
9. Claims of Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven, http://uruknet.info/?p=8549
10. Report Suppressed: Iran Gassed Kurds, Not Iraq, http://uruknet.info/?p=12256
11. More on Jeffrey Goldberg, http://uruknet.info/?p=13256
12. A Fair Trial for Saddam?, http://uruknet.info/?p=13370
As far as I know, zyklon B is comprised of (a) an absorbant substance, such as plaster-of-paris, and (b) hydrogen cyanide gas adsorbed onto the plaster-of-paris. Thus the zyklon B can be put into airtight cans, making more robust gas cylinders unnecessary.
To regenerate the hydrogen cyanide gas, the pellets were shaken out from the can, and the gas evaporated slowly. To make it evaporate more quickly, the pellets needed to be raised to 27deg Celsius. If a building was to be fumigated, it needed to have windows & doors covered, and allowed to stand for several days.
Needless to say, the horror story of 'nazi gas chambers' using zyklon B to kill people is quite fictitious. Yes, zyklon B was an effective bug-killer in the days before DDT. Yes, there were problems with bugs: louse-borne typhus was a major killer in the concentration camps. Yes, clothes & bedding were fumigated with zyklon B. No, people were not poisoned with zyklon B.
So zyklon B was a (human) life-preserving substance — not a (human) killer.
As for the Halabja tragedy, it appears to have been 'collateral damage' (as the yankees love to say) of the Iran-Iraq War twenty years ago. There are opinions that the death-dealing gas was Iranian, not Iraqi. Something went wrong, and civilians were killed. That's one of the major reasons why gas warfare is so condemned: it is too open to unexpected changes in wind & weather and gets the wrong target.
Needless to say, the show trial (against President Saddam Hussein & his colleagues) is not interested in truth & justice. It's all part of the political parade for the uninformed & misinformed masses of the U.S.A., UK, Australia and other countries complicit in the criminal invasion & destruction of Iraq.
§1. Due to present circumstances around the Iraq war I’m unfortunately able to use only my nick-name and virtual home address (jouna, iraq-war.ru) for reasons I’m sure you understand. Unable to find your e-mail address and having nothing to hide what comes to the contents of this letter I’m publishing it now right here in the internet.
You were the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. I’ve became to know your name some time ago, when I read your book "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf." (hereafter IIOS).
I’ve also read your article ‘A War Crime or an Act of War?’ (hereafter WCAW), available in http://uruknet.info/?p=12256. In addition I’m familiar with your video representations in http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2097.htm and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2098.htm and some discussion around your views around these.
From the timing of my approach you must already have guessed that I’m writing about the events at Halabja, in March 1988. As I was aware your expertise on this issue, I now turn to you with some issues that have been troubling me for some time on.
Not wanting to take your time more than necessary, I will proceed straight to the happenings around Halabja, 1988.
§2. At this very moment Dutchman Frans van Anraat is accused in a Hague trial, being charged for delivering chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. These weapons are claimed to have killed thousands of Kurds at Halabja in 1988. As we both, like many others already know this is absolute rubbish, since the mustard gas delivered by van Anraat did not kill the Kurds at Halabja, I won’t waste our time any more with this (for the proof of these claims, cf. the section §7, further google for Frans van Anraat if you are interested in the latest developments of his trial). The trial is in its final week, with a verdict expected on December 23, 2005).
§3. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein is at the present charged in a illegal trial in Baghdad for the very same charges (cf. http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m18569). In this connection it is necessary to introduce some facts concerning the Halabja incidents. The substance believed to have killed the Kurds at Halabja is a ‘blood agent’, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), better know as ‘Zyklon B’ of the Germans in WWII.
Among many others you tell (passim) that it was not the Iraqis, who zyklonb’d the Kurds at Halabja, and besides of this that Saddam Hussein is not guilty of the accused genocide as the use of gas occured in a battle action.
Your claim that the Iraqis would have used cyanide gas would not make sense anyway, just because of the following points:
(1) the Iraqis did not have nor did they use the cyanide gas at the time (rather: any time).
(2) why would the Iraqis have attacked their own city and own people?
(3) why did they not use the gas against the attacking Iranians instead?
The innocence of Frans van Anraat, Iraqis and Saddam Hussein to the gassing of the Kurds leaves us with several open questions. One of them is who then used cyanide gas against the civilian inhabitants of Halabja? Before looking an answer to, I would like to go deeper in the details of this murky event.
§4. First, I would like to highligth the involvement of Jalal Talabani:
(1) In IIOS (p. 188) you write: “The rebel Kurdish Leader, Jalal Talabani facilitated the introduction of the Iranian forces into Halabja by night so that the Iraqi commander was unaware of the penetration.”
(2) Before proceeding further, I would like to have few words on the character of Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, the rebel force leader in March 1988. In the events around Halabja he obviously deceives his own people, the Kurds, as he first exposes them to Iranian attack, and right after causes them to be gassed with cyanide. Not very nice from him, or what do you think?
(3) Instead of his own people, Talabani is admittedly siding with the Iranians, but on the other hand Talabani deceives the Iranians too: he entangles them to a very serious international crime, the use of chemical weapons with no profit whatever for the Iran (the attack turned a failure). Guilty or not, the Iranians have been under very serious suspicions after this event, made possible by nobody else than Jalal Talabani.
(4) Later on, in the second Iraq war (the one still raging), Mr. Talabani resurfaces as one of the leading allies of the United Stated, waging an illegal war (by UN standars) against Iraq and Iraqi people. As a reward for his contributions he is chosen (rather: seated) as the president of the New Iraq, fitting very well among other scum gathered by the U.S. as the puppet ‘government’ of Iraq.
From this and the difficult Iran-U.S. relationship, one is seemingly not mistaken in thinking that Mr. (if such an epithet can be used of him) Talabani completed his well-started treason of the Iranians (back in 1988), now finding new friends from the United States.
(5) However, the latest deception of Mr. Talabani, perhaps widest in its scope so far, took place in this autumn, when he deceived the United States by selling the Kurds in Iraq to the Iranian regime in Teheran.
With this action he gave the final death-blow to all U.S. hopes to win the war in Iraq: with Sunni support lost right from the beginning due to U.S. own conscious plan to wipe the Sunnis off the earth, the Shia loyalty shifting little by little towards Iran, now the Kurds are also lost, thanks to Mr. Talabani. Squarely, this that the U.S. has no local support whatever in Iraq. These are the ‘deadly circumstances’, where the defeat of any occupier is inevitable and inavoidable. If you are unaware of these latest developments, I recommend you the following articles:
a) ‘When U.S. needed victory strategy for Iran, Bush recycled an used one for Iraq’, in http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/72116. The same core facts are now also stated in
b) ‘Baath Party Statement’, http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/72475 and furthermore
c) Iraq: is Iran the real winner?, http://www.ww4report.com/node/1367).
The U.S. defeat and Iranian victory are now actually described and claimed in the articles
d) U.S. will suffer bigger defeat in Iraq than in Vietnam: Iran’, http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4749 and
e) Rafsanjani says Iran won in the U.S.-led war on Iraq, http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4772)
To put it short, Jalal Talabani, a truly fine personality, has deceived not only the Kurds, the Iranians, the United States, the Iraqi people but in fact, the entire world. As at the same time a wholly innocent man, Saddam Hussein is charged for the crimes of Mr. Talabani. Besides as a recognition of these merits (and several other, not mentioned here due their encyclopedic scope), Mr. Talabani has been appointed as the “president” of Iraq, although the legal president of Iraq is still Saddam Hussein. Viewing all this together, one can well say that Mr. Talabani most likely holds the world record of the successive deceptions ever. If not otherwise, then because he may still have a future in Iraq due to his new alliance with the Iranian regime.
§5. Before going back to the happenings at Halabja, let’s have a general view on the context of the gassing of the Kurds.
In 1986-1988 Iraq was already winning the war between Iraq and Iran. As you quite correctly mention, “the U.S. did not expect Iraq to win, and when it did (rather: was doing so), U.S. leaders were ‘dumbfounded’.” In this final phase of the war the U.S., wanting to prevent Iraqis from winning, started secretly support Iran, delivering her both sophisticated weapons and intelligence to subvert the Iraqis’ defences (IIOS, 195-198, actions which – after their revelation became known as Iran-Contra scandal.
From the involvement of ‘Mr.’ Talabani, a friend – if this word can be used of him at all – of both U.S. and Iran, it looks clear that the U.S. sided with the Iranians with the help of Jalal Talabani at Halabja. This means that the United States and ‘Mr.’ Talabani go much further back than the Iraq war now waging. If you or anybody else doubts this, the proof that ‘Mr.’ Talabani ‘worked’ at Halabja both as an Iranian and U.S. ally are included in your own narrative. In WCAV you write:
“And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report.”
Let’s stop right here: “Immediately?”
This makes me wonder is it not so that the DIA could not have been “immediately” on the spot, had it not been cooperating either with the Iranians or Jalal Talabani – or both. Taken that the U.S. itself did not bombard the Halabja with the Zyklon B, and taken that it was (as the U.S. study claims) the Iranian, not Iraqi gas that killed the Kurds, at least the U.S. military intellligence was well aware of what would happen at Halabja long before it actually happened. Unlike Saddam Hussein. And did nothing to stop this.
§6. I’m contacting now you on this matter, because you tell us being ”privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.”
Wanting to be very straightforward concerning your knowlegde on this issue, I would like now to ask you the following questions:
1) Was it Iran, who used cyanide gas against Iraqi Kurds, and were the Iranians assisted in this by the U.S. either with recommendations, delivering the gas, intelligence or what so ever, connecting the U.S. to the gassing of the Kurds? Or
2) Was it U.S. itself (or some its ally, for example Israel), who used the cyanide gas at Halabja, but pointed the finger on Iran after this? Or
3) Was U.S. using Jalal Talabani, an agent for them and ally of Iran, who – without Iranian knowledge of this – made the Iranians to use its own, home-made cyanide gas against the Kurdish civilians at Halabja? Or
4) Was it so that, the DIA originally planned the operation at Halabja against both Iraq and Iran as follows: in first phase ‘the Halabja genocide’ was intended to be used as a justification for a war against Iraq, as actually happened in 2003?
5) Was it further intended that after the Iraq war was won and Saddam convicted, the DIA investigation, showing that ‘actually’ it was the Iranians, (“Oops, sorry Iraq, we made a little mistake here...”), who used cyanide gas? Which was, according to the plan, to be now used to start an successive war against Iran? (For a sketch for such a “radical right-wing agenda, cf. Iraq: The War To Start All Wars, http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/07/war-to-start-all-wars/)
6) Was it further so that Jalal Talabani double-crossed the Americans just few weeks ago, because he had by then understood that the second phase of war, the planned attack against Iran was not to happen, as actually the Iranians had already won the Iraq war?
7) Is it so that after Mr. Chalabi turned his coat once again, he arrived to the Iranian camp with the proofs of the U.S. involvement, or possibly with the conclusive proof of U.S. initiative in the use of the cyanide gas at Halabja?
8) Is this one of the reasons for the Iranians claiming now victory over the United States in Iraq, simply because the Iranians know that as they have a solid evidence against U.S., they’ve also gained an absolute immunity against any U.S. forgery aimed at starting a war against Iran, giving them also a guarantee against Israel?
9) Is it so that the U.S. must be very nice to Iran from now on, since it fears that Iran could (and would) leak the U.S. involvement at Halabja?
10) Is it so that the U.S. is now being blackmailed by Tehran? Wouldn’t it be much better to bring all the evidence out before the U.S. is gotten into a very big trouble because of it’s position in this?
If you are not able to answer these questions on your own name, I fully understand you. In that case I would however hope that you choose a nick-name and drop both the answers and the proofs of these question to the internet through channels that can not be tracked back to you.
Not only me, but the entire world will be most thankful to you for doing this favor. My sincerest thanks to you already,
Yours Truely,
jouna, iraq-war.ru
§7. LITERATURE:
1. Did Iraq attack Halabja with chemical weapons in 1988?, http://uruknet.info/?p=770
2. A Glimpse of The Past: A War Crime or an Act of War?, http://uruknet.info/?p=880
3. Saddam Hussein Did Not Commit Genocide, http://uruknet.info/?p=1454
4. Saddam never gassed his own people, http://uruknet.info/?p=3943
5. In Defense of Saddam Hussein, http://uruknet.info/?p=4009
6. Defending Saddam, Not President Bush, http://uruknet.info/?p=4249
7. What Happened at Halabja?, http://uruknet.info/?p=8446
8. What do Fallujah and Halabja have in Common?, http://uruknet.info/?p=8541
9. Claims of Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven, http://uruknet.info/?p=8549
10. Report Suppressed: Iran Gassed Kurds, Not Iraq, http://uruknet.info/?p=12256
11. More on Jeffrey Goldberg, http://uruknet.info/?p=13256
12. A Fair Trial for Saddam?, http://uruknet.info/?p=13370
As far as I know, zyklon B is comprised of (a) an absorbant substance, such as plaster-of-paris, and (b) hydrogen cyanide gas adsorbed onto the plaster-of-paris. Thus the zyklon B can be put into airtight cans, making more robust gas cylinders unnecessary.
To regenerate the hydrogen cyanide gas, the pellets were shaken out from the can, and the gas evaporated slowly. To make it evaporate more quickly, the pellets needed to be raised to 27deg Celsius. If a building was to be fumigated, it needed to have windows & doors covered, and allowed to stand for several days.
Needless to say, the horror story of 'nazi gas chambers' using zyklon B to kill people is quite fictitious. Yes, zyklon B was an effective bug-killer in the days before DDT. Yes, there were problems with bugs: louse-borne typhus was a major killer in the concentration camps. Yes, clothes & bedding were fumigated with zyklon B. No, people were not poisoned with zyklon B.
So zyklon B was a (human) life-preserving substance — not a (human) killer.
As for the Halabja tragedy, it appears to have been 'collateral damage' (as the yankees love to say) of the Iran-Iraq War twenty years ago. There are opinions that the death-dealing gas was Iranian, not Iraqi. Something went wrong, and civilians were killed. That's one of the major reasons why gas warfare is so condemned: it is too open to unexpected changes in wind & weather and gets the wrong target.
Needless to say, the show trial (against President Saddam Hussein & his colleagues) is not interested in truth & justice. It's all part of the political parade for the uninformed & misinformed masses of the U.S.A., UK, Australia and other countries complicit in the criminal invasion & destruction of Iraq.
Cunningham Scandal Link with Iran Contra Scandal
Cunningham Scandal Link with Iran Contra Scandal: " Cunningham�s hometown paper, reported that Brent Wilkes has a two decade long history of close links with the CIA. "
Falling sunflowers
Lightning over Evian, France, seen from across Lake Geneva in Lausanne, Switzerland.
A leftover from this summer, I had somehow forgotten to post this shot, taken the same night as this one , with a different white balance setting.
A leftover from this summer, I had somehow forgotten to post this shot, taken the same night as this one , with a different white balance setting.
therapy
Lightning over Evian, France, seen from across Lake Geneva in Lausanne, Switzerland.
A leftover from this summer, I had somehow forgotten to post this shot, taken the same night as this one , with a different white balance setting.
A leftover from this summer, I had somehow forgotten to post this shot, taken the same night as this one , with a different white balance setting.
911 - Too Hot To Handle?
911 - Too Hot To Handle?
Exclusive to Rense.comBy Douglas Herman12-8-5
"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us." -- George HW Bush
A couple weeks ago, just out of curiosity and in the interest of fairness, I decide to email a hundred mainstream media news editors from newspapers large and small. I wanted to get their own remarks to four very innocuous but pertinent questions regarding THE EVENT that spawned two foreign wars based on lies, massive government spending, enormous corruption and cronyism, vote fraud, crimes against the Geneva Convention and destruction of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not to mention the rather minor (by comparison) Valerie Plame affair.
That event, of course, was the 911 attacks that opened the Pandora's box to ALL the felonies that followed.
So I wrote polite emails to nearly one hundred news editors around America. I opened with the query: "Dear Editors, Do Joseph Pulitzer's words still apply today?" Then I added Pulitzer's quote (below), just in case some of the news editors may have forgotten who JP was and what he tried to do.
"Iwill always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." -- Joseph Pulitzer, April 10, 1907
My fourth question to the editors, particularly, may have struck a raw nerve. "If you personally became suspicious that 911 was possibly an inside job--by a rogue element in the government--would you suppress the story rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"
I sent along a few links to well-researched 911 news stories, topics we on the Internet are familiar with and can openly discuss. Nothing too shocking or far-fetched, but simply well researched reports of discrepancies that should awaken the skeptical instincts of any good editor. Two 911 Planes Were Never Deregistered, for example, and BYU Discredits Prof Jones For 911 WTC Paper! Like I said, nothing that we on the Internet can't handle.
I received ONE (1) response.
Is 911 the story that may NEVER be mentioned in the polite mainstream media? Rare indeed to read an article in the local newspaper, airing even one of the many contradictions--and there are hundreds--to the Greatest Unsolved Crime of The New Century.
I wrote to some editors twice, before I concluded, by their stony silence, that 911 was the one topic that may never be questioned---EVER-in the US mainstream media. As noted muckraker and tenacious Internet reporter, Greg Szymanski wrote: "Pulitzer may be turning over in his grave, wanting to pull his name from the prestigious awards given out yearly, considering the media's pathetic coverage of 9/11, the PATRIOT Act and doctoring of WMD intelligence reports to sell the war in Iraq."
For example, New York Times "reporter"-and I use that word loosely--Judith Miller once won a Pulitzer Prize, believe it or not. One can thus conclude that news awards, as presented by the self-congratulatory US press, have become almost a fraud perpetrated by phonies as awards for fakery. Otherwise the US news media would be attacking rather than ignoring the mountain of discrepancies in the 911 event. The US media might even conclude that, yes, 911 was indeed an act of terror. An act of terrorism conceived after weeks of secret planning in some five-sided fortresses, by a cabal of war criminals, double agents and nefarious profiteers.
The response to my brief questionnaire did not surprise me. Rather it appeared to coincide with what I have come to expect from the US media, especially newspapers. That is, little or nothing.
Henry David Thoreau observed: "I never read any memorable news in a newspaper." But I keep reading them hoping to be surprised one day. I suppose I'm a self-appointed inspector of newspapers.
Like a lot of Internet writers, I used to send some of my best columns to my local newspaper. To their credit they published two. They never paid for either but then most newspapers have their own stable of writers and contributors who live thousands of miles away. Local writers, especially the majority of hard-working Americans who "hold these truths to be self-evident," seldom see their opinions in print.
One California citizen, a frustrated letters-to-the-editor writer to his own local newspaper, understood this well. And so he composed his own, widely read, Freewayblogger Manifesto. "Sure anybody can write a book, article, or a letter to the editor," he said. "You might even get it published provided the publisher and/or its parent corporation agrees with what you have to say."
And if they do NOT agree with what you say, you will be effectively ignored or silenced in that community.
I wrote to the news editors and publishers of my local newspaper, the South Florida Sun Sentinel. I wrote to them twice, asking about 911. I wrote to editors Earl Maucker and Kingsley Guy and Chauncey Mabe. I even wrote to the Sun Sentinel publisher, Bob Gremillion. I politely asked them: "Does the US media purposely avoid reporting news stories of 911 contradictions that conflict with the official government version of events?"
No response. Twice.
I wrote to the editor of the Austin American-Statesman. The editor, Rich Oppel, had written a recent column I admired. He concluded, "The business of journalism has changed, not always for the best. Yet the journalism of journalism had not changed. In those still-fierce faces and voices of the aging editors, I saw and heard idealism and ideas at octane levels that made them driven and eternally young."
Sounded fine to me, in theory.
I wrote to editor Oppel twice. Hoping for that "still-fierce" idealism. I thought Rich might live up to his words. At least in print, editor Oppel sounded a lot like that idealistic New York news editor that actor Michael Keaton portrayed in an entertaining movie, The Paper (1994).
No response. Twice.
I wrote to sixty editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Austin American-Statesman, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the recent Pulitzer Prize winning Toledo Blade before I finally gave up.
I even wrote to the trio of Blade reporters who wrote that Pulitzer Prize-winning piece about the war in Vietnam. (How The Toledo Blade came to win a Pulitzer for a Story That Was 37 Years Old).
I had hoped that those three award-winning reporters, Joe Mahr, Mike Sallah and Mitch Weiss might email me back. Maybe write me that 911 was hotter than depleted uranium (another topic off limits to the MSM media) and admit that they couldn't touch it. I mean, it took The Toledo Blade 37 years to focus on atrocities in Vietnam, ignored by the US media. Imagine how many centuries it might take for the MSM to focus on 911?
The one editor gutsy enough to answer my emails? Jim Wilhelm from The Toledo Blade. Here's his reply, in part.
"Without looking at the 'example,' (links) I personally don't believe the U.S. media would purposely avoid reporting such stories. There are lots of reasons information that comes to the attention of a newspaper or other media are not reported, some of them having to do with whether they can be properly substantiated through sources and documents that would stand up in a court of law."
Okay. Reasonable response, right? But not even a smidgen of curiosity to examine the well-researched links I sent? Sadly, Jim Wilhelm, like all the other editors, ignored the information that might not "stand up in a court of law," even the very same mainstream media reports that appeared immediately after the attack but never surfaced again.
Unfortunately, 911 researchers have been clamoring for just such a court of law. Some in the 911 Truth Movement, like Mike Ruppert and Jimmy Walters, have even challenged people to come forth and either sue them or prove their shaky contentions, that 911 happened as the mainstream media reported it. Walters even promised a million dollars to anyone who could bring a little PROOF to the discouse, simply saying, "Reopen 9/11 - Catch the Real Terrorists"
No takers so far.
Wilhelm replied to my fourth question--the one that likely struck a raw nerve with every editor who works in the US media. Recall, I had asked: "If you personally became suspicious that 911 was possibly an inside job--by a rogue element in the government--would you suppress the story rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"
"The question--- like most of the others above, is loaded," wrote Wilhelm. "If I had the resources (for example, reporters in Washington) I would pursue such a story. I would not willfully suppress such a story if I had substantiated information."
Curiously, guys like Greg Szymanski, way up in Idaho, without a huge news organization behind them (The Toledo Blade employs 146 newsroom staff), without a newspaper paying a decent weekly salary or even a reporter's phone bills, can manage to uncover more substantial bits and pieces to the puzzle of 911 than ALL the editors I queried.
They may not "willingly suppress such a story" but the truth about 911 may not win any Pulitzer Prizes for, oh, 37 years.
Amateur historian and novelist, Douglas Herman writes regularly for the Worldwide Web, the last bastion of truly Free Speech and of gutsy reporting. He is the author of the controversial thriller,
The Guns of Dallas
Exclusive to Rense.comBy Douglas Herman12-8-5
"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us." -- George HW Bush
A couple weeks ago, just out of curiosity and in the interest of fairness, I decide to email a hundred mainstream media news editors from newspapers large and small. I wanted to get their own remarks to four very innocuous but pertinent questions regarding THE EVENT that spawned two foreign wars based on lies, massive government spending, enormous corruption and cronyism, vote fraud, crimes against the Geneva Convention and destruction of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not to mention the rather minor (by comparison) Valerie Plame affair.
That event, of course, was the 911 attacks that opened the Pandora's box to ALL the felonies that followed.
So I wrote polite emails to nearly one hundred news editors around America. I opened with the query: "Dear Editors, Do Joseph Pulitzer's words still apply today?" Then I added Pulitzer's quote (below), just in case some of the news editors may have forgotten who JP was and what he tried to do.
"Iwill always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." -- Joseph Pulitzer, April 10, 1907
My fourth question to the editors, particularly, may have struck a raw nerve. "If you personally became suspicious that 911 was possibly an inside job--by a rogue element in the government--would you suppress the story rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"
I sent along a few links to well-researched 911 news stories, topics we on the Internet are familiar with and can openly discuss. Nothing too shocking or far-fetched, but simply well researched reports of discrepancies that should awaken the skeptical instincts of any good editor. Two 911 Planes Were Never Deregistered, for example, and BYU Discredits Prof Jones For 911 WTC Paper! Like I said, nothing that we on the Internet can't handle.
I received ONE (1) response.
Is 911 the story that may NEVER be mentioned in the polite mainstream media? Rare indeed to read an article in the local newspaper, airing even one of the many contradictions--and there are hundreds--to the Greatest Unsolved Crime of The New Century.
I wrote to some editors twice, before I concluded, by their stony silence, that 911 was the one topic that may never be questioned---EVER-in the US mainstream media. As noted muckraker and tenacious Internet reporter, Greg Szymanski wrote: "Pulitzer may be turning over in his grave, wanting to pull his name from the prestigious awards given out yearly, considering the media's pathetic coverage of 9/11, the PATRIOT Act and doctoring of WMD intelligence reports to sell the war in Iraq."
For example, New York Times "reporter"-and I use that word loosely--Judith Miller once won a Pulitzer Prize, believe it or not. One can thus conclude that news awards, as presented by the self-congratulatory US press, have become almost a fraud perpetrated by phonies as awards for fakery. Otherwise the US news media would be attacking rather than ignoring the mountain of discrepancies in the 911 event. The US media might even conclude that, yes, 911 was indeed an act of terror. An act of terrorism conceived after weeks of secret planning in some five-sided fortresses, by a cabal of war criminals, double agents and nefarious profiteers.
The response to my brief questionnaire did not surprise me. Rather it appeared to coincide with what I have come to expect from the US media, especially newspapers. That is, little or nothing.
Henry David Thoreau observed: "I never read any memorable news in a newspaper." But I keep reading them hoping to be surprised one day. I suppose I'm a self-appointed inspector of newspapers.
Like a lot of Internet writers, I used to send some of my best columns to my local newspaper. To their credit they published two. They never paid for either but then most newspapers have their own stable of writers and contributors who live thousands of miles away. Local writers, especially the majority of hard-working Americans who "hold these truths to be self-evident," seldom see their opinions in print.
One California citizen, a frustrated letters-to-the-editor writer to his own local newspaper, understood this well. And so he composed his own, widely read, Freewayblogger Manifesto. "Sure anybody can write a book, article, or a letter to the editor," he said. "You might even get it published provided the publisher and/or its parent corporation agrees with what you have to say."
And if they do NOT agree with what you say, you will be effectively ignored or silenced in that community.
I wrote to the news editors and publishers of my local newspaper, the South Florida Sun Sentinel. I wrote to them twice, asking about 911. I wrote to editors Earl Maucker and Kingsley Guy and Chauncey Mabe. I even wrote to the Sun Sentinel publisher, Bob Gremillion. I politely asked them: "Does the US media purposely avoid reporting news stories of 911 contradictions that conflict with the official government version of events?"
No response. Twice.
I wrote to the editor of the Austin American-Statesman. The editor, Rich Oppel, had written a recent column I admired. He concluded, "The business of journalism has changed, not always for the best. Yet the journalism of journalism had not changed. In those still-fierce faces and voices of the aging editors, I saw and heard idealism and ideas at octane levels that made them driven and eternally young."
Sounded fine to me, in theory.
I wrote to editor Oppel twice. Hoping for that "still-fierce" idealism. I thought Rich might live up to his words. At least in print, editor Oppel sounded a lot like that idealistic New York news editor that actor Michael Keaton portrayed in an entertaining movie, The Paper (1994).
No response. Twice.
I wrote to sixty editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Austin American-Statesman, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the recent Pulitzer Prize winning Toledo Blade before I finally gave up.
I even wrote to the trio of Blade reporters who wrote that Pulitzer Prize-winning piece about the war in Vietnam. (How The Toledo Blade came to win a Pulitzer for a Story That Was 37 Years Old).
I had hoped that those three award-winning reporters, Joe Mahr, Mike Sallah and Mitch Weiss might email me back. Maybe write me that 911 was hotter than depleted uranium (another topic off limits to the MSM media) and admit that they couldn't touch it. I mean, it took The Toledo Blade 37 years to focus on atrocities in Vietnam, ignored by the US media. Imagine how many centuries it might take for the MSM to focus on 911?
The one editor gutsy enough to answer my emails? Jim Wilhelm from The Toledo Blade. Here's his reply, in part.
"Without looking at the 'example,' (links) I personally don't believe the U.S. media would purposely avoid reporting such stories. There are lots of reasons information that comes to the attention of a newspaper or other media are not reported, some of them having to do with whether they can be properly substantiated through sources and documents that would stand up in a court of law."
Okay. Reasonable response, right? But not even a smidgen of curiosity to examine the well-researched links I sent? Sadly, Jim Wilhelm, like all the other editors, ignored the information that might not "stand up in a court of law," even the very same mainstream media reports that appeared immediately after the attack but never surfaced again.
Unfortunately, 911 researchers have been clamoring for just such a court of law. Some in the 911 Truth Movement, like Mike Ruppert and Jimmy Walters, have even challenged people to come forth and either sue them or prove their shaky contentions, that 911 happened as the mainstream media reported it. Walters even promised a million dollars to anyone who could bring a little PROOF to the discouse, simply saying, "Reopen 9/11 - Catch the Real Terrorists"
No takers so far.
Wilhelm replied to my fourth question--the one that likely struck a raw nerve with every editor who works in the US media. Recall, I had asked: "If you personally became suspicious that 911 was possibly an inside job--by a rogue element in the government--would you suppress the story rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"
"The question--- like most of the others above, is loaded," wrote Wilhelm. "If I had the resources (for example, reporters in Washington) I would pursue such a story. I would not willfully suppress such a story if I had substantiated information."
Curiously, guys like Greg Szymanski, way up in Idaho, without a huge news organization behind them (The Toledo Blade employs 146 newsroom staff), without a newspaper paying a decent weekly salary or even a reporter's phone bills, can manage to uncover more substantial bits and pieces to the puzzle of 911 than ALL the editors I queried.
They may not "willingly suppress such a story" but the truth about 911 may not win any Pulitzer Prizes for, oh, 37 years.
Amateur historian and novelist, Douglas Herman writes regularly for the Worldwide Web, the last bastion of truly Free Speech and of gutsy reporting. He is the author of the controversial thriller,
The Guns of Dallas
Internet Censorship
Internet Censorship
Internet CensorshipBy Wayne Madsen12-9-5
Internet censorship. It did not happen overnight but slowly came to America's shores from testing grounds in China and the Middle East.
Progressive and investigative journalist web site administrators are beginning to talk to each other about it, e-mail users are beginning to understand why their e-mail is being disrupted by it, major search engines appear to be complying with it, and the low to equal signal-to-noise ratio of legitimate e-mail and spam appears to be perpetuated by it.
In this case, "it," is what privacy and computer experts have long warned about: massive censorship of the web on a nationwide and global scale. For many years, the web has been heavily censored in countries around the world. That censorship continues at this very moment. Now it is happening right here in America.
The agreement by the Congress to extend an enhanced Patriot Act for another four years will permit the political enforcers of the Bush administration, who use law enforcement as their proxies, to further clamp censorship controls on the web.
Internet Censorship: The Warning Signs Were Not Hidden
The warning signs for the crackdown on the web have been with us for over a decade. The Clipper chip controversy of the 90s, John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) system pushed in the aftermath of 9-11, backroom deals between the Federal government and the Internet service industry, and the Patriot Act have ushered in a new era of Internet censorship, something just half a decade ago computer programmers averred was impossible given the nature of the web. They were wrong, dead wrong.
Take for example of what recently occurred when two journalists were taking on the phone about a story that appeared on Google News. The story was about a Christian fundamentalist move in Congress to use U.S. military force in Sudan to end genocide in Darfur. The story appeared on the English Google News site in Qatar. But the very same Google News site when accessed simultaneously in Washington, DC failed to show the article. This censorship is accomplished by geolocation filtering: the restriction or modifying of web content based on the geographical region of the user. In addition to countries, such filtering can now be implemented for states, cities, and even individual IP addresses.
With reports in the Swedish newspaper Svensa Dagbladet today that the United States has transmitted a Homeland Security Department "no fly" list of 80,000 suspected terrorists to airport authorities around the world, it is not unreasonable that a "no [or restricted] surfing/emailing" list has been transmitted to Internet Service Providers around the world. The systematic disruptions of web sites and email strongly suggests that such a list exists.
News reports on CIA prisoner flights and secret prisons are disappearing from Google and other search engines like Alltheweb as fast as they appear. Here now, gone tomorrow is the name of the game.
Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.
America On Line is the most egregious is stifling Internet freedom. A former AOL employee noted how AOL and other Internet Service Providers cooperate with the Bush administration in censoring email. The Patriot Act gave federal agencies the power to review information to the packet level and AOL was directed by agencies like the FBI to do more than sniff the subject line. The AOL term of service (TOS) has gradually been expanded to grant AOL virtually universal power regarding information. Many AOL users are likely unaware of the elastic clause, which says they will be bound by the current TOS and any TOS revisions which AOL may elect at any time in the future. Essentially, AOL users once agreed to allow the censorship and non-delivery of their email.
Microsoft has similar requirements for Hotmail as do Yahoo and Google for their respective e-mail services.
There are also many cases of Google's search engine failing to list and link to certain information. According to a number of web site administrators who carry anti-Bush political content, this situation has become more pronounced in the last month. In addition, many web site administrators are reporting a dramatic drop-off in hits to their sites, according to their web statistic analyzers. Adding to their woes is the frequency at which spam viruses are being spoofed as coming from their web site addresses.
Government disruption of the political side of the web can easily be hidden amid hyped mainstream news media reports of the latest "boutique" viruses and worms, reports that have more to do with the sales of anti-virus software and services than actual long-term disruption of banks, utilities, or airlines.
Internet Censorship in the US: No Longer a Prediction
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems have honed their skills at Internet censorship for years in places like China, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and other countries. They have learned well. They will be the last to admit they have imported their censorship skills into the United States at the behest of the Bush regime. Last year, the Bush-Cheney campaign blocked international access to its web site -- www.georgewbush.com -- for unspecified "security reasons."
Only those in the Federal bureaucracy and the companies involved are in a position to know what deals have been made and how extensive Internet censorship has become. They owe full disclosure to their customers and their fellow citizens.
Internet CensorshipBy Wayne Madsen12-9-5
Internet censorship. It did not happen overnight but slowly came to America's shores from testing grounds in China and the Middle East.
Progressive and investigative journalist web site administrators are beginning to talk to each other about it, e-mail users are beginning to understand why their e-mail is being disrupted by it, major search engines appear to be complying with it, and the low to equal signal-to-noise ratio of legitimate e-mail and spam appears to be perpetuated by it.
In this case, "it," is what privacy and computer experts have long warned about: massive censorship of the web on a nationwide and global scale. For many years, the web has been heavily censored in countries around the world. That censorship continues at this very moment. Now it is happening right here in America.
The agreement by the Congress to extend an enhanced Patriot Act for another four years will permit the political enforcers of the Bush administration, who use law enforcement as their proxies, to further clamp censorship controls on the web.
Internet Censorship: The Warning Signs Were Not Hidden
The warning signs for the crackdown on the web have been with us for over a decade. The Clipper chip controversy of the 90s, John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) system pushed in the aftermath of 9-11, backroom deals between the Federal government and the Internet service industry, and the Patriot Act have ushered in a new era of Internet censorship, something just half a decade ago computer programmers averred was impossible given the nature of the web. They were wrong, dead wrong.
Take for example of what recently occurred when two journalists were taking on the phone about a story that appeared on Google News. The story was about a Christian fundamentalist move in Congress to use U.S. military force in Sudan to end genocide in Darfur. The story appeared on the English Google News site in Qatar. But the very same Google News site when accessed simultaneously in Washington, DC failed to show the article. This censorship is accomplished by geolocation filtering: the restriction or modifying of web content based on the geographical region of the user. In addition to countries, such filtering can now be implemented for states, cities, and even individual IP addresses.
With reports in the Swedish newspaper Svensa Dagbladet today that the United States has transmitted a Homeland Security Department "no fly" list of 80,000 suspected terrorists to airport authorities around the world, it is not unreasonable that a "no [or restricted] surfing/emailing" list has been transmitted to Internet Service Providers around the world. The systematic disruptions of web sites and email strongly suggests that such a list exists.
News reports on CIA prisoner flights and secret prisons are disappearing from Google and other search engines like Alltheweb as fast as they appear. Here now, gone tomorrow is the name of the game.
Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.
America On Line is the most egregious is stifling Internet freedom. A former AOL employee noted how AOL and other Internet Service Providers cooperate with the Bush administration in censoring email. The Patriot Act gave federal agencies the power to review information to the packet level and AOL was directed by agencies like the FBI to do more than sniff the subject line. The AOL term of service (TOS) has gradually been expanded to grant AOL virtually universal power regarding information. Many AOL users are likely unaware of the elastic clause, which says they will be bound by the current TOS and any TOS revisions which AOL may elect at any time in the future. Essentially, AOL users once agreed to allow the censorship and non-delivery of their email.
Microsoft has similar requirements for Hotmail as do Yahoo and Google for their respective e-mail services.
There are also many cases of Google's search engine failing to list and link to certain information. According to a number of web site administrators who carry anti-Bush political content, this situation has become more pronounced in the last month. In addition, many web site administrators are reporting a dramatic drop-off in hits to their sites, according to their web statistic analyzers. Adding to their woes is the frequency at which spam viruses are being spoofed as coming from their web site addresses.
Government disruption of the political side of the web can easily be hidden amid hyped mainstream news media reports of the latest "boutique" viruses and worms, reports that have more to do with the sales of anti-virus software and services than actual long-term disruption of banks, utilities, or airlines.
Internet Censorship in the US: No Longer a Prediction
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems have honed their skills at Internet censorship for years in places like China, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and other countries. They have learned well. They will be the last to admit they have imported their censorship skills into the United States at the behest of the Bush regime. Last year, the Bush-Cheney campaign blocked international access to its web site -- www.georgewbush.com -- for unspecified "security reasons."
Only those in the Federal bureaucracy and the companies involved are in a position to know what deals have been made and how extensive Internet censorship has become. They owe full disclosure to their customers and their fellow citizens.
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