Court sanctions lawyers behind 9/11 case
2012-02-02, Reuters News
http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/New_York/News/2012/02_-_February/Cou...

A federal appeals court on [February 2] sanctioned lawyers behind a lawsuit accusing former officials in the Bush administration of orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ordered two California lawyers to pay $15,000 in addition to double what the government spent defending the case. Three attorneys -- Dennis Cunningham, William Veale and Mustapha Ndanusa -- filed the lawsuit in 2008 on behalf of April Gallop, a member of the U.S. Army injured in the Pentagon attack on Sept. 11, 2001. The lawyers accused then-Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld of causing the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in order to create a political atmosphere that would allow the U.S. government to pursue domestic and international policy objectives. The suit alleged conspiracy to cause death and bodily harm and a violation of the Antiterrorism Act. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin dismissed the case in 2010, ruling that the complaint was frivolous and a product of "cynical delusion and fantasy." A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit upheld that decision, imposing $15,000 in sanctions on the three lawyers for filing the suit. "We are not delusional by any means. We have the facts, and they cannot be explained," said Veale, a former chief assistant public defender for Contra Costa County, California. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment on the litigation. The case is Gallop v. Cheney et al, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, No. 10-1241.

Note: Unmentioned in this article is the fact that the appeals panel which sanctioned the lawyers was presided over by a cousin of former Pres. George W. Bush, who had refused to recuse himself from the case as requested by the lawyers. For more information on this important court case brought by US soldier April Gallop, who was in the Pentagon where it was struck on 9/11, and whose account was suppressed by the FBI but has been brought to light by, among others, Jesse Ventura on his recent television program on the Pentagon, click here and here.

U.S. Settles Suit Over Anthrax Attacks
2011-11-30, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/us/anthrax-victims-family-to-receive-2-5-mi...

The federal government has agreed to pay $2.5 million to the widow and children of the first person killed in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, settling a lawsuit claiming that the Army did not adequately secure its supply of the deadly pathogen. The settlement with the family of Robert Stevens, a tabloid photo editor in Florida, follows an eight-year legal battle that exposed slack rules and sloppy recordkeeping at the Armys biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. As part of the agreement, Justice Department lawyers are seeking to have many documents that were uncovered in the litigation kept under court seal or destroyed. Mr. Stevenss widow, Maureen, filed suit against the government in 2003, as evidence accumulated that the anthrax powder in the lethal letters had come from an Army laboratory. Mr. Stevens, 62, died on Oct. 5, 2001, days after inhaling anthrax powder at work.

Note: Why would the government want these documents destroyed? Remember that these attacks, which happened within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, were at first attributed to terrorists. Now it is fully acknowledged they were the responsibility of someone in government. Hmmmmm.

Graham: Still no FBI records on Sarasota 9/11 probe
2011-11-10, Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/10/2496033/graham-still-no-fbi-records-on....

In September, news about a previously unknown FBI investigation into possible ties between 9/11 hijackers and a Saudi family living near Sarasota led the agency to deny there was any connection and assert that it made all of its files available to congressional investigators a decade ago. But two months later, the FBI has been unable or unwilling to substantiate that it disclosed any information regarding its Sarasota investigation to Congress, says former Florida U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. He has long contended the FBI stonewalled Congress about what it knows about possible Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers. The FBI investigation began shortly after 9/11 when residents of the gated community of Prestancia, south of Sarasota, called to report the abrupt departure from their luxury home of a Saudi family about two weeks before [9/11]. The most important information came when the FBI examined gatehouse security logs and photographs of license plates, according to then-homeowner’s association administrator Larry Berberich and a counterterrorism agent involved in the investigation. They said the security records revealed that the home was visited by vehicles used by 9/11 terrorist leader Mohamed Atta and fellow hijacker-pilot Ziad Jarrah.

Note: For key questions about the official account of 9/11 raised by respected government officials and academics, click here and here.

Lloyd's insurer sues Saudi Arabia for 'funding 9/11 attacks'
2011-09-19, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/lloyds-insurer-sues-saudi-arab...

A Lloyd's insurance syndicate has begun a landmark legal case against Saudi Arabia, accusing the kingdom of indirectly funding al-Qa'ida and demanding the repayment of £136m it paid out to victims of the 9/11 attacks. Outlined in a 156-page document filed in western Pennsylvania, where United Airlines flight 93 crashed on 9/11, the claim suggests that the nine defendants "knowingly" provided resources, including funding, to al-Qa'ida in the years before the attack and encouraged anti-Western sentiment which increased support for the terror group. The case singles out the activities of a charity, the Saudi Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo and Chechnya (SJRC), which was alleged by UN officials to have been used as a cover by several al-Qa'ida operatives, including two men who acted as directors of the charity. It is alleged that at the time the SJRC was under the control of Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, half-brother of King Abdullah and the long-standing Saudi Interior minister. The claim states: "Between 1998 and 2000, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, through the SJRC, diverted more than $74m to al-Qa'ida members and loyalists affiliated with SJRC bureaus. Throughout this time, the Committee was under the supervision and control of Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz."

Note: This article singles out the important connection between Al Qaeda and the wars in Kosovo and Chechnya, where, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden's organization provided Muslim jihadis to promote US imperial interests. This activity continued into the summer of 2001 in Macedonia, just a few months before 9/11. Amazingly, the lawsuit described in the article has been dropped. What pressures could have been brought to bear on Lloyd's to cause it to drop its suit two weeks after bringing it?

How the world changed after 9/11
2011-09-12, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/sep/12/9-11-symposium-charlie-skelton

I found myself at a conference on Walker Street called 'How The World Changed After 9/11'. It was packed, but I managed to slide in at the back, to hear a guy called Webster Tarpley chant his own list of names. The names of the 46 military exercises and hijack drills ... that were actually taking place on the morning of September 11. "The greatest density of drills in US military history," Tarpley said. The drills, said Tarpley, were important, because not only did they weaken and confuse US air defence, but there was also a military drill for each major component of the 9/11 attacks. The drills were cover, and the dummy threats were made real. September 11, he argues, was a coup carried out by a rogue network within the US military and government. A cabal of fascists, working with (and for) a banking oligarchy, "the old boys of Wall Street". "You want to blame Saudi Arabia, or Israel, or Pakistan? You can't. There isn't the evidence." The evidence, Tarpley says, points towards 9/11 as a false flag attack, carried out by a high level clique, that forced a shocked and awestruck US public into a vast and still ongoing war. It was America's very own Reichstag fire. What I heard, from speaker after speaker, was a heartfelt desire to turn away from the path of destruction, militarism and lies that America has been set upon after 9/11.

Note: For questions raised about the official story of 9/11 by hundreds of highly-respected citizens from all walks of life, click here and here. For a four-minute invited commentary at PressTV (Iran) by Tod Fletcher of WantToKnow on the falsity of the official account of 9/11, click here.

Newly Published Audio Provides Real-Time View of 9/11 Attacks
2011-09-09, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/nyregion/newly-published-audio-provides-rea...

[A] chronicle of the civil and military aviation responses to the [9/11] hijackings that originally had been prepared by investigators for the 9/11 Commission, but never completed or released, [is about to be published]. Though some of the audio has emerged over the years, mainly through public hearings and a federal criminal trial, the ... complete document, with recordings, is being published for the first time by the Rutgers Law Review. Most of the work on the document — which commission staff members called an “audio monograph” — was finished in 2004, not in time to go through a long legal review before the commission was shut down that August. At hearings in 2003 and 2004, the 9/11 Commission played some of the recordings and said civil and military controllers improvised responses to attacks they had never trained for. The account published this week is missing two essential pieces that remain restricted or classified. One is about 30 minutes of the cockpit recording of United Airlines Flight 93. The other still-secret recording is of a high-level conference call that ... grew, over the course of the morning, to include ... Mr. Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers. The recording was turned over to the National Security Council. The 9/11 Commission was not permitted to keep a copy of it or of the transcript ... and investigators were closely monitored when they listened to it.

Note: WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin has analyzed the use made by the 9/11 Commission of the audiotapes described in this article, in "9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report?", concluding that they may well have been faked by the Pentagon to provide a basis for the Commission's otherwise unsupported claim that the FAA did not notify NORAD of the hijackings in time for an air-defense response. Prof. Griffin developed his argument further in Chapter One of his seminal book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking.

Toronto Hearings to examine 'state crime' of 9/11
2011-09-09, Montreal Gazette (Montreal's leading English newspaper)
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada/Toronto+Hearings+examine+state+cri...

Dubbed the Toronto Hearings, [a] four-day event at Ryerson University — which wraps up [on September 11] — will hear from a variety of experts and academics on why the official narrative of 9/11 is flawed. Lance deHaven-Smith, a public policy professor at Florida State University, called 9/11 a "state crime against democracy," suggesting the destruction of the Twin Towers was staged to advance a war agenda. Speaker David Ray Griffin, who authored the book 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed, focused on alleged anomalies in the official report from the 9/11 Commission. The report, which he called a product of "the White House investigating itself," failed to include relevant information about the alleged hijackers, including the discovery that some were still alive after the attacks. Kevin Ryan, co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, was similarly critical of a report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology into how and why the Twin Towers collapsed in the fashion they did. "A steel structure does not collapse suddenly when attacked by fire," Ryan said, noting the institute's report "distorted many important facts." "We know that the official story does not fly," [conference organizer Graeme MacQueen said]. "The legitimate mourning is mixed together with myth and deception."

Note: For more on the historic Toronto Hearings, at which cutting edge research on the most important questions about 9/11 was presented, click here.

New Investigative Panel Releases 13 Consensus Statements of Evidence Opposing the Official Account of 9/11
2011-09-09, MarketWatch (Wall Street Journal Digital Network)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-investigative-panel-releases-13-consensu...

For ten years independent scholars and researchers have been investigating the troubling anomalies of the 9/11 official account. One such scholar, Dr. David Ray Griffin, has written ten encyclopedic books documenting fundamental problems with the government account. Although 9/11 has been the seminal event of this century, none of the research by Dr. Griffin and other critics has been reported by the North American media. Today, the formation of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, involving 22 investigators of the September 11th events, is being announced at consensus911.org. The 13 Consensus Points issued by the Panel were derived from a Delphi survey modeled on consensus statements developed by expert panels in medicine to guide diagnosis and treatment. The 9/11 Consensus Panel, co-founded by Dr. David Ray Griffin and medical librarian Elizabeth Woodworth ... include[s] two former NASA engineers, six professors, one physician, two lawyers, four journalists, and three pilots. The Consensus Panel offers the media and the public the scientifically validated information needed to address this seminal issue with the confidence that has been lacking.

Note: In addition to WantToKnow team member Prof. David Ray Griffin, WantToKnow's Tod Fletcher is a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel. They are both media contacts at the panel who can be reached by clicking here.

National Archives sits on 9/11 Commission records
2011-09-08, Reuters News
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/08/us-sept11-archive-idUSTRE7872QI2011...

Ten years after [the 9/11 attacks], the vast majority of the 9/11 Commission's investigative records remain sealed at the National Archives in Washington, even though the commission had directed the archives to make most of the material public in 2009. The National Archives' failure to release the material presents a hurdle for historians and others seeking to plumb one of the most dramatic events in modern American history. Matt Fulgham, assistant director of the archives' center for legislative affairs..., said that more than a third of the material has been reviewed for possible release. But many of those documents have been withheld or heavily redacted, and the released material includes documents that already were in the public domain, such as press articles. Commission items still not public include a 30-page summary of an April 29, 2004 interview by all 10 commissioners with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted in the White House's Oval Office. This was the only time the two were formally questioned about the events surrounding the attacks. The information could shed light on public accounts the two men have given in recent weeks of their actions around the time of the attacks. The still-sealed documents contain source material on subjects ranging from actions by President Bush on the day of the attacks to ... vast amounts of information on al Qaeda and U.S. intelligence efforts in the years preceding the attacks.

Note: For lots more on government secrecy from major media sources, click here.

10 years later, 9/11 still shrouded in mystery
2011-09-07, Philadephia Inquirer (Philadelphia's leading newspaper)
http://articles.philly.com/2011-09-07/news/30123446_1_al-mihdhar-hijackers-di...

If you think that on the 10th anniversary you know the whole story of 9/11 - and here I'm addressing conspiracy-minded "truthers" and the 13 percent who approved of the job Dick Cheney did as vice president - actually, you don't. The dictum of famed investigative reporter I.F. Stone about all governments - i.e., they lie - is no less true about 9/11 than any other event. Here are [some] questions about 9/11 that remain unanswered. Who killed five Americans with anthrax in fall 2001? Forensics showed that the biological weapon came from American stockpiles. In 2008, the government announced that its ... prime suspect - a scientist at Maryland's Fort Detrick named Bruce Ivins - had committed suicide and that the case was considered closed. But is it? Remarkably, a disputed U.S. Justice Department filing just this July claimed that Ivins didn't have access to the equipment needed to execute the attacks, causing some members of Congress to call for a new probe. Why did so many Bush officials fixate on Iraq in the hours after the attacks? Despite a lack of any evidence tying Saddam's Iraq to 9/11, Bush administration officials looked immediately toward Baghdad. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioned whether to "hit S.H." - Saddam - "at the same time" while the Pentagon was still on fire, and Bush immediately pressed Clarke on whether there was an Iraqi connection.

Note: For questions raised about the 9/11 attacks by highly credible and respected professionals, click here and here.

The Terrible Missed Chance
2011-09-04, Newsweek Magazine
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/04/the-terrible-missed-chance.html

It was early afternoon on Friday, Aug. 17, 2001. Special Agent Harry Samit of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office [sat] across from ... Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old French-born student arrested the day before for overstaying his visa. Samit, a former intelligence officer at the Navy’s celebrated Top Gun flight school, felt sure the man across the desk from him was a Muslim extremist who was part of a plot to hijack a commercial jetliner filled with passengers. That same day [at] FBI headquarters ... in Washington, counterterrorism supervisors were treating Samit’s first reports about Moussaoui with skepticism, even contempt. New disclosures about Samit’s story suggest that FBI agents in Minneapolis were much closer to unraveling the 9/11 plot than previously known. The officials directly involved in the case were denied access to a key internal memo —- prepared for outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh —- that could have allowed the Minneapolis field office to connect the dots and possibly preempt the attacks. Their efforts were thwarted by a group of arrogant, slow-moving supervisors at FBI headquarters. There is no clear reference to the Freeh memo in the 9/11 commission’s report.

Note: For questions raised about the official story of 9/11 by hundreds of highly-respected citizens from all walks of life, click here and here.

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Americans live in an era of endless war
2011-09-04, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-decade-after-the-911-...

This is the American era of endless war. America’s embrace of endless war [has unfolded] in the 10 years since Sept. 11, 2001. In previous decades, the military and the American public viewed war as an aberration and peace as the norm. Most soldiers and Marines in today’s military have seen their entire careers consumed by combat. During last year’s 9/11 anniversary, Lt. Col. Christopher M. Coglianese accompanied his second-grade daughter on her school’s annual Freedom Walk outside Fort Hood, Tex. “Basically the whole student body walks around the grounds of the school wearing patriotic garb and carrying signs about freedom,” Coglianese recalled in an e-mail from Iraq, where he is on his third tour. “To be honest there was a certain surrealism about it,” Coglianese wrote. “For this very small slice of American children this way of life is completely normal.” The long stretch of war has also isolated the U.S. military from society. Top military officials fret that the troops are developing a troubling sense that they are better than the society they serve. “Today’s Army, including its leadership, lives in a bubble separate from society,” wrote retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in an essay for the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine. “This splendid military isolation — set in the midst of a largely adoring nation — risks fostering a closed culture of superiority and aloofness. This must change if the Army is to remain in, of, and with the ever-diverse peoples of the United States.”

Note: For lots more on all facets of America's endless war, click here.

35,000 Worldwide Convicted for Terror
2011-09-03, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=14441630

At least 35,000 people worldwide have been convicted as terrorists in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. But while some bombed hotels or blew up buses, others were put behind bars for waving a political sign or blogging about a protest. In the first tally ever done of global anti-terror arrests and convictions, The Associated Press documented a surge in prosecutions under new or toughened anti-terror laws, often passed at the urging and with the funding of the West. Before 9/11, just a few hundred people were convicted of terrorism each year. The sheer volume of convictions, along with almost 120,000 arrests, shows ... that dozens of countries are using the fight against terrorism to curb political dissent. The AP used freedom of information queries, law enforcement data and hundreds of interviews to identify 119,044 anti-terror arrests and 35,117 convictions in 66 countries, accounting for 70 percent of the world's population. The actual numbers undoubtedly run higher because some countries refused to provide information. That included 2,934 arrests and 2,568 convictions in the United States, which led the war on terror — eight times more than in the decade before. More than half the convictions came from two countries accused of using anti-terror laws to crack down on dissent, Turkey and China. Turkey alone accounted for a third of all convictions, with 12,897.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the hidden realities behind the "Global War on Terror", click here.

9/11 conspiracy theories
2011-08-29, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14572054

Conspiracy theories have proliferated following the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001. An opinion poll ... for BBC's The Conspiracy Files in 2011, found that 14% of people questioned in the UK and 15% in the US did not believe the official explanation that al-Qaeda was responsible, and instead believed the US government was involved in a wider conspiracy. Among 16 to 24-year-olds that belief rises to around one in four. Ten years on from the attacks [conspiracy theories] now question every aspect of the official account. The starting point for 9/11 conspiracies is that many people find it hard to believe 19 young men, armed with just knives and box-cutters, could casually walk through airport security, hijack four commercial planes and then within the space of 77 minutes destroy three of the iconic symbols of America's power, in the face of the world's most powerful and technologically-advanced military superpower. It is a similar argument that questions whether a lone gunman could have killed President John F Kennedy, then the most powerful and best-protected man on the earth, or how someone so special as Princess Diana could die in a car crash. "We don't know the full story of exactly what happened," says American radio talk show host Alex Jones. "It needs to be investigated."

Note: For questions raised about the 9/11 attacks by highly credible and respected professionals, click here and here.

Richard Clarke launches new 9/11 charge at CIA
2011-08-12, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/08/12/national/main20091608.shtml

[The top counterterrorism adviser to President Clinton and Mr. Bush, Richard Clarke will] be featured in a documentary advancing [a] theory that the Central Intelligence Agency tried to turn two of the 9/11 hijackers into double agents while they resided in the United States in the years leading up to the attacks. During the 9/11 Commission's investigation of the attacks, the CIA said it didn't know the location of the hijackers Clarke refers to, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In the documentary, Clarke ... concludes that the CIA director at the time, George Tenet, ordered the cover-up after the recruitment effort failed. In response to that accusation, Tenet released a written statement saying that Clarke has "suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration."

Note: Richard Clarke is not the only highly-credible and respected former government official to question the official acount of 9/11. For the questions raised by many more, click here.

International Hearings on 9/11 to begin in Toronto in September
2011-08-08, CNBC
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44059164

A decade after the events of September 11, 2001, which resulted in the immediate deaths of nearly 3,000 people on American soil, countless victims from toxic dust, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, international hearings on this pivotal event will begin in Toronto in September. The events of September 11 provided a pretext for a War on Terror that has led to military invasions and occupations, and attacks upon civil and human rights throughout the world. The credibility of the official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, carried out by the U.S. Government between 2003 and 2005, has been questioned by millions of citizens in the United States and abroad, including victim family members, expert witnesses and international legal experts. A group of international citizens has therefore undertaken to privately fund and cause these independent hearings to take place. Because of the global ramifications of the events of 9/11, the initiators of this inquest have opted to select an international location outside of the United States for these hearings to proceed. The city of Toronto, Canada was chosen as an ideal "international" location because of its proximity to New York, Washington and Shanksville (the crime scenes).

Note: Sponsored by the International Center for 9/11 Studies, the first four days of these hearings will take place at Toronto's Ryerson University between September 8 and 11, 2011. The proceedings will be broadcast live via the Internet. For more information, click here.

30 Americans Killed Including 22 SEALs When Afghan Insurgents Shoot Down Helicopter
2011-08-06, ABC/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/International/helicopter-shot-25-navy-seals-dead-crash-...

A helicopter was shot down today by Afghan insurgents as it was rushing to aid troops in a firefight, killing 30 Americans, including 22 Navy SEALs, most of whom belonged to Team 6, the unit whose members were involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said. It's unclear how far away the helicopter was from the initial firefight when it went down and unclear how the troops in the firefight got to the crash location, the official said. Although the Taliban have claimed to have shot the helicopter down, U.S. officials have only identified the attackers as insurgents. The last worst one-day U.S. casualty record in Afghanistan was on June 28, 2005 when 16 U.S. soldiers were killed in Kunar province after a helicopter was shot down by Taliban insurgents.

Note: Many scholars claim Osama bin Laden was already dead long before he was allegedly killed by the Navy Seal Team 6. Isn't it strange the his body was buried at sea, so that the identity of the dead body could never be certain, when those in charge knew about theories that bin Laden wasn't dead. And now, many members of the team that took part in the raid may be dead, so that they can't tell their side of the story. For more evidence that bin Laden died long before the raid, see BBC articles here and here, a Washington Post article, and an article in New Zealand's leading newspaper showing the published death photo was a fake.

New Documents Cast Doubt on Federal Anthrax Case
2011-07-18, PBS Frontline/McClatchy News
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/2011/07/new-documents-cast-doubt-on-f...

The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago. Shortly after Ivins committed suicide in 2008, federal investigators announced that they had identified him as the mass murderer who sent the letters to members of Congress and the media. The case was circumstantial, with federal officials arguing that the scientist had the means, motive and opportunity to make the deadly powder at a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. On July 15, however, Justice Department lawyers acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab -- the so-called hot suite -- did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001. The government's statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI's eight-year, $100 million investigation never proved he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder.

Note: For more doubts on the FBI's case against Ivins, click here. For a detailed analysis of the anthrax attacks by Prof. Graeme MacQueen of McMaster University, showing that it was an integral part, with the 9/11 attacks, of a larger operation to launch two wars, click here.

CIA defends running vaccine program to find bin Laden
2011-07-13, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-defends-running-vac...

U.S. officials ... defended a tactic used by the CIA to attempt to verify the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden — the covert creation of a vaccine program in Abbottabad, the town in Pakistan where he was later killed in a U.S. raid. The vaccine drive was conducted shortly before the raid in early May ... and was overseen by a Pakistani doctor who traveled to Abbottabad. A senior U.S. official said the campaign involved actual hepatitis vaccine and should not be construed as a “fake public health effort. The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else.” The doctor who oversaw the effort has since been arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency for cooperating with the CIA. U.S. officials have said they are seeking to have him released. The senior U.S. official declined to say whether DNA from bin Laden’s relatives was collected as part of the vaccine program. Officials have previously said, however, that they used DNA analysis to confirm bin Laden’s identify after he was killed. In doing so, they used samples taken from known relatives.

Note: For information about a disturbing Pentagon program using vaccinations to combat religious fundamentalism, click here.

Cost of War at Least $3.7 Trillion and Counting
2011-06-29, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/06/29/us/politics/politics-us-usa-war.html

When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars. Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on [June 29]. The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan ... spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020. The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due. In human terms, 224,000 to 258,000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125,000 civilians in Iraq. Many more have died indirectly, from the loss of clean drinking water, healthcare, and nutrition. An additional 365,000 have been wounded and 7.8 million people -- equal to the combined population of Connecticut and Kentucky -- have been displaced. In one sense, the report measures the cost of 9/11. What followed were three wars in which $50 billion amounts to a rounding error. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since.

Note: To watch a video of WantToKnow team member Dr. David Ray Griffin's explanation that the war in Afghanistan was not justified by the 9/11 attacks, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on the US/NATO wars of aggression, click here.

The top 10 greatest conspiracy theories
2011-05-13, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8512553/The-top-1...

Here is a list of the world's greatest conspiracy theories. 1. September 11, 2001: The conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... continue to grow in strength. A large group of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that an airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not have been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many witnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. As with the assassination of JFK, the official inquiry into the events - the 9/11 Commission Report - is widely derided by the conspiracy community and held up as further evidence that 9/11 was an "inside job". 2. The assassination of John F Kennedy: Doubts about the official explanation ... surfaced soon after the [Warren Commission] report. Footage of the motorcade taken by Abraham Zapruder on 8mm film supported the growing belief that at least four shots were fired - not the three that the Warren Commission claimed. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) found both the original FBI investigation and the Warren Commission Report to be seriously flawed. The HSCA also concluded that there were at least four shots fired and that it was probable that a conspiracy existed.

Note: Other conspiracy theories listed in this survey include: 3. Roswell, 5. The Illuminati and the New World Order, 7. Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?, and 10. The Aids virus was created in a laboratory. Oddly for a UK newspaper, there is no mention of the 7/7 bombings in London or Princess Diana's mysterious death.

Obama Says 'Justice Has Been Done': Bin Laden Scholar Says No
2011-05-06, CNBC News (NBC's Business News Channel)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/42929478/

President Obama, speaking of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, said: "Justice has been done." It has been widely assumed that, if bin Laden is now dead, the person most responsible for the 9/11 attacks has been brought to justice. But the US government has never provided evidence that the attacks were carried out by bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. In September 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to provide this evidence, but the next day recanted, saying "most of [the evidence] is classified." In October, Prime Minister Tony Blair provided evidence that bin Laden and al-Qaeda planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. But he added: "This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law." The FBI's acts that made bin Laden a "Most Wanted Terrorist" do not include the 9/11 attacks. The FBI's chief of investigative publicity explained: "The FBI has seen no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Could al-Qaeda have carried out the attacks? Scientists for 9/11 Truth views the rapid, symmetrical, straight-down collapses of the Towers and nearby WTC 7 as consistent only with controlled demolition. And 1500 members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth agree: The 9/11 attacks were not the work of al-Qaeda.

Note: CNBC removed this article not long after posting it. To read this critically important press release by WantToKnow.info team member and Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Ray Griffin in its entirety, click here. Dr. Griffin's 2009 book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? presented compelling evidence that bin Laden died in December 2001 -- prompting a BBC documentary of the same name. Griffin was named among the New Statesman's "50 People Who Matter Today". For an abundance of reliable news articles, videos, and more showing major deception on 9/11, click here.

The nagging questions that refuse to go away
2011-05-05, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-the-nag...

Some 36 hours after the world first learnt of the US commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the White House changed parts of its story. A woman was killed, its spokesman said, but she was not Bin Laden's wife – who survived after being shot in the leg. Bin Laden did not, as had earlier been claimed, use his wife as a human shield; she was injured when she tried to challenge one of the US commandos. And Bin Laden was not, after all, armed, although he did, the spokesman said, put up some resistance. The new version – no wife as human shield, no weapon – makes [bin Laden] more ordinary and more vulnerable. It also raises further questions. If the first version was incorrect, perhaps even to an extent "spun" for a certain effect, might there not be room for doubt about other aspects of the official narrative? About, say, whether the crucial intelligence about Bin Laden was extracted from al-Qa'ida operatives under torture, which might appear to justify such methods and lift some of the opprobrium from the previous US administration and the CIA. A no less pertinent question that the new version raises is whether Bin Laden was ever actually given a chance to surrender and whether he might have been taken alive rather than dead. When President Obama said that justice had been done, was this – strictly speaking – justice, or was it cold-blooded retribution?

Note: WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book establishing the likelihood that Osama bin Laden died in December 2001, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, is available here. For many other major media news articles showing clear deception and more by government officials, click here.

Osama bin Laden dead: Blackout during raid on bin Laden compound
2011-05-04, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8493391/Osama-bin-Laden-de...

Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off. A photograph released by the White House appeared to show President Barack Obama and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound. In an interview with PBS, Mr Panetta said: "Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on. We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound." The President only knew the mission was successful after the Navy Seals commander heard the word “Geronimo” on the radio, a code word from commandos reporting that they had killed bin Laden. The absence of footage of the raid has led to conflicting reports about what happened in the compound.

Note: The White House photo was fake and the original news was quite distorted. Hmmmm. Who do we trust here? WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book establishing the likelihood that Osama bin Laden died in December 2001, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, is available here. For a brief summary of reliable information from major media sources raising serious questions about what happened on 9/11, click here.

Skeptics Question Osama Bin Laden Death, Asking for Proof
2011-05-02, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/WorldNews/conspiracy-theories-proof-bin-ladens...

As elated crowds celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden after Navy SEALs killed the al-Qaida chief in a weekend raid in Pakistan some are asking, "Where's the proof?" Photos depicting a bloodied and bruised face appearing to be that of bin Laden began appearing on Twitter and Facebook last night soon after news of his death spread across the Internet. According to Reuters, an archive photo of bin Laden at a news conference proves that image was a fake. Now people are asking to see the evidence proving bin Laden is dead. From Pakistan to the U.S. people expressed their skepticism about the death of the man who is perhaps the most infamous terrorist ever known. Officials said today they are "99.9 percent" certain that bin Laden was shot dead in Pakistan. They also cited CIA photo analysis matching physical features such as bin Laden's height. Rep. Mike Roger, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Associated Press that more than one DNA sample was used to identify Osama bin Laden. After Adolf Hitler's suicide in April 1945, conspiracy theories for years suggested Hitler was alive and in hiding. The Russian secret services came forward with a skull and jawbones. DNA results eventually showed the skull was that of a female.

Note: For two BBC reports suggesting that bin Laden may already have been dead, click here and here. Why would bin Laden's body be buried at sea? Could it be to prevent a proof of identity?

Report of bin Laden’s death spurs questions from conspiracy theorists
2011-05-02, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/report-of-bin-ladens-death-spur...

While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened. Could the public trust bin Laden’s DNA samples? Why was [his body disposed of] in an undisclosed location in the northern Arabian Sea? “This has not put a single of the 9/11 questions to bed,” said Steven Jones, a retired Brigham Young University physics professor and contributor to the 9/11 Truth Movement. “I don’t know how you can have closure, when there are hundreds of contradictions to the stories that you were told. The story doesn’t end here because we are told bin Laden is dead,” said Mike Berger, who works with 911Truth.org, an organization founded to examine facts around the attack. Alex Jones, a radio personality out of Austin, who gives voice to the 9/11 Truth Movement and runs the Web site Infowars.com, sent out a Web headline, “Red Alert. Inside Sources: Bin Laden Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade.” He lists FBI officials and counterintelligence leaders from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan who have said for years that bin Laden was dead. Former Council on Foreign Relations member Steve R. Pieczenik even told Jones on the air in 2002 that bin Laden had been dead for months.

Note: For intriguing BBC News reports from 2010 and 2007 which claim bin Laden was already dead at that time, click here and here. WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book establishing the likelihood that Osama bin Laden died in December 2001, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, is available here.

Osama Bin Laden never charged for 9/11
2011-05-02, International Business Times
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140099/20110502/osama-bin-laden-never-charged...

Osama Bin Laden's death is being celebrated, and everyone seems to repeat the old conspiracy theory that he was indeed the mastermind behind the terror attacks of 9/11. But that was never proven, and there is not even evidence hinting at such a connection according to the FBI. Osama Bin Laden was never formally charged, because the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation didn't deliver the necessary evidence to the Department of Justice. Read ... what Rex Tomb, FBI Director of Investigative Publicity, stated in 2006 about the FBI's position: “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11." The connection between Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks was made by the Bush-Cheney administration, [on] the morning of the attacks, before the first tower even collapsed. Nearly ten years later, after intensive investigation, a government commission, two wars and the interrogation under torture of some 750 people detained in Guantanamo Bay without charges, no hard evidence could be found that would confirm the initial allegation.

Note: The International Business Times is an online global business newspaper, published in thirteen editions in twelve countries across eight languages. It is among the top-ten online business newspapers in the world. WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book establishing the likelihood that Osama bin Laden died in December 2001, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, is available here.

World's media tricked by fake bin Laden photo
2011-05-02, New Zealand Herald (New Zealand's leading newspaper)
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10723030

An image of Osama bin Laden after his death yesterday has been revealed as a fake. The photo, which shows a bloodied bin Laden with a gun wound to the head, is the photo-shopped combination of two images - one of the al Qaeda founder alive in 1998 and another of an unnamed corpse. The image has reportedly been circulating for two years, but that did not stop the image being picked up by media across the world in the wake of the terrorist's death. Britain's Daily Mail, Times of London, Telegraph, Sun and Daily Mirror ... all used the image of their websites' front pages, the Guardian reported, although they were quickly taken down. Associated Press had placed the image on its wires, but soon retracted the photo as it could not verify its authenticity. The picture appears to have first been published by the Middle East online newspaper themedialine.org on April 29, 2009, although the site's editor then said they could not ascertain whether it was genuine. A US official revealed the body was photographed before being buried at sea, although no images have been released by the Obama administration. It is not clear whether photos of bin Laden's body will be released.

Note: How did this photo become accepted by the media? And why was bin Laden's body buried at sea? Could it be that those involved did not want anyone to be able to investigate whether the body was indeed that of bin Laden? For two BBC reports suggesting that bin Laden may already have been dead, click here and here.

Yukoner tackles 9/11 Korean Air 'hijackings' mystery
2011-04-25, MSN Canada/CBC
http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/yukoner-tackles-9-11-korean-air-hijackings...

When Max Fraser started collecting footage and stories about how Sept. 11, 2001, played out in the Yukon capital of Whitehorse, he set out to make a point-of-view documentary about the terrifying spectre of 2 supposedly hijacked jumbo jets landing in — or on — Whitehorse. What Fraser ended up with is the mysterious tale of how Korean Air Flight 085, bound for New York City, came to land at the then-Whitehorse International Airport at 11:54 a.m. that day, instead of descending at one of the many better-equipped Alaskan runways it passed on its way. And even more mysterious is why 2 Korean planes were transmitting a hijack "squawk" (a satellite code that can be discreetly set by a pilot to alert authorities on the ground of a hostile takeover), even though all was well on board the flights. In response, American and Canadian fighter jets were deployed to accompany those planes to the Whitehorse airport. That inspired the local filmmaker to make the 45-minute documentary titled "Never Happen Here — the Whitehorse 9/11 Story." It premiered [on April 24] at the Dawson City Short Film Festival. "Nowhere else in the world on 9/11 was a community under an evacuation order and nowhere else were emergency authorities told to prepare for a mass casualty incident involving a hijacked airliner," Fraser said. "What we experienced, what we went through, is a story that should be told the world over."

Note: For many unanswered questions about the unexplained happenings on 9/11 raised by highly respected professionals and officials, click here and here.

Architect Richard Gage Explains His 9/11 Theory
2011-04-19, WJBK Fox 2 (Detroit Affiliate of Fox News)
http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/architect-richard-gage-explains-hi...

It is a day of infamy – 9/11. The official investigation concluded that intense heat from the crash and the jet fuel melted the support beams causing the [WTC] towers to collapse. But architect Richard Gage doesn't believe that. He is the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. [Gage:] There is evidence to suggest that explosive demolitions have brought down all three World Trade Center skyscrapers. We have now 1,500 architects and engineers calling for a new investigation based on this evidence, including the third skyscraper that most people know nothing about. This is a 47-story skyscraper that collapses at free fall acceleration, straight down ... into its own footprint just like a controlled demolition. This is extraordinary evidence, along with the chemical evidence of high-tech nanothermite composite explosives or incendiaries found in the all the World Trade Center dust. The architects and engineers are highlighting the specific evidence in these three skyscrapers, because its so clear that they're explosive demolitions. We have [found] in all of this massive quantity of dust ... iron microspheres the size of the diameter of a human hair. Billions of them ... are found. These contain the evidence of ignited thermite. There is no other explanation for them. What the 1,500 architects and engineers that I represent are calling for is an investigation that is thorough that uses the scientific method [and] analyzes all of the evidence. Once this evidence is all analyzed, we'll let the chips fall where they may. We don't have conspiracy theories. What we want is a real investigation.

Note: The text above is taken from the video news report at the Fox News link above. To watch the symmetrical fall of the third World Trade Center building, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable information questioning the 9/11 official story, see our 9/11 Information Center.

Bush Cousin Presides Over Federal Court Case Against Former Bush Administration Officials
2011-04-07, CNBC
http://www.cnbc.com/id/42469680

Confounding lawyers and legal scholars all over the world, Judge John Walker, first cousin of former President George W. Bush, was one of three judges of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to hear argument [on April 5] in Gallop v. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers. The lawsuit was brought by a soldier injured during the attack on the Pentagon and accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, of conspiring to facilitate the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The attacks killed 3000 Americans, plus many who have died from the toxic clean-up conditions at Ground Zero. Attorney William Veale, acting for April Gallop, learned of the assignment the usual 5 days before the argument, and filed a motion to disqualify Judge Walker. There was no prior decision regarding the motion, and when Veale asked about it in court the motion was denied by Judge Winter. Veale then requested a continuance to seek appellate review of the court's ruling but that was denied as well. Veale, amidst frequent interruptions from the three judges, managed to point out Cheney's direct involvement in tracking and dealing with the airplane that was heading for the Pentagon, as reported to the 9/11 Commission by then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Note: For a description of this important court case brought by US soldier April Gallop, who was in the Pentagon where it was struck on 9/11 and whose account was suppressed by the FBI and has been brought to light by, among others, Jesse Ventura on his recent television program on the Pentagon, click here and here.

Digging Deeper: Jesse Ventura's Alternative Take on American History
2011-04-04, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/excerpt-63-documents-government-read-jesse-ventura-...

In his new book, 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read, former wrestler turned governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura takes a close and at times disturbing look at major historical events. Ventura draws on public but often overlooked information about such events as John F. Kennedy's assassination and the 9/11 attacks, offering fresh, often intriguing insights. Here is an excerpt: "There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment." – John F. Kennedy This book is titled 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read, lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th President. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what you're going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom-of-Information Act, I came to realize the importance of the public's right to know. Let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we're moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.

Note: Jesse Ventura reveals amazing information in this powerful interview. You might appreciate the video and all 10 pages available at the ABC News link above. For key reports from major media sources that shed light on the unsolved assassination of JFK and other major US political leaders, click here.

UN human rights official claims 9/11 was US plot
2011-01-25, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8281125/UN-human-r...

A UN human rights official has been roundly condemned for suggesting that the US government may have orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Richard Falk, a retired professor from Princeton University, wrote on his blog that there had been an "apparent cover up" by American authorities. He added that most media were "unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events" on 9/11, despite it containing "gaps and contradictions". And he described David Ray Griffin, a conspiracy theorist highly regarded in the so-called "9/11 truth" movement, as a "scholar of high integrity" whose book on the subject was "authoritative". UN Watch, a pressure group that monitors the organisation, has called for Prof Falk to be sacked. Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, described the comments as "preposterous" and "an affront to the memory of the more than 3,000 people who died in the attack." But Mr Ban said that it was not for him to decide whether Prof Falk, who serves the organisation as a special investigator into human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, should be fired by the UN. Vijay Nambiar, Mr Ban's chief of staff, said this was up to the human rights council, a 47-nation body based in Geneva, Switzerland, that was created by the UN in 2006.

Note: Although the title of this article distorts the facts and its tone is dismissive, The Telegraph's quotes from Falk's blog are accurate. For excerpts from his remarks, click here. Richard Falk is only one of many highly-respected scholars and professionals who have raised such questions about the official account of 9/11. For examples of others, click here and here.

Interrogating the Arizona Killings from a Safe Distance
2011-01-13, Foreign Policy Journal
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/01/13/interrogating-the-arizona-kill...

Governments (ab)use their authority to treat awkward knowledge as a matter of state secrets, and criminalise those who are brave enough to believe that the citizenry needs to know the crimes that their government is committing with their trust and their tax dollars. The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that [WantToKnow team member] David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since his authoritative The New Pearl Harbor in 2004 (updated in 2008). This brings me to the Arizona shootings. The most insistent immediate responses have come from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both proceeding on presuppositions rather than awaiting evidence. If we want to be responsible in our assessments, we must restrain our political predispositions, and obtain the evidence. Let us remember that what seems most disturbing about the 9/11 controversy is the widespread aversion of government and media to the evidence that suggests, at the very least, the need for an independent investigation that proceeds with no holds barred.

Note: The author of this article, Richard Falk, is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, and since March, 2008 has served as UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories of Palestine. The publication of this article mentioning the questioning of the official account of 9/11 by highly-credible and respected individuals has been the pretext for a campaign calling for his dismissal from his UN post, brought by the organization UN Watch, a pro-Israel lobby group. Isn't such a demand an attempt at censorship of questioning of the official account of 9/11?

C.I.A. Secrets Could Surface in Swiss Nuclear Case
2010-12-24, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/world/europe/24nukes.html

A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on [December 23] when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms. The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.’s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency’s behalf. The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network’s manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries. A trial ... could also expose in court a tale of C.I.A. break-ins in Switzerland, and of a still unexplained decision by the agency not to seize electronic copies of a number of nuclear bomb designs found on the computers of the Tinner family. Ultimately, copies of those blueprints were found around the globe on the computers of members of the Khan network.

Note: This report establishes yet another connection between a secret nuclear materials network linking both Khan and US government officials, parts of which were divulged by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, who identified moles working with Khan in both the US State Department and the Pentagon. For more on these highly suspicious networks, click here.

Australian trade union president claims 9/11 was a conspiracy
2010-10-20, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/80...

A senior member of the Australian trade union movement has come under fire after he claimed that the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001 were part of an American conspiracy. Kevin Bracken, who is the Victorian secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia and president of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, [said] that "the official story doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny". Mr Bracken [said] that Australia should instead hold an inquiry into the events of 9/11, claiming that elements of the former Bush administration, US military and security services were involved in the attacks and that the motive was related to a large insurance policy that had been taken out on the Twin Towers. "There are so many unanswered questions," he said. "The fact is that aviation fuel doesn't get hot enough to melt steel and no high rise steel frame building before or after September 11 has ever collapsed due to fire. "I stick to scientific facts. In my mind the buildings were imploded."

Note: Kevin Bracken is one among many highly credible people to question the official account of 9/11. For questions raised by many courageous professionals, click here and here.

Al Qaeda Leader Dined at the Pentagon Just Months After 9/11
2010-10-20, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/10/20/al-qaeda-terror-leader-dined-pentagon-mo...

Anwar Al-Awlaki may be the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, but he was also a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News ... state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon ... in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. A current Defense Department employee ... came forward and told investigators she helped arrange the meeting after she saw Awlaki speak in Alexandria, Va. The employee "attended this talk and ... she recalls being impressed by this imam. He condemned Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks," reads one document. "After her vetting, Aulaqi (Awlaki) was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel." Awlaki, a Yemeni-American who was born in Las Cruces, N.M., was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first week after the attacks because of his ties to the three [alleged] hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour. The three ... were all onboard Flight 77 that [allegedly] slammed into the Pentagon.

Note: This article certainly raises suspicions that the amazing connections of Awlaki to so many recent terror incidents may not be unrelated to his now-established connections to the Pentagon shortly after 9/11.

WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if?
2010-10-15, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/15/opinion/la-oe-rowley-wikileaks-20101015

If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented? The idea is worth considering. There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. One of us, Coleen Rowley, was a special agent/legal counsel at the FBI's Minneapolis division and worked closely with those who arrested would-be terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui on an immigration violation less than a month before the World Trade Center was destroyed. Following up on a tip from flight school instructors who had become suspicious of the French Moroccan who claimed to want to fly a jet as an "ego boost," Special Agent Harry Samit and an INS colleague had detained Moussaoui. A foreign intelligence service promptly reported that he had connections with a foreign terrorist group, but FBI officials in Washington inexplicably turned down Samit's request for authority to search Moussaoui's laptop computer and personal effects. Later, testifying at Moussaoui's trial, Samit testified that he believed the behavior of his FBI superiors in Washington constituted "criminal negligence." WikiLeaks might have provided a pressure valve for those agents who were terribly worried about what might happen and frustrated by their superiors' seeming indifference.

Note: For questions raised about the official account of 9/11 by many courageous professionals, click here and here.

Witnesses in Defense Dept. Report Suggest Cover-Up of 9/11 Findings
2010-10-04, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/04/exclusive-witnesses-defense-depart...

A document obtained and witnesses interviewed by Fox News raise new questions over whether there was an effort by the Defense Department to cover up a pre-9/11 military intelligence program known as "Able Danger." At least five witnesses questioned by the Defense Department's Inspector General told Fox News that their statements were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report -- or it left out key information, backing up assertions that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was identified a year before 9/11. Lt. Col Tony Shaffer, an operative involved with Able Danger [and author of Operation Dark Heart, a recent book which discussed the Able Danger operation, and all copies of which were destroyed by the Pentagon] said, "My last interview was very, very hostile." When asked why the IG's report was so aggressive in its denials of his claims and those of other witnesses -- that the data mining project had identified Atta as a threat to the U.S. before 9/11 -- Shaffer said [the] Defense Department was worried about taking some of the blame for 9/11. Specifically, the Defense Intelligence Agency ... wanted the removal of references to a meeting between Shaffer and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. Shaffer alleges that in that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, the commission was told about Able Danger and the identification of Atta before the attacks. Shaffer, who was undercover at the time, said there was "stunned silence" at the meeting. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 Commission report.

Note: Able Danger was the program which identified Mohamed Atta and three other alleged 9/11 hijackers as a potential terror threat before 9/11. To read major media reports on the intense controversy around this program (which is likely why Shaffer's book is being burned by the Pentagon), click here. For a highly revealing Fox News interview with Col. Shaffer on these major deceptions, click here.

9/11 conspiracy theories rife in Muslim world
2010-10-02, Washington Post / Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/02/AR20101002006...

About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks. However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey ... said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks. Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them. Tod Fletcher of [WantToKnow.info] has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president's comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government. "It seems like it's the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States," Fletcher said.

Note: To listen to Tod Fletcher's commentary on WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's recent book, Cognitive Infiltration: an Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, about the latest attempts by the US government to vilify 9/11 truth movement members as "extremist," "violent" and "likely to resort to terrorism", click here.

CIA hired Karzai brother before 9/11, Woodward says
2010-09-30, Washington Post
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/09/cia_hired_karzai_brother_befo...

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of Afghanistan’s president and boss of the strategically important Kandahar province, has been on the CIA payroll for over a decade, Bob Woodward writes in his new book, Obama’s Wars. By the fall of 2008, Woodward says, “Ahmed Wali Karzai had been on the CIA payroll for years, beginning before 9/11. He had belonged to the CIA's small network of paid agents and informants inside Afghanistan. In addition, the CIA paid him money through his half-brother, the president.” Hamid Karzai was plucked from obscurity and installed as president after U.S.-backed Afghan forces chased the Taliban from power following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. There have been many accounts of his brother’s relationship with the CIA over the years, leaving the impression that he is a CIA “agent,” i.e., a controlled asset of the spy agency. But Woodward’s account of the CIA’s relationship with Karzai, who has also been accused repeatedly -- but not charged with -- protecting the illicit opium trade, is more nuanced. “He was not in any sense a controlled agent who always responded to U.S. and CIA requests and pressure,” Woodward writes. “He was his own man, playing all sides against the others -- the United States, the drug dealers, the Taliban and even his brother if necessary.”

Note: What this article fails to mention is that President Karzai was also an employee of the major oil company Unocal, as reported in this Chicago Tribune article.

Pentagon Destroys Copies of Controversial Memoir Written by Army Officer
2010-09-25, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/25/pentagon-destroys-copies-controver...

The Pentagon has burned 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's memoir Operation Dark Heart, his book about going undercover in Afghanistan. A Department of Defense official tells Fox News that the department purchased copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security. The U.S. Army originally cleared the book for release. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency attempted to block the book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger." In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if Operation Dark Heart is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim "Able Danger" successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Note: Able Danger was the program which identified Mohamed Atta and three other alleged 9/11 hijackers as a potential terror threat before 9/11. To read major media reports on the intense controversy around this program (which is likely why the book is being burned), click here.

Secrets in Plain Sight in Censored Book’s Reprint
2010-09-18, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/us/18book.html

The National Security Agency, headquarters for the government’s eavesdroppers and code breakers, has been located at Fort Meade, Md., for half a century. Its nickname, the Fort, has been familiar for decades to neighbors and government workers alike. Yet that nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of Operation Dark Heart, by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security. Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.” Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” The redactions offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that cloaks information the government considers too important for public airing.

Note: Interesting that this NY Times article fails to even mention the "Able Danger" program which Shaffer publicly revealed had identified some of the hijackers before 9/11. For powerful information suggesting government foreknowledge of 9/11 through this program, click here. Yet a Fox News article available here gives all the details. For lots more from major media sources on government secrecy, click here.

Pentagon Attempts to Block Book on Afghan War
2010-09-10, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/09/military-intelligence-attempts-blo...

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has attempted to block a book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger." In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if Operation Dark Heart is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim "Able Danger" successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. In a highly unusual move, the Department of Defense is now negotiating with the publisher, St. Martin's Press, to buy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of the book to keep it off shelves -- even after the U.S. Army had cleared the book for release. Specifically, the DIA wanted references to a meeting between Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the book's author, and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. In that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, Shaffer alleges the commission was told about "Able Danger" and the identification of Atta before the attacks. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 report. Once back in the U.S., Shaffer says he contacted the commission. Without explanation, the commission was no longer interested.

Note: Click here to read the full DIA letter (pdf). For a video of Fox News' exclusive interview with the author of the book blocked by the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, click here.

New Scientific Evidence Undermines Afghanistan War
2010-09-09, Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS204116+09-Sep-2010+PRN20100909

On the eve of the 9th anniversary of 9/11, support for the war in Afghanistan took a serious blow today. Simultaneous press conferences were held in New York and Los Angeles to present startling new information refuting the official 9/11 narrative, used to justify the war. Also announced were three major professional groups which have joined the worldwide, and ever-growing, "9/11 Truth Movement." Representatives of "Scientists for 9/11 Truth," "U.S. Military Officers for 9/11 Truth" and "Actors & Artists for 9/11 Truth" presented their findings and unveiled their eye-opening websites. Each non-profit group has launched a petition calling for a new, transparent investigation. In NY, representing "Scientists," Professor Niels Harrit said, "The official account put forth by NIST violates the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry." In LA, physics teacher David Chandler discussed the swift destruction of the WTC towers, including Building 7, the little-known third tower. Having demonstrated its free fall, he confronted the US government agency NIST with his analyses and forced NIST to revise its November 2008 Final Report on WTC 7. NIST's Draft Report had claimed free fall was impossible but NIST ultimately acknowledged WTC 7 was in absolute free fall for over two seconds. Concluded Chandler, "Free fall is physically impossible without explosives." In LA, former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development Lt. Col. Robert Bowman stated, "9/11 has been an excuse to use our brave young troops as cannon fodder in unjust wars of aggression."

Note: To view a powerful video of the joint press conferences of these three new 9/11 truth organizations, click here.

Angry in America: Inside Alex Jones' World
2010-09-02, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/alex-jones-day-life-libertarian-radio-host/st...

"Good old Uncle Sam will stage attacks ... that's how they keep the slaves in line," the libertarian radio host says during a rant on his show. "We have to wake up and face the fact that we have a criminal government." The criminal government is just one of many conspiracy theories [Alex] Jones espouses -- although he thinks that term belittles his reporting. He also believes that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center were an inside job ... and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) runs concentration camps. "They [FEMA] have designat[ed] sports stadiums," he said matter-of-factly, "They have designated fields, they have designated closed down prisoner of war camps for the American people during a civil uprising." His six-day-a-week radio show and webcast reach an estimated one million people a day. On YouTube and elsewhere, Jones estimates 200 million people have seen his various documentaries, like "The Fall of the Republic," "Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement" and "The Obama Deception." "I've got to report the information I see and what I believe is happening," he said. "I have a responsibility to put out."

Note: It's extremely rare that a major media outlet such as ABC News will cover the work of a prominent member of the 9/11 truth movement. It is likely due to the growing groundswell of demands for a genuine investigation into the events. On September 9, two days before the ninth anniversary of 9/11, three new professional organizations held joint press conferences in New York City and Los Angeles: Scientists for 9/11 Truth, Military Officers for 9/11 Truth, and Actors and Artists for 9/11 Truth, calling for such an investigation.

Secret services 'must be made more transparent'
2010-08-29, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/secret-services-must-be-made-m...

The secret services must become more transparent if they are to halt the spread of damaging conspiracy theories and increase trust in the Government, claims a leading think tank. A Demos report published today, "The Power of Unreason", argues that secrecy surrounding the investigation of events such as the 9/11 New York attacks and the 7/7 bombings in London merely adds weight to ... claims that they were "inside jobs". It ... recommends the Government fight back by infiltrating internet sites to dispute these theories. The Royal United Services Institute warned last week that the UK may soon face a new wave of home-grown terrorists, when criminals who have been targeted by jihadists while in prison are released.

Note: The report cited in this article advocates UK government infiltration of "conspiracist" organizations and websites. In the US the same recommendation has been made by Obama appointee Cass Sunstein, whose article "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures" has just been fully dissected by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin in his new book Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.

Cuba's Fidel Castro claims al-Qaida leader Osama bin laden is a US agent
2010-08-27, Minneapolis Star-Tribune/Associated Press
http://www.startribune.com/world/101653038.html?page=1&c=y

Fidel Castro says al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent who always popped up when former President George W. Bush needed to scare the world, arguing that documents recently posted on the Internet prove it. "Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do," Castro told state media during a meeting with a Lithuanian-born writer known for advancing conspiracy theories about world domination. "Bush never lacked for bin Laden's support. He was a subordinate." Castro said documents posted on WikiLeaks.org — a website that recently released thousands of pages of classified documents from the Afghan war — "effectively proved he was a CIA agent." Last week, he began highlighting the work of Daniel Estulin, who wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors. During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks. He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a "bad actor."

Note: WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin has analyzed the evidence for bin Laden's likely death in December 2001 in his important book Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?. For key reports from major media sources on secret societies such as the Bilderberg Club, click here.

Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club
2010-08-18, Boston Globe/Associated Press
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2010/08/18/fidel_castr...

Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture. The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article [on August 18 to quote] from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin. Estulin's work, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland. Estulin's book, as quoted by Castro, described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self." The prominence of the group is what alarms critics. It often includes members of the Rockefeller family, Henry Kissinger, senior U.S. and European officials and major international business and media executives. Castro -- who had an inside seat to the Cold War -- has long expressed suspicions of back-room plots. He has raised questions about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to stoke military budgets and, more recently suggested that Washington was behind the March sinking of a South Korean ship blamed on North Korea.

Note: For lots more on secret societies like the Bildergroup, click here.

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists
2010-06-24, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/middleeast/24saudi.html

Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles. The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material. Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders. The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal.

Note: For many questions about the relationship between powerful Saudis, the US government and the events of 9/11, click here.

Report: Pakistani Spy Agency Arms, Trains Taliban
2010-06-13, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=10900484

Pakistan's main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group's leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, a research report concluded. U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, have maintained links to the Taliban despite the government's decision to denounce the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure. The report issued [on June 13] by the London School of Economics offered one of the strongest cases that assistance to the group is official ISI policy, and even extends to the highest levels of the Pakistani government. The report ... was based on interviews with Taliban commanders, former Taliban officials, Western diplomats and many others. "Without a change in Pakistani behavior it will be difficult, if not impossible, for international forces and the Afghan government to make progress against the insurgency," said the report, written by Matt Waldman, a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Note: For lots more powerful information suggestion Pakistani involvement with terrorism and 9/11, watch the highly insightful documentary available here.

Jesse Ventura claims gov’t involved in 9/11
2010-03-09, MSNBC
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/35728268/ns/today-today_books

In his new book, American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us, former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura begins an investigative journey to prove that there is more to our national history than the government wants us to know. In this excerpt, he writes about an alleged 9/11 cover-up. Chapter 12: What really happened on September 11? Our government engaged in a massive cover-up of what really happened, including its own ties to the hijackers. Unanswered questions remain about how the towers were brought down, and whether a plane really struck the Pentagon. The Bush Administration either knew about the plan and allowed it to proceed, or they had a hand in it themselves. I certainly never expected to think that elements of the Bush Administration were complicit. Today, though, I am convinced that some people inside our government knew the attack was going to happen and allowed it to come to pass — because it furthered their political agenda. I say this after expending many hours researching things about the official story that don’t add up, and interviewing a number of witnesses with firsthand knowledge that contradicts what we were told. As a patriotic American, I say this with a heavy heart — and with an outrage that really knows no words. But it’s something we, as a nation, must come to terms with. Otherwise, it could happen again.

Note: For the questions raised by many other highly respected former government officials about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy
2010-03-08, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/07/AR20100307023...

Yukihisa Fujita is an influential member of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. As chief of the DPJ's international department and head of the Research Committee on Foreign Affairs in the upper house of Japan's parliament, to which he was elected in 2007, he is a Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment of Washington's most important East Asian ally. He also seems to think that America's rendering of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is a gigantic hoax. He questions whether it was really the work of terrorists; suggests that shadowy forces with advance knowledge of the plot played the stock market to profit from it; peddles the ... idea that eight of the 19 hijackers are alive and well; and hints that controlled demolition rather than fire or debris may be a more likely explanation for at least the collapse of the building at 7 World Trade Center, which was adjacent to the twin towers. As with almost any calamity whose scale and scope assume historic proportions, the events of Sept. 11 have spawned a thriving subculture of conspiracy theorists at home and abroad. We have no reason to believe that Mr. Fujita's views are widely shared in Japan. His proposal two years ago that Tokyo undertake an independent investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 24 Japanese citizens died, went nowhere.

Note: How interesting that the Washington Post is just now reporting this, when this brave Japanese politician presented his case on 9/11 to the Japanese parliament over two years ago. See the video of his presentation at this link. To read Fujita's revealing response to this editorial, click here. For lots more on 9/11, click here.

Explosive News
2010-02-22, Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/22/inside-the-beltway-70128635

A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center. "In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards," says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry. "The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials," Mr. Gage adds. "The implications are enormous."

Note: To read statements questionig the official account of the events of 9/11 by hundreds of professors, government officials and professionals, click here and here. For our 9/11 Information Center, click here.

1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for a Real 9/11 Investigation
2010-01-25, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
http://www.ae911truth.org/info/152

AE911Truth will hold a press conference on Friday, February 19, at 11:00 AM at the Marines Memorial Club and Hotel in San Francisco. We will announce and honor the milestone of our achievement of obtaining 1,000 architects and engineers petitioning for a real investigation into the destruction of the 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers. The press conference will include a large-screen scrolling display of all 1,000 A/E's; statements by Richard Gage, AIA, founder of AE911Truth and several petition signers; and a short ten-minute presentation of "9/11: Blueprint for Truth" – the explosive evidence for the engineered destruction of the 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers. A press kit including the AE911Truth DVD will be made available to all attendees. We will also be inviting various leaders in the 9/11 Truth movement to this milestone event. We are working with We Are Change and other 9/11 Truth organizations to deliver hardcopy petition evidence press kits to every member of Congress. Join us on February 19 in San Francisco to honor this remarkable achievement and meet some of those who have made AE911Truth one of the most respected voices in the 9/11 Truth movement.

Note: For a powerful 10-minute video clip by the founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, click here. WantToKnow team member, Dr. David Ray Griffin, and Dr. Steven Jones will deliver keynote speeches at the press conference luncheon at noon.

The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved
2010-01-24, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575011421223515284.html

The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md. Less than a week after his apparent suicide, the FBI declared Ivins to have been the sole perpetrator of the 2001 Anthrax attacks. The FBI [had] turned the pressure up on him, isolating him at work and forcing him to spend what little money he had on lawyers to defend himself. He became increasingly stressed. Then came his suicide (which, as Eric Nadler and Bob Coen show in their documentary "The Anthrax War," was one of four suicides among American and British biowarfare researchers in past years). But there was still a vexing problem. Silicon was used in the 1960s to weaponize anthrax. Anthrax spores were coated with the substance to prevent them from clinging together so as to create a lethal aerosol. But since weaponization was banned by international treaties, research anthrax no longer contains silicon, and the [anthrax] at Fort Detrick contained none. Ivins, no matter how weird he may have been, had neither the set of skills nor the means to attach silicon to anthrax spores. If Ivins had neither the equipment or skills to weaponize anthrax with silicon, then some other party with access to the anthrax must have done it.

Note: As usual, the FBI tries to pin it on one wacko, when it is clear others most have been involved. Remember that the anthrax attacks occurred as Congress was considering the PATRIOT Act, and were directed in part at key senators opposed to the act. Congress was shut down for a period, and when it reconvened it passed the bill without discussion. For lots more on the antrax attacks as a likely false-flag operation, click here.

Spanish MP's photo used for Osama Bin Laden poster
2010-01-16, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8463657.stm

A Spanish politician has said he was shocked to find out the FBI had used his photo for a digitally-altered image showing how Osama Bin Laden might look. Gaspar Llamazares said he would no longer feel safe travelling to the US after his hair and parts of his face appeared on a most-wanted poster. He said the use of a real person for the mocked-up image was "shameless". The FBI admitted a forensic artist had obtained certain facial features "from a photograph he found on the internet". The digitally-altered photos of the al-Qaeda leader, showing how he might look now, aged 52, were published on the state department's Rewards for Justice website. Officials said they had adapted a 1998 file image to take account of a decade's worth of ageing, and possible changes to facial hair. Mr Llamazares said it showed the "low level" of US intelligence services and could cause problems if he was wrongly identified as the Saudi. "Bin Laden's safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is," he said, adding that he was considering taking legal action.

Note: Now the FBI has admitted that it is doctoring images of Osama bin Laden, and doing so quite ineptly. For WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's powerful analysis of the highly suspect series of audio and video "messages from bin Laden" claimed by US authorities, click here.

Is Osama Bin Laden dead or alive?
2010-01-09, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8444069.stm

Osama Bin Laden died eight years ago during the battle for Tora Bora in Afghanistan, either from a US bomb or from a serious kidney disease. Or so the conspiracy theory goes. The theory that has developed on the web since 9/11 is that US intelligence services are manufacturing the Bin Laden statements ... to justify the so-called war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and back at home. Numerous audio and video statements purporting to be from Bin Laden have been released, but their authenticity has been continually questioned. The veracity of all of the videos is questioned by David Ray Griffin, a former theology professor and member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, which also questions mainstream accounts of the attack on the World Trade Centre. "None of them can be proven to be authentic," he says. "At least three of them can be shown to be almost certainly fake. And if somebody is faking Bin Laden videos, then that leads to the suspicion that all the videos and audio tapes have been faked." His first example is a video released by the US Department of Defense in December 2001. In it, [the] Bin Laden [figure] confesses to 9/11, yet Mr Griffin points out that al-Qaeda has only rarely admitted responsibility for terrorist attacks. He also maintains that the Bin Laden figure looks very different to previous footage - fatter, with shorter fingers, and that he is even writing with the wrong hand.

Note: To see how easily audio and video materials can be faked, read excerpts from this Washington Post article. WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin has written extensively about the evidence regarding whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead, including his recent book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? BBC also interviewed former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who states bin Laden was dead. She was murdered one month later. For more on this, click here

Osama bin Laden’s missing family found in secret compound in Iran
2009-12-23, Times of London
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6965756.ece

Osama bin Laden’s closest relatives are living in a secret compound in Iran, members of the family said. They include a wife and children who disappeared from his Afghan camp at the time of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. There has been uncertainty about the family’s whereabouts for the past eight years, with reports that some of the children had been killed in bombings. However, relatives said that they found out last month that the group, including one of Osama’s wives, six of his children and 11 of his grandchildren, had been kept in a high-security compound outside Tehran. Members of the bin Laden family are now appealing for the group to be allowed to leave Iran and described them as the “forgotten victims of 9/11”. Omar Ossama bin Laden, 29, [Osama bin Laden's] fourth-eldest son, said he had no idea that his brothers and sisters were still alive until they called him in November. They told him how they had fled Afghanistan just before the 9/11 attacks and walked to the Iranian border. They were taken to a walled compound outside Tehran where guards said they were not allowed to leave “for their own safety”.

Note: This article fails to mention that the US government secretly assisted many bin Laden family members to escape the US within days of the 9/11 attacks, as reported in the major media. For more on this, click here. For many other reports by the major media raising serious questions about the involvement of rogue elements of government in 9/11, click here.

Ventura Turns Investigator for 'Conspiracy Theory'
2009-12-01, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=9219009

Jesse Ventura is back for another stab at TV stardom, this time hosting a program that digs into conspiracy theories, including alternate views of what was behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the purpose of a sprawling research center in remote Alaska. The former Minnesota governor, professional wrestler and Navy SEAL stars in "Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura," ... on truTV. The cable network, part of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., has ordered seven episodes of the hourlong weekly series. Marc Juris, executive vide president and general manager of truTV, said Ventura is passionate about the show and brings "knowledge from the inside" of government. "He's not doing this as an act or a gimmick. It's true to his heart. He's really looking for the answers," Juris told the AP. The premiere episode deals with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, a 35-acre compound of 180 antennas near Gakona, Alaska, that is used to study the Earth's ionosphere. Ventura and those he interviews question whether the government is using the site to manipulate the weather or to bombard people with mind-controlling radio waves. Future "Conspiracy Theory" shows explore alleged cover-ups surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks and whether there are real "Manchurian Candidate" assassins who are programmed to kill, said Juris.

Note: Ventura was also a Navy Seal, where he personally was involved in top secret activities and learned how what is presented to the public is very different from the deeper realities. Don't miss the highly educational episode on the vitally important topic of HAARP by clicking here. And watch the excellent episode on 9/11 by clicking here. You'll be surprised by the new angles presented.

Jesse Ventura searches for coverups
2009-11-29, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-conversation29-2009nov29,0,17...

Jesse Ventura is back. The former pro wrestler, who served as Minnesota governor from 1999 to 2003, is the host of "Conspiracy Theory," an investigative series ... on truTV. [Q:] On "Conspiracy Theory," you investigate secret societies and supposed government coverups. Such theories are everywhere, but really, what big conspiracy has ever been proven? [Ventura:] How can you prove it? That's the point. The better part would be to ask, "How many of the government's points have ever been proven?" I find what's most interesting about doing this show is how the government will not participate or allow you in or answer any questions. We're not allowed to question our government. [Q:] One of the alleged coverups you investigate involves 9/11. Do you believe the terrorist attacks were an inside job? [Ventura:] I believe that the government has not been truthful with us about it. Yes, absolutely. That there's massive holes in the story they've told. That none of these questions have ever been adequately addressed. All evidence has been destroyed, pretty much. [Q:] Why would the government want to do such things? {Ventura:} Well, what changed after 9/11? We're in two wars, passage of Patriot Act and all that. Our entire society changed that day. We've become paranoid. We think there's a terrorist behind every tree. I live in Mexico half the year. And when I'm down there, for six months, I never hear the word "terrorism." When I'm up here, I can't go a day without hearing it.

Note: Many government officials, like Jesse Ventura, have questioned the official explanation of the 9/11 attacks. To read their questions, click here.

Was 9/11 a conspiracy? ‘Truthers' make their case
2009-11-26, The Globe and Mail (One of Toronto's leading newspapers)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/was-911-a-conspiracy-truthers-make-t...

Though rarely shown on TV these days ... 9/11 footage is replayed more than once in "The Unofficial Story" [on the CBC News program the fifth estate]. The documentary follows up on some fairly startling public-opinion polls of late. To wit: More than half of all Americans believe the Bush administration had advance knowledge of 9/11, and did nothing to stop it; slightly more than one-third of the Canadian population believes likewise. “The number of people who believe the U.S. government was involved in the attacks appears to be growing,” says fifth estate veteran Bob McKeown, who helms the report. “Most of them believe there are still questions that have gone unanswered.” Among the group's more prominent proponents is Richard Gage, a well-regarded architect interviewed by McKeown in the program. Gage is fervent in his belief that the destruction was intentional, and was not accomplished with airplanes, but with explosives. Also speaking out for the Truthers movement is academic and Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Ray Griffin – who questions the lack of NORAD response after the first plane struck the tower – and Canadian professor Kee Dewdney, who insists the fabled on-board struggle between hijackers and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 could only be a hoax. “The really interesting thing to me is that you cannot get these people to speculate,” observes McKeown. “They will say, ‘That is not my job.'”

Note: Watch this first-ever North American major media network news documentary on the 9/11 truth movement by clicking here. And for what may be the best ever documentary on 9/11 for opening people's eyes, click here.

Website Wikileaks publishes '9/11 messages'
2009-11-26, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8379960.stm

A website has published what it says are 573,000 intercepted pager messages sent during the 9/11 attacks in the United States. WikiLeaks says it will not reveal who gave it the messages - some of which are from federal agencies as well as ordinary citizens. Internet analysts say they believe the messages are genuine but federal authorities have refused to comment. The messages are not all about the attacks. Some are mundane questions about what people are having for lunch. However, many are about the deadly plane attacks and range from people trying to find out if their loved ones are safe to government messages. They include messages such as * This is Myrna, I will not rest until you get home, the second tower is down, I don't want to have to keep calling you after every event. Pls just go home * Bomb detonated in World Trade Ctr. Pls get back to Mike Brady w/ a quick assessment of your areas and contact us if anything is needed. New York's fire and police departments said they could not comment on whether messages purportedly sent from them were genuine while the US Secret Service refused to comment. WikiLeaks allows people to anonymously post documents on the web, saying its aim is to promote transparency. It was created in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Note: For questions raised by hundreds of highly respected and credible officials, academics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here and here.

9/11's delayed legacy: cancer for many of the rescue workers
2009-11-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/11/cancer-new-york-rescuers

A spate of recent deaths of New York police and fire officers who took part in the emergency operation at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks has heightened fears that it could be the start of a delayed epidemic of cancer-related illness. Five firefighters and police officers, all of whom were involved in the rescue and clear-up at the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, have died of cancer in the past three months, the oldest being 44. Three died last month within a four-day period. Up to 70,000 people took part in the massive operation at Ground Zero, including police, firefighters and construction workers who came to New York voluntarily from all over the US. Many worked for months amid a toxic soup of dust and chemicals. Amid the pollutants within the giant pile of 1.8m tons of debris and the surrounding air were ... about 1,000 tons of asbestos that was used in the construction of the Twin Towers, pulverised lead from computers, mercury and highly carcinogenic by-products from the burning of plastics and chlorinated chemicals. No official tally is available for the number of those who have died as a result of the 9/11 clear-up. The New York state health department has recorded 817 deaths of emergency workers. Claire Calladine, a campaigner who runs the organisation 9/11 Health Now, said the fear was that the recent rise in cancer cases was just the start. "We have only seen the tip of the iceberg. How bad will it get – that is the big question."

Note: To read important questions raised by hundreds of government officials, academics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here and here.

Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?
2009-11-01, The American Conservative
http://amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/0000

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. On Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. PHILIP GIRALDI: You map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. So the network starts with a person like [Marc] Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies? EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces.

Note: Sibel Edmonds is the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. For lots more on her key testimony, click here. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist. An ever increasing number of people are waking up to the truth of 9/11.

Material missing from Oklahoma bombing tapes, lawyer says
2009-09-27, USA Today/Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-09-27-okla-city-bombing-tapes_N.htm

Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday. "The real story is what's missing," said Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who obtained the recordings through the federal Freedom of Information Act as part of an unofficial inquiry he is conducting into the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. The tapes turned over by the FBI came from security cameras various companies had mounted outside office buildings near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They are blank at points before 9:02 a.m., when a truck bomb carrying a 4,000-pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the building, Trentadue said. "Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence," Trentadue said. He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because "they had run out of tape" or "the tape was being replaced." "The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see." Trentadue said he is seeking more tapes along with a variety of bombing-related documents from the FBI and the CIA. An FOIA request by Trentadue for 26 CIA documents was rejected in June. A letter from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which reviewed the documents, said their release "could cause grave damage to our national security."

Note: This revealing article also tells how Trentadue's brother was murdered by FBI agents who mistakenly thought his brother was the bomber. For more valuable information on this and other evidence challenging the official story of the Oklahoma City bombing, click here.

Twin Towers, Twin Myths?
2009-09-17, Santa Barbara Independent (Santa Barbara's leading weekly)
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/sep/17/twin-towers-twin-myths

One of the crucial technical disputes in American history, perhaps second only to global warming, is underway. It pits hundreds of government technicians who say the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by airplane impact against hundreds of professional architects and building engineers who insist that the Twin Towers could never have collapsed solely due to the planes and are calling for a new independent investigation. It is a fight that is not going away and is likely to get louder as more building trade professionals sign on to one side or the other. Better than anyone, David Ray Griffin understands the “enormous importance” of Richard Gage, the Bay Area architect and staunch Republican who founded Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911 Truth). Griffin, [a] retired Santa Barbara philosophy professor/theologian (Claremont School of Theology), is regarded as the leading investigative force within what is called the 9/11 Truth movement, with seven 9/11 books to his credit, including his bestseller The New Pearl Harbor. Griffin found his greatest stumbling block in public appearances to be this question: If his analysis was true – that two planes could not have brought down three World Trade Center (WTC) buildings without the aid of pre-planted explosives – why didn’t a single U.S. architect or building engineer publicly support him? Now, in three years, Gage has signed up 804 architects and structural engineers, some from top firms, who challenge the official version of the buildings’ collapses. AE911 Truth has grown rapidly, igniting a struggling grassroots movement of hundreds of other “9/11 Truth” organizations, and spearheading a growing assault on the official story.

Note: WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin has just published a thorough debunking of the latest official explanation of the collapse of three steel-framed skyscrapers at the World Trade Center after two of them were struck by aircraft, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7.

The World's Most Wanted Man
2009-09-12, Daily Express (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers)
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/126787/The-world-s-most-wanted-man

Thousands of troops from countries including Britain, America, Afghanistan and Pakistan search relentlessly for him. Dozens of CIA agents have no other mission than working day after day on his capture. Yet eight years after the 9/11 outrage on the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon in Washington, no one has come close to laying a finger on Osama Bin Laden. Ever since that day when nearly 3,000 people were murdered, America has wanted the leader of al Qaeda dead or alive. But there is a compelling argument, put forward by a respected American academic, that Bin Laden was killed eight years ago. Professor David Ray Griffin, who has written authoritative books on the 9/11 attacks, believes the US has kept the Bin Laden myth alive to bolster the war against terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is truly astonishing is that despite an army of investigators, a practically limitless budget and an immense £15million bounty on his head, so little is known about what has actually happened to Bin Laden. In his new book Osama Bin Laden: Dead Or Alive?. “There’s much evidence which points to the conclusion that Osama Bin Laden is no longer alive,” Prof Griffin insists. “We have had no credible intelligence on Bin Laden since 2001.” On Christmas Day 2001, Pakistan’s Observer newspaper carried a report of Bin Laden’s funeral, saying he died a natural and quiet death. “The major pretext for the war in Afghanistan is the expressed need to prevent Osama Bin Laden and his followers attacking the West again. This pretext would be removed by convincing evidence that Bin Laden is dead. Such evidence exists,” [said Prof. Griffin.].

Note: Esteemed scholar and WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, can be purchased here.

A New Look at the 9-11 Commission
2009-09-11, Time magazine
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1921659,00.html

Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, tasked with investigating the government response to the attacks. His new book, The Ground Truth, picks up where the commission left off — taking a deeper look at the government's ... response to the attacks and exposing officials determined to hide their failings from the inquiry. Farmer uses newly released transcripts and recordings to cast doubt on the official version of events. He spoke with TIME. [Time:] Why do you think officials tried to obscure [the truth about 9/11]? [Farmer:] It's almost a culture of concealment. You have someone like Sandy Berger ... taking rather extreme measures to remove documents from the National Archives and hide them at a construction site where he could retrieve them later and destroy them. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened. If what the government is telling you isn't true, then the truth could be anything. I think there is evidence that the truth wasn't told and that at least some of that was deliberate.

Note: Many respected scholars, officials and professionals have questioned the 9/11 Commission's report. Click here and here to read some of their statements. For lots more reliable, verifiable information from the major media questioning the 9/11 Commission's report, click here and here.

Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?
2009-09-11, Daily Mail (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seve...

[President] Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find [Osama bin Laden]. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror. This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff? What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror? Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts. Still more questions have been raised with the publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, ... it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his supposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West. The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan. His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom. The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the West to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?

Note: Hundreds of scholars, officials and professionals have raised questions about bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and other aspects of the official conspiracy about the events of 9/11. Click here and here to read their concerns.

Explosive Theory
2009-09-09, MetroActive (Silicon Valley's leading weekly newspaper)
http://www.metroactive.com/metro/09.09.09/cover-0936.html

Just a few years ago Ed Munyak, a fire protection engineer for the city of San Jose, seemed like a lonely, out-there figure, a sometimes-target because of his outspoken position on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. These days, hundreds of other building trade professionals have joined him in challenging the official narrative about the collapse of three buildings at New York's World Trade Center (WTC) on that fateful, traumatic day. Munyak, of Los Altos Hills, is a mechanical and fire engineer whose job is to review building plans to ensure they comply with the California Building and Fire Code. In 2007, after speaking out on his own for a few years, Munyak signed on with a then-fledging organization called Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, founded by Bay Area architect Richard Gage. Today, far from being isolated, Munyak now counts as allies 804 professional architects and building engineers from around the country. Collectively, they have joined Munyak's call for an independent technical investigation of the causes of the WTC buildings collapse. In doing so, they reject the federal government's conclusions that two airplanes alone brought the buildings down—without the aid of pre-planted explosives. Munyak and his fellow AE911 supporters recently received acknowledgement from the FBI's counterterrorism division, which concluded that the organization's core evidence deserves—and will get—FBI scrutiny. In a letter, Deputy Director Michael J. Heimbach assessed AE911's presentation as "backed by thorough research and analysis."

Note: WantToKnow Team member David Ray Griffin has just published a detailed critique of the fraudulent "science" in the latest government publication defending the official account of the collapse of WTC 7.

Sheen wants to discuss his 9/11 theories with Obama
2009-09-09, Houston Chronicle (One of Houston's leading newspapers)
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/celebrities/6609335.html

Actor Charlie Sheen has written a letter to President Barack Obama requesting a meeting over Sheen's theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The day of Sept. 11, 2001, saw America hit by the worst terrorist atrocities in the country's history, including an attack in New York which killed almost 3,000 people. Sheen has always been outspoken about his views on the attacks, supporting a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government at the time defrauded the public with its official story about the incident. The star has now written to Obama asking him to reopen the investigation into 9/11. The note, entitled "20 Minutes With The President," is written as a fictional meeting with Obama, in which Sheen urges the leader to follow through his promises of change, accountability and government transparency by using his powers to look into the actions of George W. Bush's previous administration. Sheen hopes the president will take note of his campaign and grant him a meeting.

Note: To watch an excellent six-minute video narrated by Sheen asking hard questions to the president, click here. For a powerful summary of many unanswered questions raised by the official account of 9/11, click here.

The deep state does not respond to FOIA requests
2009-08-22, Chicago Sun-Times News Group/Rock Creek Free Press
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/news/blogentries/index.html?bbP...

In an attempt to get to the bottom of what really happened on 9/11, citizen investigator Aidan Monaghan has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with federal agencies such as the FBI, SEC, [and] Department of the Navy. Agency after agency has refused to comply with his requests, instead claiming that the information cannot be found, does not exist, [or is "exempt from disclosure."] The FBI has put an exemption on all of their 9/11 information and will release information only if compelled to do so by a lawsuit, of which Monaghan has filed two. The list of FOIAs that Monaghan has filed which have yielded no information is long. He asked the Secret Service for documents that reveal what time former Vice President Dick Cheney entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), as well as documents pertaining to the names of persons admitted to PEOC. Reply: no records or documents pertaining to your request. He asked the SEC for a bibliography of the investigation records that were located in the SEC’s offices on floors 11-13 in World Trade Center 7. The reply: did not locate or identify any information responsive to your request. Monaghan asked the Naval Surface Warfare Center for records about the research and development of nano-sized aluminum powders or nano-sized iron oxide powders. Reply: have not found any records responsive to your request. “I’m beginning to wonder if the FOIA is just a lot of theatre for public consumption to provide a perception that yes, government is accessible, it’s transparent,” said Monaghan. “For two years now I’ve tried to pull as much 9/11 info from the federal government as I can, and the most noteworthy thing I’ve found is the absence of information. Material that should be there just isn’t.”

Note: For lots more on government secrecy from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

A Window Into C.I.A.'s Embrace of Secret Jails
2009-08-13, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html

In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency's main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world's most threatening terrorists. Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, ... agreed to the assignment. With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees. The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate [captives] has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account. Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison. Eventually, the agency's network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100. Mr. Foggo's success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.'s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief. "It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment," said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.'s executive director from 2001 to 2004. "It popped people's eyes."

Note: Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's case is highly unusual. Very few high-level CIA officers have ever been imprisoned for corruption. His predecessor as Executive Director of the CIA, quoted in the article above, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who held the office on 9/11, had been the chief executive of a branch of the investment company which placed the still unexplained "put options" on American and United Airlines stocks the week before the attacks, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of profits to "unknown" parties.

Judge: CIA interrogations not relevant to 9/11 accused's sanity
2009-08-10, Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1179756.html

U.S. military defense lawyers for accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh cannot learn what interrogation techniques CIA agents used on the Yemeni before he was moved to Guantánamo to be tried as a terrorist, an Army judge has ruled. Bin al Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution by military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. But his lawyers say he suffers a "delusional disorder," and hallucinations in his cell at Guantánamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge on the case, has scheduled a competency hearing for mid-September. Meantime, the judge ruled on Aug. 6 that "evidence of specific techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accused is . . . not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case." Prosecutors had invoked a national security privilege in seeking to shield the details from defense lawyers. Many of the techniques used on the men have already been made public. They included waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation methods meant to break a captive's will. But Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the Yemeni's Pentagon appointed defense attorney, said court-approved mental health experts -- as well as the judge -- need to know the specifics to assess her client's mental illness. If he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his CIA interrogations, there may be PTSD treatments that could make him competent.

Note: For many reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of "the war on terror," click here.

9/11 Case Could Bring Broad Shift on Civil Suits
2009-07-21, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21bar.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewante...

The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court’s last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong reason. But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months. On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention. But something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the United States. For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery. The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible. “It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments,” said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”

Note: For many important reports from major media sources on the erosion of civil liberties since the 9/11 attacks, click here.

The Alarming Record of the F.B.I.'s Informant in the Bronx Bomb Plot
2009-07-07, Village Voice (A progressive New York City street newspaper)
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-08/news/the-alarming-record-of-the-f-b-i-...

Last month, police and the FBI arrested four Newburgh men on charges that they had plotted to bomb synagogues in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx and fire a missile at a military jet. As more details emerged, however, the less the four defendants sounded like men with the skills to plan a sophisticated terror plot. They were small-time crooks, felons with long criminal records. What the indictment didn't say, and what the initial news reports didn't fill in, was the extent to which the fifth man in the plot, an unnamed FBI informant, had provided the glue to hold the Newburgh 4 together. That informant was a Pakistani man named Shahed Hussain, code-named "Malik," who agreed to work for the FBI to obtain leniency after he was arrested in 2002 for fraud. Over a period of about a year, Malik met with [the] defendants ... while under FBI surveillance. The Newburgh bomb plot isn't the first of Malik's operations for the government. He played a similar role four years ago in an Albany case, in which he helped the FBI arrest a man named Mohammed Hossain, a cash-poor pizzeria owner, and his imam, Yassin Aref, after persuading them to launder $50,000 in a made-up plot to bring a missile to the U.S. and assassinate the Pakistani prime minister. In both cases, Malik did not stumble upon active terror cells plotting to bring destruction on American soil. Instead, in both Newburgh and Albany, he needed long periods of time to recruit his Muslim contacts, spin elaborate tales about his terror contacts, and develop solid plans of action, all the while providing the defendants with large amounts of resources and cash incentives. In each case, the question remains: Would either set of defendants have done anything remotely like plant bombs or launder money for terrorists if not for the prodding and plotting and encouragement of Malik and the FBI?

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the hidden realities behind the never-ending "war on terror", click here.

'If I didn't confess to 7/7 bombings MI5 officers would rape my wife,' claims torture victim
2009-06-25, Daily Mail (a popular U.K. newspaper)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1195484/If-I-didnt-confess-7-7-bombin...

A British man spoke publicly for the first time yesterday to accuse MI5 officers of forcing him to confess to masterminding the July 7 bombings. Jamil Rahman claims UK security officers were behind his arrest in 2005 in Bangladesh. He says he was beaten repeatedly by local officials who also threatened to rape him and his wife. Mr Rahman, who is suing the Home Office, said a pair of MI5 officers who attended his torture and interrogation would leave the room while he was beaten. He claims when he told the pair he had been tortured they merely answered: 'They haven't done a very good job on you.' Mr Rahman told the BBC: 'They threatened my family. They go to me, "In the UK, gas leaks happen, if your family house had a gas leak and everyone got burnt, there's no problems, we can do that easily".' He says he eventually made a false confession of involvement in the July 7 bomb plots. The extraordinary allegations will add to pressure on UK ministers to come clean over the way Britain's intelligence agencies have been allowed to gather evidence around the world in the eight years since the September 11 attacks. Jamil Rahman, a former civil servant from south Wales, is a British citizen who moved to Bangladesh in 2005 and married a woman he met there. He returned to the UK last year. He said: 'It was all to do with the British. Jamil Rahman is one of a number of former detainees who accuse the British Government colluded in their torture abroad. His account echoes that of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, who said he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with MI5's knowledge. The 30-year-old Ethiopian says he was beaten and deprived of sleep to try to make him confess to an Al Qaeda 'dirty bomb' plot, and his treatment is now the subject of an unprecedented police investigation into MI5's conduct.

Note: For lots more on the hidden strategies used to maintain the "war on terror", click here.

D.C. Crash Kills General Who Scrambled Jets on 9/11
2009-06-24, Bloomberg News
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGu5lX16VTk8

David F. Wherley Jr., the head of the Washington National Guard who scrambled jets over the city during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was among those killed in the worst commuter train crash in the city’s history, officials said. Wherley’s wife, Ann, was also among the nine people killed when a train plowed into the rear of a stopped train during rush hour on June 22, Quintin Peterson, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said in a telephone interview. Both were 62 and lived in southeast Washington. Wherley was commander of the 113th Fighter Wing at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland during the September 2001 terrorist attacks and sent up aircraft with orders to protect the White House and the Capitol, according to the 9/11 Commission report. He commanded the District of Columbia National Guard from 2003 to 2008, the unit said in a statement. Wherley flew T-38 training jets and F-105 Thunderchief and F-4 Phantom combat jets during a military career that began in 1969, according to the guard’s statement. It said he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Fordham University in New York City in 1969, and a master’s in business administration from the University of Maryland in 1977.

Note: Could there be something more than a mere accident behind the death of the commander of the air defense forces over Washington DC on 9/11? Many questions continue to swirl concerning what was in the air over the city that morning, what was launched by Gen. Wherley and when, and why no interception of an attack aircraft approaching the Pentagon occurred. He knew more than the public does about what really took place in those crucial hours, but he will now not be available for questioning should a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks take place. For lots more on the suspicions that surround the official explanation and calls by highly respected citizens for just such an investigation, click here and here.

Historic Broadcast of "9/11 Press For Truth"
2009-06-06, KBDI-TV (Colorado Public Television station)
http://www.kbdi.org/tv_schedule/program_details.cfm?id=120090606210000

Following the attacks of September 11th, a small group of grieving families waged a tenacious battle against those who sought to bury the truth about the event. In this documentary, six of them – including three of the famous 9/11 widows known as the "Jersey Girls" – tell the powerful story of how they took on the greatest powers in Washington, compelling lawmakers to launch an investigation that ultimately failed to answer most of their questions. The filmmakers collaborated with the media group Globalvision to stitch together overlooked news clips, buried stories, and government press conferences, revealing a pattern of official lies, deception, and spin. As a result, a very different picture of 9/11 emerges – one that raises new, and more pressing, questions. To mark the film's U.S. broadcast premiere, Executive Producer Kyle Hence, Director Ray Nowosielski, and family member Bob McIlvaine – who lost his son Bobby in the attacks on New York – will be in the KBDI studios to discuss the film throughout the evening. Additionally, volunteers from Colorado 911 Visibility will be on hand to answer phones.

Note: To watch this important, landmark 9/11 documentary, click here. This highly engaging, well researched film may be the best way yet to open the eyes of those who don't know about the major 9/11 cover-up.

Architects and Engineers Seek 9/11 Truth
2009-06-03, KGO Radio (San Francisco's top talk-radio station)
http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?id=1353865&spid=20399

"Architects know that you can't have 400 structural steel connections failing per second in a fire-induced gravitational collapse," says architect Richard Gage about the collapse of World Trade Center 7, a building not struck by a plane, on September 11, 2001. Richard is with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group of professionals who have factual reservations about conclusions reached in the 9/11 Report.

Note: To listen to this path-breaking 7-minute broadcast, click on the link above. For lots more reliable information showing the official story of 9/11 cannot be true, see our 9/11 Information Center.

Great Day Talks To Architect Richard Gage About 9/11
2009-05-28, KMPH-TV (Fresno, CA Fox Network affiliate)
http://www.kmph.com/Global/story.asp?s=10445264

Kim Stephens: He’s an architect experienced in steel structures. Now Richard Gage is touring the country with a controversial message about September 11. Kopi Sotiropulos: Richard Gage is here to show us why he’s calling for a more thorough investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. First of all give us a little bit more about your background. Gage: I’m an architect of twenty years, a member of the American Institute of Architects, and have been studying steel frame fire proof buildings for about that long. Kim Stephens: We ask that for clarification because as we get into this, we want people to make sure that you’re not just somebody with a wacky idea. You come with some science to you. What is the official reason for the collapse of the World Trade Center towers? Gage: Well we’re told that the planes hit the buildings, and there was an explosion and a fire, and about a hour and a half later, in the case of the north tower, the buildings collapsed due to structural weakening, due to the fires. The problem is that we don’t have large gradual deformations associated with collapses. And fires in high rises have never brought down a steel frame high rise building at all, ever. And what we have, unfortunately, is the evidence in the twin towers and the third skyscraper to collapse that day, which most people don’t know anything about it. We have the evidence of the ten key features of controlled demolition. In the case of building seven, it collapses straight down into its own footprint, at free fall speed, in the first hundred feet. It’s dropping, as you can see symmetrically, smoothly, at free fall speed, in the first hundred feet. Two and a half seconds. This is uncanny, there’s forty thousand tons of structural steel designed to resist this collapse.

Note: The above text is taken from the KMPH interview available here. Richard Gage, AIA, is the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Remarkably, this interview, though short, was respectful and evenhanded. No ridicule, no debunking, no "conspiracy theory" dismissals! To watch a 7-minute video of the interview, click on the link above. To read a transcript of the interview, click here. For an astonishing comment on PBS by the owner of the building's decision to "pull" the building, click here.

Review: 'New World Order' on Independent Film Channel
2009-05-26, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-new-world-order26-2009may26,0...

"New World Order," which premieres today on the Independent Film Channel, is a film about ... volunteers in an "information war" who see ... that 9/11 was an "inside job," that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy, and that an international "power elite" is plotting to enslave us all, excepting for those it will kill outright. They are hard to pigeonhole politically, these conspiracy adepts, trusting neither the "socialist Democrats" nor the "fascist Republicans" -- Ron Paul seems to be their man, if anyone is -- yet sounding as often like '60s leftist radicals as right-wing militiamen. They take the 1st Amendment as seriously as any card-carrying member of the ACLU, styling themselves muckrakers and speakers of truth to power, often through a bullhorn. The man with the biggest bullhorn is Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas-based syndicated radio host ... and the point through which all the strands connect in this unexpectedly affecting, nonjudgmental documentary by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel. Much of what Jones and his fellows and followers believe is, in a general way, hardly controversial. But whether 9/11 was a plot to bring on world government, or whether the government you already have has painted a red or blue dot on your mailbox to indicate whether you will be shot immediately or merely be sent to the "FEMA camps" when the American Armageddon arrives, well, that's a pale horse of a different color. (Still, you'll want to check your mailbox now.) "This is more important than how much Britney Spears' hair sold for on EBay, 'Dancing With the Stars' or who's gonna be America's next idol," says one believer. "People think this is a joke. We're not a joke."

Note: The disparaging tone of this review of the documentary is typical of mainstream media treatment of 9/11 truth activity, but it makes clear that the film itself does not share this attitude.

Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say
2009-04-06, Deseret News (One of Salt Lake City's leading newspapers)
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/0,5143,705295677,00.html

Tiny red and gray chips found in the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center contain highly explosive materials — proof, according to a former BYU professor, that 9/11 is still a sinister mystery. Physicist Steven E. Jones, who retired from Brigham Young University in 2006 after the school recoiled from the controversy surrounding his 9/11 theories, is one of nine authors on a paper published last week in the online, peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal. Also listed as authors are BYU physics professor Jeffrey Farrer and a professor of nanochemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. For several years, Jones has theorized that pre-positioned explosives, not fires from jet fuel, caused the rapid, symmetrical collapse of the two World Trade Center buildings, plus the collapse of a third building, WTC-7. The newest research, according to the journal authors, shows that dust from the collapsing towers contained a "nano-thermite" material that is highly explosive. A layer of dust lay over parts of Manhattan immediately following the collapse of the towers, and it was samples of this dust that Jones and fellow researchers requested in a 2006 paper, hoping to determine "the whole truth of the events of that day." They eventually tested four samples they received from New Yorkers. Red/gray chips ... were found in all four dust samples. The chips were then analyzed using scanning electron microscopy and other high-tech tools. The red layer of the chips, according to the researchers, contains a "highly energetic" form of thermite.

Note: For the full text of this path-breaking scientific report, click here. Note that other major media failed to pick up this important news, though you can watch a Dutch news report (with English subtitles) on YouTube available here. For more key reports on the cutting-edge research of Prof. Steven Jones, click here.

Fifth Alarm for That Haunted Fireman
2009-04-05, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/arts/television/05harr.html?partner=rss&emc...

In Season 5 of “Rescue Me,” which begins Tuesday on FX, the specter of 9/11 becomes a major character once again, when a French journalist starts interviewing firefighters about their experiences for a commemorative book. This season one major character will become seriously ill with cancer apparently caused by his work at ground zero. Another, Franco Rivera (Daniel Sunjata), will articulate his ... belief that 9/11 was “an inside job,” the result of “a massive neoconservative government conspiracy” that was designed to increase American power by creating a pretext for seizing control of the world’s oil supplies — a view Mr. Sunjata himself happens to share. “The reason we wrote it,” Mr. Tolan said, “is that Danny was spouting this stuff and even some of the guys, the firefighters on the set, were saying ‘What is this?’ We saw how divisive this was and thought: We have to do this.” Mr. Sunjata admits to some trepidation about how the show’s audience will react to the story line. “I won’t say that my opinions were warmly received on the set,” he said. “At one point I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll get fired if I keep opening my mouth.’ But even though Peter and Denis didn’t sign on to this conspiracy, they were brave enough to include it in the show. I give them and FX and Fox — I never thought I’d say this — a big round of applause.” Mr. Sunjata certainly had reason to fear losing his job, since “Rescue Me” has never been timid about dispatching major characters.

Note: To read why hundreds of professors and professionals agree with Daniel Sunjata, click here and here.

'Global War On Terror' Is Given New Name
2009-03-25, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR20090324028...

The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor. In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' " Senior administration officials had been publicly using the phrase "overseas contingency operations" in a war context for roughly a month before the e-mail was sent. The Bush administration adopted the phrase ["Global War on Terror"] soon after the Sept. 11, 2001. But critics abroad and at home, including some within the U.S. military, said the terminology mischaracterized the nature of the enemy and its abilities. Some military officers said, for example, that classifying al-Qaeda and other anti-American militant groups as part of a single movement overstated their strength. Last month, the International Commission of Jurists urged the Obama administration to drop the phrase "war on terror." The commission said the term had given the Bush administration "spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations," including detention practices and interrogation methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as torture.

The 9/11 Commission and Torture
2009-03-14, Newsweek Magazine
http://www.newsweek.com/id/189251

Powerful Democrats on Capitol Hill are clamoring for creation of a bipartisan "9/11 style" commission to investigate the legality of the Bush administration's antiterrorism tactics—especially its use of harsh interrogation techniques. The case for a "truth" commission was bolstered by the disclosure this month that the CIA had destroyed 92 videotapes of the interrogations and confinement of Al Qaeda suspects. A dozen showed the use of ... torture. Lawmakers say the obvious model for such an inquiry would be the 9/11 Commission. [But] the commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda's history relied heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it. The [Commission] raised no public protest over the CIA's interrogation methods. In fact, the Commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions. That has troubling implications for the credibility of the commission's final report. In intelligence circles, testimony obtained through torture is typically discredited; research shows that people will say anything under threat of intense physical pain. Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking. Kerrey said it might take "a permanent 9/11 commission" to end the remaining mysteries of September 11.

Note: For key statements by hundreds of respected scholars and professionals questioning the accuracy of the 9/11 Commission's report, click here.

'Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11' by Kathryn S. Olmsted
2009-02-28, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0228-real-enemiesfeb28,0...

In August 2006, almost five years after the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a poll by Scripps Howard and Ohio University found that 36 percent of respondents thought it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that officials of the federal government "either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them." The poll also found that those who regularly use the Internet but do not habitually consult mainstream media "are significantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies." Kathryn S. Olmsted, in her exquisitely researched and annotated new book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, points out that although such views "may seem to belong to the fringe," they are held by millions of Americans and a majority of those between the ages of 18 and 29. In fact, Olmsted asserts that the tendency to see conspiracies everywhere "long ago spread from the margins into the main body of American political culture," and that the quelling of political dissent is an exacerbating factor. She has set out to track the history and patterning of conspiratorial beliefs as they relate to politics and public policy. Her thesis — that conspiracy theories thrive in part because the government has misled the public or acted illegally and covertly, and been caught at it frequently enough to make them credible — is a disconcerting one. But the historical detail she marshals (which demonstrates a tendency for fusion of far-left and far-right political views) is persuasive in its cumulative power.

Note: For more on the important Scripps/Howard poll showing that high percentages of American citizens suspect US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, click here. For a 15-minute clip of a powerfully revealing documentary on this, 9/11: Press for Truth, click here.

9/11 widow among victims of crash near Buffalo
2009-02-13, MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29176877/

One of the victims of Continental Flight 3407, Beverly Eckert, was a Sept. 11 widow who put her never-ending grief to good use to make the country safer. Just last week, Eckert was at the White House with Barack Obama, part of a meeting the president had with relatives of those killed in the 2001 attacks and the bombing of the USS Cole to discuss how the new administration would handle terror suspects. Obama, addressing business leaders on Friday, referred to her "passionate commitment" to the 9/11 families. "She was an inspiration to me and to so many others, and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead," the president said during remarks about the crash at the East Room event. "She was such an important part of all of our work," said Mary Fetchet, another 9/11 family activist.

Note: Mrs. Eckert rejected the $1.8 million payment for 9/11 survivors, as she would have forfeited the right to sue the government for its role in the event. ABC News quotes her on how she had "chosen to go to court rather than accept a payoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited. I am suing because unlike ... congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence." For why Mrs. Eckert and hundreds of other highly respected politicians and professors are calling for a new investigation on 9/11, click here.

Bush Sought 'Way' To Invade Iraq?
2009-02-11, CBS News 60 Minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml

[Former Treasury Secretary Paul] O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run. Entitled The Price of Loyalty, the book by [Ron Suskind,] former Wall Street Journal reporter, draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. What happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11. "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime," says Suskind. "Day one, these things were laid and sealed." As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill.

Note: Most wars in the 20th Century were started by false-flag operations; could 9/11 have been yet another one, on a scale large enough to launch a "global" and "endless" war? For an overview, click here.

The Political Suspicions of 9/11
2009-02-02, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/media/02fx.html?partner=rss&emc=rs...

A coming episode of the acclaimed FX drama “Rescue Me” will tackle what may sound like a far-fetched plot line: that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job.” The actor who espouses the theories on camera, it turns out, also subscribes to them in real life. The second episode of “Rescue Me’s” fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company (FX is operated by the News Corporation). “They’re not discussed a lot in the press,” Daniel Sunjata, the actor who plays Franco Rivera on “Rescue Me,” told reporters at a television press tour last month. In the episode, Mr. Sunjata’s character [describes] a “neoconservative government effort” to control the world’s oil, drastically increase military spending and “change the definition of pre-emptive attack.” To put it into action, he continues, “what you need is a new Pearl Harbor. That’s what they said they needed.” Mr. Sunjata surprised some of the TV reporters when he said that he “absolutely, 100 percent” supports the assertion that “9/11 was an inside job.” The alternative theories “seem to me to make a lot more sense than the ones that are popularly espoused,” he said, calling it admirable that the conversation was allowed within “Rescue Me.” Peter Tolan, an executive producer, said Mr. Sunjata is “well read” and has “done a lot of research.” “Look, obviously not all of us buy in,” he told reporters. “But we went: ‘Wow, that’s interesting, and he’s passionate about it. Let’s use that.’ ”

Note: For a powerful two-page summary of key unanswered questions from major media sources about what really happened on 9/11, click here. To read charges by hundreds of professors and top politicians claiming that the U.S. government is lying about 9/11, click here.

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics
2008-12-16, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-cheney16-2008dec16...

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely. Cheney's comments ... mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a ... method known as waterboarding. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News. Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: "I do." His comments come on the heels of disclosures by a Senate committee showing that high-level officials in the Bush administration were intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation methods that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned internationally as torture. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it." Waterboarding involves strapping a prisoner to a tilted surface, covering his face with a towel and dousing it to simulate the sensation of drowning. CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said that the agency used the technique on three Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. Cheney has long defended the technique. But he has not previously disclosed his role in pushing to give the CIA such authority.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on US torture and other war crimes committed in the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

U.N. Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel
2008-12-16, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?partner=rss...

Israeli authorities on Monday expelled Richard Falk, a United Nations investigator of human rights in the Palestinian territories, saying he was unwelcome because of what the government has regarded as his hostile position toward Israel. Mr. Falk, an American, arrived in Israel on Sunday. He was held [overnight] at the airport and placed on the first available flight back to Geneva, his point of departure. Mr. Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, has the title of United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories. He has long been criticized in Israel for what many Israelis say are unfair and unpalatable views. He has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that “only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.” In his capacity as a United Nations investigator, Mr. Falk issued a statement this month describing Israel’s embargo on Gaza ... as a crime against humanity. Regardless of Mr. Falk’s views, some Israelis questioned the wisdom of banning him, noting that it would hardly make his reports more sympathetic. Jessica Montell, the executive director of B’Tselem, an Israeli group that monitors human rights in the occupied territories, said that ... barring his entry was “an act unbefitting of democracy.”

Note: Israel quite explicitly raised the issue of Falk's call for a genuine investigation of the 9/11 attacks in its explanation of his deportation. Why would the state of Israel oppose such an investigation? For information from major media sources on this and many other questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Web Pick of the Week: The New Pearl Harbor Revisited
2008-11-24, Publishers Weekly
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6617001.html?industryid=47159

Author and professor [David Ray] Griffin ... knows his work is referred to by officials and the media as conspiracy theory, and he has a rebuttal: “the official theory is itself a conspiracy theory.” In [The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé, a] companion volume to 2004's The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Griffin provides corrections, raises new issues and discusses “the two most important official reports about 9/11,” the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology report on the Twin Towers, both “prepared by people highly responsive to the wishes of the White House” and riddled with “omission and distortion from beginning to end.” Griffin addresses many points in exhaustive detail, from the physical impossibility of the official explanation of the towers’ collapse to the Commission's failure to scrutinize the administration to the NIST’s contradiction of its own scientists to the scads of eyewitness and scientific testimony in direct opposition to official claims. Citing hundreds, if not thousands, of sources, Griffin's detailed analysis is far from reactionary or delusional, building a case that, though not conclusive, raises enough valid and disturbing questions to make his call for a new investigation more convincing than ever.

Note: Publishers Weekly reviews have guided the book trade, including booksellers, publishers, librarians, and literary agents, for 136 years. "Pick of the Week" sets the standard for the best of the best new books. This recognition by such a prestigious journal shows the remarkable quality of the 9/11-truth work of WantToKnow.info team member David Ray Griffin. To read about all his 9/11 books, click here.

The 30 greatest conspiracy theories
2008-11-19, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/The-30-greate...

From the assassination of John F Kennedy to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. From Roswell, New Mexico, to Nasa's moon landings. From the bloodline of Christ to the death of Elvis Presley. From the Moscow appartment bombings to the Indian Ocean tsunami. From Pearl Harbour to Peak Oil, the Philadelphia experiment and Pan Am flight 103. Every major event of the last 2,000 years has prompted a conspiracy theory and here we examine those with the biggest followings and the most longevity. 1. September 11, 2001. Thanks to the power of the web and live broadcasts on television, the ... theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. The [alternative] theories continue to grow in strength. At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists who believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately turned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars in the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large group of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that an airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not have been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many witnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves.

Note: For a concise two-page summary of many unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Mark Cuban Is Charged With Insider Trading
2008-11-18, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/18insider.html?_r=1&partner=rss&em...

Mark Cuban, the Internet entrepreneur turned owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, has never shied from a fight. But now the pugnacious billionaire is squaring off against his biggest adversary yet: the federal government. On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit charging Mr. Cuban with insider trading for selling shares of a small Internet search company in 2004, just before its share price fell. [Allegedly] Mr. Cuban saved himself a $750,000 loss. Scott W. Friestad, the S.E.C.’s deputy director of enforcement, said the investigation of Mr. Cuban’s trading began in early 2007, but declined to say what had set off the inquiry. A person close to Mr. Cuban provided what he said was one of a series of e-mail messages from Jeffrey B. Norris, an S.E.C. lawyer in Fort Worth, who accused the billionaire of being unpatriotic for helping to finance a movie named “Loose Change.” In the e-mail message, Mr. Norris described the movie as a “vicious and absurd documentary” that “posits that President Bush planned the demolition of the World Trade Center as a pretext for going to war against Iraq.” In the e-mail message, sent from his S.E.C. e-mail address, Mr. Norris said he was informing Christopher Cox, the chairman of the S.E.C., of Mr. Cuban’s actions. “If this upsets you, I wonder how George Bush feels,” Mr. Norris wrote. “I assume that Mr. Cox would view your involvement with ‘Loose Change’ much as I do. After all, he served his country as a Republican congressman from Orange County for nearly 20 years and was appointed by President Bush.”

Note: This New York Times report clearly suggests that Cuban is being pursued by the SEC because of his support for the 9/11-truth documentary Loose Change Final Cut, for which WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin acted as script consultant. To read the full text of the email from Norris to Cuban, click here. Another project Mark Cuban supports is the highly useful website for tracking the Wall Street bailout, bailoutsleuth.com, which has recently estimated the bailout to date at over $2.5 trillion!

Former CIA executive pleads guilty to defrauding government
2008-09-30, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-foggo30-2008sep30,0,5681841.story

The former No. 3 official at the CIA pleaded guilty Monday to defrauding the government, closing an investigation that linked the nation's preeminent spy service to the corruption scandal involving former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. In admitting that he abused his rank to steer lucrative contracts to cronies, Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, the agency's onetime executive director, became one of the highest-ranking officials in CIA history to be convicted of criminal charges. But the deal also involved major concessions from prosecutors, who allowed Foggo to admit guilt to a single fraud charge, wiping out 27 additional counts that included money laundering and conspiracy. Prosecutors indicated that they would recommend he serve no more than 37 months. The revelations of Foggo's crimes surfaced two years ago during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent agency history, and added to the pressure on the Bush administration to remove Porter J. Goss as CIA director in 2006. Goss selected Foggo for the agency's third-ranking position. Foggo had never served as a case officer or an analyst -- the jobs that typically garner the most respect within the CIA. But as a procurement officer at a secret CIA post in Frankfurt, Germany, he was in a position to cultivate contacts with members of Congress and other influential officials who visited during overseas trips to war zones.

Note: Interesting that a guilty plea for one count was exchanged for dismissing numerous other charges of fraud and money laundering. For an excellent analysis of the reasons behind this unusual prosecutorial strategy, click here. Buzzy Krongard, the previous #3 man at the CIA, has been linked to the millions of dollars in suspicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

Bush Doctrine enters American vocabulary
2008-09-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/26/EDGR135ERL.DTL

Thanks to the Sept. 11 interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson of ABC News, the Bush Doctrine has become part of the American vocabulary. Although it has been a fateful doctrine - it was used to justify the attack on Iraq - many Americans reported that they were as clueless about it as Gov. Palin. So what is the Bush Doctrine? According to international law as generally understood since the creation of the United Nations, a pre-emptive attack is legal only if a country has certain knowledge that an attack on it is imminent - too imminent for the matter to be taken to the U.N. Security Council. Pre-emptive war is different from preventive war, in which a country, fearing that another country may become strong enough to threaten it at some time in the future, attacks it to prevent this possibility. Preventive wars are illegal under international law. This distinction, however, creates a terminological problem: Although preventive war is worse than pre-emptive war, to most ears preemption sounds worse. Many people, therefore, speak of pre-emptive war when they mean preventive war. To avoid confusion, we can use the term pre-emptive-preventive war. Neoconservatives, the most powerful of whom is Vice President Dick Cheney, had long disliked the idea that America's use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preemptive-preventive war. In 1992, his last year as secretary of defense, Cheney produced a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance that said the United States should use force to "pre-empt" and "preclude threats." After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the neocons were able to turn their wish into U.S. policy.

Note: This article is by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin. He analyzes the significance of the 9/11 attacks for the acceptance of the Bush Doctrine in more detail in his recent book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, pointing out that the author of the document which first made the doctrine official policy was Philip Zelikow, who then later became executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom
2008-09-09, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/world/africa/09cairo.html

Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom [in Cairo] that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too. “Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.” Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq. “Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.” Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, [said] “What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why.”

Note: For a two-page summary of many reports from reliable, verifiable sources that highlight unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Fire, Not Explosives, Felled 3rd Tower on 9/11, Report Says
2008-08-21, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/nyregion/22wtccnd.html?partner=rssuserland&...

Fires in the 47-story office tower at the edge of the World Trade Center site undermined floor beams and a critical structural column, federal investigators [from the National Institute of Standards and Technology] concluded on Thursday, as they attempted to curb still-rampant speculation that explosives caused the building’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2001. The collapse of 7 World Trade Center ... is cited in hundreds of Web sites and books as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower. [Critics] have pointed to the fact that the building fell straight down, instead of tumbling, as proof that explosives were used to topple it, as well as to bring down the twin towers. Sixteen percent of the respondents in a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll said it was very likely or somewhat likely that explosives were planted. Other towers in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have remained standing through catastrophic blazes that burned out of control for hours because of malfunctioning or nonexistent sprinkler systems. But 7 World Trade Center, which was not struck by a plane, is the first skyscraper in modern times to collapse primarily as a result of a fire. Adding to the suspicion is the fact that in the rush to clean up the site, almost all of the steel remains of the tower were disposed of, leaving investigators in later years with little forensic evidence. Skeptics ... have long argued that an incendiary material called thermite, made of aluminum powder and a metal oxide, was used to take down the trade center towers. They also have argued that a sulfur residue found at the World Trade Center site is evidence of an inside job.

Civil liberties: Outrage at New York police plan to track vehicles
2008-08-14, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/14/usa.humanrights

The Big Apple is turning into Big Brother, civil liberties groups have warned in response to a new plan from New York city's police chiefs to photograph every vehicle entering Manhattan and hold the details on a massive database. As well as placing cameras at all tunnels and bridges into Manhattan, the 36-page plan, called Operation Sentinel, calls for a security ring to be erected at Ground Zero and for a 50-mile buffer zone around the city within which mobile units would search for nuclear or "dirty" bombs. [The] 3,000 cameras that could be mounted as a result of the plans of the New York police ... have provoked outrage in the United States. Donna Lieberman, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the idea of tracking the movements of millions of people was "an assault on the country's historical respect for the right to privacy and the freedom to be left alone". The NYCLU is pressing the New York police to release further details of its intentions under freedom of information laws. The toughest element of the scheme relates to preparations to secure Ground Zero once the six-hectare site is rebuilt and open to the public again. Those measures include moveable roadblocks, security cameras across lower Manhattan and an underground bomb-screening centre through which all delivery vehicles would have to pass. The plan to video the number plates of every vehicle would be applied to all points of entry into Manhattan, including the main Brooklyn-Battery, Holland, Lincoln and Midtown tunnels and Brooklyn, Manhattan and other bridges.

Note: For lots more on threats to privacy from major media sources, click here.

Bruce Ivins Wasn't the Anthrax Culprit
2008-08-05, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121789293570011775.html

Over the past week the media was gripped by the news that the FBI was about to charge Bruce Ivins, a leading anthrax expert, as the man responsible for the anthrax letter attacks in September/October 2001. But despite the seemingly powerful narrative that Ivins committed suicide because investigators were closing in, this is still far from a shut case. The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute. The product contained essentially pure spores. The particle size was 1.5 to 3 microns in diameter. There are several methods used to produce anthrax that small. But most of them require milling the spores to a size small enough that it can be inhaled into the lower reaches of the lungs. In this case, however, the anthrax spores were not milled. They were also tailored to make them potentially more dangerous. The spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. Each particle was given a weak electric charge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their retention in the lungs. In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program.

Bin Laden driver said to have known 9/11 target
2008-07-23, Reuters
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN2230096620080723

Osama bin Laden's driver knew the target of the fourth hijacked jetliner in the September 11 attacks, a prosecutor said. Prosecutor Timothy Stone, in an attempt to draw a link between [Salim] Hamdan and the al Qaeda leadership in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, told the six-member jury of U.S. military officers ... that Hamdan had inside knowledge of the 2001 attacks on the United States because he overheard a conversation between bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. "If they hadn't shot down the fourth plane it would've hit the dome," Stone, a Navy officer, said in his opening remarks. "Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew," Stone said. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. U.S. officials have never stated it was shot down although rumours saying that abound to this day.

Note: Some 9/11 researchers have long believed the target of the fourth plane was the US Capitol. If a number of members of Congress had been killed, Bush almost certainly would have declared martial law, thus stripping Congress of its power and making him a virtual dictator. Just imagine what might have happened in that case. Some suspect that Flight 93 was shot down by friendly fire, possibly on orders of factions within the power elite who were against the plot. For more on all this, click here and here.

9/11 third tower mystery 'solved'
2008-07-04, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7485331.stm

The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers. Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse. Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition. Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane. The National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] ... is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse. That would make it the first and only steel skyscraper in the world to collapse because of fire. [NIST's] lead investigator, Dr Shyam Sunder, spoke to BBC Two's "The Conspiracy Files": "Our working hypothesis now actually suggests that it was normal building fires that were growing and spreading throughout the multiple floors that may have caused the ultimate collapse of the buildings." However, a group of architects, engineers and scientists say the official explanation that fires caused the collapse is impossible. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth argue there must have been a controlled demolition. The founder of the group, Richard Gage, says the collapse of the third tower is an obvious example of a controlled demolition using explosives. "Building Seven is the smoking gun of 9/11. A sixth grader can look at this building falling at virtually freefall speed, symmetrically and smoothly, and see that it is not a natural process. Buildings that fall in natural processes fall to the path of least resistance", says Gage, "they don't go straight down through themselves."

Note: To watch a one-minute clip of the fall of WTC 7 from a PBS documentary, click here. For a two-page summary of some unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here. To learn about over 1,000 architects and engineers who claim a major cover-up around 9/11 click here.

The evolution of a conspiracy theory
2008-07-04, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7488159.stm

Nearly seven years after the terrible events of that September day, the US authorities are due to publish the final report on a third tower that also collapsed on 9/11. Unlike the Twin Towers, this 47-storey, 610-foot skyscraper was not hit by a plane. The official explanation is that ordinary fires were the main reason for the collapse of Tower 7. That makes this the first and only tall skyscraper in the world to have collapsed because of fire. Yet despite that all the thousands of tonnes of steel from the building were carted away and melted down. The way official bodies have investigated Tower 7 at the World Trade Center has made some people think they're hiding something. Its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. An inquiry by the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the building collapsed because intense fires had burned for hours, fed by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building for emergency generators. But its report said this had "only a low probability of occurrence" and more work was needed. That was in May 2002. The task has now fallen to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based at a sprawling campus near Washington DC. For more than two-and-a-half years, scientists there have been studying Tower 7. The officials have been criticised for being slow and even of being frightened to publish. Steven Jones, a former physics professor at Brigham Young University, who has become [a] leading academic voice in the movement, first watched a video of the collapse of Tower 7 in the spring of 2005. But when he did, he said he was taken aback as a physicist.

Note: For a two-page summary of some unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Controversy and conspiracies
2008-07-02, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/07/controversy_conspiracies_iii.html

World Trade Center Building 7 has become the subject of heated speculation and a host of conspiracy theories suggesting it was brought down by a controlled demolition. And some people suggest it was not just the government and foreign intelligence, but ... even the media that were involved. It is certainly true that on 9/11 the BBC broadcast that WTC7 had collapsed when it was still standing. Then the satellite transmission seemed to cut out mysteriously when the correspondent was still talking. Then [head of BBC News] Richard Porter admitted in his blog last year that the BBC had lost those key tapes of BBC World News output from the day. The internet movie Loose Change has been viewed by more than 100 million people according to its makers and it asks this question in the latest film release: "Where did CNN and the BBC get their information especially considering the building was still standing directly behind their reporters?" It turns out that the respected news agency Reuters picked up an incorrect report and passed it on. They have issued this statement: "On 11 September 2001 Reuters incorrectly reported that one of the buildings at the New York World Trade Center, 7WTC, had collapsed before it actually did. The report was picked up from a local news story and was withdrawn as soon as it emerged that the building had not fallen." And the reason the interview with the BBC correspondent, Jane Standley, ended so abruptly? The satellite feed had an electronic timer, which cut out at 1715 exactly.

Note: How many "coincidences" does it take for people to start to ask questions? How could people know that the building was going to collapse when a skyscraper had never collapsed before from fire? For a useful BBC FAQ on 9/11 alternative theories, click here.

Gov't says FBI agents can't testify about 9/11
2008-06-19, International Herald Tribune/Associated Press
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/06/19/america/Sept-11-Lawsuits.php

Government lawyers say the ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks could be compromised if the airline industry is allowed to seek more information from the FBI to defend itself against lawsuits brought by terrorism victims. The government urged a judge to block aviation companies from interviewing five FBI employees who the companies say will help them prove the government withheld key information before the 2001 attacks. The lawyers said it would be impossible to interview the employees without disclosing classified or privileged material that could "cause serious damage to national security and interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings." The largest investigation in FBI history has resulted in 167,000 interviews and more than 155,000 pieces of evidence and involved the pursuit of 500,000 investigative leads, the lawyers wrote. The airlines and aviation companies are defending themselves against lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for injuries, fatalities, property damage and business losses related to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The companies filed separate lawsuits against the CIA and the FBI last August to force terrorism investigators to tell whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, lawyers for the victims of the attacks ... recounted in court papers numerous hijackings and attacks aboard planes before Sept. 11 that they said should have put the airline industry on notice that a disastrous attack could occur.

Note: For a two-page overview of many unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts
2008-06-13, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/washington/13scotus.html?partner=rssuserlan...

The Supreme Court ... delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention. The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that ... stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.” Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” The decision, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, was categorical in its rejection of the administration’s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration’s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

Note: For many disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties from major media sources, click here.

Detainees Now Have Access to Federal Court
2008-06-13, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR20080612042...

Defense attorneys for the 270 detainees at Guantanamo Bay said the Supreme Court decision yesterday that granted detainees habeas corpus rights was a watershed moment that will allow the men, some held for as long as 6 1/2 years, to challenge their detentions before a civilian judge. The court's ruling immediately gives the detainees access to a federal court in Washington, where lawyers will seek to have judges order the men released from indefinite detention. Legal experts said it is unclear how the hearings will proceed, but the government could be compelled to present highly classified evidence, and detainees could for the first time be able to publicly call witnesses, present evidence of abuse and rebut terrorism allegations. The decision could force the U.S. government to show why individual detainees must be held, something U.S. officials have fought for years. As many as 130 detainees have been deemed dangerous but are unlikely to ever face criminal charges, according to prosecutors, and now government officials could have to argue for indefinite detention even if the evidence is flimsy or nonexistent. "We're going to see a high number of people the government is going to have to release," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees since 2002. It is unclear how the Boumediene v. Bush decision will affect military commissions trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 20 detainees, including ... Khalid Sheik Mohammed, have been charged with war crimes.

The truth is out there
2008-06-07, Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8d66e778-3128-11dd-ab22-000077b07658.html

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King�s cadence. �A time comes,� declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, �when silence is betrayal.� Before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government�s war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict ... began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through. According to a show of hands that February afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this to be true. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of [9/11 truth] groups across the US. Last winter, �Investigate 9/11� banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by �truthers� in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Country music star Willie Nelson ... described as naive the notion that the �implosion� of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened the Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about the official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the �9/11 Truth� movement.

Note: This extensive story in The Financial Times shows that the 9/11 movement is having a major impact. For a detailed two-page summary of many questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

What happened to building 7?
2008-06-06, Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7d174b42-31fa-11dd-9b87-0000779fd2ac,s01=1.html

To the ["9/11 Truth movement"], Building 7 – the third building in the World Trade Center complex to collapse on September 11 – is evidence that the mainstream media is in on the plot. On that day, the BBC reported the building’s fall almost half an hour before it happened. Journalist Jane Standley was broadcast at 4.54pm eastern time reporting that the tower had collapsed – but in the background, it was still standing. It fell 26 minutes later, seven hours after the Twin Towers came down. When the Standley clip hit YouTube, truthers bombarded the BBC’s website with questions and accusations. Richard Porter, head of BBC world news, was forced to deny that the broadcaster was reading from the Bush conspirators’ script. He said the BBC had misreported warnings from fire crews of the building’s imminent collapse and instead stated that it had already happened. He blamed the confusion of the day for the mix-up. CNN had earlier reported rumours that a third building had either collapsed or was about to. This explanation was undermined by Porter’s admission that the BBC no longer had the original tapes of its coverage. Building 7 is [a] smoking gun for other reasons, too. How, they ask, could this modern, steel-framed skyscraper collapse merely because of fire, without even being hit by an airliner? The 47-storey WTC7 fell straight down, at almost free-fall speed, largely into its own footprint: all the hallmarks, the sceptics say, of a controlled demolition.

Note: To read a related Financial Times report on the 9/11 Truth movement's claims, click here.

Officer calls Sept. 11 cases tainted
2008-06-05, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tribunal5-2008jun05,0,79...

When Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged collaborators in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks appear before the war crimes tribunal here today, ousted chief prosecutor Col. Morris D. Davis will not be celebrating. Davis, who has spent half of his life in the military justice system, still considers it "the most ethical process in the world." But the Pentagon's push to prosecute the so-called 9/11 Five is tainted, in his view, by political intrusions, illegal influence applied by more-senior officers and reliance on evidence obtained through coercion or torture. Davis drew the wrath of many in the Pentagon hierarchy when he objected last fall to pressures from Bush administration political appointees to prosecute Mohammed, known in intelligence circles as KSM, ahead of other war crimes suspects whose cases were already researched and on whom vital evidence was declassified. Unless the evidence prosecutors have against Mohammed and his codefendants is declassified, much of their prosecution will be conducted behind closed doors, depriving the American media and public of a clear view of the proceedings, he says. Davis ran afoul of superiors ... when he advised his prosecutors against relying on evidence obtained through waterboarding and other interrogation techniques that have been deemed coercive or tantamount to torture. Davis resigned after political appointees at the Pentagon rejected his judgment on the choice of cases to be tried in the months leading up to this November's election, as well as his advice against building prosecutions on coerced and potentially unreliable confessions.

360 post-9/11 workers have died, including 80 of cancer
2008-05-08, New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008/05/08/2008-05-08_360_post911_workers_hav...

More than 360 workers who dealt with the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster have died, state health officials said Wednesday. Officials have determined the cause of death of 154 of the responders and volunteers who toiled at Ground Zero, the blocks nearby and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the site was taken. Of those, 80 died of cancer. "It's the tip of the iceberg," said David Worby, who is representing 10,000 workers - 600 with cancer - who say they got sick after working on rescue and recovery efforts. "These statistics bear out how toxic that site was," Worby said. Most of the deadly tumors were in the lungs and digestive system, according to the tally from the state's World Trade Center Responder Fatality Investigation Program. Other deaths were traced to blood cancers and heart and circulatory diseases. Five ex-workers committed suicide, said Kitty Gelberg, who is tracking the deaths for the program. Gelberg said ... there is an overall undercount of workers who have died. Last year, the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center's monitoring and treatment program, Dr. Robin Herbert, predicted a "third wave" of 9/11-related deaths from cancer. Cathy Murray, whose husband, Fire Lt. John Murray, died of colon cancer April 30, "absolutely" connects his disease to his work at Ground Zero. He was diagnosed in June and was 52 when he died, she said. "He was perfectly healthy," said Cathy Murray, 53, of Staten Island. "He never smoked a day in his life, and neither did I. It happened so quick and so aggressive. He was responding at first, but then he wasn't," she added. "And now he's gone."

Note: For a powerful summary of reports from major media sources questioning the official story of what happened on 9/11, click here.

9/11 theorist not curtailing his research
2008-05-03, Deseret News (One of Utah's leading newspapers)
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695275973,00.html

Sixteen months ago, Brigham Young University and Steven Jones parted ways, but he said this week he isn't bitter about the academic divorce. He certainly hasn't curtailed his volatile research on the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, Jones is the lead author of a paper on the collapses published April 18 in a civil engineering journal. Most importantly, he is preparing several more papers that, if they pass peer review and are published, will give him the peace of mind that his case reached the public. Jones was energized in November when he ... received a response from the national lab charged by Congress to determine why and how the towers collapsed. The letter contained the following phrase: "We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse." "That," Jones said, "really was progress. It made me believe we could talk with them." It is striking. After producing a 10,000-page report, the National Institute of Standards and Technology can't explain the collapse. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has said that its best hypothesis for the fall of the third tower, WTC 7 — diesel fuel stored in the building caused fires that collapsed the building — has a "low probability" of being correct. [Jones'] new peer-reviewed paper in the Open Civil Engineering Journal ... lays out 14 points of agreement Jones and his colleagues have with the official government reports. "We're getting to a higher level of discussion with this paper," Jones said. The open paper can be found for free on the Web at www.bentham.org.

Note: For many revealing reports on the path-breaking work of renowned physicist Steven Jones to shed light on what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
2008-04-11, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4635175

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people," Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." As first reported by ABC News, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before [ABC's original] report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner -- had never been disclosed. Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. In the interview with ABC News, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM. "We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew." The president said, "I think it's very important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks."

Note: For a transcript of the interview with President Bush on the Washington Post website, click here. For a powerful two-page summary of many unanswered questions about who really ordered the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Jesse Ventura says he regrets not asking more questions
2008-04-03, WKBT TV/Associated Press
http://wkbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=8115056

Jesse Ventura says he regrets not asking more questions about the 9/11 attacks when he was still governor of Minnesota. Ventura tells the nationally syndicated radio host Alex Jones that his skepticism about the official version of events would have then carried more weight. Among many other things, Ventura questions how the Twin Towers could have fallen so fast and in such a way as to turn so much of the wreckage into dust. He also says that after watching the Twin Towers collapse in slow motion, it appears to him exactly like the controlled demolition of a Las Vegas hotel. Ventura spoke on Jones' program on Wednesday. Ventura was elected as an independent in 1998 and left office in 2003 after deciding not to seek re-election. Jones frequently questions the events surrounding 9/11 and often discusses conspiracies on his radio show and documentary films.

Note: For a powerful two-page summary of unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11, click here.

Colorado Proposes Tough Law on Executive Accountability
2008-04-01, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/business/01fraud.html?ex=1364702400&en=6a78...

For 30 years, Lew Ellingson loved being a telephone man. His job splicing phone cables was one that he says gave him “a true sense of accomplishment,” first for Northwestern Bell, then US West and finally Qwest Communications International. But by the time Mr. Ellingson retired from Qwest last year at 52, he had grown angry. An insider trading scandal had damaged the company’s reputation, and the life savings of former colleagues had evaporated in the face of Qwest’s stock troubles. “It was a good place,” he said wistfully. “And then something like this happened.” Now, Mr. Ellingson is the public face of a proposed ballot measure in Colorado that seeks to create what supporters hope will be the nation’s toughest corporate fraud law. Buttressed by local advocacy groups and criticized by a Colorado business organization, the measure would make business executives criminally responsible if their companies run afoul of the law. It would also permit any Colorado resident to sue the executives under such circumstances. Proceeds from successful suits would go to the state. If passed by voters in November, the proposal would leave top business officers [with] unprecedented individual accountability, said Mr. Ellingson. “If nothing else, these folks in charge of the corporations and companies will think twice about cutting corners to make themselves look more profitable than they really are,” he said. The plight of Mr. Ellingson’s former employer, Qwest, based in Denver, was a motivation for the proposal. Last April, a jury in Denver convicted Qwest’s former chief executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, of 19 of 42 counts of insider trading. Mr. Nacchio was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of $19 million and forfeit $52 million in money he earned from stock sales in 2001.

Note: As reported in the Washington Post, Joseph P. Nacchio, the former Qwest CEO, has claimed that he was singled out for prosecution because he refused to cooperate with the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance of American citizens, which began before 9/11.

Engineer Society Accused of Cover-Ups
2008-03-25, Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Associated Press
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Embattled_Engineers.html

After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal government paid the American Society of Civil Engineers to investigate what went wrong. Critics now accuse [ASCE] of covering up engineering mistakes ... and using the investigations to protect engineers and government agencies from lawsuits. In the World Trade Center case, critics contend the engineering society wrongly concluded skyscrapers cannot withstand getting hit by airplanes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid the group about $257,000 to investigate the World Trade Center collapse. In 2002, the society's report on the World Trade Center praised the buildings for remaining standing long enough to allow tens thousands of people to flee. But, the report said, skyscrapers are not typically designed to withstand airplane impacts. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his computer simulations disprove the society's findings that skyscrapers could not be designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner. Astaneh-Asl, who received money from the National Science Foundation to investigate the collapse, insisted most New York skyscrapers built with traditional designs would survive such an impact. He also questioned the makeup of the society's investigation team. On the team were the wife of the trade center's structural engineer and a representative of the buildings' original design team. "I call this moral corruption," said Astaneh-Asl, who is on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

Note: For a revealing two-page summary of many unanswered questions about 9/11 raised by major media sources, click here.

9/11 Commission Chief's Ties to White House
2008-03-08, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/they-knew-but-did-nothing/2008/03/07/1204780...

The members of Mike Hurley's [9/11 Commisson investigative] team were ... alarmed by the revelations, week by week, month by month, of how close the commission's chief director, Philip Zelikow, was to Rice and others at the White House. They learned early on about Zelikow's work on the Bush transition team in 2000 and early 2001, and about how much antipathy there was between him and ["Counterterrorism Czar"] Richard Clarke. They heard the stories about Zelikow's role in developing the "pre-emptive war" strategy at the White House in 2002. Zelikow's friendships with Rice and others were a particular problem for Warren Bass, since Rice and Clarke were at the heart of his part of the investigation. It was clear to some members of team that they could not have an open discussion in front of Zelikow about Rice and her performance as National Security Adviser. For Hurley's team, there was a reverse problem with Clarke. It was easy to talk about Clarke in Zelikow's presence, as long as the conversation centred on Clarke's failings at the NSC and his purported dishonesty. Long before Bass had seen Clarke's files, Zelikow made it clear to the team's investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect. He argued that Clarke was a braggart who would try to rewrite history to justify his errors and slander his enemies, Rice in particular.

Note: This critique of the close ties to the White House of Philip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, is an excerpt from Philip Shenon's new book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. For an even deeper analysis of the Commission's failings, read WantToKnow.info team member David Ray Griffin's book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

Marion Cotillard's 9/11 conspiracy theory
2008-03-01, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/01/wcotillard101...

Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard was facing embarrasment with her new American public last night after it emerged that she doubted the official account of the September 11 attacks. The 32-year-old French star has swept this year’s best actress awards, also receiving a Bafta, Golden Globe and a César for her performance as singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. But the actress faces a potential backlash in the US over comments she made in an interview in France. Footage which surfaced on the internet showed her questioning the New York terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. "I think we’re lied to about a number of things," she said, singling out September 11. Referring to the two passenger jets flown into the World Trade Centre, Miss Cotillard said: "We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed." Miss Cotillard suggested that the towers, planned in the early 1960s, were an outdated "money sucker" which would have cost so much to modernise that it was easier to destroy them. Miss Cotillard, who was born and brought up in Paris, made the comments on Paris Première – Paris Dernière (Paris First – Paris Last), a programme first broadcast a year ago. They were largely ignored at the time, but appeared yesterday on a French website. Miss Cotillard’s film career began in Luc Besson’s 1998 film Taxi.

Note: For a revealing summary of many unanswered questions about what happened on 9/11, click here.

What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation
2008-02-17, Dallas Morning News (Dallas' leading newspaper)
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-sibe...

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington's highest levels – sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. Ms. Edmonds' account is full of dates, places and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Ms. Edmonds' case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. Ms. Edmonds' revelations have attracted corroboration in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases involve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down investigations based on "sensitive foreign diplomatic relations." Curiously, the state-secrets gag order binding Ms. Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon – which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary.

Note: The author of this article, Philip Giraldi, is a retired career CIA officer. For further powerful details of Sibel Edmonds' revelations, click here.

BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince
2008-02-15, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday. Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE. He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family. The threats halted the fraud inquiry. Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government. The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals. Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.

Note: This report comes very close to confirming the close link between terrorist attacks and high-level policy of certain states. For many revealing clues along these lines from reliable sources, click here.

Willie Nelson doubts official explanation for 9/11
2008-02-05, Houston Chronicle/Associated Press
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5516149.html

Texas icon Willie Nelson said on a nationally syndicated radio show that he questions the official story of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. "I certainly do," Nelson said ... when asked by talk-show host Alex Jones. "I saw those towers fall and I've seen an implosion in Las Vegas, there's too much similarities between the two. And I saw the building fall that didn't get hit by nothing," the singer-songwriter said. "So, how naive are we, you know, what do they think we'll go for?" Nelson, 74, said that if he were president, he would "stop the damn war, it's just that simple." He said he doesn't [understand] why if Saudi Arabians "hit us in New York ... we go jump on Afghanistan." Nelson's publicist would not comment on the remarks.

Note: For an ABC video clip of this news, click here.

9/11 Commission controversy
2008-01-30, NBC News
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx

The 9/11 Commission suspected that critical information it used in its ... Report was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives - interrogations that many critics have labeled torture. Yet, commission staffers never questioned the agency about the interrogation techniques and in fact ordered a second round of interrogations specifically to ask additional questions of the same operatives. Much of what was reported about the planning and execution of the terror attacks on New York and Washington was derived from the interrogations of high-ranking al-Qaida operatives. Each had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques." Some were even subjected to waterboarding. There was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the Commission, [involving] more than 30 separate interrogation sessions. According to both current and former senior U.S. intelligence officials, the operatives cited by the Commission were subjected to the harshest of the CIA’s methods, the "enhanced interrogation techniques." The techniques included physical and mental abuse, exposure to extreme heat and cold, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. In addition, officials of both the 9/11 Commission and CIA confirm the Commission specifically asked the agency to push the operatives on a new round of interrogations months after their first interrogations. The Commission, in fact, supplied specific questions for the operatives to the agency. This new round took place in early 2004, when the agency was still engaged in the full range of harsh techniques.

Note: WantToKnow team member and renowned theologian David Ray Griffin's detailed exposure of the many lies put forth by the 9/11 Commission is available here. And for a succinct, eye-opening summary of many unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11, click here.

Ex-9/11 Panel Chief Denies Secret White House Ties
2008-01-30, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218157

The former executive director of the 9/11 Commission denies explosive charges of undisclosed ties to the Bush White House or interference with the panel's report. The charges are ... contained in New York Times reporter Philip Shenon's [new] book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, [and are] confirmed by the book's publisher. [When] 9/11 Commission co-chairs [Thomas] Kean and Lee Hamilton hired former Condoleezza Rice aide Philip Zelikow to be executive director, Zelikow failed to tell them ... that he was "instrumental" in demoting Richard Clarke, the onetime White House counterterrorism czar. In his book, Shenon also says that while working for the panel, Zelikow appears to have had private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, despite a ban on such communication. Shenon reports that Zelikow later ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls. Zelikow told ABC News he was under no prohibition that barred his conversations with Rove, and did not recall asking his assistant to stop logging his calls. Shenon directed calls to his publisher, Twelve Books, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group. Cary Goldstein, a spokesman for Hachette, confirmed the [above] characterization of the book's contents, but said he could not confirm direct quotes. "It's not a surprise," Goldstein said when asked his reaction to the leak of the book's details before its Feb. 5 publication date. "I think people are really curious to see what the report had looked like if it hadn't been neutered in [the panel's] effort to be unanimous."

Note: Philip Zelikow co-authored a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately predicted the governmental aftermath of 9/11. And a highly significant fact is that before he was selected as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, he authored the Bush administration's National Security Strategy of the United States of America for 2002. This document for the first time asserted a national policy of pre-emptive war (the "Bush Doctrine"), and paved the way for the war on Iraq.

Stonewalled by the C.I.A.
2008-01-02, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02kean.html

More than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. Soon after its creation, the president’s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission. The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation. No one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations. We did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been contained in such videotapes. Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information ... that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior Qaeda operatives, portions of whose interrogations were apparently recorded and then destroyed. The C.I.A. gave us many reports summarizing information gained in the interrogations. But the reports raised almost as many questions as they answered. So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.’s general counsel. The general counsel responded in writing with non-specific replies. The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

Note: The authors of this op-ed, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, served as chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission.

Blame U.S. for 9/11: 'Plots' Thicken in Shocking Poll
2007-11-24, New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/11242007/news/nationalnews/blame_u_s__for_9_11_id...

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found. Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was "not likely," according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. The findings followed a 2006 poll by the same researchers, who found that 36 percent of Americans believe federal government officials "either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action" because they wanted "to go to war in the Middle East." In that poll, 16 percent said the Twin Towers might have collapsed because of secretly planted explosives - not hijacked passenger jets flown into them. And what hit the Pentagon? Twelve percent figured it was a US cruise missile. In the latest Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, 811 US adults were interviewed Sept. 24 to Oct. 10. Among [other] findings: 42 percent believe the federal government knew in advance of the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, compared with 40 percent who call that theory "not likely." 37 percent believe UFOs are real and that the feds have been hiding the truth about them. Eight out of 10 Americans suspect oil companies are conspiring to keep fuel prices high and 50 percent said a conspiracy is "very likely." Only 14 percent felt it was unlikely.

Note: We normally don't use the New York Post as a reliable source. Yet this key news is based on a very reliable poll, which you can read in the Scripps News Service report available here. Sadly, the Post was the only major newspaper to pick up this important news, and they took a heavy editorial slant against 9/11 truth. For a concise summary of major media reports suggesting that the official account of 9/11 cannot be true, click here.

Dan Ellsberg: Sibel Edmonds case "Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers
2007-11-19, OpEdNews.com
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_luke_ryl_071119_dan_ellsberg_3a_sibel...

Bradblog has been chasing the story about former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' offer to 'tell all.' [Daniel] Ellsberg says: "I'd say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers. From what [Edmonds] has to tell, it has a major difference from the Pentagon Papers in that it deals directly with criminal activity and may involve impeachable offenses. And I don't necessarily mean the President or the Vice-President, though I wouldn't be surprised if the information reached up that high. But other members of the Executive Branch may be impeached as well. There will be phone calls going out to the media saying 'don't even think of touching [Edmonds' case], you will be prosecuted for violating national security.'" [Edmonds] said: "The media called from Japan and France and Belgium and Germany and Canada and from all over the world. I'm getting contact from all over the world, but not from here." More Ellsberg: "I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to 'How do we deal with Sibel?' The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn't get into the media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to the government and they would be told 'don't touch this, it's communications intelligence.' As long as they hold a united front on this, they don't run the risk of being shamed." [Edmonds:] "I will name the name of major publications who know the story, and have been sitting on it --- almost a year and a half." "How do you know they have the story?," we asked. "I know they have it because people from the FBI have come in and given it to them. They've given them the documents and specific case-numbers on my case."

Note: Though this is not from one of our normal reliable sources, Dan Ellsberg is a highly respected whistleblower who has received an abundance of major media coverage over the years. As the mainstream media are clearly and consciously ignoring this story, we felt it deserved to be posted, even though we don't have a major media source to back it up. For lots more reliable information on this courageous woman, click here.

Brothers, Bad Blood and the Blackwater Tangle
2007-11-17, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17brothers.html?ex=1352955600&en=1cb325e...

They were smart, scrappy brothers who rose from modest circumstances in Baltimore to become lacrosse stars at Princeton, succeed in business and land big government jobs. Now the Krongard brothers — who have carried childhood nicknames, Buzzy and Cookie, through long careers — are tied up in the tangled story of Blackwater, the security contractor accused in the deaths of at least 17 Iraqis while guarding a State Department convoy in Baghdad. The shorthand version boils their involvement down to that Washington catchall conflict of interest. The full story appears more complicated. Alvin [Buzzy] Krongard, 71, ... left a $4 million-a-year job in investment banking to serve in top posts at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1998 to 2004. Buzzy Krongard spoke [to the New York Times] in his 15,000-square-foot Georgian mansion, Torch Hill, north of Baltimore. After rising to the helm of Alex. Brown & Sons, the venerable Baltimore investment banking firm, Buzzy Krongard oversaw its acquisition by Bankers Trust in 1997 and left the next year for the C.I.A., as a counselor to George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. He became executive director, the No. 3 post, in 2001 and helped design the agency’s secret detention program after the Sept. 11 attacks. Buzzy Krongard vigorously defends Blackwater’s record in Iraq. “It’s very easy to second-guess them when you’re sitting back in an air-conditioned office,” he said.

Note: Buzzy Krongard took quite a cut in pay to move from Bankers Trust to the comparatively modest salary of even a high-ranking CIA position. Bankers Trust was purchased by the same company that placed the highly unusual and suspicious "put options" on United Airlines stock just days before 9/11. For a powerful summary of similarly strange, unexplained facts related to 9/11, click here.

O Brother, Who Art Thou?
2007-11-15, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/14/AR20071114021...

"I am not my brother's keeper," Howard "Cookie" Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday. As Cookie surely must know, that excuse hasn't worked since Genesis. In this case, the players weren't Cain and Abel, but Cookie and his brother Buzzy. Cookie, under fire for allegedly quashing probes of the infamous Blackwater security contractor, began his testimony by angrily denying the "ugly rumors" that his brother, former CIA official Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard, is on Blackwater's advisory board. But during a recess, Cookie called Buzzy and learned that -- gulp -- the ugly rumors are true: His brother is on the board. When the lawmakers returned, Cookie revised and extended his testimony. "I had not been aware of that," Cookie told the congressmen. "I hereby recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater." The lawmakers reacted with Old Testament fury. The swaggering Cookie -- he alternately addressed the lawmakers with his thumb in his waistband, slouching in his chair, rolling his eyes and making baffled glances -- had spent the morning aggressively denying the allegations lodged against him: that he had impeded investigations into contracting fraud, including weapons smuggling by Blackwater, and that he had abused his underlings. But then came Buzzy's bombshell -- and Cookie's credibility crumbled. Either he had lied to Congress, or his own brother had lied to him. It was only the latest bit of strangeness for the powerful but eccentric Brothers Krongard. Buzzy [is] known for his cigar chomping, martial arts and recreational workouts with SWAT teams. "Krongard once punched a great white shark in the jaw," his hometown Baltimore Sun reported when he took the No. 3 job at the CIA a decade ago. More recently, Buzzy joined the advisory board of Blackwater, the firm known for its ready trigger fingers in Iraq.

Note: Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard was the Executive Director (the third-highest position) at the CIA on 9/11, and had until 1998 been the head of the firm used to buy many of the "put" options on United Airlines stock made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto: Osama bin Laden is Dead
2007-11-02, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7070000/newsid_7075800/7075843.stm

David Frost: Does anyone know exactly who was responsible for this assassination attempt? There is one report that said that you arranged to send President Musharraf a letter ... in the event of your death by assassination, urging him to investigate certain individuals in his government. Is that true? Benazir Bhutto: Yes it is true that I wrote to General Musharraf. I feel these are the forces that really want to stop not just me, but the democratic process and the will of the people [from] triumphing. David Frost: In terms of these three people you mentioned where they members of or associated with the government? Benazir Bhutto: One of them is a very key figure in security. He is a former military officer. He is someone who has had dealings with Jaish-e-Mohammad, one of the band [of] groups of Maulana Masood Azhar, who was in an Indian jail for decapitating three British tourists and three American tourists. And he also had dealings with Omar Shiekh, who murdered Osama bin Laden.

Note: The key statement on bin Laden's murder happens at minute five in the video at the above link. If the link fails, click here. For a Jan. 9, 2010 BBC article also suggesting bin Laden may already have been dead years earlier and that his death had been covered up, click here. Bhutto was assassinated not long after this interview on Dec. 27, 2007.

Was Bin Laden's last video faked?
2007-10-29, MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21530470

When [the] first Osama Bin Laden video in nearly three years [appeared], most of the media attention was focused on Bin Laden's beard. It appeared either dyed — or perhaps even pasted on. He was ridiculed and a variety of theories were offered to explain it. But now, there is a running debate among video analysts about whether, rather than being new, the September 7 [video] may have been something recorded at the same time as [the] last video in October 2004 (and then released with new audio). Of the 25 minutes of video tape, only three and a half minutes, were moving video. The rest was covered by a still image or a frozen still. Moreover, the still covered the only time references on the 25 minutes of tape— references to political developments in Iraq, Britain and France. This led to the suspicion that the video is not new, but disguised to appear as new. The leading proponent of the theory is computer scientist ... Dr. Neal Krawetz of Colorado ... who [says] that the similarities between the October 29, 2004 tape and the September 7, 2007 tape are too great to be coincidental. “Here is Bin Laden in the same clothing, same studio, same studio setup, and same desk three years later,” [said] Krawetz ... in an interview with NBC News. “In fact, [the] papers that he reads are moved between the exact same stacks. What are the chances of nothing changing (except his beard) in three years? Virtually zero. The clips appear to have been recorded three years ago. I am saying the two videos were likely made either on the same day or within days of each other.” The CIA will not say what it thinks about the possibility, but a senior U.S. intelligence official tells NBC News the U.S. believes the tape is new. He would not discuss the reasons why intelligence analysts feel that way.

Note: For a succinct summary of many reports from major media sources that suggest the US government's explanation of what happened on 9/11 cannot be true, click here.

TV show host boots out 9/11 conspiracy theorists
2007-10-23, Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2197237,00.html

It's the conundrum that faces all television personalities broadcasting live: how to deal with hecklers trying to disrupt the show. Do you ignore the perpetrators? Do you try to reason with them? Or do you do what the American comic and talk show host Bill Maher did - jump into the audience, threaten the hecklers with an "ass kicking" and scream "Get the fuck out of my building!" In one of the more unconventional displays of audience interaction on US television in recent years, that is now doing hot trade as a clip on YouTube, Maher reacted to the interruptions of hecklers in his studio audience with the memorable words: "Do we have some fucking security in this building?" He then tore off his lapel microphone and stormed off the stage and up to some protesters wielding "expose the 9/11 cover-up" banners. It was at that point during a panel discussion on his HBO show, Real Time With Bill Maher, that the nature of the comic's difficulties with an element of his audience became clear. Maher is a darling of the US liberal intelligentsia for his brand of Bush-bashing and anti-religious pedantry. But the one point over which he will not bash the Bush administration is the events of September 11 2001. He does not agree with 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or Truthers as they call themselves, that the Bush administration brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion. The trouble started a few weeks ago when Maher launched a verbal assault on air against the Truthers, calling them "crazy people". He advised the conspiracy theorists, who had been demonstrating outside his studio, to visit their doctor to ask whether the antidepressant Paxil was right for them. In 2002 ABC ended its relationship with him over comments he made in his former show, Politically Incorrect, about the 9/11 hijackers.

Note: To watch Bill Maher's performance on YouTube, click here. For a concise summary of reliable reports from major media sources which raise many unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years
2007-10-19, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24contractor.html?ex=1350878400&...

Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to private security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a year from $1 billion, ... but ... the department had added few new officials to oversee the contracts. Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has so far gone unpunished. A vast majority of the money goes to companies like DynCorp International and Blackwater [Worldwide] to protect diplomats overseas, train foreign police forces and assist in drug eradication programs. There are only 17 contract compliance officers at the State Department’s management bureau overseeing spending of the billions of dollars on these programs, officials said. Two new reports have delivered harsh judgments about the State Department’s handling of the contracts, including the protective services contract that employs Blackwater guards whose involvement in a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad has raised questions about their role in guarding American diplomats in Iraq. The ballooning budget for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend, contracting experts say. The Bush administration has doubled the amount of government money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion, creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditing contracts has barely grown. “That’s a criticism that’s true of not just State but of almost every agency,” said Jody Freeman, an expert on administrative law at Harvard Law School.

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us
2007-10-14, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html?ex=1350014400&en=83a8b...

“Bush lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves. By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.” We must ... examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map. The war was sold by a ... fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top. [But] as the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin. Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm
2007-10-13, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR20071012024...

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal. Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ... about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records. In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper. He has claimed in court papers that he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected top-secret contract with the government. Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts. In May 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecom firms. Qwest, it reported, declined to participate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing.

Note: The Bush Administration has claimed that the NSA surveillance of the American public was a necessary response to the attacks of 9/11. But this story reveals that the surveillance began before 9/11, shortly after Bush took office. The obvious question is, why? For many other reliable, verifiable reports that suggest the official explanation of the events of 9/11 is false, click here.

"One of the Eeriest Moments Amid the Carnage of 9/11"
2007-09-12, CNN
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0709/12/acd.01.html

JOHN KING: Today, six years after 9/11, a mystery endures about just what happened in the skies over the White House that terrible day. A plane flew right over it, but why, and what was it? For conspiracy theorists, the image is a gold mine. It appeared overhead just before 10 a.m., a four- engine jet ... in the nation's most off-limits airspace. On the White House grounds and the rooftop, a nervous scramble. And still today, no one will offer an official explanation of what we saw. Two government sources familiar with the incident tell CNN it was a military aircraft. They say the details are classified. This comparison of the CNN video and an official Air Force photo suggests the mystery plane is among the military's most sensitive aircraft, an Air Force E-4B. Note the flag on the tail, the stripe around the fuselage, and the telltale bubble just behind the 747 cockpit area. MAJ. GEN. DON SHEPPERD (RET.), U.S. AIR FORCE: There are many commercial versions of the 747 ... that look similar, but I don't think any of them that have the communications pod like the ... Air Force E-4 does behind the cockpit. KING: The E-4B is a state of the art flying command post, built and equipped for one reason: to keep the government running no matter what, even in the event of a nuclear war, the reason it was nicknamed the doomsday plane during the Cold War. Ask the Pentagon, and it insists this is not a military aircraft, and there is no mention of it in the official report of the 9/11 Commission. [In] sum: the lack of any official explanation feeds an ominous conspiracy. This is from an online discussion about the plane on the web site 911blogger.com. "I have always thought these planes were exactly that, mission control for the 9/11 attack on our country."

Note: For many other anomalous major media reports which collectively suggest that the official story of 9/11 may be a cover-up, click here.

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
2007-08-25, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece

I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers ... the [FBI's] list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East. What about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us.

Note: Robert Fisk is an award-winning, veteran Middle East reporter for the Independent. For a concise summary of reliable news reports that raise serious questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here

Telecom Firms Helped With Government's Warrantless Wiretaps
2007-08-24, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR20070823020...

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality. "[U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times. His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans' privacy rights. David Kris, a former Justice Department official, ... said McConnell's admission makes it difficult to argue that the phone companies' cooperation with the government is a state secret. "It's going to be tough to continue to call it 'alleged' when he's just admitted it," Kris said. McConnell has just added to "the list of publicly available facts that are no longer state secrets," increasing the plaintiffs' chances that their cases can proceed, Kris said. McConnell's statement "does serious damage to the government's state secrets claims that are at the heart of its defenses," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said that McConnell's disclosure shows that "an important element of a program can be discussed publicly and openly without endangering the nation. These Cassandran cries that the earth is going to fall every time you have a discussion simply are not borne out by the facts," he said.

The Padilla Conviction
2007-08-17, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/opinion/17fri1.html?ex=1345003200&en=b04dde...

It would be a mistake to see [the verdict against Jose Padilla] as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism. On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical ... that the crime he was convicted of — conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas — bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. When Mr. Padilla was arrested in 2002, the government said he was an Al Qaeda operative who had plotted to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb inside the United States. Mr. Padilla, who is an American citizen, should have been charged as a criminal and put on trial in a civilian court. Instead, President Bush declared him an “enemy combatant” and kept him in a Navy brig for more than three years. The administration’s insistence that it had the right to hold Mr. Padilla indefinitely — simply on the president’s word — was its first outrageous act in the case, but hardly its last. Mr. Padilla was kept in a small isolation cell, and when he left that cell he was blindfolded and his ears were covered. He was denied access to a lawyer even when he was being questioned. It was only after the Supreme Court appeared poised last year to use Mr. Padilla’s case to decide whether indefinite detention of an American citizen violates the Constitution, that the White House suddenly decided to give him a civilian trial. He will likely never be brought to trial on the dirty-bomb plot. The administration did everything it could to keep Mr. Padilla away from a jury and deny him impartial justice.

Source Disclosure Ordered in Anthrax Suit
2007-08-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR20070813009...

Five reporters must reveal their government sources for stories they wrote about Steven J. Hatfill and investigators' suspicions that the former Army scientist was behind the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, a federal judge ruled. The ruling is a victory for Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert who has argued in a civil suit that the government violated his privacy rights and ruined his chances at a job by unfairly leaking information about the probe. He has not been charged in the attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 others, and he has denied wrongdoing. Hatfill's suit, filed in 2003, accuses the government of waging a "coordinated smear campaign." To succeed, Hatfill and his attorneys have been seeking the identities of FBI and Justice Department officials who disclosed disparaging information about him to the media. In lengthy depositions in the case, reporters have identified 100 instances when Justice or FBI sources provided them with information about the investigation of Hatfill and the techniques used to probe his possible role in anthrax-laced mailings. But the reporters have refused to name the individuals. In 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft called Hatfill, who had formerly worked at the Army's infectious diseases lab in Fort Detrick in Frederick County, a "person of interest" in the anthrax case. Authorities have not made any arrests in the investigation. Hatfill's search for government leakers is "strikingly similar" to the civil suit filed by Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear scientist who became the subject of a flurry of media stories identifying him as a chief suspect in a nuclear-secrets spy case. Those stories also relied on anonymous sources. Lee was never charged with espionage.

Note: For more reliable information about the anthrax attacks that followed closely after 9/11 and the mysterious deaths of over a dozen renowned microbiologists shortly thereafter, click here.

Bush administration defends spy law
2007-08-07, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-intel7aug07,0,1631228.story

The Bush administration rushed to defend new espionage legislation Monday amid growing concern that the changes could lead to increased spying by U.S. intelligence agencies on American citizens. But officials declined to provide details about how the new capabilities might be used by the National Security Agency and other spy services. And in many cases, they could point only to internal monitoring mechanisms to prevent abuse of the new rules that appear to give the government greater authority to tap into the traffic flowing across U.S. telecommunications networks. Officials rejected assertions that the new capabilities would enable the government to cast electronic "drift nets" that might ensnare U.S. citizens [and] that the new legislation would amount to the expansion of a controversial — and critics contend unconstitutional — warrantless wiretapping program that President Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks. Intelligence experts said there were an array of provisions in the new legislation that appeared to make it possible for the government to engage in intelligence-collection activities that the Bush administration officials were discounting. "They are trying to shift the terms of the debate to their intentions and away from the meaning of the new law," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "The new law gives them authority to do far more than simply surveil foreign communications abroad," he said. "It expands the surveillance program beyond terrorism to encompass foreign intelligence. It permits the monitoring of communications of a U.S. person as long as he or she is not the primary target. And it effectively removes judicial supervision of the surveillance process."

Airlines Sue FBI, CIA Over Sept. 11
2007-08-07, Associated Press
http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/airlines-sue-fbi-cia-over-sept-11/n2007...

Airlines and aviation-related companies sued the CIA and the FBI on Tuesday to force terrorism investigators to tell whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. The two lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Manhattan sought court orders for depositions as the aviation entities build their defenses against lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for injuries, fatalities, property damage and business losses related to Sept. 11, 2001. The aviation companies said the agencies in a series of boilerplate letters had refused to let them depose two secret agents, including the 2001 head of the CIA's special Osama bin Laden unit, and six FBI agents with key information about al-Qaida and bin Laden. The [plaintiffs] said they were entitled to present evidence to show the terrorist attacks did not depend upon negligence by any aviation defendants and that there were other causes of the attacks. In the CIA lawsuit, companies ... asked to interview the deputy chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit in 2001 and an FBI agent assigned to the unit at that time. The names of both are secret. In the FBI lawsuit, the companies asked to interview five former and current FBI employees who had participated in investigations of al-Qaida and al-Qaida operatives before and after Sept. 11. Those individuals included Coleen M. Rowley, the former top FBI lawyer in its Minneapolis office, who sent a scathing letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in May 2002 complaining that a supervisor in Washington interfered with the Minnesota investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. Requests to interview the agents were rejected as not sufficiently explained, burdensome or protected by investigative or attorney-client privilege, the lawsuits said.

Note: For a concise summary of reliable, verifiable information on the 9/11 coverup, click here.

Producer of 9/11 Conspiracy Film 'Loose Change' Arrested for Deserting the Army
2007-07-26, FOX News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290942,00.html

One of the young filmmakers behind a controversial 9/11 conspiracy documentary was arrested this week on charges that he deserted the Army, even though ... he received an honorable discharge. Korey Rowe, 24, who served with the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan and Iraq, told FOXNews.com that he was honorably discharged from the military 18 months ago — which he said he explained to sheriffs when they pounded on his door late Monday night. “When they came to my house, I showed them my paperwork,” Rowe said. “The cops said, 'You’re still in the system.'” Rowe is one of the producers of "Loose Change," a cult hit on the Internet espousing the theory that the U.S. government and specifically the Bush administration orchestrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The movie is set to be released in about 40 British theaters in late August, according to Rowe and fellow filmmakers Jason Bermas and Dylan Avery. Police arrested Rowe at his house in Oneonta, N.Y., about 10:45 p.m. on Monday and took him to the Otsego County jail, where he spent a day-and-a-half before he was released, he said. Rowe was turned over to officials at Fort Drum — the closest military base — who then booked him on a flight to Fort Campbell, Ky., where his unit is based, to try to straighten out why the military issued a warrant for his arrest. “A warrant for my arrest came down and showed up on the sheriff’s desk,” Rowe said. “Where it came from and why it showed up all of a sudden is a mystery to me.” There were at least five sheriffs on hand for his arrest, Rowe said. “They pulled a whole operation. They cut my phone lines. They came from the woods. It was crazy — it was ridiculous,” he said.

DeFazio asks, but he's denied access
2007-07-20, The Oregonian (Oregon's leading newspaper)
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/118489654058910...

Oregonians called Peter DeFazio's office, worried there was a conspiracy buried in the classified portion of a White House plan for operating the government after a terrorist attack. As a member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Committee, DeFazio, D-Ore., is permitted to enter a secure "bubbleroom" in the Capitol and examine classified material. So he asked the White House to see the secret documents. On Wednesday, DeFazio got his answer: DENIED. "I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack," DeFazio says. Homeland Security Committee staffers told his office that the White House initially approved his request, but it was later quashed. DeFazio doesn't know who did it or why. "We're talking about the continuity of the government of the United States of America," DeFazio says. "I would think that would be relevant to any member of Congress, let alone a member of the Homeland Security Committee." Bush administration spokesman Trey Bohn declined to say why DeFazio was denied access: "We do not comment through the press on the process that this access entails. It is important to keep in mind that much of the information related to the continuity of government is highly sensitive." Norm Ornstein, a legal scholar who studies government continuity at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he "cannot think of one good reason" to deny access to a member of Congress who serves on the Homeland Security Committee. This is the first time DeFazio has been denied access to documents. "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right," DeFazio said.

Special Operations Prepared for Domestic Missions
2007-06-22, washingtonpost.com
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/special_operations_prepar...

The U.S. Northern Command, the military command responsible for "homeland defense," has asked the Pentagon if it can establish its own special operations command for domestic missions. The request ... would establish a permanent sub-command for responses to incidents of domestic terrorism as well as other occasions where special operators may be necessary on American soil. The establishment of a domestic special operations mission, and the preparation of contingency plans to employ commandos in the United States, would upend decades of tradition. Military actions within the United States are the responsibility of state militias (the National Guard), and federal law enforcement is a function of the FBI. Employing special operations for domestic missions sounds very ominous, and NORTHCOM's request earlier this year should receive the closest possible Pentagon and congressional scrutiny. There's only one problem: NORTHCOM is already doing what it has requested permission to do. When NORTHCOM was established after 9/11 to be the military counterpart to the Department of Homeland Security, within its headquarters staff it established a Compartmented Planning and Operations Cell (CPOC) responsible for planning and directing a set of "compartmented" and "sensitive" operations on U.S., Canadian and Mexican soil. In other words, these are the very special operations that NORTHCOM is now formally asking the Pentagon to beef up into a public and acknowledged sub-command.

Osama Flight Shocker
2007-06-21, New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06212007/news/nationalnews/osama_flight_shocker_n...

Osama bin Laden was suspected of chartering a plane that carried his family and other Saudis from the United States shortly after 9/11, according to FBI documents released yesterday. One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 plane that left Los Angeles on Sept. 19, 2001, carrying Saudi nationals. "The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden," according to the document obtained by Judicial Watch. The flight made stops in Orlando, Washington, D.C. and Boston, and terminated in Paris. Asked about the documents' assertion, an FBI spokesman said, "There is no new information here. Osama bin Laden did not charter a flight out of the U.S."

Note: To read an excellent article on the implications of this brief report, click here.

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data
2007-06-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR20070613024...

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002. The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files. Two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have. The results confirmed what ... critics feared, namely that many agents did not ... follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL. Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, [leading] to an explosive growth in the use of the letters. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pieces of information, mostly from telecommunications companies.

FBI Terror Watch List "Out of Control"
2007-06-13, ABC News
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/06/fbi_terror_watc.html

A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror. The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified. A portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names." A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to international organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals. Many names are different versions of the same identity. In addition to the NCTC list, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be domestic terrorists - abortion clinic bombers, for example, or firebombing environmental extremists, who have no known tie to an international terrorist group. Combined, the NCTC and FBI compendia comprise the watch list used by federal security screening personnel on the lookout for terrorists. While the NCTC has made no secret of its terrorist tally, the FBI has consistently declined to tell the public how many names are on its list. "It grows seemingly without control or limitation," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani of the terrorism watch list. Sparapani called the 509,000 figure "stunning. If we have 509,000 names on that list, the watch list is virtually useless," he told ABC News. "You'll be capturing innocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror." U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list.

Sandy Berger gives up law license
2007-06-08, MSNBC/Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19106937/

Berger, now an international business consultant, said in a statement last month that he "decided to voluntarily relinquish my license" as a result of pleading guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, a misdemeanor. "I realized then that my law license would be affected," Berger said in the statement obtained Thursday. In April 2005, Berger admitted destroying some of the documents and then lying about it. He called his actions a lapse of judgment that came while he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission. The documents he took contained information on terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration. Berger had only copies of documents; all the originals remain in the government's possession. A report by the archives inspector general said that Berger acknowledged hiding some of them at a construction site near the archives building in Washington.

Note: For a more in-depth analysis of Berger's admitted crime, which tries to answer the question "What information was worth risking his reputation, his career, and his freedom to keep hidden?", click here.

RUDY, INTERRUPTED
2007-05-29, MSNBC
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/05/29/206666.aspx

On what should [have been] a happy day of fundraising in the four boroughs of New York City ... for Rudy Giuliani's 63rd birthday, a few protestors ruined his first event. At City Island's Sea Shore Restaurant in the Bronx, a young woman named Sabrina approached the Mayor with a prepared question, reading it word for word off of a notepad. "You reported to Peter Jennings on 9/11 that the World Trade Center towers were going to collapse. No steel structure in history has ever collapsed due to fire. How come the people in the buildings weren't notified and who else knew about this? How do you sleep at night?" Matthew Lepaceak, who stood on the other side of Giuliani, joined in. "But you said on ABC video with Peter Jennings in an interview that you were aware the towers were going to collapse in advance. Who told you the towers were going to collapse in advance, sir?" During this time, Giuliani had an incredulous look on his face, completely caught off guard. The statement they were referring to is from a phoner Giuliani had with Jennings. "We set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street which was right there with the police commissioner and the fire commissioner, the head of emergency management, and we were operating out of there when we were told the World Traded Center was going to collapse." After being interrupted again, Giuliani responded with an explanation. "Our understanding was that over a long period of time, the way other buildings collapse, the towers could collapse. Meaning over a seven-, eight-, nine-, ten-hour period. No one that I knew of had any idea that they would implode. That was a complete surprise."

Note: To view a video clip of Rudy Giuliani describing how he was told of the Towers' collapse ahead of time, click here. To watch him deny what he said on this clip, watch this one. When so many have said no one could have predicted the fall of the towers, how is it that Giuliani knew otherwise -- and then denied ever knowing it?

Claims of 9/11 conspiracy have suspect running scared
2007-05-25, Rocky Mountain News (One of Denver's two leading newspapers)
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5555425,00...

A former Federal Emergency Management Agency videographer accused of killing his wife in Denver is seeking political asylum in Argentina, claiming the U.S. government wants him silenced for what he saw in the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers after 9/11. Kurt Sonnenfeld's efforts to avoid extradition have gained interest from human rights organizations in South America and broad attention from conspiracy theorists on the Internet. Sonnenfeld, 44, is charged with first-degree murder in the New Year's Day 2002 shooting death of his 36-year-old wife, Nancy. Sonnenfeld is quoted by the Argentine newspaper el Pais as saying, "I realized that they were after something else: the tapes of Ground Zero in my possession." Sonnenfeld said he was arrested by Interpol agents on the new Denver charges a week after delivering a demo video of 9/11 footage to a TV producer in Argentina. "I find that extremely coincidental," he said. In other interviews with Argentine media, Sonnenfeld is quoted as saying, "What I saw (at 9/11) leads me to the terrible conclusion that there was foreknowledge of what was going to happen — the precautions that were taken to save certain things that the authorities there considered irreplaceable or invaluable. For example, certain things were missing that could only have been removed with a truck. Yet after the first plane hit one of the towers, everything in Manhattan collapsed and no one could have gotten near the towers to do that." Sonnenfeld is quoted as saying documentation was removed from U.S. intelligence agencies in the World Trade Center, including the CIA, prior to the attacks.

Note: To read a more recent, powerful Voltaire Network interview with Kurt Sonnenfeld, click here. The truth is coming out more all the time!

Senators Want CIA to Release 9 / 11 Report
2007-05-17, New York Times/Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-CIA-Sept-11-Probe.html

A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA to release an inspector general's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA has spent more than 20 months weighing requests under the Freedom of Information Act for its internal investigation of the attacks but has yet to release any portion of it. The agency is the only federal office involved in counterterrorism operations that has not made at least a version of its internal 9/11 investigation public. The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and two other intelligence committee leaders -- chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and senior Republican Kit Bond of Missouri -- are pushing legislation that would require the agency to declassify the executive summary of the review within one month and submit a report to Congress explaining why any material was withheld. "It's amazing the efforts the administration is going to stonewall this,'' Wyden said. "The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11.'' Completed in June 2005, the inspector general's report examined the personal responsibility of individuals at the CIA before and after the attacks. The CIA has not released any documents to The Associated Press or other organizations that began requesting the information at least 20 months ago. Groups including the National Security Archive have clashed with the agency over its FOIA policies. Last year, the archive gave the CIA its prize for the agency with the worst FOIA record. ''CIA has for three decades been one of the worst FOIA agencies,'' archive Director Thomas Blanton said this week.

Note: For more reliable information on what US intelligence agencies knew about the coming attacks, click here.

Ex-CIA official, contractor face new charges
2007-05-11, MSNBC/Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18622361

New charges have been filed alleging that a former top CIA official pushed a proposed $100 million government contract for his best friend in return for lavish vacations, private jet flights and a lucrative job offer. The indictment [brings] charges ... against Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who resigned from the spy agency a year ago, and ... defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The charges grew from the bribery scandal that landed former U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in prison. The pair now face 30 wide-ranging counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering [including that] Foggo provided Wilkes with “sensitive, internal information related to ... national security,” including classified information, to help him prepare proposals for providing undercover flights for the CIA under the guise of a civil aviation company and armored vehicles for agency operations. Then, he pushed his CIA colleagues to hire Wilkes’ companies without disclosing their friendship, prosecutors allege. In a June 2005 e-mail to the head of CIA air operations quoted in the indictment, Foggo offered to “use some ’EXDIR grease”’ on Wilkes’ behalf. Foggo was the agency’s executive director at the time. In return, Wilkes offered to hire Foggo after he retired from government service. [An] initial indictment in February charged the pair with 11 counts of the same charges in connection with a $1.7 million water-supply contract Foggo allegedly helped win for one of Wilkes’ companies while he was working as a logistics coordinator at a CIA supply hub overseas. Foggo, the former No. 3 official at the CIA, resigned from the spy agency after his house and office were raided by federal agents.

Note: Until just a few years ago, there was a virtual blackout in the media on any negative coverage of the CIA. The prosecution of the #3 man in the CIA is an external manifestation of huge shake-ups going on behind the scenes. Buzzy Krongard, the previous #3 at the CIA has been linked to the millions of dollars in suspicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

Contingencies for nuclear terrorist attack
2007-05-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/11/MNG2OPP22R1.DTL

Senior government and military officials and other experts, organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program called the Preventive Defense Project, met behind closed doors in Washington for a day-long workshop called "The Day After." The organizers of the nonpartisan project, Stanford's William Perry, a secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, and Harvard's Ashton Carter, a senior Defense Department official during the Clinton years, assumed the detonation of a bomb similar in size to the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. A paper [they] are writing ... urges local governments and individuals to build underground bomb shelters; encourages authorities who survive to prevent evacuation of at least some of the areas attacked for three days ... and proposes suspending regulations on radiation exposure so that first responders would be able to act, even if that caused higher cancer rates. "The public at large will expect that their government had thought through this possibility and to have planned for it," Carter said in an interview. "This kind of an event would be unprecedented. We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and with Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow," Carter said. "This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than a single episode, has major consequences." It would, he added, require powerful government intervention to force people to do something many may resist -- staying put.

Note: Ashton Carter was co-author, with Philip Zelikow (later Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission) and John Deutch (former CIA Director), of a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately described the governmental aftermath of 9/11.

Bush Changes Continuity Plan
2007-05-10, The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR20070509027...

President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering agencies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, "decapitating" attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House. The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington without warning ... has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order makes explicit that the focus of federal worst-case planning involves a covert nuclear attack against the nation's capital. "Adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity planning shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received," states the 72-paragraph order. The statement added, "Emphasis will be placed upon geographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increase survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions." After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time [forming] a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans." Since then, other agencies including the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have taken steps to relocate facilities or key functions outside of Washington for their own reasons, citing factors such as economics or the importance of avoiding Beltway "group-think."

Note: Why isn't Congress making these absolutely vital decisions? What gives these organizations authority to determine what will happen in the case of a major attack?

Trust Busters
2007-04-15, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-neil15apr15,1,434...

[ABC's talk show] "The View," by accident or design, has an almost eerie calibration to the public at large. For example, only one of the four co-hosts ... is a supporter of President Bush. In other words, 25% of the cast has a favorable opinion of Bush, pretty much in line with Bush's approval ratings nationally. Likewise, last year a Scripps Howard poll found that 36% of the U.S. public believes the government was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks. I estimate Rosie [O'Donnell] constitutes 36% of the cast. Why does pop culture matter? Because it reveals ... what is really on our minds. And what's on our minds lately is reasonable doubt. Actor Charlie Sheen [is] onboard to narrate a new version of the online 9/11 conspiracy documentary "Loose Change," with distribution by billionaire Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures. We're not talking about a couple of flaky moonbats in an Oakland basement. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. And just about everywhere you look, official narratives are coming unglued: Pat Tillman, for example, or the firing of eight federal prosecutors. The abduction of British sailors in what Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed was indisputably Iraqi territorial waters has proved to be quite disputable. [An] ex-British ambassador claims the map used by the Ministry of Defence to support its case is a fake. I am not a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. At the same time, I'm certain we don't know all there is to know about those events. The data stream has been so thoroughly corrupted. Weapons of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib. The silencing of climate scientists. It's hard for the ministries of Washington to make an appeal to authority when they have been proven so unreliable.

Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Hating America (Dallas Mavericks' billionaire owner on 9/11 cover-up)
2007-03-26, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261242,00.html

There's a movie called "Loose Change" that asserts hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans colluded to kill their fellow citizens on 9/11. That Al Qaeda didn't attack us, we essentially attacked ourselves. Billionaire Mark Cuban is going to distribute the film so people all over the world can see it. We reported the situation last night and I talked with Mr. Cuban today on "The Radio Factor": [BILL] O'REILLY: The people in my town, Mr. Cuban, do now want "Loose Change" playing in the theater or Charlie Sheen narrating it. They believe that this is dishonest. They believe it diverts attention away from the real villains. MARK CUBAN, OWNER OF THE DALLAS MAVERICKS: Well, let's qualify here. First of all, it's already been on the Internet. O'REILLY: Rationalization, sir. CUBAN: It's not rationalization. This is just fact. When you have things that are in the shadows that people can't find and take on mythic proportions, that's what they can take. And they can take innuendo. Once you can see something, you can refute it.

Note: To understand how one of the richest people in the world (Mark Cuban) and a famous actor (Charlie Sheen) came to believe in a major cover-up of 9/11, see our 9/11 Information Center. Mr. Cuban is financing a new version of the Internet blockbuster which opened the eyes of millions to the cover-up. The new version will be narrated by Charlie Sheen. To see the earlier version of this powerful documentary, click here.

O'Donnell, Sheen Back 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
2007-03-22, WCBS News - New York CBS Affiliate
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_081173332.html

A controversial new film about 9/11 is raising eyebrows, not only for its content, but also for the people involved in the project: Rosie O'Donnell and Charlie Sheen. The sitcom actor and talk show hostess have both become spokespeople for the 9/11 conspiracy movement. The video "Loose Change" ... has been floating around the Internet for years, but now Sheen is in talks with Magnolia Pictures to narrate a new version of the video and redistribute it. Sheen believes the government may have been behind the attacks. O'Donnell has been using her Web site to reprint excerpts from the 9/11 conspiracy site, Whatreallyhappened.com. Magnolia Films founder Mark Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks, said they're also looking for a film telling the other side of the story, saying "we like controversial subjects."

Note: To view this film which has awoken tens of millions to the 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Call to reopen Oklahoma bomb case
2007-03-02, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/6275147.stm

The FBI man in charge of collecting evidence from the government building destroyed by the Oklahoma bomb has called for the case to be reopened. Former deputy assistant director Danny Coulson ... said a federal grand jury is now needed to find out what really happened. He argues this is the only way to prove whether other people were involved in the bombing in a wider conspiracy beyond Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Mr Coulson spent 31 years in the FBI. Between 1991 and 1997 he was the deputy assistant director of the Criminal Division of the FBI in Washington, responsible for all violent crime cases in the United States. Mr Coulson said there were some "very strong indicators" that other people were involved with Timothy McVeigh. The FBI interviewed 24 people who claimed to have seen McVeigh in Oklahoma City with someone else on the morning of the attack, yet the only known accomplice of McVeigh, Terry Nichols, was at home in Kansas over 200 miles away on that day. The FBI's investigation concluded that the eyewitnesses were unreliable. However, Danny Coulson says they were "extremely credible" and had no reason to make it up. "If only one person had seen it, or two of three, but 24?" he said. "I know FBI headquarters told [agents] to close down the investigation in Elohim City which has some very significant connections to Mr McVeigh. "Never in my career did I have FBI headquarters tell me not to investigate something." Last December a US Congressional report found no conclusive evidence of a wider conspiracy, but the report concluded that "questions remain unanswered and mysteries remain unsolved."

Note: Don't miss a highly revealing four-minute video-clip showing live media coverage of the Oklahoma City bomb available here. The official story is that one truck with a huge bomb was parked in front of the Oklahoma City federal building and only Timothy McVeigh and his partner were involved. The news footage proves that others must have been involved, as multiple unexploded bombs were recovered from points inside the building. Yet none of this was questioned in later testimony.

The American Empire and 9/11 by Prof. David Ray Griffin
2007-03-00, Tikkun Magazine - March/April 2007 Issue
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0703/frontpage/empire911

Literally dozens of people – including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters – reported hearing explosions in the Twin Towers, with some of them explicitly saying that the collapses appeared to be instances of controlled demolition. One fire captain said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom." [A] paramedic said: "It was [like a] professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors." One firefighter said: "It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings." Given all the features that indicate controlled demolition, it is not surprising that when a controlled demolition expert in Holland was shown videos of the collapse of WTC 7, without being told what the building was ... he said: "They have simply blown away columns. A team of experts did this. This is controlled demolition." Two emeritus professors of structural analysis and construction at Zurich's prestigious ETH Institute of Technology say that WTC 7 was "with the highest probability brought down by explosives." FEMA, the first agency given the task of explaining the collapse of the WTC, said that its best explanation for the collapse of WTC 7 had "only a low probability of occurrence." The 9/11 Commission avoided the problem by simply not finding room to mention this collapse in its 571-page report. This behavior is no surprise given the fact that the Commission was run by its executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a member of the Bush-Cheney administration.

Note:  This article in Tikkun by renowned theologian David Ray Griffin is the first in any major U.S. national magazine to contain a detailed argument that the attacks of 9/11 were planned and carried out by rogue elements within the U.S. government.  For additional reliable information on the 9/11 coverup, click here.

The 9/11 conspiracy movement
2007-02-14, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/6354679.stm

9/11 was the first global event in the age of the internet. And now the world wide web is being used as a platform for a wide range of conspiracy theories ... which allege that the US government was somehow involved in the attacks. Those who question the official account of 9/11 form a broad coalition. Loose Change has been viewed tens of millions of times and pulls no punches. [Creator Dylan Avery claims] "our government will willingly kill its own citizens for whatever gain it deems necessary ... and then lie as much as they need to cover it up." At the other extreme [Professor Jim] Fetzer is a former US Marine officer and retired professor of philosophy. Puzzled by the apparent discrepancies in the official account of 9/11, he founded a coalition of like-minded academics called Scholars For 9/11 Truth. Its purpose is to research exactly what happened that day, using the principles of scientific research. Alex Jones, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host ... believes 9/11 was "an inside job." "It's a self inflicted wound, it's a false-flag terror operation," he claims. After the attacks, government officials were summoned to give evidence before a Congressional Inquiry set up to investigate the intelligence failure before 9/11. Co-chairman Senator Bob Graham told ... of his frustration at the lack of co-operation from the FBI in that inquiry, and by the government's decision to censor over 30 pages of his report which related to Saudi Arabia. "Within 9/11 there are too many secrets," he said, "withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their government."

Note: Don't miss the BBC's impressive 9/11 Timeline available here which is related to the above article. And for lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here. If the above link to the BBC article does not function, click on The 9/11 Conspiracy Movement.

An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11
2007-02-09, The Daily Mail (The U.K.'s second most popular newspaper)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article...

A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story. [The] accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie, [Loose Change, which is] so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched [it]. Why were no military aircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pentagon? The movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain. Former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher ... has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery." These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour. Griffin ... is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: could the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by President Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro? Initially ... Professor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job. It was only a year later ... that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's events based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he changed his mind.

Note: The timeline which opened Prof. Griffin's eyes was the two-page 9/11 timeline from WantToKnow.info available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up. This is the most supportive article yet by the mainstream media. The word is spreading. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on 9/11, click here.

Revisiting 9/11 Failures
2007-01-31, Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16907952/site/newsweek

Senators are renewing calls for the declassification of a CIA report documenting the agency’s mistakes in preventing the 2001 attacks. The Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA may be headed for a new confrontation over an old issue: why an internal report documenting the agency’s failures in the run up to the September 11 terror attacks is still being withheld from the public. The report, prepared by the CIA’s inspector general, is the only major 9/11 government review that has still not been made publicly available. While Bush administration officials are hardly eager for a public rehash of the 9/11 intelligence failures, the issue is an especially sensitive one at CIA headquarters. The report provides the CIA’s own internal account of what some believe was the most spectacular of the pre-9/11 failures: the agency’s failure to alert the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to information showing that two of the hijackers had entered the United States as early as January 2000.

Dangerous World Fuels Conspiracy Theorists
2007-01-30, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/29/national/main2411081.shtml

Five years later, it's the violent rattling of the ground moments before the World Trade Center's South Tower fell ... that keeps Gary Welz raising questions about just what he survived on Sept. 11, 2001. "I felt what was like an earthquake ... just before the South Tower fell," recalls Welz, an adjunct math lecturer at John Jay Criminal College and Fordham University. "The official explanation that I've heard doesn't make sense because it doesn't explain why I heard and felt an explosion before the South Tower fell." Welz is among the growing ranks of conspiracy theorists who question the official explanation of ... the Sept. 11 attacks. The actions of U.S. administrations in recent American history have done nothing to dissuade conspiracy theorists. The details of the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, after all, read like an implausible conspiracy theorist's dream. The Watergate scandal provides fodder too. The Bush administration, it can be argued, has encouraged a new generation of theorists after implying there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks ... and insisting Iraq was riddled with weapons of mass destruction. Although he is doubtful of the official 9/11 story, Welz ... does not consider himself a conspiracy theorist. Welz' own skepticism toward 9/11, while based on personal experience, has been reinforced by broadcast quality, highly-polished films on the Internet such as "9/11 Mysteries." There are hundreds of others out there. One such film is "Loose Change" ... a polished, albeit journalistically flawed, attempt to poke holes in the U.S. government's explanation and response to the Sept. 11 attacks. "Loose Change" has been downloaded over 30 million times in 50 countries.

Note: For free viewing of "Loose Change," click here. To view "9/11 Mysteries," click here. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a major cover-up of 9/11, click here.

'They're all forced to listen to us'
2007-01-26, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1998430,00.html

Like it or loathe it, you can't ignore Loose Change ... the most successful movie to emerge from what followers call the 9/11 Truth Movement. They believe ... that the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 2001 were [the work of] of elements within the US government. Recent polls suggest more than a third of Americans believe that either the official version of events never happened, or that US officials knew the attacks were imminent, but did nothing to stop them. Google Video acts as a portal for the movie. The running tally of the number of times it has been viewed since last August ... stands at 4,048,990. On top of that, the movie was shown on television to up to 50 million people in 12 countries on September 11 last year; 100,000 DVDs have been sold and 50,000 more given away free. The film gained airplay on old media platforms such as Air America and Pacifica radio stations, local Fox TV outlets and on stations around the world, including state outlets in Belgium, Ireland and Portugal. The power of the film is that it lays down layer upon layer of seemingly rational analysis to end up with a conclusion many would find incredible. It is compiled from original footage from numerous news sources. Yet to come [is] Loose Change: the Final Cut, [which] filmed original interviews with Washington players, employed lawyers to iron out copyright issues with borrowed footage, [and] commissioned 3D graphics from Germany. The end result ... will be seen at Cannes and have a cinema release in America and across the world on the sixth anniversary of 9/11.

Note: To view this highly revealing 9/11 documentary, click here. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Judge dismisses New York Times libel suit
2007-01-12, MSNBC News/Associate Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16600278

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a libel lawsuit filed against The New York Times by a former Army scientist once identified as a person of interest in the 2001 anthrax attacks. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria dismissed the case a week after lawyers for the Times argued that Steven Hatfill should be considered a public figure under libel law, which makes it much more difficult for a public figure to win a judgment than a private citizen. The judge did not explain his ruling in the order issued Friday. Hatfill had claimed that a series of columns falsely implicated him as the culprit in the anthrax attacks. Kristof said all along that he never intended to accuse Hatfill but simply wanted to prod a dawdling FBI investigation. He initially referred to Hatfill in his columns only as “Mr. X,” and identified him by name only after Hatfill held a news conference to denounce rumors that had been swirling around him. Hatfill argued that the columns contained enough information about him that people could deduce his identity. Five people were killed and 17 sickened by anthrax that had been mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The case remains unsolved.

Note: There is much more here than meets the eye. This article fails to mention some key facts. As reported by the highly respected Federation of American Scientists, "the New York Times invoked the 'state secrets' doctrine last month in a motion to dismiss the libel suit brought against it by Steven J. Hatfill." What secrets would be divulged? Could this have anything to do with the many microbiologists who were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances within months of the anthrax scares? For more, click here.

Opium, thugs bloom under U.S. policies in Afghanistan war
2006-12-17, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/17/ING08MTPMB1.DTL

The Taliban ... briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid. When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the American occupation ... poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since -- this year by 60 percent. Within Afghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw direct income from poppy, profits may reach $3 billion this year. In-country profit adds up to an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, or more than half the country's annual income. Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin. Through many administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug trade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. The CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations. The United States [encouraged] Islamist extremists (then "our" soldiers) and ... set the stage for the Taliban. [Currently,] President Hamid Karzai['s] strategy is to avoid confrontation, befriend potential adversaries and give them offices, often in his Cabinet. The trade penetrates even the elected Parliament. Among the 249 members of the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) are at least 17 known drug traffickers, in addition to 40 commanders of armed militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegations of war crimes.

Note: Could it be that some U.S. officials are turning a blind eye, or even supporting this drug trade? For some very strong evidence of this from a former award-winning DEA agent turned journalist and author, click here.

The 9/11 Truth Movement's Dangers
2006-12-10, CBS News/The Nation
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/opinion/main2242387.shtml

Tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens. The government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary "Loose Change." It's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash — Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and ... a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting ... was nowhere mentioned in the report. It's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth.

Note: Though this article belittles the 9/11 movement, there is abundant evidence to support the claim that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash and the attacks may have been orchestrated. For more, click here.

How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century
2006-12-10, Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480,00.html

In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. The juniors in Bill Stroud's class are riveted by a documentary called Loose Change unspooling on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in urban Astoria, N.Y. The film uses 9/11 footage and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling if paranoid case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the students--an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories--dive into a discussion about the elusive nature of truth. Raya Harris finds the video more convincing than the official version of the facts. Marisa Reichel objects. "Because of a movie, you are going to change your beliefs?" she demands. "Just because people heard explosions doesn't mean there were explosions." Stroud has posed this question to his class on the blackboard: "If truth is difficult to prove in history, does it follow that all versions are equally acceptable?" Throughout the year, the class will examine news reports, websites, propaganda, history books, blogs, even pop songs. The goal is to teach kids to be discerning consumers of information and to research, formulate and defend their own views, says Stroud, who is founder and principal of [the] school.

Note: To view the highly engaging documentary Loose Change, click here. For more on 9/11, click here.

Pentagon resists pleas for help in Afghan opium fight
2006-12-05, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-afghandrugs5dec05,...

The Pentagon ... has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to play an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium trade. Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States. Poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world's opium. "It is surprising to me that we have allowed things to get to the point that they have," said ... a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade is a law enforcement problem, not a military one. The opium trade is one-third of the country's economy. Several dozen kingpins ... have become more brazen, richer and powerful. [They] openly run huge opium bazaars and labs that turn opium into heroin. [The] head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said ... that the location of major drug operations were "well-known to us and to the authorities." The Pentagon has balked at drug interdiction efforts even when it had the resources, said a former senior U.S. anti-drug official. "There were [drug] convoys where military people looked the other way," the former official said. "DEA would identify a lab to go hit or a storage facility and [the Pentagon] would find a reason to ground the helicopters." A recent congressional report said the DEA asked the Pentagon for airlifts on 26 occasions in 2005, and the requests were denied in all but three cases.

Note: Some observers and insiders believe the reason Afghanistan was attacked is because the Taliban had virtually stopped the opium trade in 2001. For reliable evidence supporting these allegations, click here.

'State secrets privilege' blocks fired translator from suing FBI
2006-11-24, USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-23-whistleblower-translator_x...

Sibel Edmonds, who formed the 100-plus member National Security whistle-blowers Coalition in 2002, began working as a linguist for the FBI the week after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Several months into her contract, she discovered "shoddy" translations relevant to 9/11 created by translators who had "failed the proficiency exams." Edmonds says the translator was sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate "the most sensitive terrorist-related information" from interviews of detainees. Edmonds also notified her superiors that a co-worker was responsible for translating wiretaps of a company the latter used to work for. [Edmonds] was fired in March 2002. When Edmonds asked why, she received a letter saying her contract had been "terminated completely for the government's convenience." In its final report, the inspector general concluded that "we believe that many of (Edmonds') allegations were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services." The same month the report was released, Edmonds' lawsuit to contest her firing was dismissed. Legal briefs show the government had invoked the so-called state secrets privilege, arguing that the lawsuit would jeopardize national security. "Instead of protecting and standing up for whistle-blowers, this is just giving the complete green light to retaliate," says Edmonds, who lost her appeal.

Note: This article fails to mention that Edmonds has repeatedly stated in public forums and in the press that she has specific information on the involvement of certain high officials in 9/11. For more on this vital topic, click here.

Ex-employee says FAA warned before 9/11
2006-11-24, USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-23-whistle-blower-faa_x.htm

From 1995 to 2001, Bogdan Dzakovic served as a team leader on the Federal Aviation Administration's Red Team. Set up by Congress to help the FAA ... the elite squad tested airport security systems. In the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dzakovic says, the team was able to breach security about 90% of the time, sneaking bombs and submachine guns past airport screeners. Expensive new bomb detection machines consistently failed. The team repeatedly warned the FAA of the potential for security breaches and hijackings but was told to cover up its findings. Eventually, the FAA began notifying airports in advance when the Red Team would be doing its undercover testing. He and other Red Team members approached the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General, the General Accounting Office and members of Congress about the FAA's alleged misconduct. No one did anything. "Immediately (after 9/11), numerous government officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, 'How could we have known this was going to happen?' " Dzakovic testified later before the 9/11 Commission. After filing [a] complaint, Dzakovic was removed from his Red Team leadership position. He now works for the Transportation Security Administration. His primary assignments include tasks such as hole-punching, updating agency phonebooks and "thumb-twiddling." At least he hasn't received a pay cut, he says. He makes about $110,000 a year for what he describes as "entry-level idiot work."

Conspiracy theories propel AM radio show into Top 10
2006-11-12, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/12/MNGV9MBB3T1.DTL

There was a time when "Coast to Coast AM," the late-night syndicated talk radio show dedicated to paranormal activities and political conspiracies, didn't get much respect. That all changed when millions from the mainstream met up with the after-midnight fringe folks to make "Coast to Coast AM" a top-rated radio show. George Noory...has hosted the program on weeknights from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. PST full time since 2003. The show...was taking calls about Sept. 11 conspiracy theories just two weeks after the terrorist attacks. "Coast to Coast AM"...can now reach upward of 3 million listeners through 500 stations each week. "There's absolutely a growing conspiracy climate," said Noory. "People are tired of being misled and confused from taking information directly from a government official." Noory, 56, took over "Coast to Coast AM" when the show's founder, Art Bell, retired. Bell, who has come in and out of retirement several times over the years, now hosts the program on weekends from his new home in the Philippines. Judging by the 300-plus phone calls and 1,000 e-mails the show receives on an average night...listeners include liberals, conservatives, senior citizens in San Francisco, college students in South Carolina and even soldiers in Iraq. Talkers magazine, the trade publication that tracks radio ratings, has Noory in the top 10 of its "Top Talk Radio Audiences," alongside Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly [and] Sean Hannity. "Coast to Coast" has on occasion scooped major media outlets like the New York Times and CNN, according to Noory. "We broke the story on the Dubai ports," said Noory. "We broke the story on SARS, and we were the first to report on the bird flu pandemic."

Backers hail 9/11 theorist's speech
2006-10-30, Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4572518

The standing ovation has finally died down, and Steven E. Jones, a soft-spoken physics professor, finds himself pinned against the stage by some of the enthusiastic fans who packed a University of Denver auditorium. "Can I just shake your hand?" a woman in a baggy red sweater asks Jones. "You're doing such important work." If anything, Jones appears embarrassed by all the attention. Quiet and self-effacing, he's an unlikely hero for 9/11 conspiracy theorists of every stripe, but that's exactly what he's become. A physicist whose background includes work on nuclear fusion, Jones was put on leave by Brigham Young University in September after publishing a paper saying that the twin towers couldn't have collapsed solely as a result of the planes that rammed the upper floors on Sept. 11. The paper theorizes that explosives planted inside the building must have been involved. Though Jones doesn't specify who he believes planted the charges, he concedes it would have had to be "an inside job" and likely would have included either very powerful figures on the American scene or entities inside the government. Jones and his work reflect the mainstreaming of a movement that has defied the Bush administration's efforts to put it to rest and mystified people who have studied the events of that day closely. A startlingly large percentage of the population simply doesn't believe the official explanation. A national poll by the Scripps Survey Center at Ohio University conducted in the summer found that more than a third of people questioned believed the government either planned the attacks or could have stopped them but didn't.

9/11 theorists are either silly or shrewd
2006-10-29, Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_4543650

They believe the federal government had a hand in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Members of Colorado911Visibility.org include psychologists, lawyers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, an aerospace engineer, physicists and lots of people with doctorates and master's degrees in the sciences. They understand why people want to dismiss them. They say people want to attack them as messengers because it's too disturbing to believe the government that is supposed to protect us would orchestrate the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. One of the organizers invited three scholars to speak...to "take this out of the realm of conspiracy theory." (Details at denverpostbloghouse.com/rodriguez.) The year-old group has an e-mail list of about 350 people. Among them is Earl Staelin, a 66-year-old civil litigator. He said many of his friends who are engineers didn't believe the official story, that the towers fell because [of] burning fuel from the planes. After he showed films, such as "9-11 Mysteries," they came to the same conclusion: demolition experts must have planned this in advance. Why would the government do it? The explanations are plentiful, as is the evidence that groups such as this one, which exist throughout the nation...share on such websites as 911truth.org. And for those who say these groups are wacko fringe groups, think again: According to a poll by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University taken this August, 36 percent of Americans believe the government was either complicit in the 9/11 attacks or knew about it and didn't try to stop it. 16 percent believe explosives were used to bring down the towers.

Can the ‘20th hijacker’ of Sept. 11 stand trial?
2006-10-24, MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361462/

Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. That much is known. These details were among the findings of the U.S. Army’s investigation of al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But only now is a picture emerging of how the interrogation policy developed, and the battle that law enforcement agents waged, inside Guantanamo and in the offices of the Pentagon, against harsh treatment of al-Qahtani and other detainees by military intelligence interrogators. In interviews with MSNBC.com — the first time they have spoken publicly — former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used...after Guantanamo's prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques. And they described their disappointment when military prosecutors told them not to worry about making a criminal case against al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" of Sept. 11, because what had been done to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.

Controversial prof to leave BYU
2006-10-22, Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_4528049