布什和他的高级官员从事了误传竞选关于Saddam Hussein的伊拉克造成的威胁。

由查尔斯刘易斯和标记读书史密斯

乔治· W.总统。 布什和七他的管理的高级官员，包括Dick Cheney副总统，国家安全顾问Condoleezza Rice和国防部长Donald Rumsfeld，在跟随2001年9月11日的二年做了至少935假供词，关于Saddam Hussein的伊拉克造成的国家安全威胁。 几乎五年在美国以后。 伊拉克的入侵，纪录的一次详尽的考试表示，声明是有效地镀锌民意，并且，在过程中一次谱写音乐的竞选的一部分，带领国家打仗用断然不实理由。

至少532个不同场合(在讲话，简报、采访，证词，等等)，布什和这三位关键官员，与国务卿Colin Powell，代理国防部长保罗Wolfowitz和白宫新闻秘书Ari Fleischer和斯科特McClellan一起，陈述了伊拉克有大规模杀伤性武器(或设法生产或获得他们)，与阿尔凯达或者两个毫不含糊地连接。 这被共同安排的努力是布什政府的事例的基盘为战争。

它现在无疑那伊拉克 [[did]] 没有 拥有所有大规模杀伤性武器或有意味深长的领带对阿尔凯达。 这是许多两党政府调查结论，包括那些由参议院精选的委员会在智力(2004年和2006)， 9/11委员会和多民族伊拉克调查小组， 1991年“Duelfer报告”建立Saddam Hussein终止了伊拉克的核项目并且做了一点努力重新开始它。

简而言之，布什政府带领国家根据它有条不紊地繁殖，并且在军事行动在2003年3月19日达到高潮反对伊拉克的错误信息打仗。 毫不奇怪，官员以多数机会做讲话，津贴媒介采访和否则构筑公开辩论根据对战前修辞整个身体的这第一分析也做了假供词。

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

• On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney’s assertions went well beyond his agency’s assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, “Our reaction was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’ “
• In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn’t been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn’t requested it.
• In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.” In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.”
• On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.” But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team’s final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
• On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement “probably is a hoax.”
• On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.” As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named “Curveball,” whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had “decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].”

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

(click for larger version)

In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, “independent” validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq.

The “ground truth” of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: “It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual “ground truth” regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who’s Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation’s allies on their way to war.

Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.

Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Statements coming from Gordon Brown seem to openly admit what has long been denied. The super imperial world is being constructed behind the curtain W/O our consent. Will you continue to allow it?

Andrew Grice in Delhi

Gordon Brown has begun secret talks with other world leaders on far-reaching reform of the United Nations Security Council as part of a drive to create a “new world order” and “global society”.

The Prime Minister is drawing up plans to expand the number of permanent members in a move that will provoke fears that the veto enjoyed by Britain could be diluted eventually. The United States, France, Russia and China also have a veto but the number of members could be doubled to include India, Germany, Japan, Brazil and one or two African nations.

Mr Brown has discussed a shake-up of a structure created in 1945 to reflect the world’s new challenges and power bases during his four-day trip to China and India. Last night, British sources revealed “intense discussions” on UN reform were under way and Mr Brown raised it whenever he met another world leader.

The Prime Minister believes the UN is punching below its weight. In 2003, it failed to agree on a fresh resolution giving explicit approval for military action in Iraq. George Bush then acted unilaterally, winning the support of Tony Blair.

UN reform is highly sensitive and Britain will not yet publish formal proposals for fear of uniting opponents against them. Mr Brown is trying to build a consensus for change first.

His aides are adamant that the British veto will not be negotiated away. One option is for the nations who join not to have a veto, at least initially. In a speech in Delhi today, the Prime Minister will say: “I support India’s bid for a permanent place – with others – on an expanded UN Security Council.” However, he is not backing Pakistan’s demand for a seat if India wins one.

Mr Brown will unveil a proposal for the UN to spend £100m a year on setting up a “rapid reaction force” to stop “failed states” sliding back into chaos after a peace deal has been reached. Civilians such as police, administrators, judges and lawyers would work alongside military peace-keepers. “There is limited value in military action to end fighting if law and order does not follow,” he will say. “So we must do more to ensure rapid reconstruction on the ground once conflicts are over – and combine traditional humanitarian aid and peace-keeping with stabilisation, recovery and development.”

He will call for the World Bank to lead the fight against climate change as well as poverty in the developing world, and argue that the International Monetary Fund should prevent crises like the credit crunch rather than just resolve them.

Arriving in Delhi yesterday, Mr Brown said he wanted a “partnership of equals” between Britain and India as he called for closer trade links and co-operation against terrorism. He announced £825m of aid over the next three years – £500m of which will be spent on health and education.

Mr Brown is to bring back honorary knighthoods and other awards for cricketers from Commonwealth countries. He said: “Cricket is one of the great things that bind the Commonwealth together. It used to be that great cricketers from the Commonwealth would be recognised by the British nation I would like to see some of the great players in the modern era honoured.”

Read Andrew Grice atindependent.co.uk/todayinpolitics

Security Council membership

The UN Security Council’s membership has remained virtually unchanged since it first met in 1946.

Great Britain, the United States, the then Soviet Union, China and France were designated permanent members of the UN’s most powerful body.

Initially, six other countries were elected to serve two-year spells on the council – in 1946 they were Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, the Netherlands and Poland.

The number of elected members, who are chosen to cover all parts of the globe, was increased to 10 in 1965. They are currently Belgium, Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Croatia, Indonesia, Italy, Libya, Panama, South Africa and Vietnam.

Decisions made by the council require nine “yes” votes out of 15. Each permanent member has a veto over resolutions.

The issue of UN reform has long been on the agenda. One suggestion is that permanent membership could be expanded to 10 with India, Japan, Germany, Brazil and South Africa taking places. Any reform requires 128 nations, two-thirds, to support it in the assembly.

—–

Please spread very widely before it is too late. General Joe

John Tirman

The warmongers who got us into Iraq are blaming everyone but themselves for the humanitarian disaster they created.

Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, first hand, by that “vast right-wing conspiracy.” When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you — along with about 100 right-wing bloggers — rest assured you’ve hit a nerve.

Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?

More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?

So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: ‘do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.’ They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering “should have done this” and “might have done that.” But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Then, earlier this month, the National Journal, a Capitol Hill “insider” weekly, ran a cover story titled “Data Bomb” by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. In a note by Munro published by the National Review blog, he asserts:

George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data-collection, and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data-collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam’s anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr’s Ministry of Health. The Iraqis’ numbers contain evidence of fakery, and the Lancet did not check for fakery.

It’s a neat summary of their allegations, which include dozens of unfounded charges, promiscuous innuendo, misquoting of the principals, and misunderstanding statistics, and relies on two disgruntled critics. It was a hatchet job, pure and simple. Not a sentence of Munro’s summary is truthful, and that goes for much of the NJ article, too, which I have demolished elsewhere (PDF). The principal author, Gilbert Burnham, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues have taken time from their clinics in Afghanistan and Jordan and Africa to answer the charges on the John Hopkins website, too ( with a letter here, and a FAQ here).

But lies have a way of proliferating on the Internet, and so it was with this set of schoolyard bully brickbats. What seemed most to get under the skin of the right-wing media was a small grant for public education funded by the Open Society Institute, a foundation created by George Soros.

The charges of fraud that NJ clumsily made but never came close to proving were of course a tonic to the war supporters who were shamed by the estimate of 600,000 fatalities. There is nothing as devastating to the increasingly discredited case for war as the specter of the U.S. invasion having caused, directly and indirectly, more deaths than were attributed to the bloody reign of Saddam Hussein.

But it was news that “Soros” was a donor, and the wingnuts went berserk. The line that Munro and Cannon took was that “Soros” was somehow behind the survey from the start, which was timed to affect the 2006 elections. It was not only fraud, they contend, but the perversion of science for political ends backed by the disgruntled, Bush-hating billionaire.

It’s classic right-wing defamation, and of course none of it is true. Munro and Cannon were painstakingly walked through the chronology and donors, but deliberately ignored it to fashion their paranoid fairy tale, and the Wall Street Journal et al lapped it up.

We commissioned the survey on October 25, 2005, hoping to get it done as quickly as it could be done professionally, and perhaps have the results out in the spring. Why wait? But Iraq quickly became too violent to permit teams of questioners go out to 1,000 randomly chosen households. So it was not until late spring that they did begin the door-to-door work-still very perilous-and completed the survey in early July. It took another two months to enter the data, have biostatisticians at Johns Hopkins analyze it, and write up the article. The Lancet then took weeks to peer review. It was released when ready. There was no political agenda; there didn’t need to be. The results spoke for themselves.

The Open Society Institute came late to the process, announcing to me that a grant had been made for public education on May 4, 2006. That is six and a half months after the survey process began. We had already paid for the survey out of internal funds. Less than half of the cash needs of the survey, the analysis, and the public education effort was paid for by OSI. (If the real cost of the effort were totaled-to include salaries of Burnham, myself, and many others who were not compensated directly-then the OSI contribution would have offset about 10 percent of the cost.) I doubt very much whether George Soros himself was ever aware of the grant. OSI is a very large, humanitarian foundation, and their $46,000 grant to MIT is small by their standards.

And, needless to say, OSI and “Soros” had no influence over the initiation, conduct, or findings of the survey. Neither Burnham and his colleagues nor the Lancet editors knew OSI was one of the donors. The contract was with MIT.

I carefully told this to Munro on the telephone, and Burnham’s colleague Les Roberts emailed the same information to Cannon last autumn. Munro had asked, among other hostile questions, whether any Muslims or Arabs were supporting the survey, a racism reflected in his remark about Allah above and a charge in the NJ piece that the survey teams lacked American oversight and were thereby suspect. But he was emotionally fixated on Soros, and asked about his role repeatedly. When I tried to offer corroborating evidence for the survey, he screamed at me that none of that mattered. I could see where this was going.

Of course, Munro himself has been a rabid supporter of the war from the start. In the tradition of former NJ editor Michael Kelly, who called opponents of the war traitors, Munro agitated for the “destruction of Iraq” as early as November 2001. He had elsewhere insisted that the peace in Northern Ireland was the result of the British Army’s iron fist. His sentiments were on display through the hatchet job on us, not least in alleging that The Lancet article was a spur to jihadists.

So the headlines-”Soros Underwrites Osama’s Talking Points,” and “$oros Iraq Death Claim was a Sham” are typical. The Soros Derangement Syndrome derives, I suspect, from his special status as a traitor to his class, as the right used to refer to FDR. Someone so intelligent, articulate, actively compassionate, and rich cannot be tolerated.

In an odd twist, a new mortality survey-approvingly mentioned by the NJ piece-appeared earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, it found 151,000 deaths by violence as of June 2006, about the same period as the Lancet article. Newspaper coverage duly noted that their estimate was only one-quarter that of the Lancet. But a little digging would have revealed much more: the total deaths attributable to the war, non-violent as well as violent, was about 400,000 for that period, now 19 months ago. If the same trends continued, that total today would be more than 600,000.

The deaths-by-violence in that latter survey remained the same from year-to-year, however, which is not plausible-all observers agree that violent deaths were rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. The discrepancy is found in how the survey was conducted: interviewers identified themselves as employees of the Ministry of Health, then under the control of Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr. Those interviewed, therefore, would be wary of saying a brother or son or husband had been killed by violence, fearing retribution. And, indeed, there are non-violent categories in the survey that suggest just such equivocation: “Unintentional injuries” would equal about 40 percent of the death-by-violence toll, for example. Road accidents were ten times their pre-war totals-if someone is run off a highway by a U.S. convoy, is that a “non-violent” death?

The researchers, to their credit, acknowledge that their estimate is likely too low due to several factors. They did not go into dangerous neighborhoods, which made up 11 percent of the sample, and could not accurately estimate the death toll in those, which would of course have been high. Still, the survey is revealing on the non-violent mortality, too: deaths by kidney failure, cancer, diabetes, and others rose by several times, signaling the near-collapse of the health care system.

The MoH survey is the fifth trying to measure mortality during the war, and there is significant congruence among all. (The Lancet estimate is not actually the highest; that belongs to the private British polling firm, Opinion Research Business, which found that as of August 2007, 1.2 million Iraqis were dead due to the war.) But all the surveys point to one thing: a colossal amount of killing and dying has been going on, far more than numbers used in most discussions of the issue in the fleeting instances when concern for Iraqis appears.

And that, of course, should be the real issue here, not whether George Soros is interested in the issue. The NJ calumny and the many gleeful references to it are a sign that the pro-war legions are really at wit’s end. The catastrophe they created and supported must be blamed on others-the conveyors of bad news, the quisling liberals, and the Iraqis themselves.

But the dead in Iraq cannot be silenced as long as we have courageous researchers who will go into the warzone to gather data and tell us the truth. That’s what five surveys-against perilous of odds-have done, and the findings should haunt us every day.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Zionist who once called Muslims “bloodthirsty terrorists” helps Giuliani’s flagging numbers before New Hampshire primary

Adam Pearlman, the Jewish Mossad agent who once wrote stinging essays condemning Muslims as “bloodthirsty terrorists”, has once again popped up as an “Al-Qaeda spokesman” to boost the Neo-Con’s imperial agenda by threatening George Bush on the eve of his trip to the middle east.

In a new videotape, Pearlman, now calling himself Adam Gadahn, states, “The occupied territories are awaiting their first visit by the crusader Bush and the mujahideen are also waiting for him,” reports ABC News.

According to the tape, Gadahn promises to welcome Bush “with bombs and traps.”

Gadahn’s appearance is also perfectly timed to boost the flagging poll numbers of Rudy Giuliani and other establishment Republican candidates who have invoked the imaginary threat of terror for political points scoring before the New Hampshire primary tomorrow.

But who is the mysterious Adam Yehiye Gadahn?

The FBI lists Gadahn’s aliases as Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu Suhayb, Yihya Majadin Adams, Adam Pearlman, and Yayah.

Adam Pearlman is his real name and his grandfather is none other than the late Carl K. Pearlman; a prominent Jewish urologist in Orange County. Carl was also a member of the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League, which was caught spying on Americans for Israel in 1993. Mike Rivero has the scoop at WhatReallyHappened.com.

Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency was caught in 2002 creating a phony Al-Qaeda group to justify attacks on Palestinians.

Pearlman has a knack of releasing his tapes at the most politically opportune time for Bush, having first burst onto the scene shortly before the 2004 presidential election and then again right after Katrina when the President’s approval rating was tanking fast.

Even more mainstream publications, like the Los Angeles City Beat, have dismissed Pearlman before as nothing more than “cartoonish propaganda.”

Pearlman had a hippy upbringing, a brief but intense flirtation with death metal and before a sudden transformation, once referred to Muslims as “bloodthirsty, barbaric terrorists.” Pearlman was a hardcore Jewish Zionist and wrote essays and screeds bashing the Muslim faith. He even got into fights at mosques and beat up Muslim worshippers.

Pearlman, the hardcore Jewish Zionist who trashed Muslims and beat them up, grows a beard and suddenly becomes an “Al-Qaeda spokesman” - nothing suspicious here, move along!

Pearlman’s personal history and the highly suspicious nature in which he suddenly professed his conversion to Islam in a single Internet posting and later appeared on the scene as a spokesman for “Al-Qaeda” are all the ingredients needed to draw the conclusion that Pearlman is working as a double agent and most likely for Mossad.

The new tape is once again the work of As Sahab, Al-Qaeda’s alleged media arm and was released by the U.S. government affiliated IntelCenter organization.

The previous Pearlman tape, released at the end of May last year, was also obtained by the IntelCenter group, a U.S. government contractor, and its head Ben Venzke gave the tape credence in media interviews concerning the story, as he has done again on this occasion.

It also emerged that Gadahn was the scriptwriter for the September 11, 2007 Bin Laden tape in which segments of Bin Laden’s previous statements were hastily slapped together and the contrast altered to make his dubious beard appear darker, an attempt to hoodwink viewers into thinking the tape was new material.

In our previous groundbreaking expose, we unveiled the ties between Intelcenter, a group that regularly ‘obtains’ Al-Qaeda tapes and the Pentagon. Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter were behind the October 2006 release of the “laughing hijackers” tape that showed Mohammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah allegedly attending a 2000 Al-Qaeda meeting and reading their last will and testament.

Segments of the video that were interspersed with footage of the “laughing hijackers,” Jarrah and Atta, showing Bin Laden giving a speech to an audience in Afghanistan on January 8 2000, were culled from what terror experts described as surveillance footage taken by a “security agency.”

News reports at the time contained the admission that the U.S. government had been in possession of the footage since 2002, while others said it was found when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and yet it was still bizarrely reported that the tape, bearing all the hallmarks of having been filmed and edited by undercover US intelligence and having admittedly been in US possession for five years, was released over the weekend of September 31/October 1 by Al-Qaeda.

The video also contained segments that were first broadcast in a British documentary called The Road to Guantanamo, which was originally aired in March 2006. The context of the corresponding scene in the dramatized documentary featured U.S. interrogators attempting to coerce Gitmo detainees into confessing Al-Qaeda membership by showing them fake videos where their likeness had been computer generated to appear as if they were in attendance during Bin Laden’s January 8 2000 speech.

The new Pearlman/Gadahn propaganda tape will no doubt be seized upon by bellicose Neo-Cons who desperately yearn for another terror attack like junkies yearn for their next hit. Unfortunately for them, crass videotapes presented by discredited intelligence double agents don’t have nearly the same impact they did before masses of people started waking up to the fact that the entire war on terror is a complete fraud propped up by crude smoke and mirror stunts which manage to fool only the dumbest of Americans.

In March 2003, Dick Cheney said, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” In May 2003, George W. Bush said, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” In November 2004, Lt. General John Sattler said that U.S. forces (in Fallujah) had “broken the back of the insurgency.” In May 2005, Cheney said, “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

These yahoos have turned more corners than a monkey with a Rubik’s cube. Their quotes were not only repeated, ad infinitum, but were portrayed by the media as gospel truth. Yet, with unparalleled naïveté, there are those who constantly rail against the media for their bias in neglecting to report the “progress” being made in Iraq. Some even go so far as to allegedly troll for unbiased statistics on the Department of Defense Web site.

The justification “du jour” for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, according to Bush appeasers, is the safety and prosperity of that country. Well, it’s nice to see that fictional accounts of WMD and Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda links have finally been abandoned. How many lies can these Bush/Cheney sycophants swallow before they choke on their own gullibility? How many more American and Iraqi lives must be sacrificed on the altar of their ignorance? —Robert Baruch

Phil Plait

Whenever the Bush administration balks at spending money on some needed issue, I always mention on my blog that the Iraq war is costing us 11 million dollars per hour.

I am embarrassed to admit that this figure is wrong. I apologize. It has recently come to light that the Iraq war (plus Afghanistan, a trivial amount by comparison) is actually costing us 20 million dollars per hour.

This new amount was revealed by The Washington Post just the other day, but I have seen precious little mention of it, either in the MSM or on the blogs. I posted about it on my own blog, and was met by the usual and expected troops of equivocators. Remember folks, until we attacked Iraq, there was no connection between that country and terrorism (except, of course, for the very conscious and deliberate conflation of the two by the Bush administration).

So what does 20 megabucks an hour really mean? For one thing, it means we are spending nearly $6,000 every second in Iraq (and Afghanistan, but note that it only gets about 1/5 of the total money, while Iraq gets the other 4/5). In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, if you read moderately quickly, we’ll have spent over $50,000. That’s comfortably more than the median income of an individual American last year.

I poked around the web a bit to see what this kind of money would fund, but it’s almost impossible for the mind to grasp the enormity, the numbingly colossal nature of this expenditure.

The money we spend in Iraq in about 40 minutes would feed one million needy American families for a month. The amount we spend on Iraq in two weeks would give NASA enough money to design, build, launch, and use a Hubble-type telescope for a decade (which includes paying the army of engineers and scientists who would run it). One month worth of Iraq would buy — outright — nearly 23,000 homes in San Francisco, the priciest market in the country.

One hour in Iraq — one short hour, the amount of time I spent putting this blog entry together — could buy over one hundred thousand computers for children in third world nations. An hour and a half would fund Human Rights Watch for a year.

I could go on and on, and you can go right ahead and calculate the numbers for your own favorite cause. But before you go, I want to point out the elephant in the room on this issue.

Where did this number come from? Who calculated that the War on Terror is costing us 20 million dollars every hour, of every day, for the foreseeable future?

Why, it was Ted Stevens, Senator Intertubes his own self.

And why did he release this number? Because he wants more funding for the war.

C’mon, folks. This thing is expensive. Pitch in! We only need 20 million of you to throw a buck in every hour. After all, what else do you have to spend it on?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy assured a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday that his country would stand by Washington in the fight against nuclear proliferation in Iran and terrorism in Afghanistan.

“America can count on France,” Sarkozy said in a speech that underscored his desire for warmer ties with Washington and was filled with effusive praise for American values.

“Together we must fight to defend and promote the values and ideals of freedom and democracy that men such as Washington and Lafayette invented together,” he said, referring to the French military officer who fought along side George Washington in the American war of independence.

Sarko is Pavlov’s dog, salivating “freedom and democracy” when Bush rings the bell.

Sarko Represents the Rise of the Petit Bourgeoisie in France [Original]

Hard times for the hard-nosed, hard-playing president of France, Nicolas Paul Stephane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, or more familiarly “Sarko” for both friends and foes.

Only five months into his term, the powerful French trade unions called out a nationwide general strike on October 18 against Sarkozy’s proposed pension reforms; his beloved wife, Cecilia, signed divorce papers on October 15; and the week before France lost out miserably in the world rugby championship hosted by Sarkozy and France.

Sarko had a dream: to become president of France. His dream came true last May 16 when he was crowned Chief of State.

Paving the way for the electoral victory of the 52-year old leader of the French Right were the simultaneous decomposition of the French Left and Sarkozy’s successful unification of the three streams of the Right — neoliberal, national and fascist.

His hard language, without alienating the Center, attracted the necessary voters from the extreme Right, which however tended to consider him its ally, if not hostage. The combination of Right and Center guaranteed his victory.

Though he heads the Gaulist UMP (Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire), his Gaulist roots are today less and less evident. Sarkozy and his cohorts appear more as populists concealed behind a market oriented conservative facade.

When Sarkozy became “Monsieur le President de la Republique,” the 23rd French chief of state, the sixth since the new Constitution of 1958 that initiated the Fifth Republic of France, his true intentions for promised new directions were still ambiguous.

Was he a neo-Gaulist, one speculated, or truly a hostage of the extreme Right that swept him into office?

In his first presidential speech Sarkozy emphasized the roles of his predecessors, beginning with Charles De Gaulle whose tradition he allegedly embodies, referring to the French as �a great people with a great history behind them.�

His electoral slogan of “work more, earn more” rang appealingly at first. Now, though the love for money is strong in France, the slogan seems contradictory to his recognition of new exigences for national devlopment along social lines.

In fact, no successful European leader can neglect the social system inherent in Europe�s DNA, which differs radically from the American spirit.

That is especially true in France, with its reputation of listening more to ideological voices than to entrepreneurial demands.

Therefore, the scorn for the stupid words of one Minister of Economy �to work more and think less,� which reflects the US reality.

On the other hand, Sarkozy’s underlining of great national objectives means distancing France from the spirit of liberal free trade.

The French Left accuses Sarkozy of being authoritarian and of unstable character.

The Left’s electoral campaign early this year aimed at trying to rouse his ire and demonstrate his incapacity of leading la douce France.

The crude reality is that while the French Left claims a monopoly on morality, the political Right dominates this largely conservative, extremely traditional nation.

Patriotic voters of 2007 were in fact less interested in morality than in questions of the French image in Europe and France�s role on the international scene.

Many French people are still attached to the dream that France still plays a universal role, even though most at the same time realize it is a fiction. Though they killed their kings, they still miss them.

Globalization has forced France to redefine its international role, which French people expect the political class to do.

Sarkozy responds best to that demand; he has overcome right-wing moral hang-ups vis-a-vis the Left.

He has invaded Left territory, coupling nationalism with calls for fraternity and solidarity, those slogans the French love, a stand against inequality and abuses of capitalism and in favor of weaker classes.

On the other hand, he immediately changed France’s position toward the USA that his predecessor Chirac had largely snubbed. He has made known his admiration for the American government model: a cabinet of only 15 ministers.

Also, he takes the time to take off his tie and join 1′ami George for a barbecue in Maine, so that he has gained another nickname, 1′Americain.

At the same time, he has abandoned traditional French orientation toward the Arab world in favor of closer relations with Israel.

This despite the Socialist charge that his choice is because he is Jewish and because of the strong pre-electoral preference for him by France�s 600,000 Jews, especially among intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut.

In fact, Sarkozy is Catholic, although his maternal grandfather was a converted Jew.

The so-called “Europe skeptics” are strong in France, as in Italy. The category is widely admired by the French who voted against the European Constitution last year.

Like many Europeans, they believe the dramatic rise in the cost of living is due to the euro currency and the stringent EU economic rules considered damaging to the national economy.

Sarkozy reacted by calling a halt to fiscal restrictions imposed by the EU in favor of the national economy which is now marking record deficits.

Sarkozy’s France is today more projected toward Europe than in recent years.

On the other hand, and again in response to his electors� expectations, although Sarkozy promises good relations with the USA, France is not about to be servile to Washington.

Who is Nicolas Sarkozy?

Sarkozy is an outsider; for some, not truly French. The son of Hungarian political emigrants who fled Budapest after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as often happens with immigrants, he is more French than the French themselves.

Sarkozy, who allegedly began dreaming of the presidency at age 20, is today the champion of the French “democratic” Right.

He is known as a tough man. I happened to be in Paris during the upheaval in the banlieues in November of 2005 when Interior Minister Sarkozy, already into his electoral campaign, was seen daily storming over the streets of the northern suburb of Seine Saint-Denis and at the same time speaking of the end of the French social model in order to justify the market economy model.

In fact, he and his conservatives were accused of fanning the fires of revolt in order to justify refocusing the state based on police repression.

True or not, Sarko is the archtype of the man of power, a man thirsty for victory. For Sarkozy, immigrants are a plague, second class citizens, and their children are the “bastards of the Republic.”

During the uprising of the children of immigrants in the banlieues, Sarkozy over and over labeled them “the scum of society.”

The philosopher Michel Onfray, who interviewed him before the elections, labels him also “fragile and infantile, a lonely and unhappy child in search of love.”

Sarkozy himself, who as the tough minister of the Interior was known as “the policeman of France,” confessed that he was in politics in order to be loved.

Onfray claims that Sarkozy “is projected toward the future, doesn’t know the present and rejects the past. He took his victory for granted. He seemed to me more like Nero than Napoleon.”

This unflattering image of the new French president is underscored by the image of the French president depicted by the major Moroccan-French writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun.

In the writer’s view, Sarkozy heads the part of France eager to break with the France long known as a haven for exiles and immigrants and the downtrodden of the world.

Sarkozy’s friends are magnates of media chains. Not at all embarrassed by egoism, and even betrayal, Sarkozy enters the club of the neo-fascist ex-president of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, of Gianfranco Fini and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy.

He claims friendship with George Bush and Vladimir Putin, with whom he shares only the love for power. His closest friends are France’s richest tycoons, the top managers of industrial and media conglomerates.

Renewal

From the start, President Sarkozy promised to change France, renew institutions, introduce more women into his cabinet, and crush extreme rightists by absorbing them.

At the same time, he tends to back legislation to recognize the widely debated question of the benefits of French colonialization in Africa and Asia.

Pro-Sarkozy intellectuals demand an end to �anti-white racism� and they support US wars in the Middle East.

Meanwhile unease and discontent are surfacing among opponents, in the corridors of government, as well as in his own UMP party.

Both Left and Right are dissatisfied, perhaps perplexed about the precise direction France under HyperSarko is taking. Ugliness is emerging from the seams.

Neoliberalism, that is the role of unfettered market forces, is distasteful in France, as it is among the peoples in much of Western Europe.

Sarkozy’s problem is an old one: his attempt to satisfy everyone satisfies no one. Elected by the Right, he has frequently appeared as a leftist reformer to his electors.

All in all, Sarko comes across as a neocon driven by the concept of a UN-led One World Order, still retaining however a resistant strain of European social mentality in his DNA.

In his recent address to the UN General Assembly filled with references to France’s past revolutionary ideals such as equitable distribution of wealth, he said also that the United Nations should be an instrument for a “new world order.”

His direct association with the highly secretive, European-North American Bilderberg Group, one of the world’s most powerful political-economic organizations accused of wanting to determine the direction of the world behind closed doors, is unclear.

He was invited to the annual hush-hush Bilderberger gathering held in Canada in 2006 while he was still Interior minister.

Sarkozy’s presence on the guest list was revealed prior to the meeting and the Bilderbergers tend to disinvite those whose names are made public beforehand.

His friend and a former French foreign minister, Michele Barnier, attended the meeting in Istanbul last June.

Over 130 powerful people were there, including American neocons led by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, queens and kings, multinational CEOs and chairmen and adminstrators.

Also there were NATO representatives, who most likely spoke of an invasion of Iran.

Since it was a top secret gathering, perhaps they were planning a massive false-flag, in-house terror attack somewhere in Europe, for which Iran could be blamed.

Searching the French web on Sarkozy�s relations with the fascist-like Bilderberg Group, I ran into an entry concerning his work tactics which in turn reflect his character.

On his arrival in the presidential palace, Sarkozy organized his own press service manned by journalism and political science students in order to keep an eye on what is happening in the country and to react immediately, showering the media with mulitple communique

s. A unique press service dedicated to one subject: Nicoloas Sarkozy.

http://joswift.blogspot.com/2007/11/condemning-sarkozy-toxic-mix-of.html

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Arch-Neo Con Norman Podhoretz’s book reading at a recent Barnes and Noble appearance in New York turned into a hostile affair after he told the audience that Iran should be bombed because “We were attacked by Islamofascists on 9/11,” before being bombarded with accusatory questions and eventually telling the crowd to “shut up”.

Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor was subject to walkouts by individuals disgusted at the fact that Podhoretz openly called for air strikes on Iran, labeling Podhoretz a “fascist” who would have blood on his hands.

Asked whether there should be a fresh investigation into 9/11, Podhoretz simply dismissed the suggestion as “paranoia” and refused to answer the question.

Watch the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MBzLTjVMhY

He later defended the fact that he signed the infamous Project For a New American Century documents, a Neo-Con manifesto for world domination that includes advocating the use of race-specific bio-weapons, and claimed that the PNAC had been “misrepresented”.Podhoretz then admitted that the CIA had overthrown the U.S.-friendly Iranian government of Mohammad Mossadegh in the 50’s, but called it “ancient history.”

He then went on to make a case that Iran was behind the violence in Iraq and had formed an alliance with Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that the two are Shia and Sunni respectively and as such are arch-enemies. He was then educated about how in fact it was the U.S. government that is funding Al-Qaeda affiliated groups to attack Iran. This mattered little to Podhoretz, who was then asked why we should “fight back” against Iran by bombing them when they had never attacked us?

Podhoretz’s answer was to state that, “We were attacked by Islamofascists on 9/11,” clearly implying that Iran attacked the U.S. on 9/11. Such unmitigated and bellicose propaganda might fly on Fox News, but many members of the audience were having none of it, asking why they should trust Bush and the Neo-Cons after being lied to for six years.

“Why don’t you shut up,” barked Podhoretz, seemingly having abandoned his ceaseless regurgitation of warmongering rhetoric and finally losing his temper.

Several members of the audience were kicked out of the store by cops but as Podhoretz left he was heckled again as protesters chanted “No Iran war,” before ducking into a vehicle and scurrying away.

The incident was another example of the sterling efforts of We Are Change NYC, who have made headlines this year for their prolific confrontations of numerous public figures from Hillary Clinton, to David Rockefeller, to Alan Greenspan.

We Are Change have almost single handedly ruined Rudy Giuliani’s Republican nomination campaign by repeatedly hounding him at public events and reminding that watching media that he is universally hated by New York firefighters and other 9/11 heroes while constantly invoking their names for cheap political points scoring.

Giuliani enlisted Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor back in July. In September, Podhoretz met secretly with President Bush and Karl Rove and encouraged them to bomb Iran. Podhoretz is widely considered to be one of the few remaining hardcore Neo-Con loyalists, while a sizeable majority of the rest begin to flee the sinking ship as public opinion turns ferociously against the Neo-Con’s anti-American agenda and incessant warmongering.

“Bomb Iran” Scholar: Rudy Invited Me To Discuss “World War IV”
http://www.observer.com/2007/i-podhoretz-mr-world-war-4-tutors-giuliani

Top neocon urged Bush to bomb Iran during private White House meeting
http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Top_neocon_urged_Bush_to_bomb_0924.html

Podhoretz Granted Secret Access To Lobby Bush On ‘The Case For Bombing Iran’
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/24/podhoretz-bush-meeting/

Politico: Podhoretz secretly urged Bush to bomb Iran
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5964.html

RINF Editors Note: Check out this awesome new site that’s also dedicated to fighting the NWO, it’s recently hit my radar and pulls news from trustworthy sources, a must for your bookmarks   

ADE

It’s now official, the entire Senate is criminally complicit in undermining the Fourth Amendment.

“Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post.

In standard doublespeak fashion, the Post is attempting to put the best face on the fact the Senate has dealt the telecoms a get out of jail free card. It is, as well, typical that the Post characterizes the legislation as a “control” mechanism when in fact it is a blank check. Of course, this hardly matters, as the NSA has worked with the telecoms for decades to subvert the constitutional rights of Americans, who are basically none the wiser when it comes down to the fact the government is a police state, long engaged in snooping of the sort Germany’s Stasi employed.

“Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.” In other words, Democrats, who are a Senate majority, disrespect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to the same disgusting degree as the neocon Republicans, and are thus as criminal. Naturally, this is nothing new, as you can turn your garden variety Democrat upside down and he or she will look identical to a Republican, never mind the corporate media turning somersaults in an effort to get us to buy into supposed differences, the very framework of the phony left-right paradigm on Capitol Hill. Millions of Americans—from your Rush Limbaugh Republican to your MoveOn Democrat—buy into this nonsense, apparently unable to break free of the voodoo trance of the corporate media buttressed fiction of ideological differences.

Said neocon traitor and so-called House Minority leader John A. Boehner: “There is absolutely no reason our intelligence officials should have to consult government lawyers before listening into terrorist communications with the likes of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other foreign terror groups.” Translation: there is no reason the neocons should have to follow the Constitution and rule of law when snooping the phone calls and internet communication of millions of Americans. As we know, Osama is dead and “al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups” are covertly—or not so covertly—organized, financed, and unleashed by the CIA, MI6, Mossad, indeed the entire “intelligence” monolith, legendary for spinning off useful terrorist groups. Moreover, as a well-read tenth grader might tell you, the NSA engages in the vacuum cleaner approach to “intelligence gathering,” not pinpoint monitoring of “al-Qaeda” phone calls made from a pay phone in Ship Bottom, New Jersey.

More than anything, this “agreement” (criminal conspiracy) was reached in order to protect multinational telecoms, open to “pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants.” Of course, the Senate and House were long ago turned into whorehouse parlors for transnational corporations, so this really is not surprising. Question is, how long will the government continue the charade there is actually legal recourse for Americans when the Constitution is so egregiously violated? How long before we are pitched into full-fledged decider-commander guy fascism?

“Senate Democrats successfully pressed for a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court review the government’s procedures for deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance,” the CIA’s favorite fish wrapper continues. “They also insisted that the legislation be renewed in six years, Democratic congressional officials said. The Bush administration had sought less stringent oversight by the court and wanted the law to be permanent.”

In other words, treasonous Democrats want to continue the illusion that the “constitutional compromise” FISA Court is legal, when in fact is it is a long-standing violation of the Fourth Amendment, as all surveillance must follow probable cause with a court order. But then bogus “special needs” categories, mutating from the unconstitutional province of drunk driving checkpoints and random drug tests to the federal government as a whole, are the rule of the day. As previously noted, “highly intrusive and wholly discretionary warrantless wiretapping” is nothing new, as the NSA has worked with the telecoms since at least the 1940s.

Even so-called “civil libertarians” are not dedicated to the original principles held in the Bill of Rights, preferring to play footsy with “conservatives,” i.e., fascist corporatists (an admitted redundancy), and sell the Constitution out lock, stock, and barrel. “Most Democratic lawmakers and party members—backed by civil libertarians and even some conservatives—wanted the new legislation to ensure for example that future domestic surveillance in foreign-intelligence-related investigations would be overseen by the foreign surveillance court. The court was created in response to CIA and FBI domestic spying abuses unmasked in the mid-1970s.” Of course, these exposed “spying abuses” were an aberration—a sign of the times, part of the outrage over Watergate and government criminality—and the CIA and FBI are feeling much better now, knowing that there are few if any people in government willing to unmask current abuses, that is to say long term and ongoing and endemic abuses.

“But conservative Democrats worried about Republicans’ charges that the Democratic bill extended too many rights to suspected terrorists,” that is to say the American people, a few who actually believe they have an intact Constitution, as there are no “suspected terrorists” on phone lines, or rather no genuine terrorists, simply government plants and clueless patsies, programmed to exude an air of terrorist scariness, no matter how absurd as it emanates from remote caves (complete with kidney dialysis machines and internet servers) and MI6 sponsored mosques or ISI facilitated religious schools.

Finally, in order to better understand the fascistic character of our rulers, consider Rep. Louie Gohmert, who blathered: the supposed Democrat horse trading compromise “extends our Constitution beyond American soil to our enemies who want to cut the heads off Americans.” Of course, this is ridiculous, and what Gohmert intended to say is that the Constitution itself is no longer required, is in fact dangerous, as it provides black op terrorists with an excuse to cut off our heads, a colorful if entirely fallacious allusion.

But never mind, none of this matters, as the average American is wholly bereft of any sense of loss, and in fact it can be argued he or she does not need the Fourth Amendment as more than likely they will chime “I don’t got nothing to hide,” so why all the fuss? It was like this when Martin Niemoeller supposedly made his famous claim in Nazi Germany. “First they came for the Jews,” and then everybody else, but then it was too late.

Dare I say it is too late in America? Our once cherished, now ignored and largely unknown, Constitution and Bill of Rights are dead numbers. The NSA, CIA, FBI, et al, may snoop on us at will, without legal or moral hindrance, not that it matters to the masses. Most will not receive visits by the Ministry of Homeland Security, receive national security letters, or be sent packing to a FEMA camp, if it ever comes to that. Most will, however, suffer the results, as did the people of Germany—roundly fire-bombed, defeated, and reviled around the world for years to come.

The History Channel has produced a documentary titled 9/11 Conspiracies – Fact or Fiction.  It aired on Monday, August 20, 2007.  According to the abstract, the documentary examines the various conspiracy theories espoused on the Internet, in articles and in public forums that attempt to explain the 9/11 attacks. It includes theories that the World Trade Center was brought down by a controlled demolition; that a missile, not a commercial airliner, hit the Pentagon; and that members of the U.S. government orchestrated the attacks in hopes of creating a war in the Middle East. Each conspiracy argument is countered by a variety of experts in the fields of engineering, intelligence and the military. The program also delves into the anatomy of such conspiracies and how they grow on the Internet.  

Even the abstract is a lie. 

The only honest conclusion that can be reached after watching this dishonest piece is that Hearst Publishing, Popular Mechanics, NBC, show producer Brad Davis, and the History Channel have conspired to produce what amounts to a shallow hit piece aimed at reassuring the dull and self-absorbed that there is indeed a terrorist under every bed and only the government and corporate media can be trusted to keep the people safe and informed.  Not only did the History Channel distort the facts, it purposely went out of its way to depict the thinking people that question elements of the government / media cabal’s account of 9/11 in a less than favorable light – literally. 

According to Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet, The debunkers’ interviews were pristinely shot and framed, with beautiful backdrops and highly sympathetic camera angles and filters, whereas the truthers were shot from bizarre positions, their images were deliberately distorted and even the color filter of the shot had been manipulated to make their appearance look tainted, blurred and contorted. This was an intentional ploy and a crude act of manipulation to detract credibility from the truthers and violates all known ethical standards of journalism.

Debunkers is a term used to describe the Tories such as the James Meigs of Popular Mechanic and Truther is a term used to describe 50 percent of the U.S. population that have awakened from the 9/11 spell, wiped the propaganda from their eyes, and began to see again. 

So what can we that see do about a thing like the History Channel engaging in journalistic misconduct and spreading propaganda that aids and abets the cover-up of the crime of the century? 

The History Channel has its tentacles spread throughout our federal, state, and municipal governments, to include our local school boards, and the minds of our young via its educational arm www.historyeducation.com. 

It derives a good portion of its income through taxpayers’ money and our educational system. In its 2007 “Educator’s Catalog” topics such as American History, World History, Biography, Engineering & Technology, Science & Nature, Arts & Literature, Social Issues, and finally, Current Events are covered.

If “The 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction” gets listed in the next catalog it will be available to public schools – purchased with your tax dollars!  It is currently for sale online for $24.95.

A great way to hit back is to hit the History Channel in the pocketbook.  Educators and advocates within the truth movement should appoint themselves child advocates and challenge the History Channel in court for inaccuracies in the classroom.  A grassroots effort to prevent this 9/11 hit piece from being purchased by public schools should be launched.  Furthermore, based on the proven record of misinformation, any future History Channel material should be required to be reviewed and approved by a similar court appointed panel before our public schools can access the information and present it to our impressionable schoolchildren. 

http://www.muckrakerreport.com/id495.html

flamesong
RINF Alternative News

Unconfirmed reports on the internet suggest that filmmaker and political activist Aaron Russo died on 24th August 2007 after a struggle with cancer. He will be perhaps most remembered for his outspoken work, America: From Freedom to Fascism.

Although a filmmaker, famous for producing films as Trading Places and The Rose as well as managing Bette Midler, Aaron Russo became politically active when he produced the film Mad As Hell - which took its name from the phrase ranted by Peter Finch in the film Network - in which he was critical of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), the introduction of identity cards, the so-called war on drugs and proposed regulations on alternative medicine.

He made numerous attempts to seek elected office including his 2004 campaign for nomination as the Libertarian Party candidate for US president in which he was only defeated in the final ballot by a modest majority.

He had been acquainted with some of the most powerful people in the world with some of whom he fell foul - including Nicholas Rockefeller about whom he said:

‘Here’s what I do know first hand - I know that about eleven months to a year before 9/11 ever happened I was talking to my Rockefeller friend (Nicholas Rockefeller) and he said to me ‘Aaron there’s gonna be an event’ and he never told me what the event was going to be - I’m not sure he knew what the event was going to be I don’t know that he knew that,’‘He just said there’s gonna be an event and out of that event we’re gonna invade Afghanistan so we can run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we can go into Iraq to take the oil and establish bases in the middle east and to make the middle east part of the new world order and we’re going to go after Venezuela - that’s what’s going to come out of this event.’‘Eleven months to a year later that’s what happened….he certainly knew that something was going to happen.’‘In my relationships with some of these people I can tell you that it’s as evil as it really gets - this is it - this is the game.’

By Steve Watson
Infowars.net

A recent exposé in the London Independent, when stripped of its heavily lefty leaning bias, has provided a stark picture of neocon worshippers in America today as a bunch of bigoted wannabe elites who have swallowed whole the mantra of the Bush cabal and now believe that real conservatism consists of invading every oil producing country in the world and killing American citizens who protest.

Johann Hari’s recent article, while being laced with overly liberal padding, contains at its heart a detailed picture of the fallout of the neoconservative hijacking of America in the 21st century.

Hari, reporting from the annual cruise organised by the staunchly neocon publication the ‘National Review’, details casual comments made by attendees that highlight how the self made reality of right wing lobbyists and elites has filtered through to a bandwagon of greasy ladder climbing yuppies who consider total servitude and worship of the globalist run government to be the key to a strong and healthy American society.

Some of the highlights of the article follow:

I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”

Hillary-Ann and many others like her may get her wish should the Michael Chertoff’s “gut feeling” and the other daily warnings that there is going to be a major terror attack turn out to be accurate.

Hari also discovers that many of these mindless fools cannot get enough of their daily neocon media brainwashing and literally worship the mouthpieces that deliver it to them:

To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones… One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to “thank God for Fox News”.

Some are less happy with Fox news however, take Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, who is clearly unhappy with the unbalanced reporting on Fox:

[Bork] mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”

Hari also details low ranking CFR member, editor of Commentary, and arch neocon Norman Podhoretz’s comments on the Iraq war as he declares that it has been “an amazing success”:

He waves his fist and declaims: “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and ” thank God” for that…. He goes on to insist that “nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo” and that Bush is “a hero”.

Another cruiser who laughably considers himself to be a traditional American conservative states:

“The civilised countries should invade all the oil-owning places in the Middle East and run them properly. We won’t take the money ourselves, but we’ll manage it so the money isn’t going to terrorists.”

Among various other ridiculous declarations that Al Qaeda is taking over the world and that all Muslims are terrorists, the crux of the piece lies in the following statement:

There is something strange about this, and it takes me a few moments to realise exactly what it is. All the tropes that conservatives usually deny in public – that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich – are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. The writer Dinesh D’Souza… says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”

Though Hari wrongly labels these neocon worshippers as “conservatives” it is telling that he discovers that they consider themselves to be “joining the winning team”. They know deep down that true American values are being obliterated but have decided to embrace what is being offered to them instead. Trapped in a false left/right paradigm and failing to see that there is only one “team” that they cannot join, in reality these people are looked upon as nothing more than useful idiots by the elite masters they pander to.

Meanwhile real conservatives such as presidential candidate Ron Paul, whose whole campaign is structured around reigning in big government, restoring the Republic at home and abruptly halting military interventionism abroad, are looked upon by these twisted neocon underlings as traitors who hate America and should be gassed to death.

Renowned and trusted conservatives such as Paul Craig Roberts and even Ron Paul himself are now desperately trying to warn the American people that this administration has been hijacked and is willing to use false flag terror events to bring about the end of the Republic. They urge an instant restoration of the American constitutional system.

The false conservatives however continue to tell us that we must give up our liberties and support the expansion of government power to monolithic proportions.

This is the reality of the greatest threat to freedom in America in the 21st Century and what we must move to combat if liberty is to win out. To these soulless followers of the globalist elite, war is the new peace, slavery is the new freedom, ignorance is the new strength and blind worship of tyranny is the new conservatism.