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Building the WTC
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
The WTC was built to be indestructible, withstand Huge wind speeds, multiple fires and even JET crashes. The WTC twin towers were the jewel in the crown and were 110 floors, 500,000 tonnes, 200,000 tones of steel and 300,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete. Everything about the towers was massive, the towers were built with 3 times working loads in mind. A square steel outer cylinder with an “Indestructible” steel core was its construction. All other tall buildings followed and improved upon the WTC design style, it was the strongest, tallest structure of its day, a significant achievement using only the most high quality steel.
Have Your Say: Building the WTC
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So, JUST HOW many security systems failed on 911? All of them!!
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
The following list is from Jim Marrs book Inside Job.
• A wide variety of standard defense mechanisms designed to prevent such an attack systematically failed on 9/11. Especially notable are the atypical failures which occurred simultaneously within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Military Command Center (NMCC), and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), all charged with protecting US airspace.
• Interceptor jets were not scrambled for more than thirty minutes after it was obvious that four airliners had gone off course and were presumably hijacked. In the case of Flight 77, which reportedly slammed into the Pentagon, an hour and forty-five minutes elapsed with no interception.
• Missile batteries designed to protect Washington, DC, failed to stop the strike on the Pentagon, one of the world’s most protected structures, and fighter jets on constant alert at Andrews Air Force Base just twelve miles away were never scrambled.
• By a “bizarre coincidence,” two government homeland defense agencies (NORAD and the NRO) were practicing war games on the morning of 9/11. The games simulated responses to a scenario in which hijacked planes were crashed into buildings. This fact could explain the government’s lack of rapid response to the real hijackings, yet this plausible alibi has never been brought to public attention. One also wonders: How did the hijackers know the time and date of these war games in order to time their attacks to coincide with them?
• President Bush proceeded with a photo op at a Florida elementary school even after he and his aides knew that three planes had been hijacked. He lingered in the classroom for nearly twenty minutes after being informed that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center (WTC).
• Not one steel-framed high-rise building in history has collapsed solely due to fire. The free-fall speed collapse of the Trade Center towers, with attendant melted steel and powdery dust, exhibited all the characteristics of a controlled demolition.
• Just such a controlled demolition apparently occurred about 5 p.m. that same day when, according to the leaseholder of the WTC complex, the 47-story Building 7 was “pulled,” i.e., intentionally demolished.
• Vital evidence, including the buildings’ structural steel, was destroyed through rapid removal and destruction by US government officials with no investigation. This is only one of the many reasons why Fire Engineering magazine called the official investigation “a half-baked farce.”
• An eight-mile-long debris trail indicated that Flight 93 was destroyed in the air rather than in the Pennsylvania crash reportedly caused by an onboard struggle between the hijackers and passengers.
• More than a dozen countries firmly warned US authorities that an attack on American soil was imminent, some only days before the events.
• Strong evidence points to complicity in the attacks by senior intelligence operatives from Israel and Pakistan who are closely aligned with American intelligence agencies.
• A classified Congressional report incriminates senior officials in the Saudi Arabian government, showing that they had close ties to the hijackers. The Saudis enjoy long-term business and social ties to the Bush family and close political ties to the US government.
• The US government expedited the swift departure of over 100 Saudis from the country, even as the American public had been denied the right to fly. Two dozen members of bin Laden’s own family, presumably potential witnesses, were allowed to leave the country without interrogation.
• Insiders with foreknowledge of the events to come engaged in massive and highly profitable short-selling of shares in American Airlines and United Airlines, as well as other stocks readily affected by the disaster. The public has still not been presented with the final results of official investigations into these transactions-if there are any.
• A growing number of whistleblowers from within the federal government have pointed to evidence that various agencies were well aware of the possibility of attack, and were prevented by seniors officials from mounting full investigations.
• Far from being a mere reaction to 9/11, evidence now proves that the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were the culmination of long-standing plans which only awaited a provocation such as 9/11.
• The official explanations for the invasion of Iraq, such as the need to capture weapons of mass destruction, and to “bring democracy” to the country, have proven false.
• Within a few hours, the FBI released names and photos of the suspected hijackers although later many of those named turned up alive in the Middle East.
• Also within hours of the attacks, FBI agents were scouring the houses, restaurants, and flight schools they frequented. If no one had foreknowledge of the hijackers or their activities, how did they know where to look?
• Far from ordering a full and objective investigation to determine who was responsible for the 9/11 tragedies, the Bush administration dragged its feet and actually took actions to impede a swift and truthful probe into the events of that day. It was nearly two years after the events that mounting pressure from the public, led by families of 9/11 victims, finally forced the creation of an “independent” investigatory commission.
• No one in government has been reprimanded or even scolded for what we are told was the greatest intelligence and homeland-defense failure in US history. In fact, the very agencies which failed the nation watched their budgets increase dramatically, and some of the officials ostensibly at fault were actually promoted.
• No person in government, other than former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, has felt the need to apologize to the American people for the 9/11 security failure.
• President Bush himself declined to apologize for the 9/11 tragedy to either the American public or to victims’ families during an April 2004 press conference, despite being presented with the opportunity to do so at least three times.
What follows now is from www.911proof.com (posted here without permission)
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PRIOR WARNINGS OF PLANES CRASHING INTO BUILDINGS
The administration’s claim that terrorists crashing planes into buildings was not foreseeable is contradicted by numerous sources:
Initially, the CIA Director had warned congress shortly before 9/11 “that there could be an attack, an imminent attack, on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected” according to a broadcast on National Public Radio
And the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was “not surprised there was an attack (but) was surprised at the specificity . . . . (he was only) shocked at what actually happened — the extent of it”
But let’s go back and look at the facts chronologically:
Initially, the CIA Director had warned congress shortly before 9/11 “that there could be an attack, an imminent attack, on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected” according to a broadcast on National Public Radio
And the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was “not surprised there was an attack . . . .”
But let’s go back and look at the facts chronologically:
According to MSNBC, “There have been a slew of reports over the past decade of plots to use planes to strike American targets”.
In 1994, the government received information that international terrorists “had seriously considered the use of airplanes as a means of carrying out terrorist attacks” (see also this article).
In 1998, U.S. officials received reports concerning a “Bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, areas.” Officials received reports that al Qaeda was trying to establish an operative cell in the United States and that bin Laden was attempting to recruit a group of five to seven young men from the United States to travel to the Middle East for training in conjunction with his plans to strike U.S. domestic targets. Indeed, the report concluded that “a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane . . . into the World Trade Center”.
A 1999 report for the National Intelligence Council warned that fanatics loyal to bin Laden might try to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the Pentagon..
Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.
The Pentagon tracked the hijackers before 9/11.
And the U.S. received warnings from numerous foreign intelligence services about planned attacks, many of them quite detailed. Indeed, America’s closest ally apparently tracked the hijackers’ every movement prior to the attacks, and may have sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers.
According to the New York Times, “Foreign [intelligence service] agents had infiltrated
Osama bin Laden’s network and were carefully tracking its moves”, and — in January 2001 — the French intelligence services gave a report to the CIA entitled “Plan to hijack an aircraft by Islamic radicals”.
There were extraordinarily high terrorist attack threat levels in the summer of 2001, involving threats of attack within the U.S., and the U.S. government knew there were Al-Qaeda cells within the U.S. (or watch the video here).
In July 2001, a briefing prepared for senior government officials warned of “a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties … (it) will occur with little or no warning.”.
FBI agents recommended to FBI headquarters, in July 2001, an urgent nationwide review of flight schools regarding terrorism, and mentioned Bin Laden by name.
A pre-9/11 National Intelligence Estimate was entitled “Islamic Extremists Learn to Fly”, and was apparently about Islamic people taking classes at U.S. flight schools.
President Bush was told in August 2001 that supporters of Bin Laden planned an attack within the U.S. with explosives and that they wanted to hijack airplanes.
A month before 9/11, the CIA sent a message to the Federal Aviation Administration warning of a possible hijacking “or an act of sabotage against a commercial airliner”.
The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief was entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”.
U.S. intelligence officials informed President Bush weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks that Bin Laden’s terrorist network might try to hijack American planes, and that information prompted administration officials to issue a private warning to transportation officials and national security agencies.
It was widely known within the FBI shortly before 9/11 that an imminent attack was planned on lower Manhattan.
An employee who worked in the Twin Towers stated “How could they let this happen? They knew this building was a target. Over the past few weeks we’d been evacuated a number of times, which is unusual. I think they had an inkling something was going on”
And a guard who worked in the world trade center stated that “officials had recently taken steps to secure the towers against aerial attacks”
On September 6, 2001, Condoleezza Rice was warned that a terrorist attack inside the United States was imminent
Also on September 6th, author Salman Rushdie is banned by US authorities from taking internal US flights; the FAA told his publisher the reason was that it had “intelligence of something about to happen”
The former FBI translator who the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups have claimed is credible says that the government was provided with information about the planned attacks, including the fact that the attacks would be carried out using airplanes, and some information about date ranges and targets. She says that - after 9/11 - the FBI translators were ordered to “keep quiet” regarding this information.
The National Security Agency and the FBI were both independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls. The day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls. (The NSA claims that it did not translate the intercept until September 12th; however, the above-mentioned FBI translator said that she was frequently ordered to falsify dates of translations regarding 9/11)
Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls from Bin Laden’s chief of operations to the United States.
The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years.
Indeed, two days before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.
Newsweek stated “On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns” (pay-per-view; cached version of article here)
Indeed, the military had actually drilled for aerial attacks with planes:
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the military air defense agency responsible for protecting the U.S. mainland, had run drills for several years of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, and “numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft”. In other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were run.
And the military had conducted numerous drills of planes crashing into the Pentagon. For example, see this official military website showing a military drill conducted in 2000 using miniatures; this article concerning a May 2001 exercise of a plane crashing into the Pentagon (see also this article and this one); and this article about yet another drill of a plane hitting the Pentagon from August 2001.
(Indeed, many of the drills appear to have included warning alarms and evacuation of the building.)
The military had also run war games involving multiple, simultaneous hijackings (first paragraph), so this aspect of 9/11 was not as overwhelming as we have been led to believe.
There are literally hundreds of other lines of evidence that prove that the government had substantial foreknowledge concerning the attacks (see this website). A former Lieutenant Colonel for the Air Force and former Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at the Defense Language Institute summarized the feeling of many when he stated “Of course Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism.”
Overview of New 9/11 Research (from scholarsfor911truth.org)
- The impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes that hit were very similar to those they were designed to withstand, and they continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.
- The melting point of steel at 2,800*F is about 1,000*F higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800*F under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt, which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down.
- UL certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000*F for three or four hours before it would even significantly weaken, where these fires burned too low and too briefly at an average temperature of around 500*F–about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North–to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt.
- If the steel had melted or weakened, the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt, and total demolition that was observed.
- William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the subbasements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a 50-ton hydraulic press and ripping the skin off a fellow worker, a report corroborated by the testimony of around three dozen other custodians.
- Willie reported that the explosion occurred prior to the airplane’s impact, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, “Seismic Proof: 9/11 was an Inside Job”, which demonstrates that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds prior to the airplanes impacts.
- Heavy steel construction buildings like the Twin Towers, built with more than 100,000 tons of steel, are not even capable of “pancake collapse”, which normally only occurs with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in “redundant” welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, as Charles Pegelow has pointed out to me.
- The destruction of the Twin Towers in approximately 10 seconds apiece is even faster than free fall with only air resistance, which would have taken at least 12 seconds, which, as Judy Wood has emphasized, is an astounding result that would have been impossible without extremely powerful explosives.
- The towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where the floors do not move, a phenomenon that Judy Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the concrete, the official account cannot possibly explain.
- WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM/ET after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to “pull it”, displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions, including a complete, abrupt, and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, and so forth, an event so embarrassing to the official account that it is not even mentioned in THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT.
- The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44 feet above the ground; the kind and quantity of debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
- The Pentagon’s own videotape does not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when it was shown on “The Factor”; but at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 71-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and visible; it was not, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
- Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed black box data allegedly from the Pentagon plane and discovered that it contradicts the official account in direction, approach, and altitude: it was 300 feet too high to have taken out the lampposts and 100 feet too high to have hit the building itself.
- The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory–flying at high speed barely above ground level–physically impossible; and if it had come it at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater; but there is no crater and the government has no way out, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
- If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, then there would have been a debris field of about a city block in size, but in fact the debris is distributed over an area of about eight square miles, which would be explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed as required by the government’s official scenario.There are more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly the planes; their names were not on any passenger manifest; they were not subject to any autopsy; several have turned up alive and well; the cell phone calls appear to have been impossible; on and on. The evidence may be found at 911Scholars.org.
http://patricio2ahora.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/911-moral-imperative-spread-the-word/
Have Your Say: So, JUST HOW many security systems failed on 911? All of them!!
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The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm has long ties to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken Starr.
By Ben Van Heuvelen
When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 “escalation of force incidents”; in 163 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents.
On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will hold a hearing on the U.S. military’s use of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the hearing last week, the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any information or testimony without its signoff. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
But the attempt to shield Prince was apparently not the first time State had protected Blackwater. A report issued by Waxman on Monday alleges that State helped Blackwater cover up Iraqi fatalities. In December 2006, State arranged for the company to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a Blackwater employee to write State’s initial “spot report” on the Sept. 16 shooting incident — a report that did not mention civilian casualties and claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a convoy.
The ties between State and Blackwater are only part of a web of relationships that Blackwater has maintained with the Bush administration and with prominent Republicans. From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than $1 million to more than $500 million, all while employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the security company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater’s luminaries with their professional — and political — résumés.
Erik Prince, founder and CEO: How did Blackwater go from a small corporation training local SWAT teams to a seemingly inseparable part of U.S. operations in Iraq? Good timing, and the connections of its CEO, may be the answer.
Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11, has connections to the Republican Party in his blood. His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince’s widow, Elsa, who remarried after her husband’s death, has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian-right organization, Dobson’s Focus on the Family. She currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a vice president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus on the Family.
Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.
The former Betsy Prince — Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister — married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (”I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,” Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006.
Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees. Through his Freiheit Foundation, he also gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000. In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. During college, he interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House, and also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Rep. John Doolittle have visited Blackwater’s Moyock, N.C., compound, on a trip arranged by the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then House Majority Leader Tom Delay. ASG partner Paul Behrends is a longtime associate of Prince’s.
Prince’s connections seem to have paid off for Blackwater. Robert Young Pelton, author of “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror,” has reported that one of Blackwater’s earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid $5.4 million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came after Prince made a call to then CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard. What’s more, Harper’s Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters and “meets with senior people” inside the CIA. But Prince’s most important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert L. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government in Iraq. In August 2003, Blackwater won a $27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer. In charge of the Blackwater team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal security for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s.
By 2005, Blackwater was earning $353 million annually from federal contracts. Blackwater’s benefits from government largess haven’t ended with Iraq. The company was recently one of five awarded a Department of Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as $15 billion. Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and profited handsomely. According to Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” Blackwater had made roughly $73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year after the hurricane hit.
Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel: In 2002, President Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon’s military contracts as the Defense Department’s inspector general. Schmitz presided over the largest increase of military-contracting spending in history: As of 2005, 77 companies were awarded 149 “prime contracts” worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions going to Blackwater. Unlike previous I.G.s, Schmitz reported directly to the secretary of defense — a setup that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers objected to, given Schmitz’s oversight responsibility. Schmitz even carried Rumsfeld’s “12 principles” for the Pentagon in his lapel pocket. The first principle read, “Do nothing that could raise questions about the credibility of DoD.”
Schmitz has many ties to the Republican Party establishment. His father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman, and his brother, Patrick Schmitz, served as George H.W. Bush’s deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993. Joseph himself worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight. According to an October 2005 article in Time magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his staff’s multiyear investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them, then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the decision before sending the final report to Congress. Schmitz informed his staff on Aug. 26, 2005, that he was leaving the Pentagon; in September of that year, he went to work for Blackwater.
J. Cofer Black, vice chairman: Black spent most of his 28-year CIA career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where he worked with Rob Richer (below). At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. There he was former CIA Director George Tenet’s ace in the hole when it came to convincing Bush that the CIA should lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Black is, according to published accounts, a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of briefer President Bush likes. In one briefing, according to several reports, Black told the president, “When we’re through with [terrorists in Afghanistan], they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” (Black also ordered CIA field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden’s head packed in dry ice so Black could show it to Bush.) Black’s Afghanistan presentation earned him “special access” to the White House, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest reported in December 2005.
Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush administration’s interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies. In a famous moment, Black told Congress in 2002, “After 9/11, the gloves came off.” And the group within the CIA responsible for extraordinary renditions — operations in which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret prison facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as torture — fell under Black at the CTC, Priest has reported.
Black later went to the State Department, where one of his roles was to begin coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In 2003, the State Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security teams.
In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of what Harper’s Silverstein termed a “revolving door to Blackwater” from the CIA. In addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total Intelligence Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior advisor for counterterrorism and national security.
Rob Richer, vice president for intelligence: Richer was head of the CIA’s Near East division — and the agency’s liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan — from 1999 to 2004. In 2003, he briefed President Bush on the nascent Iraqi insurgency. In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking official for clandestine operations. He left the agency for Blackwater in the fall of 2005, effectively taking the agency’s relationship with Abdullah with him. The CIA had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan’s intelligence services. There was an obvious quid pro quo: In exchange for the training, Jordan would share information. Jordan has now hired Blackwater’s intelligence division — headed by Richer — to do its spy training instead. The CIA isn’t happy, writes Silverstein: “People [at the agency] are pissed off,” said Silverstein’s source. “Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly and he thinks that’s the same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer is still the man.”
Fred Fielding, former outside counsel: After four Blackwater employees were tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, their families brought a wrongful-death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the company had not provided adequate arms, armor and backup. Blackwater feared that if it was found liable for its employees’ deaths, a floodgate of future litigation could be opened. To fight the suit, Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican insider. Dan Callahan, a lawyer representing the families, told Salon he was shocked when he learned Fielding would be representing the company. “How the hell,” Callahan says he wondered at the time, “did I draw Fred Fielding on this case?”
Fielding has had a long career as a lawyer to prominent Republicans. From 1970 to 1972, he was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon administration; from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that administration as deputy White House counsel. Under President Reagan, he served as White House counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel named John Roberts, now the chief justice of the United States. After the 2000 election, he served the current administration as transition counsel, and he also held a spot on the 9/11 Commission. In January 2007, Bush chose him as White House counsel.
Ken Starr, outside counsel: According to Callahan, Fielding represented Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in February 2005. After Fielding left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount, represented Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired another high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials — Ken Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine Law School in California. Starr was appointed to the federal bench by Reagan, was U.S. solicitor general under George H.W. Bush and was on Bush’s shortlist to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court. He is best known, however, as the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton. He revealed the intimate details of Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton’s impeachment by Congress.
Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks jurisdiction in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the security firm. On Oct. 18, 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of Blackwater, asserting that the company was “constitutionally immune” to the lawsuit. “If companies such as Blackwater must factor the defense costs of state tort lawsuits into [their] overall costs,” argued Starr, “Blackwater will suffer irreparable harm.” Roberts denied the petition on Oct. 24. In December, Starr filed a motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court. The motion was denied in February.
Additional reporting by Tracee Herbaugh.
Have Your Say: The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater
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Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton … Who Needs Elections?
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Suddenly - and FINALLY - people are talking about the problem of presidential dynasties here in America. The possibility of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton (up to 28 years of 2-family rule) is looming with Hillary on the rise. (Add to that 8 run-up years of Bush the Father as VP to Reagan.)
I hate to sound like a smarty pants. But why not? Here is a commentary I taped for CBS Sunday Morning a year and a half ago on this subject. (Hence the references to Jeb Bush as candidate.) Forgive the over-enunciation and the annoying billowy shirt. I was new on the job:
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/09/28/bush-clinton-bush-clinton-who-needs-elections/
Have Your Say: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton … Who Needs Elections?
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Greenspan’s Dark Legacy Unmasked
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News
After retiring as the Federal Reserve’s second longest ever serving chairman, Alan Greenspan is now cashing in big late in life at age 81. He chaired the Fed’s Board of Governors from the time he was appointed in August, 1987 to when he stepped down January 31, 2006 amidst a hail of ill-deserved praise for his stewardship during good and perilous times. USA Today noted “the onetime jazz band musician went out on a high note.” The Wall Street Journal said “his economic legacy (rests on results) and seems secure.” The Washington Post cited his “nearly mythical status.”
Stanford Washington Research Group chief strategist Greg Valliere called him a “giant,” and Bob Woodward called him “Maestro” in his cloying hagiography (now priced $1.99 used on Alibris and $2.19 on Amazon) that was published in 2000 as the Greenspan-built house of cards was collapsing. The book was an adoring tribute to a man he called a symbol of American economic preeminence, who the Financial Times also praised as “An Activist Unafraid to Depart From the Rule” - by taking from the public and giving to the rich.
Others joined the chorus, too, lauding his steady, disciplined hand on the monetary steering wheel, his success keeping inflation and unemployment low, and his having represented the embodiment of prosperity in compiling a record of achievement his successor will be hard-pressed to match.
In 2004, William Greider in The Nation magazine had a different view. He’s the author of “Secrets of the Temple” on “how the Federal Reserve runs the country.” He wrote Greenspan “ranks among the most duplicitous figures to serve in modern American government (who used) his exalted status as economic wizard (to) regularly corrupt the political dialogue by sowing outrageously false impressions among gullible members of Congress and adoring financial reporters.”
They were front and center in the New York Times for the man who “steer(ed) the economy through multiple calamities and ultimately….one of the longest economic booms in history….(He earned his bona fides) weather(ing) the Black Monday stock crash of 1987 (and in 18 and a half years in office) achieved more celebrity than most rock stars” and may now approach them in earnings.
The new book of his memoirs “The Age of Turbulence” is just out for which his reported advance exceeded $8.5 million (second only to Bill Clinton’s $10 for his memoirs) plus additional royalties if sales exceed 1.9 million copies. They may given the amount of high-impact publicity it and he are getting nonstop. And that’s not all. He’s in great demand on the lecture circuit at six figure fees, has his own consulting firm, Greenspan Associates LLC, and his lawyer, Robert Barnett says “virtually every major investment-banking firm” in the world wants to hire him for his rainmaking connections.
They have value, not his market advice, best avoided for the man who engineered the largest ever stock market bubble and bust in history through incompetence, timidity, dereliction of duty, and subservience to the capital interests he represented at the expense of the greater good and a sustained sound economy he didn’t worry about nor did Wall Street.
For firms on the Street and big banks, he could do no wrong and was above reproach for letting them cash in big and then get plenty of advance warning when to exit. Most ordinary investors weren’t so fortunate. They’re not insiders and were caught flat-footed by advice from market pundit fraudsters and the most influential one of all in the Fed Chairman. Just weeks before the market peak in January, 2000, he claimed “the American economy was experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which propelled forward productivity, output, corporate profits and stock prices at a pace not seen in generations, if ever.”
It was hype and nonsense and on a par with famed economist and professor Irving Fisher’s remarks just before the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression when he claimed economic fundamentals in the country were strong, stocks undervalued, and an unending period of prosperity lay ahead. It took a world war a decade later, not market magic, for them to arrive, but before it did Fisher kept insisting in the early 1930s recovery was just around the corner. It’s the same way Wall Street touts operate today on gullible investors who even after they’ve been had are easy prey again for the next con.
And they’re really in trouble when it comes from the “Maestro,” who at the height of the stock market bubble said: “Lofty equity prices have reduced the cost of capital. The result has been a veritable explosion of spending on high-tech equipment…And I see nothing to suggest that these opportunities will peter out anytime soon….Indeed many argue that the pace of innovation will continue to quicken….to exploit the still largely untapped potential for e-commerce, especially the business-to-business arena.”
One week later, the Nasdaq peaked at 5048 and crashed to a low of 1114 on October 9, 2002. It lost 78% of its value, the S&P 500 stock index dropped 49%, and retail investors lost out while Greenspan was busy engineering another bubble with a tsunami of easy money for Wall Street and big investors. It’s now unwinding as he gets a big payday for his memoirs and a chance to rewrite history. He aims to raise himself to sainthood and at the same time distance himself from the very costly policies he implemented on top of trillions he helped scam in the greatest modern era wealth transfer from the public to the rich. More on that below.
Greenspan’s Background and Tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan grew up in New York, got his B.A. and M.A. in economics from New York University and later was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia without completing a dissertation the degree usually requires. In a highly unusual move, Columbia made an exception in his case.
Early on, he became enamored with free market ideologue Ayn Rand, wrote for her newsletters and authored three essays for her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” It expressed her views on capitalism’s “moral aspects” and her attempt (with Greenspan’s help) to rescue it from its “alleged champions who are responsible for the fact that capitalism is being destroyed without a hearing (or) trial, without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning.”
That was in 1966 when Rand, a staunch libertarian as is Greenspan, believed fundamentalist capitalism was being battered by a flood of altruism in the wake of New Deal and Great Society programs she (and Greenspan) abhorred. She defended big business, made excuses for its wars, and denounced the student rebellion at the time and the evils of altruism. Greenspan concurred, maintained a 20 year association with Rand (who died in 1982), and never looked back.
From 1948 until his 1987 Federal Reserve appointment, he served as Richard Nixon’s domestic policy coordinator in his 1968 nomination campaign and later as Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers Chairman. He also headed the economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Company, from 1955 - 1987. Its forecasting record was so poor it was about to be liquidated when he left to join the Fed. A former competitor, Pierre Renfret, noted: “When Greenspan closed down his economic consulting business to (become Fed Chairman) he did so because he had no clients left and the business was going under (and we found) out he had none (of his employees left).” That made him Reagan’s perfect Fed Chairman choice, and Renfret added it was Greenspan’s failure in private business that got him into government service in the first place.
He wouldn’t disappoint as Wall Street’s man from the start. He bailed it out in 1987 after the disastrous October black Monday. It was the same way he did in it later in 1998 following Long Term Capital Management’s collapse and again after the dot-com bubble burst. It was by his favorite monetary medicine guaranteed to work when taken as directed - floods of easy money followed by still more until the patient is healed, unmindful that the cure may be worse than the disease. No matter, it’s a new Chairman’s problem with Greenspan claiming no culpability for his 18 and a half year tenure of misdeeds, subservience to capital, and contempt for the public interest.
His new book claims the opposite. It’s a breathtaking example of historical revisionism that’s become standard practice for the man Sydney Morning News’ Political and International Editor Peter Hartcher calls “Bubble Man” in his new book by that title. In it, he quotes Bob Woodward saying Greenspan “believed he had done all he could” to contain over-exuberance when, in fact, he let it get out of control. He now claims:
– he didn’t support George Bush’s regressive tax cuts for the rich (that helped create huge budget deficits). In fact, he did, and in 2001 wholeheartedly endorsed this centerpiece of the administration’s economic policy in his testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. At the time, he cited the economic slowdown saying: “Should current economic weakness spread….having a tax cut….may….do noticeable good.”
– he’s “saddened (in his book) that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” In his typical obfuscating way to confuse and have things both ways, he tried clarifying his position in a September interview claiming: “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive. I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, are we fortunate in taking out Saddam? I would say it was essential.” He failed to say he supported the Bush administration agenda across the board, including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, with reasons given at the time he’s now distancing himself from.
– no responsibility for the 2000 stock market bubble. He falsely claimed he never saw it coming while providing generous amounts of liquidity to fuel it. After citing the market’s “irrational exuberance” in a December, 1996 speech, he failed to curb it and could have by raising interest rates, margin requirements, and jawboning investors to cool an overheated market to restore stability for long-term economic growth. Instead, he did nothing. He failed to take away the punch bowl, created a bubble, and allowed it to burst causing investors (mostly retail ones) to lose trillions.
– no responsibility for the housing and bond bubbles he created by cutting interest rates aggressively to 1% and flooding the markets with liquidity. As things got out of hand, timely responsible action could have avoided the summer, 2007 credit crisis. Again, he allowed a bad situation to get worse to keep the party going and allow lenders to profit hugely. In the unprecedented run-up in house prices to an $8 trillion wealth bubble, he derided critics claiming anything was wrong. He even encouraged homebuyers to take out adjustable rate mortgages, approved of very risky no down payment purchases, created the subprime mess as a consequence, and isn’t around to address buyers faced with $1.2 trillion in mortgage resets later this year and next that will cause many thousands of painful foreclosures.
Affected homeowners won’t likely be cheered by his speech-making bunkum that bubble level asset prices proved his monetary policies worked by getting investors to demand lower risk premiums. They also won’t be calmed by his arrogant claim that it’s “simply not realistic” to expect the Fed to identify and deflate asset bubbles when it’s real role is to champion flexible and unregulated markets leaving everyone unprotected on our own.
– no responsibility for allowing outstanding US debt to more than triple to around $40 trillion on his watch that one analyst calls his “most conspicuous achievement.” Those having to pay it off won’t thank him.
Greenspan’s Role in the Greatest Modern Era Wealth Transfer from the Public to the Rich
Greenspan was a one-man wrecking crew years before he became Fed Chairman, and his earlier role likely sealed the job for him as a man the power elite could trust. He earned his stripes and then some for his role in charge of the National Commission on Social Security Reform (called the Greenspan Commission). He was appointed by Ronald Reagan to chair it in 1981 to study and recommend actions to deal with “the short-term financing crisis that Social Security faced….(with claims the) Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund would run out of money….as early as August, 1983.”
There was just one problem. It was a hoax, but who’d know as the dominant media stayed silent. They let the Commission do its work that would end up transfering trillions of public dollars to the rich. It represents one of the greatest ever heists in plain sight, still ongoing and greater than ever, with no one crying foul to stop it. The Commission issued its report in January, 1983, and Congress used it as the basis for the 1983 Social Security Amendments to “resolve short-term financing problem(s) and (make) many other significant changes in Social Security law” with the public none the wiser it was a scam harming them.
The Commission recommended:
– Social Security remain government funded and not become a voluntary program (that would have killed it);
– $150 - 200 billion in either additional income or decreased outgo be provided the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds in calendar years 1983 - 89;
– the actuarial imbalance for the 75 year Trust Funds valuation period of an average 1.80% of taxable payroll be resolved;
– a “consensus package” to fix the problem by raising payroll taxes on incomes but exempting the rich beyond a maximum level taxed. Also a gradual increase in the retirement age and various other possible short and longer range options for consideration. The result today is low income earners pay more in payroll than income tax. For bottom level earners, the burden is especially onerous. They pay no income tax but aren’t exempt from 6.2% of their wages going for Social Security and Medicare.
– coverage under OASDI be extended on a mandatory, basis as of January 1, 1984, to all newly hired civilian employees of the federal government and all employees of nonprofit organizations;
– state and local governments that elected coverage for their employees under the OASDI-HI program not be allowed to terminate it in the future;
– the method of computing benefits be revised to exclude benefits that can accrue to individuals from non-covered OASDI employment and only be for the period when they became eligible - to eliminate “windfall” benefits;
– 50% of OASDI benefits should henceforth be taxable as ordinary income for individuals earning $20,000 or more and married couples $25,000 or more;
– in addition, other recommendations concerning cost of living adjustments, the law pertaining to surviving spouses who remarry after age 60, divorced spouses, disabled widows and widowers, and for scheduled payroll tax increases to move up to earlier years up to 1990 after which no further change be made with the wage base rising and is now at a level of $97,500 in 2007 at a tax rate of 6.2% matched by employers;
– self-employed persons beginning in 1984 pay the combined employer-employee rates now at 12.4% with half considered a business expense;
– in addition, a number of other changes recommended that in total would penalize the public to benefit the most well-off that was the whole idea of the scheme in the first place.
The public was told the Commission recommendations of 1983 were supposed to make Social Security fiscally sound for the next 75 years. They weren’t told there was no problem to fix and the changes enacted were to transfer massive wealth from the public to the rich. It was one part of an overall Reagan administration scheme that included huge individual and corporate tax cuts that took place from 1981 to 1986. The rich benefitted most with top rates dropping from 70% in 1981 to 50% over three years and then to 28% in 1986 while the bottom rate actually rose from 11 to 15%.
It was the first time US income tax rates were ever reduced at the top and raised at the bottom simultaneously. But it was far worse than that. In only a few years, Reagan got enacted the largest ever US income tax cut (mostly for the rich) while instituting the greatest ever increase entirely against working Americans earning $30,000 or less.
Alan Greenspan engineered it for him by supporting income tax cuts and doubling the payroll tax to defray the revenue shortfall. He also recommended raiding the Social Security Trust Fund to offset the deficit, and who’d know the difference. His scheme helped make the US tax code hugely regressive as well as for the first time transform a pay-as-you-go retirement and disability benefits program into one where wage earner contributions subsidize the rich as well as support current beneficiaries.
As a consequence, the wealth gap widened, continued under Clinton but became unprecedented under George W. Bush with Greenspan at it again. He supported the administration’s wealth transfer scheme to the rich and outsized corporate subsidies with the public getting stuck with out-of-control deficits, deep social service cuts, and a new Treasury Department report just out promising more of the same.
It claims Social Security faces a $13.6 trillion shortfall “over the indefinite future,” “reforms” are needed, delaying them punishes younger workers, and the program “can be made permanently solvent only by reducing the present value of scheduled benefits and/or increasing the present value of scheduled tax increases.” Translation: cut benefits deeply, raise payroll taxes, and privatize Social Security so more public wealth goes to Wall Street and big investors.
Already the top 1% owns 40% of global assets; the top 10% 85% of them; the top 1% in the US controls one-third of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80% just 15.3%; and the top 20% 84.7%. In contrast, the poorest 20% are in debt, owe more than they own, and it’s getting worse.
A generation of financial manipulation devastated working Americans, but it’s even worse than that. Added are the effects of globalization, automation, outsourcing, the shift from manufacturing to services, deregulation, other harmful economic factors plus weak unions just gotten far weaker in the wake of the UAW September membership sellout to General Motors. The tentative agreement reached (for members to vote on) amounted to an unconditional surrender by a corrupted leadership after a two day walkout that was likely orchestrated in advance to cause GM the least pain. If the package is approved as is likely, it will encourage other companies to offer similar deals, take it or leave it. Organized labor suffered another grievous blow, corporate giants gained, and are more empowered than ever to win out at the expense of workers’ futures.
The whole scheme was kick-started under Ronald Reagan. Between his tax cuts for the rich and the Greenspan Commission’s orchestrated Social Security heist, working Americans lost out in a generational wealth transfer shift now exceeding $1 trillion annually from 90 million working class households to for-profit corporations and the richest 1% of the population. It created an unprecedented wealth disparity that continues to grow, shames the nation and is destroying the bedrock middle class without which democracy can’t survive.
Greenspan helped orchestrate it with economist Ravi Batra calling his economics “Greenomics” in his 2005 book “Greenspan’s Fraud.” It “turns out to be Greedomics” advocating anti-trust laws, regulations and social services be ended so “nothing….interfere(s) with business greed and the pursuit of profits.”
It won’t affect the “Maestro.” He’s getting by quite nicely on his six figure retirement income that’s just a drop in the bucket supplementing the millions he’s making as payback for the trillions he helped shift to the rich and super-rich. They take care of their own, and Greenspan is one of them.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
Have Your Say: Greenspan’s Dark Legacy Unmasked
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RACE HATE: I hate all Iranians, US aide tells MPs
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Britsh MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America’s stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush’s senior women officials: “I hate all Iranians.”
And she also accused Britain of “dismantling” the Anglo-US-led coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon.
The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month.
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Hard line: Debra Cagan stunned the MPs with her comments
The six MPs were taken aback by the hardline approach of the Pentagon and in particular Ms Cagan, one of Mr Bush’s foreign policy advisers.
She made it clear that although the US had no plans to attack Iran, it did not rule out doing so if the Iranians ignored warnings not to develop a nuclear bomb.
It was her tone when they met her on September 11 that shocked them most.
The MPs say that at one point she said: “In any case, I hate all Iranians.”
Although it was an aside, it was not out of keeping with her general demeanour.
“She seemed more keen on saying she didn’t like Iranians than that the US had no plans to attack Iran,” said one MP. “She did say there were no plans for an attack but the tone did not fit the words.”
Another MP said: “I formed the impression that some in America are looking for an excuse to attack Iran. It was very alarming.”
Tory Stuart Graham, who was on the ten-day trip, would not discuss Ms Cagan but said: “It was very sobering to hear from the horse’s mouth how the US sees the situation.”
Ms Cagan, whose job involves keeping the coalition in Iraq together, also criticised Britain for pulling out troops.
“She said if we leave the south of Iraq, the Iranians will take it over,” said one MP.
Another said: “She is very forceful and some of my colleagues were intimidated by her muscular style.”
The MPs also saw Henry Worcester, Deputy Director of the Office of Iranian Affairs, who said he favoured talks with Iran.
The Pentagon denied Ms Cagan said she “hated” Iranians.
“She doesn’t speak that way,” said an official.
But when The Mail on Sunday spoke to four of the six MPs, three confirmed privately that she made the remark and one declined to comment. The other two could not be contacted.
Have Your Say: RACE HATE: I hate all Iranians, US aide tells MPs
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USA terror bombs civilian neighbourhood for several hours
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
The Americans bombarded a civilian apartment block at No: 139 60th street, Al Saha in Dora (South Baghdad) on Friday morning. They started at around 1 a.m. continuing for several hours. Aswat Al Iraq’s official source said that they killed eight people and wounded seven others. Residents told Aswat Al Iraq that the Americans killed ten and wounded ten others. All of the dead and wounded were civilians. While an official at Al-Yarmouk hospital told AFP that 13 people — seven men, two women and four children — were killed and 10 men and a woman were wounded in the air strike. He said all the casualties were civilians. The American military said they “regretted” if women and children were killed. That’s the headline that AFP gave their report.
US regrets if women and children killed in Baghdad raid
Photo 1: All of the dead and wounded caused by the American bombing of Al Saha in Dora were civilians. Among the civilians wounded by the American bombing was this boy. The doctors in Al Yarmouk told Reuters they had had to amputate his leg.
Photo 2: Ahmed Omar’s father was one of the civilians killed by the American bombardment of the civilian residential complex around sixtieth street. He is seen here crying on his father’s coffin.
Photo 3: Outside view of apartment bombed by Americans in Dora. The body of one of the civilians killed by the Americans was recovered from this apartment.
Reporting the same American bombing of a civilian district Reuters (Arabic) say that their television report showed clips from Al Yarmouk of two men and three boys who had been wounded in the American attack and that doctors had amputated the left leg of one of the boys. — The boy you see in the first photograph in this article.
There is no question of “if” here.
The Americans have once again deliberately bombed a civilian area from the air knowing, and not caring, that they were going to kill and maim women and children.
There is no “if” about these dead children.
There is no “if” about the dead women.
There is no “if” about these dead men.
And there is no “if” about who killed them. The Americans killed them.
As usual when they kill Iraki civilians the Americans displayed their contempt for the civilians whom they kill and maim by not bothering to put out even a preliminary a statement about it until well after the event.
The American forces in Irak care nothing for the lives of civilians, women, children, the elderly, “men of military age” — which as far as the Americans are concerned means any child over the age of 12. They care nothing.
For the Americans the people of Irak are a resource to be exploited just like our oil except that we are worth less than our oil. The only thing they require of us is obedience that we must be made to understand that it is the American who is holding the whip and that he has every intention of using it.
The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.
It is the American way of war to make war against the civilians of the country they are trying to subjugate.
Their failed “surge” was never intended to bring peace to Baghdad. And it hasn’t. What it has done is to turn vast swathes of the city into gigantic open air prisons where the Americans can do as they want.
The Americans routinely bomb civilian homes Sadr City, Shula, Dora, al Fadil, the list goes on and on and on. Since January hundreds of civilians have been slaughtered by criminal cowards in American uniforms using American weapons sent here by the American government and nobody in the green zone government dares say a thing to them about it. They dare not say a thing about it because they survive at the will and pleasure of American gunmen and they know it.
And always when they do finally get around to making a statement they tell the tired old stupid American lie that they were fighting Al-Qaeda. In that part of Dora? I can only suppose that a large part of the American Army’s publicity machine is actually some sort of care institution for the feeble-minded. And that these feeble-minded buffoons think that everybody is as stupid as they are.
Then comes the second tired old American lie. That they “regret” the deaths of the civilians they shot down. They do not. Sometimes the mask slips and the viciousness and the evil of the Americans in Irak shows its true colours:
The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.
They do not regret the civilian deaths they cause any more than those who send out the suicide bombers regret the women and children cut down in their innocent blood that they have caused. They feel not the slightest regret. My dictionary defines the word regret as follows:
“a feeling of sadness about something sad or wrong or about a mistake that you have made, and a wish that it could have been different and better:”
The only thing the Americans regret is that more than four years since they first invaded our country that we still resist their detestable presence.
Irak is my home not yours Americans are not welcome here.
Mohammed Ibn Laith.
Have Your Say: USA terror bombs civilian neighbourhood for several hours
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Bush steps up anti-Iran rhetoric
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
It is being reported the US may have moved a step closer to military action against Iran, but there has also been a change in the potential target.
A new report suggests the target of any attack would be Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, rather than the country’s nuclear facilities.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has been writing about the possibility of a US strike on Iran for the past 18 months.
In his latest article for The New Yorker magazine and in a TV interview, he has gone on to claim that Australia has “expressed interest” in the concept.
Public unconvinced
In his latest article for The New Yorker he argues the Bush administration has acknowledged the American public is not convinced Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat.
At the same time, he says there is a renewed focus on the increasing number of attacks on coalition forces in Iraq, and claims that Iranian munitions are playing a key role.
This was part of a speech by President George W Bush in late August.
“The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian supplied munitions have increased in the last few months, despite pledges by Iran to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq,” Mr Bush said in the speech.
“I will take actions necessary to protect our troops, I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”
Mr Hersh cites this rhetoric as evidence of the changing tone coming out of the Bush administration.
“The name of the game used to be that they’re a nuclear threat, Iran is going to have a bomb soon, we have to do it, sort of the same game we had before the war in Iraq,” he said.
“What’s happened is that in that last few months they’ve come to the realisation that’s it’s not selling, the American people aren’t worried about Iran as a nuclear threat, certainly as they were about Iraq, there’s just some scepticism.
“So they’ve switched, really.”
Mr Hersh says he believes there is now a consensus within the American public that if the Iranians are actively pursuing plans to develop a nuclear weapon, they are at least five years away from their goal.
He says that has tipped the shift in the administration’s approach.
“Instead of trying to sell it, not only to the American people but to its allies, the notion of a massive bombing against the infrastructure, what they call counter-proliferation against the infrastructure of the Iraqi bomb, hitting the various facilities that we know exist - instead, they’ve now decided that they’re going to hit the Iranians, payback for hitting us,” he said.
“They’re going to hit the Revolutionary Guard headquarters and facilities, they’re going to tone down the bombing, they’re going to shift it. It’s going to be more surgical.”
Mr Hersh says the new strategy involves a subtle change of targets.
“We’re threatening Iran, we’ve been doing it constantly, but instead of saying to the American people and instead of saying internally, ‘It’s going to be about nuclear weapons’, it’s now going about getting the guys that are killing our boys,” he said.
“We’re going to hit the border facilities, the facilities inside Iraq that we think are training terrorists, we’re going to hit the facilities we think are supplying some of the explosive devices into Iraq.
“This is the administration’s position.”
Australia on board?
He also claims the Bush administration’s new focus is getting support from its allies, including Australia.
“The Brits are interested in this idea, there have been expressions of interest from Australia, other countries, the Israelis of course have gone bananas, they’re very upset about the idea of not going,” he said.
“If you’re going to go into Iran, the Israeli position is very firm, they want us to go, and they want us to hit hard. … An Israeli told me, if you run into a lion, you either shoot it, or ignore it, you don’t pluck out its eyebrows.
“Going in and taking out the Revolutionary Guard and not taking out the nuclear facilities, for the Israelis is it a non-starter.
“But that’s the plan, the plan is to be more surgical, more careful, and they’re getting some of their allies on board.”
Last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer said he called on Iran to stop supplying weapons to militias in Iraq during a recent bilateral meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister.
A spokesman for the Minister’s office declined to respond to Mr Hersh’s latest claims.
‘The opening gambit’
Dr Michael McKinley, a senior lecturer in International Relations and Strategy at the Australian National University, says a US attack would lead to war.
“If the United States was to engage in surgical strikes, as some people are once again talking about, you would have to say that Iran could very well behave in such a way, and there’d be a broad scope of possibilities here, where a widely escalated war would need to ensue after that, because I cannot imagine that Iran would just allow itself to be attacked without taking some sort of forceful reaction,” he said.
He is unconvinced an attack on Iran would stop with ’surgical strikes’.
“You have to challenge the logic of it, because if you attack Iran because it seems to be supporting activities inside Iraq, then by the logic that everybody in the decision-making framework seems to have, Iran would then speed up its alleged nuclear weapons program,” he said.
“That would be the logical way of regarding an Iranian reaction, which would then of course require a further and much stronger reaction on its nuclear sites from the United States.
“So this would appear to be only the opening gambit, rather than a one-off, if you take everybody’s logic at face value.”
Dr McKinley says he believes there there is a disposition in the US administration to take some form of military action against Iran.
“I would be more surprised rather than less surprised if there was not an attack sometime before the Bush administration leaves office,” he said.
Mr Hersh agrees.
“What I do know, is he wants to do something,” he said.
“He will not leave Iran in a position to be a nuclear power and a position to be a threat.”
Have Your Say: Bush steps up anti-Iran rhetoric
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Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Official Account of 9/11 a “Joke” and a “Cover-up”
September 23, 2007 – Seven CIA veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and have called for a new investigation. “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke,” said Raymond McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates during the seventies. “There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions. And the reason they’re unanswered is because this administration will not answer the questions,” he said. McGovern, who is also the founder of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), is one of many signers of a petition to reinvestigate 9/11.[1]
During his 27-year CIA career, McGovern personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. Upon retirement in 1990, McGovern was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medallion and received a letter of appreciation from then President George H. W. Bush. However, McGovern returned the award[2] in 2006 in protest of the current George W. Bush Administration’s advocacy and use of torture.
In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote[3]: “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception. This book hence confronts the American people—indeed the people of the world as a whole—with an issue second to none in importance and urgency. I give this book, which in no way can be dismissed as the ravings of ‘paranoid conspiracy theorists,’ my highest possible recommendation.”
William Christison, a 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis also describes the 9/11 Commission Report as a “joke” and offers even more outspoken criticism. In a 2006 audio interview[4] he said, “We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all.”
Earlier this year, in an endorsement of David Ray Griffin’s book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Christison wrote[5], “[There’s] a strong body of evidence showing the official U.S. Government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” And in an online essay[6] in late 2006, he wrote, “I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. … An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. … The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them.”
Prior to his retirement from the CIA in 1979, Christison served as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, overseeing 200 analysts who collected intelligence and provided analysis on all regions and every country in the world. Prior to that, he served as one of only a handful of NIO’s in the intelligence community. NIO’s are responsible for the intelligence community efforts in a particular area and are the principal advisors to the Director of Central Intelligence. Christison was NIO for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa.
Melvin Goodman, PhD, is another former senior CIA official who calls the 9/11 Commission Report a “coverup” and who signed the petition to reinvestigate 9/11.[7] Goodman was the Division Chief of the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs and served as Senior Analyst from 1966 - 1990. He also served as Professor of International Security at the National War College from 1986 - 2004.
In testimony before a 2005 Congressional briefing on the 9/11 Commission Report[8], Goodman said, “I want to talk about the [9/11] Commission itself, about the flawed process of the Commission and finally about the conflict of interest within the Commission that is extremely important to understand the failure of the Commission. … The final report is ultimately a coverup. I don’t know how else to describe it.” Goodman is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and Adjunct Professor of Government at Johns Hopkins University.
Robert Baer is another well known CIA veteran who has questioned the official account of 9/11. A 21-year CIA veteran and specialist in the Middle East, Baer was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal upon his retirement in 1997. After retirement, he wrote two best-selling non-fiction books about the CIA, See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil, the former of which was the basis for the Academy Award-winning movie Syriana, starring George Clooney. Baer was also the writer and on-camera commentator for the Emmy Award-nominated documentary Cult of the Suicide Bomber.
Baer has repeatedly questioned whether al-Qaida could have accomplished 9/11 alone. The 9/11 Commission Report categorically found al-Qaida to be entirely responsible for 9/11, stating, “Similarly, we have seen no evidence that any foreign government — or government official — supplied any funding.” However, this 9/11 Commission finding directly contradicts the earlier finding of the Joint House-Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s 2002 Report[9] (p.415) of “sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers.”
In a 2002 essay[10] for The Guardian, Baer wrote, “Did bin Laden act alone, through his own al-Qaida network, in launching the attacks? About that I’m far more certain and emphatic: no.” In subsequent interviews, Baer has suggested that support for the attacks could have come from Saudi Arabia and Iran.
In 2006, during an interview by Thom Hartmann[11], Baer, after commenting on the financial profits being made from 9/11, was asked: “What about political profit? There are those who suggest that … someone in that chain of command … had pretty good knowledge that 9/11 was going to happen — and really didn’t do much to stop it — or even obstructed efforts to stop it because they thought it would lend legitimacy to Bush’s … failing presidency.” Baer replied: “Absolutely.” Hartmann then asked, “So you are personally of the opinion … that there was an aspect of ‘inside job’ to 9/11 within the U.S. government?” To which Baer replied, “There is that possibility, the evidence points at it.” When Hartmann continued, “And why is it not being investigated?” Baer replied, “Why isn’t the WMD story being investigated? Why hasn’t anybody been held accountable for 9/11? We held people accountable after Pearl Harbor. Why has there been no change in command? Why have there been no political repercussions? Why has there been no — any sort of exposure on this? It really makes you wonder.”
In his blurb for the revised and updated edition of David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Baer wrote[12]: “Until we get a complete, honest, transparent investigation …, we will never know what happened on 9/11.”
“I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war,” wrote well-known intelligence analyst Robert David Steele in 2006 in a review of the book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley[13]. Steele is the author of numerous books on the intelligence services and is currently the CEO of OSS.net, a proponent of Open Source Intelligence. Steele has 25 years of combined service in the CIA and the U.S. Marine Corps. He also served as the second ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 - 1992 and was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. Steele continued, “I have to tell anyone who cares to read this: I believe it. I believe it enough to want a full investigation that passes the smell test of the 9/11 families as well as objective outside observers.”
In a subsequent interview on the Alex Jones Show[14], Steele said, “The U.S. government did not properly investigate this [9/11] and there are more rocks to be turned over,” and added, “I’m absolutely certain that WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition and that, as far as I’m concerned, means that this case has not been properly investigated. There’s no way that building could have come down without controlled demolition.”
In late 2004, a group of 25 intelligence service and law enforcement veterans sent a joint letter to Congress[15] expressing their concerns about “serious shortcomings,” “omissions,” and “major flaws” in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation. Their letter was apparently entirely ignored. Among the signers were four CIA veterans; Raymond McGovern and Melvin Goodman (both mentioned above) and Lynne Larkin and David MacMichael.
Lynne Larkin was a CIA Operations Officer who served in several CIA foreign stations before being assigned to the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence Center. There, she co-chaired a multi-agency task force, which, among other functions, provided direction to other federal agencies for coordinating intelligence efforts among the many intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
David MacMichael, PhD, is a former Senior Estimates Officer at the CIA with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Prior to joining the CIA, he served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer for ten years and for four years as a counter-insurgency advisor to the government.
Their letter read:
“We the undersigned wish to bring to the attention of the Congress and the people of the United States what we believe are serious shortcomings in the report and its recommendations. …
Omission is one of the major flaws in the Commission’s report. We are aware of significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the commission by those of us with direct knowledge, but somehow escaped attention. …
The omission of such serious and applicable issues and information by itself renders the report flawed, and casts doubt on the validity of many of its recommendations. …
The Commission, with its incomplete report of “facts and circumstances”, intentional avoidance of assigning accountability, and disregard for the knowledge, expertise and experience of those who actually do the job, has now set about pressuring our Congress and our nation to hastily implement all its recommendations. …
We the undersigned, who have worked within various government agencies (FBI, CIA, FAA, DIA, Customs) responsible for national security and public safety, call upon you in Congress to include the voices of those with first-hand knowledge and expertise in the important issues at hand. We stand ready to do our part.”
And they and thousands of dedicated, loyal, and experienced military officers, intelligence service and law enforcement veterans, and government officials still stand ready to provide assistance for a thorough, impartial, and honest investigation into the terrible acts of 9/11.
Statements questioning the official account of 9/11 and calls for a new investigation by hundreds of credible individuals can be found at http://PatriotsQuestion911.com
[1] Petition to Reinvestigate 9/11. Oct. 26, 2004 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633
[2] I Do Not Wish to be Associated with Torture by Ray McGovern March 2, 2006 http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/58/18096
[3] Ray McGovern’s blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott. March, 2007 http://www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?products_id=1545&osCsid=5a22b94fffd724962a118f454c5d7194
[4] William Christison interviewed by George Kenney on Electric Politics. Sept. 29, 2006 http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2006/09/the_case_for_intellectual_inte.html
[5] William Christison’s blurb for David Ray Griffin’s book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking March 2007 http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-11-Mechanics-Defenders-Conspiracy/dp/product-description/156656686X
[6] Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11 by William Christison Aug. 16, 2006 http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Christison14.htm
[7] Petition to Reinvestigate 9/11. Oct. 26, 2004 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633
[8] The 911 Commission Report – One Year Later, a Congressional Briefing July 22, 2005 http://www.vt911.org/McKinneyReport20050722transcript.pdf
[9] Congressional Reports: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 December, 2002 http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/911.html
[10] See No Evil (part 2) by Robert Baer in The Guardian January 12, 2002 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,631434,00.html
[11] Robert Baer interviewed on The Thom Hartmann Show June 9, 2006 http://www.911blogger.com/2006/06/former-cia-member-robert-baer-comments.html
[12] Robert Baer’s blurb for the revised and updated edition of David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking March 2007 http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-11-Mechanics-Defenders-Conspiracy/dp/product-description/156656686X
[13] Robert David Steele’s review of the book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley Oct. 7, 2006 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0930852370
[14] Robet David Steele interviewed on The Alex Jones Show Oct. 27, 2006 http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2006/271006googlecia.htm
[15] Letter to Congress signed by 25 intelligence service and law enforcement Sept. 13, 2004 http://www.pogo.org/m/hsp/hsp-911commission-040913.pdf
Take action — click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report
Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers
Alan Miller is author of the website http://www.PatriotsQuestion911.com
http://dissidentnews.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/seven-cia-veterans-challenge-911-commission-report/
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Iranian university dean invites Bush to address professors, students
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
TEHRAN, Iran: The dean of a northeastern Iranian university has invited U.S. President George W. Bush to address professors and students and answer their questions on human rights, terrorism and the Holocaust, state television reported Monday.
The invitation from Ferdowsi University came a week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial visit to New York, where he faced tough questioning and received a combative introduction from Columbia University’s president at the campus forum.
“The dean of Ferdowsi University has invited the U.S. president to address professors and students and answer their questions about human rights, terrorism and the Holocaust,” the television reported. The broadcast did not give further details including saying how or when the invitation was issued by the prestigious Iranian university in Mashhad.
Late last week before he left New York, Ahmadinejad invited Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic. The hardline leader was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly.
Ahmadinejad’s appearance a week ago at Columbia University caused an uproar after a blistering introduction from university President Lee Bollinger who said Ahmadinejad was exhibiting “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” who was “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated” for his denials of the Holocaust.
Bollinger’s lashing offended Iranians especially in regard to the region’s hospitality traditions that a host should be polite to a guest, no matter what he thinks of him.
In response, the chancellors of seven Iranian universities last week issued a letter to Bollinger saying his “insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with … a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.”
They invited Bollinger to Iran, adding, “You can be assured that Iranians are very polite and hospitable toward their guests.”
Back home, Ahmadinejad said the negative reception he received at Columbia University failed to damage Iran’s image and instead hurt America’s prestige abroad.
Tensions are high between Iran and the U.S. over Washington’s allegations that Tehran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and supplying Shiite militias in Iraq with deadly weapons that kill U.S. troops. Iran denies both claims.
Iran and the U.S cut off diplomatic relations in 1979 after Iranian militant students seized the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/01/africa/ME-GEN-Iran-Bush.php
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Election Fraud special
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Where’s the US news media?
George Bush was not elected president in 2004.
Greg Palast discovered the smoking gun.
Karl Rove and at least one of the federal prosecutors appointed by Alberto Gonzales engaged in a criminal conspiracy to deny hundreds of thousands of American citizens their right to vote.
This is a felony. It’s a jailable offense. It undermines the results of the 2004 election and calls the results of the 2000 election into question.
George Bush is not the legitimate president and the White House is full of unindicted felons (or at least it used to be until they all resigned.)
http://www.brasschecktv.com
Have Your Say: Election Fraud special
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