Graeme MacQueen is founding Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. He participated in developing peace-building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia, Afghanistan. He also helped develop India’s Women’s Peace Brigade and serves on a Canadian Board supporting this initiative. In recent years, he focused heavily on …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (13.4MB) | Embed
|
By Washington’s Blog
|
|
|
Global Research, December 11, 2011
|
|
The Core of the Patriot Act Was Drafted in 1995 … By Joe BidenEveryone knows that the Patriot Act was drafted before 9/11. But few know that it was Joe Biden who drafted the core provisions which were included in that bill … in 1995. CNET reported in 2008:
|
|
It might seem an odd moment for the War on Terror to expand. The 9/11 terrorist attacks are now ten years in the past; Osama bin Laden is sleeping with the fishes; and all of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators who are not dead are in custody awaiting trial.
President Obama—the man who ran for president promising to end the Bush Administration’s signature methods of fighting terrorism—is still in office.
Ten years after America’s entry into World War II, to make an imperfect but still telling analogy, the country had moved on to other global conflicts. The Japanese and Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps had been released, albeit without an apology, and Germany was an ally, not an enemy.
But the War on Terror has not only stayed with us, it’s growing. Bills currently in Congress go well beyond the already broad bounds of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror policies.
Yes, the timing is odd, but only if one cares about evidence, logic, cause-and-effect relationships, and other possibly outmoded concepts. Seen through the lens of politics, fear-mongering, and the election cycle, the timing of these bills is understandable. Call it election fever.
SALON.COM SATURDAY, DEC 10, 2011 6:30 AM EST
The FBI yesterday announced it has secured an indictment against Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, a 38-year-old citizen of Iraq currently in Canada, from which the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The headline on the FBI’s Press Release tells the basic story: “Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers.” The criminal complaint previously filed under seal provides the details: ‘Isa is charged with “providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy” because he allegedly supported a 2008 attack on a U.S. military base in Mosul that killed 5 American soldiers. In other words, if the U.S. invades and occupies your country, and you respond by fighting back against the invading army — the ultimate definition of a “military, not civilian target” — then you are a . . . Terrorist.
Here is how the complaint, in the first paragraph, summarizes the Terrorism charge against ‘Isa:
By Stephen Lendman/12-3-11
Join Stephen Lendman Thursdays @ 11:30am(ET) and Saturdays and Sundays @ 1pm(ET) for his great show “The Progressive Radio News Hour.”
|
Post-9/11, America’s moved steadily toward eroding democracy entirely. Justification given is war on terror hokum. Incrementally, international, constitutional and statute laws have been trashed. Equity, justice and other democratic values long ago were abandoned to advance America’s imperium. On May 26, the House voted to abolish freedom entirely – HR 1540, 322 – 96. On December 1, the Senate did likewise – S. 1867, 93 to 7. Both versions assure no one anywhere is now safe, including law-abiding US citizens. |
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Insiders-voice-doubts-abou-by-Rory-OConnor-111015-175.html
|
October 15, 2011 By Rory OConnor Former FBI agents say the agency’s bin Laden unit misled them about two hijackers |
A growing number of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.
These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims’ families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film “Press for Truth.” At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:
By Allen Roland
Global Research, October 4, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26897
Global Research Editor’s Note. This list is selective. For a complete list consult www.patriotsquestion911.com
Here are 40 experts, including the Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Thomas H. Kean, Former Governor of New Jersey and Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Homeland Security Advisory Council ~ sounding off in short quotes about their misgivings with the 9/11 commission and the questions that are still smoldering.
Nine-eleven’s ten-year anniversary is sparking retrospectives ranging from lives lost to a War on Terror launched. But media accounts have omitted an important political casualty: the short-lived “anti-globalization” movement, perhaps the largest American social movement since the civil rights and Vietnam War era.
I watched the massive November 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) from my computer, a high school student with a budding interest in social justice eagerly clicking “refresh” on the brand new Indymedia web site: Teamsters and Turtles, steelworkers and socialists shutting down streets and anarchists smashing Starbucks’ windows. The police conducted mass arrests and unleashed tear gas, but a shocked elite was forced to hunker down in hotel rooms: the summit failed and the march of global capitalism stumbled.
1. Twin Towers
Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world. There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.
Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.
Most Americans would likely agree that the main shock delivered to Americans and the American government by the 9/11 attacks was that of vulnerability. Another such shock is impending. It is the national vulnerability that will be revealed this month by the American veto of a Palestinian demand for full United Nations membership.
During the century and a half preceding 9/11, Americans enjoyed national and individual invulnerability to devastating foreign attack, unlike the people of any other major nation. Much has been made in recent years of how nuclear dread lay over the land in the 1950s. My own experience was that even the Cuban Missile Crisis was not what it subsequently was made out to have been. I am sure that the people actually making decisions in Washington quaked in their boots and prayed, which is why nothing happened. The menace was on the one hand so great that there was nothing to do about it (crouching under a table or possession of a shovel notwithstanding), but on the other hand no one in power was so stupid as to initiate a nuclear attack.
Global Research, September 12, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26498
In the US on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with “A Day of Remembrance,” a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Canada, at Ryerson University the four-day International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, came to a close at 5pm.
During the four days of hearings, distinguished scientists and scholars and professional architects and engineers presented the results of years of their independent research into all aspects of 9/11 to a distinguished panel consisting of the honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court who was an investigative judge who presided over terrorism cases and three distinguished scholars of high renown and judgment. The distinguished panel’s task is to produce a report with their judgment of the evidence presented by the expert witnesses.
Global Research Editors Note
This incisive and carefully researched article was first published more than nine years ago by Global Research on June 13, 2002 (revised 19 September 2002). The original URL of this article was http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP206A.html
“My hypothesis: that the events of September 11 were planned by those who not only had the motive, means, and opportunity to carry out the plan, but also were best placed to manage the consequences stemming from it, as well as managing the flow of information. If this were an “inside job”, the first thing to do was to look at who conveyed specific information on bin Laden before – and I stress, before – 9/11, for they were most likely involved wittingly or not with those who masterminded it.
“Read for yourself, and decide, at the end of the day, how much credibility you will continue to accord to those who claim to be the proper trustees of your fate and well-being.” (Chaim Kupferberg, June 2002)
The mystery surrounding the death of John O’Neill
In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the finger of guilt was directed toward the only plausible author for such a sophisticated and ruthless act of terror – Osama bin Laden.
A strikingly good piece of investigative journalism from Associated Press finds that accusations about the damage done by WikiLeaks’ latest release are — yet again — wildly overstated and without any factual basis. These most recent warnings have centered on WikiLeaks’ exposure of diplomatic sources whom the released cables indicated should be “strictly protected.” While unable to examine all of the names in the cables, AP focused on the ones “the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky.“ It found that many of them are “comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death.”
In particular, many of these super-secret sources were “already dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations” while “some have publicly written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the U.S. government.” Like the Pentagon before them, even the State Department — which has “been scouring the documents since last year to find examples where sources are exposed and inform them that they may be ‘outed’” — is unable to provide any substantiation for its shrill, public denunciations of WikiLeaks and its “dire” warnings about the “grave danger” caused by publication of these cables:
It’s been a decade since the day that changed everything — or at least, the one that finally laid it all bare. Over the years, I’ve tried to confront it, rewrite it, debunk it, historicize it, mock it, and ultimately ignore it, all to no avail. It’s not going anywhere, this Trojan Horse of the new millennium, this farce that launched a thousand ships. We’re stuck with it, even though no matter how we crunch the numbers it still doesn’t really add up. Or does it?
As it turned out, homeland insecurity was the perfect foil for the hegemony of Homeland Security. Now the architects of Total Information Awareness can legally be in our phone calls, our emails, our bank accounts, our library cards, our internet browsers, our peace groups, our medical records, our gonads, our heads, and our hearts. We’ve been hornswoggled, hoodwinked, and hijacked into accepting pervasive incursions into every vestige of individual liberty and political democracy — all done quite ingeniously in the name of protecting liberty and preserving democracy.
The events made my mind reel. The angry plumes of smoke, office paper raining like confetti, tumbling windows flashing in the sunlight. I could make out jumpers and watched a jet fighter whoosh by the burning towers, bank and disappear. I thought, “This is like a movie.”
It upset me that my only way to comprehend the events was to reference the Hollywood imaginarium. But it was understandable. Where else would I have seen images resembling the war in my backyard – collapsing skyscrapers, gigantic fireballs and thousands of dead?
