US plans to 'fight the net' revealed
2006-01-27, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4655196.stm

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations". The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act. Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it. The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks. The military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public. Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads. The document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum". US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum". The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba
2001-05-01, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's ... Fidel Castro. America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years. The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists." The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after.

Note: Many military and political leaders tend to look at the world as a chess board. Sacrificing pawns (innocent civilians) is sometimes necessary to capture the queen. Is it beyond comprehension that this might have been the case with 9/11? And why was ABC the only major news source to report this highly revealing story? To read the shocking declassified documents, click here.

9/11 conspiracy theorists multiply
2006-09-08, MSNBC/Washington Post
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14723997

A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 percent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on its hands. Sixteen percent believe explosives brought down the towers. A Zogby International poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed the government "consciously failed to act." The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the government. The academic wing is led by [Prof. David Ray] Griffin, who founded the Center for a Postmodern World at Claremont University; James Fetzer, a tenured philosopher at the University of Minnesota; and Daniel Orr, the retired chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois. The movement's de facto minister of engineering is Steven Jones, a tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University, who's...concluded that the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition. Catherine Austin Fitts served as assistant secretary of housing in the first President Bush's administration. [Robert] Bowman was chief of advanced space programs under presidents Ford and Carter. Fitts and Bowman agree that the "most unbelievable conspiracy" theory is the one retailed by the government. It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why...military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded. Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor"...never reviewed in a major U.S. newspaper, sold more than 100,000 copies and became a movement founding stone.

Connections And Then Some
2004-03-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A25...

The Carlyle Group [is] an investment house famous as one of the most well-connected companies anywhere. Former president George H.W. Bush is a Carlyle adviser. Former British prime minister John Major heads its European arm. Former secretary of state James Baker is senior counselor, former White House budget chief Richard Darman is a partner, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is senior adviser -- the list goes on. Those associations have brought Carlyle enormous success. The Washington-based merchant bank controls nearly $14 billion in investments, making it the largest private equity manager in the world. It buys and sells whole companies the way some firms trade shares of stock. But the connections also have cost Carlyle. It has developed a reputation as the CIA of the business world -- omnipresent, powerful, a little sinister. Media outlets from the Village Voice to BusinessWeek have depicted Carlyle as manipulating the levers of government from shadowy back rooms. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) even suggested that Carlyle's and Bush's ties to the Middle East made them somehow complicitous in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It didn't help that as the World Trade Center burned on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden. Former president Bush, a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day. Bush['s] primary function is to give speeches for Carlyle that attract wealthy foreigners in places where the former president is especially revered, such as Asia. The company has rewarded its faithful with a 36 percent average annual rate of return.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. To understand the amazingly powerful role of this low-profile, yet extremely wealthy and influential group, click here to view free a 48-minute documentary shown on Dutch national TV which clearly depicts the depths of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of government. You will be thankful that you watched this highly educational film.

When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
2000-02-28, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm

"Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner. At least the voice sounds amazingly like him. But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Psychological operations ... PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives. Covert operators kicked around the idea of creating a computer-faked videotape of Saddam Hussein crying or showing other such manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Iraq and the Arab world. The tape war never proceeded...but the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam? According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram idea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air. A super secret program was established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "project information power from space ... for special operations deception missions."

Note: If the above link fails, click here. If you want to understand some of the many hidden capabilities of the U.S. military, this article is a must read. For more on the use of these "nonlethal" weapons, click here.

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.

Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
2005-01-11, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/11/opinion/oe-scheer11

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" ... argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned ... around the world." Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dirty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people? Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when British and U.S. military forces later found no such thing? The film ... directly challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian neoconservatives, has seized upon the false image of a unified international terrorist threat to replace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a political agenda. "The nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy."

Note: If above link fails, click here. This highly revealing film by one of Britain's most respected documentary makers is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link and lots more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here. For an excellent review of the film in one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers, click here.

500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11
2006-06-05, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/us/05conspiracy.html?ex=1307160000&en=2d326...

In the ballroom foyer of the Embassy Suites Hotel, the two-day International Education and Strategy Conference for 9/11 Truth was off to a rollicking start. More than 500 people — from Italy to Northern California — gathered for the weekend at a major chain hotel near the runways of O'Hare International. There were talks on the Reichstag fire and the sinking of the Battleship Maine as precedents for 9/11. There were speeches by the lawyer for James Earl Ray, who claimed that a military conspiracy killed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and by a former operative for the British secret service, MI5. 9/11 Truthers [are] a group that, in its rank and file, includes professors, chain-saw operators, mothers, engineers, activists, used-book sellers, pizza deliverymen, [and] college students. Steven E. Jones [is] a professor of physics at Brigham Young University and the movement's expert in the matter of collapse. Dr. Jones...is a soft-spoken man who lets his writing do the talking. He composed an account of the destruction of the towers...that holds that "pre-positioned cutter-charges" brought the buildings down. There is a plan by the British delegation...to get members of Parliament to watch "Loose Change," the seminal movement DVD. The Truthers are not alone in believing the whole truth has not come out. A poll released last month by Zogby International found that 42 percent of all Americans believe the 9/11 Commission "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" in the attacks. [And a] Zogby poll two years ago that found that 49 percent of New York City residents agreed with the idea that some leaders "knew in advance" that the attacks were planned and failed to act.

Why I Resigned From the CIA
2004-12-05, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-scheuer5dec05,1,471321...

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, wrote "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." Between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in charge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to this small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden — either by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gathering work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted. I was never charged with deciding whether to act against Bin Laden. That decision properly belongs solely to senior White House officials. However, as a now-private American citizen, it is my right to question their judgment; I am entitled to know why the protection of Americans — most selfishly, my own children and grandchildren — was not the top priority of the senior officials who refused to act on the opportunities to attack Bin Laden provided by the clandestine service. Each of these officials have publicly argued that the intelligence was not "good enough" to act, but they almost always neglect to say that they were repeatedly advised that the intelligence was not going to get better and that Bin Laden was going to kill thousands of Americans if he was not stopped.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For many other serious questions around the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Write More About Skull And Bones
2004-10-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/10/27/notes102704.DTL

I get this a lot: Hey Mark ... why don't you quit toeing the typical blasé journalism line ... and instead write about the real truths? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones. And why, furthermore, don't you talk about the real truths of 9/11? Haven't you seen that amazing [9/11] video on that Web site? And what about Building 7? Why did that 47-story tower adjacent to the WTC collapse when it had no fire and no plane crash? Why isn't the media reporting any of this? Does this make you laugh? Scoff? It is, after all, incredibly easy to dismiss conspiracy theories. But you know what? It's not that easy. These people ... have a point. They are indeed onto something quite large and ominous and it very much has to do with the media toeing the line of "safe" information. There is indeed ample evidence that the U.S. government, long before 9/11, had already discussed the quite plausible possibilities and strategic benefits of unleashing a "Pearl Harbor"-type event on America. There are plenty of strangely unanswered questions about 9/11, about the stunning inaction of NORAD and Bush's stupefying nonreaction upon hearing of the attack, not to mention his administration's incredible attempts to halt any independent 9/11 investigations. Of course, no one in any major media will touch this stuff. It is professional suicide to dare suggest an alternate truth to the one supplied by the Pentagon and regurgitated by the media. And the truth is, we don't really want such unstable questions answered. We simply cannot tolerate to have our world, our leaders, our foundations so questioned. We prefer stasis to growth, security to true knowledge.

The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket
2004-10-19, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/19/opinion/oe-scheer19

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me. [The] release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief. The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible." By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation. The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain. And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For more reliable, verifiable information on the 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Brainwash victims win cash claims
2004-10-17, London Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-1313808,00.html

Hundreds of mentally ill patients who were subjected to barbaric CIA-funded brainwashing experiments ... could be entitled to compensation following a landmark court ruling. Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world’s leading psychiatrists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing personalities of people in his care. Cameron ... was recruited by the CIA during the cold war while working at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He carried out mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD on hundreds of patients, but only 77 of them were awarded compensation. Now a landmark ruling by a Federal Court judge in Montreal will allow more than 250 former patients, whose claims were rejected, to seek compensation. Last week, Alan Stein, of Montreal law firm Stein and Stein ... confirmed he was in the process of contacting former clients who could now renew their appeal. “There are about 200 people still due compensation,” he said. Using techniques similar to those portrayed in the celebrated novel the Manchurian Candidate, it was believed that people could be brainwashed and reprogrammed to carry out specific acts. Cameron developed a range of depatterning “treatments”. Patients were woken from drug-induced stupors two or three times a day for multiple electric shocks. In a specially designed “sleep room” made famous by Anne Collins’s book of the same name, Cameron placed a speaker under the patient’s pillow and relayed negative messages for 16 hours a day. Cameron ... rose to become the first president of the World Psychiatric Association.

Note: If the above link does not work, click here. This article clearly shows that the Manchurian candidate (programmed assassin) is not just fiction. For a powerful two-page summary of 18,000 pages of declassified CIA documents on this disturbing mind control program, click here. Links to view the original top secret documents are included.

Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet
2004-10-07, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13059-2004Oct6.html

Darren Williams spent four weeks this summer making a short but startling video that raises novel questions about the 2001 attack. The video, "9/11: Pentagon Strike," suggests that it was not American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon, but a missile or a small plane. The video offers flashes of photographs taken shortly after impact, interspersed with witness accounts. The pictures seem incompatible with damage caused by a jumbo jet. Firefighters stand outside a perfectly round hole in a Pentagon wall where the Boeing 757 punched through; it is less than 20 feet in diameter. Propelled by word of mouth, Internet search engines and e-mail, the video has been downloaded by millions of people around the world. Williams created a Web site for the video, www.pentagonstrike.co.uk. Then he e-mailed a copy to Laura Knight-Jadczyk [who] posted a link to the video on the group's Web site, www.Cassiopaea.org. Within 36 hours, Williams's site collapsed under the crush of tens of thousands of visitors. But there were others to fill the void. In Texas, a former casino worker who downloaded the video began drawing almost 700,000 visitors a day. In Louisiana, a young Navy specialist put the video on his personal Web page. Suddenly, the site was inundated by more than 20,000 hits. "Pentagon Strike" is just the latest and flashiest example of a growing number of Web sites, books and videos contending that something other than a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon. Knight-Jadczyk said she never imagined anyone outside her group would ever view "Pentagon Strike." "The fact everybody's been sending it to his brother and his cousin ... reflects the fact that there is a deep unease," she said.

Note: This five-minute video is well worth watching, even though it was made a few years ago. To view it free online, click here. For lots more information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Transcript: Rice's Testimony on 9/11 (for 9/11 Commissioner Lehman)
2004-04-08, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61252-2004Apr8_4.html

LEHMAN. Were you told that there were numerous young Arab males in flight training? RICE. I was not. LEHMAN. Were you told that the red team in F.A.A. for 10 years had reported ... that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than 20 percent effective. RICE. To the best of my recollection I was not told that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that I.N.S. had quietly internally halved its internal security enforcement budget? RICE. I was not made aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or oppose the sanctuary policies [which] prohibited the local police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities? RICE. I do not believe I was aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware of a program that was well established that allowed Saudi citizens to get visas without interviews? RICE. I learned of that after 9/11. LEHMAN. Were you aware of the extensive activities [of] the Saudi government in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques around the country, including right here in the United States? Were you aware at the time of the fact that Saudi Arabia ... had in their custody the C.F.O. [Chief Financial Officer] and the closest confidante of Al Qaeda, of Osama bin Laden, and that they refused direct access to the United States? RICE. I don't remember anything of that kind. LEHMAN. Were you aware that they would not cooperate and give us access to the perpetrators of the Cobar Towers attack? RICE. I was very involved in issues concerning Cobar Towers. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the policy of the Justice Department ... to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning? RICE. No.

Note: Don't miss the full revealing transcript at the link above. Most of the quotes above are towards the bottom of the webpage. Why didn't we hear lots more about these astounding facts put forward by one of the 9/11 commissioners, yet hardly mentioned in the final report? For lots more, click here.

[9/11] Hijack 'suspects' alive and well
2001-09-23, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well. The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt. Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities. He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year [and] became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines. Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects ... says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver. Meanwhile ... a London-based Arabic daily says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi. He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive. FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.

Note: Yet these four are all later listed in the 9/11 Commission report as the hijackers. Click here and scroll down a little over half way to see their photos in the official report. For more on this, click here. For an abundance of reliable information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, 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.

Terrorized by 'War on Terror'
2007-03-25, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR20070323016...

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs ... are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. "Security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality. Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without ... due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism.

Note: This is an amazingly deep and powerful analysis of the use of fear by politicians, big business, and the media to promote their own agendas. Amazingly, the article was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter. This is the same man who wrote in his book The Grand Chessboard, that U.S. global primacy is not likely to be achieved "except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." Strange, but the article is well worth reading in its entirety. For more, 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.

Losing bin Laden
2006-02-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR20060209016...

Despite a huge and costly effort by the media, the public still has an incomplete picture of what really happened during the [war in Afghanistan] and of how Osama bin Laden survived it. Gary Berntsen's Jawbreaker provides a valuable new account by a major participant that fills in many blanks. Berntsen was a top CIA field commander in the most critical sector of a new kind of war; at various times, the CIA veteran had elements of the Delta Force, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and tactical air units reporting to him. Crown Publishers has chosen unnecessarily to position it as a diatribe that the CIA tried to suppress. In fact, while the CIA dragged its feet in reviewing the manuscript for classified material and redacted plenty of specifics, the book is hardly an attack on the CIA. In fact, the overall picture of the CIA here is far more flattering than that in The 9/11 Commission Report. Still, to portray Jawbreaker as "the book the CIA doesn't want you to read" (as the cover puts it), the publisher has displayed the redactions throughout the book as large black lines. Contradicting Bush administration denials, Berntsen writes that his teams discovered bin Laden and the remnants of his entourage in the now famous Tora Bora Mountains along the lawless, rugged Afghan-Pakistani border. Berntsen recounts very credibly how he and others pleaded with Gen. Tommy Franks and the Pentagon brass to put in blocking forces so that bin Laden and the remnants of al Qaeda's leadership could not flee into Pakistan. But for reasons that remain unclear to Berntsen ... the Bush administration or Franks decided to depend instead on local Afghan warlords rather than put U.S. forces on the ground to block bin Laden's escape.

Note: To read a concise summary of reliable news reports that raise serious questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Getting Agnostic About 9/11
2005-08-28, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-crgriffin35aug28,...

Anyone who types the words "9/11" and "conspiracy" into an online search engine soon learns that not everybody buys the official narrative of what took place on Sept. 11, 2001. As a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, 66-year-old David Ray Griffin would seem to have more affinity for leather elbow patches than tin hats, yet after friends and colleagues prodded him into sifting through the evidence, he experienced a conversion. "For the first year and a half I just accepted the conventional view ... that this was blowback for our foreign policy. When a colleague suggested to me ... forces within our own government had arranged it, I didn't accept that. Then several months later another colleague sent me a website that had a timeline. Once I ... saw all those stories drawn from mainstream sources that contradicted the official account, I decided I needed to look into it more carefully, and the more I looked, the worse it got. The fact that Building 7 ... collapsed when it had not been hit by an airplane ... that's a smoking gun. The fact that standard operating procedures were not followed that morning, and we've gotten three different stories now by the U.S. military as to why they did not intercept the planes, that's a smoking gun. The 9/11 commission simply ignored those questions. The official account itself is a conspiracy theory. It says that 19 Arab Muslims...conspired to pull off this operation. The question is not whether one is a conspiracy theorist about 9/11. It's which conspiracy theory do you find most supported by the evidence?"

Note: If the Los Angeles Times link does not work, click here for the full article. The timeline to which Prof. Griffin refers is the WantToKnow.info timeline at http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up

CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away
2005-08-15, Newsweek magazine
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border. But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that ... bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora ... and could have been caught. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. [CIA Commander] Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was." In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora. Berntsen ... has sued the agency over what he calls unacceptable delays in approving his book. "They're just holding the book," which is scheduled for October release, he says. "CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. The CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book."

Note: For a concise summary of reliable, verifiable information questioning the official account of 9/11, click here.

CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away
2005-08-15, Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek

In a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members.

Was Use of Cell Phones on 9/11 Flights Possible?
2004-12-15, WantToKnow.info/Washington Post/SF Chronicle/Associated Press
http://www.WantToKnow.info/911cellphonecalls

”Once you get to a certain height, you are no longer in the range of the cellular network, because cell phone towers aren't built to project their signals that high.”

Washington Post, 12/9/04

“Today's vote by the FCC is intended to address whether technology has improved to the extent that cell phone calls now are possible above 10,000 feet -- they weren't in the past.”

San Francisco Chronicle, 12/15/04

"With television cameramen hovering, Qualcomm chief executive Irwin Jacobs sat in the front row of coach and made one of the first legal cell phone calls from a commercial jetliner. Jacobs pronounced the [brand new] technology behind the airborne phone call a success, although adding that it will be improved over the next couple years. Connections from the plane were generally good, although some calls were dropped."

USA Today/Associated Press, 7/16/04

Note: To find articles showing multiple cell phone use on Sept. 11, 2001, type "9/11" and "cell phone calls" into your favorite search engine, or click here for a Washington Post report on an alleged 30-minute uninterrupted cell phone call from Flight 93. Click here for a CNN report on another call from that flight. Tests have shown it is not possible to have an extended cell phone conversation above 10,000 feet.

Letter to Thomas Kean from Sibel Edmonds
2004-08-05, AsiaTimes ('Asia's most trusted news source')
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH05Aa01.html

Your commission ... has now issued its "9/11 Commission Report". After [9/11] we, the translators at the FBI's largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to terrorist activities. This issue has been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committe. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged signatures on top-secret documents related to certain 9/11 detainees. Not only does the supervisor facilitating these criminal conducts remain in a supervisory position, he has been promoted. In April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset ... received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes [and] the attack was going to be carried out soon. No action was taken. After 9/11, the agents and the translators were told to 'keep quiet' regarding this issue. The translator who was present ... reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing. Why did your report choose to exclude the information ... despite the public confirmation by the FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you received directly? As you are fully aware, these issues and incidents were found confirmed by a Senior Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, and a Senior Democrat Senator, Patrick Leahy. Even FBI officials 'confirmed all my allegations and denied none' during their unclassified meetings with the Senate Judiciary staff. However, neither your commission's hearings, nor your commission's five hundred sixty seven-page report ... include these serious issues, major incidents, and systemic problems.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. Sibel Edmonds is one of the great heroes of our day. She has been gagged directly by the U.S. Attorney General from telling what she knows. The above letter was not published in any major U.S. media, though widely reported in alternative new sources. To understand how such vital information is hidden from the public, click here. For lots more on Ms. Edmonds, click here.

9-11 Commission Funding Woes
2003-03-26, Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,437267,00.html

Is the Bush White House trying to put the brakes on the congressional panel created last fall to investigate 9-11 attacks? The White House brushed off a request quietly made last week by the 9-11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, to boost his budget by $11 million. The panel has until the end of May 2004 to complete its work, but it will spend the $3 million it was originally allotted by around August 2003 — if it doesn't get the supplement. Bush's recent move has miffed some members of the 9-11 panel. Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton, the panel's top Democrat, requested additional funding in a letter to the administration last week. In denying the request, the White House irritated many of the members of the commission. The White House sidestepped the issue of why the request wasn't granted. The latest effort to curtail funding has angered victims of the attacks. Stephen Push, a leader of the 9/11 victims' families, who are closely monitoring the commission, said the White House decision was another in a long line of efforts to water down or shrink the panel's role. Commission member Tim Roemer ... has gone so far as to draw comparisons with the $50 million provided to investigate the recent Columbia tragedy in which seven people died. "If we're looking at well over $11 million for that, we certainly should be looking for at least the same vicinity of money for how 3,000 people died and how to strengthen our homeland security," he said.

Note: MSNBC reported that "the Ken Starr investigation of Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky cost the tax-payer $64 million." The Columbia tragedy invstigation ran $50 million. Yet the White House wanted to limit the investigation of the worst terror attack ever to $3 million. What secrets are they hiding? Click here for more.

Clues Alerted White House to Potential Attacks
2002-05-17, Fox News/Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,53065,00.html

[There are] many examples of "missed leads" that the Bush administration was given prior to Sept. 11. An Iranian in custody in New York City told local police last May of a plot to attack the World Trade Center. German intelligence alerted the Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's MI-6 intelligence service, Israel's Mossad in June 2001 that Middle Eastern terrorists were training for hijackings and targeting American and Israeli interests. Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided "general" information to the United States in the second week of August that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the United States last summer that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U.S. targets. An Islamic terrorist conspiracy was uncovered in 1996 in the Philippines to hijack a dozen airplanes and fly them into CIA headquarters and other buildings. U.S. investigators confirmed in October that a 29-year-old Iranian ... made phone calls to U.S. police from his deportation cell that an attack on the World Trade Center was imminent in "the days before the attack." [A] memo from the FBI Phoenix office about Arabs training in U.S. flight schools never reached headquarters. In 1999, the Federal Research Division at the Library of Congress published its own report ... which described that "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to Al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the [CIA], or the White House."

Note: For lots more evidence that suggest 9/11 at the very least may have been allowed to happen, click here.

[9/11] Suicide hijackers hid behind stolen Arab identities
2001-09-20, WantToKnow.info/London Times
http://www.WantToKnow.info/010920londontimes.hijackers

Five of the [9/11] hijackers were using stolen identities, and investigators are studying the possibility that the entire suicide squad consisted of impostors. In Saudi Arabia, five of the alleged hijackers have emerged, alive, innocent and astonished to see their names and photographs appearing on satellite television. "The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine, but I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre," Abdulaziz Alomari told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. Mr Alomari, 28, ... said that he had left the United States in April 2000. The US-educated engineer had reported to police that his passport was stolen when his flat in Denver, Colorado, was burgled in 1995. A Saudi diplomat formerly based in Washington, Ahmed al-Shehri, told al-Eqtisadiah newspaper that details of one of the hijackers matched his son, Waleed. The young man, a pilot with Saudi Arabian Airlines who graduated four years ago from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, is living in Morocco. Another Saudi pilot, Said Hussein al-Ghamdi, whose photograph was broadcast on CNN when it portrayed him as a hijacker, is living in Tunis. The family of Ziad al-Jarrah, an alcohol-drinking Lebanese partygoer, deny he could have been the fanatical Muslim hijacker whose aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania. Alarming reports claimed that three of the hijackers -Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Mani and Ahmed al-Ghamdi -had learned to fly at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, known as the "Cradle of US Naval Aviation".

Note: Yet these individuals are all later listed in the 9/11 Commission report as the hijackers. Click here and scroll down a little over half way to see their photos in the official report. For more on this, click here. For an abundance of reliable information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast
1993-10-28, New York Times
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00617FE3A5C0C7B8EDDA...

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used. The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev. "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C." Another agent ... does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of "security and other issues." William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Government this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcripts he had seen, he said, "were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct." But citing the judge's order, he said he could not provide any details.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a two-minute CBS News clip the same day giving more information on this little-known story, click here.

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis
1987-11-04, WantToKnow.info/PBS Documentary
http://www.WantToKnow.info/050423secretgovernment

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. The Russians had been our ally against the Nazis, an expedient alliance for the sake of war. Now they were our enemy. To fight them we turned to some of the very men who had inflicted on humanity the horrors of Hitler’s madness. We hired Nazis’ as American spies. Admiral Gene La Rocque: “That National Security Act of 1947 changed dramatically the direction of this great nation. It established the framework for a national security state. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nation’s security that we’re always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do. The National Security Act also gave us the Central Intelligence Agency." In 1975 ... Congress took its first public look at the Secret Government. Senator Frank Church chaired the Select Committee to study government operations. The hearings opened the books on a string of lethal activities. From the use of electric pistols and poison pellets, to Mafia connections and drug experiments. And they gave us a detailed account of assassination plots against foreign leaders and the overthrowing of sovereign governments. This is a system easily corrupted. While freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends.

Note: This highly revealing PBS documentary is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link, written text, and much more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here.

McCain's 'big advantage'
2008-06-25, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/24/EDPC11EHS4.DTL

Charlie Black, senior adviser to John McCain, caused a fluff by saying that a terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a "big advantage" to his candidate. No one mentioned that eight years ago, the Project for a New American Century called for "a new Pearl Harbor" that could move the American people to accept the neoconservative vision of militarized global domination. Then 9/11 happened, lifting George W. Bush from the shadows of a disputed election to the heights of a "war presidency." Bush has taken on unprecedented powers since the events of 9/11. On that day, the president issued his "Declaration of Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks" under the authority of the National Emergencies Act. This declaration, which can be rescinded by joint resolution of Congress, has instead been extended six times. In 2007, the declaration was quietly strengthened with the issuance of National Security Presidential Directive 51, which gave the president the authority to do whatever he deems necessary in a vaguely defined "catastrophic emergency," including everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Not a single congressional hearing was held on this directive; members of Congress are not even allowed to read it. Will Congress act decisively to remove the president's emergency powers, challenge the directive and defend the Constitution?

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
2008-04-06, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/05/AR20080405020...

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting? These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies." But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief. In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a "frog crouch." It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions." Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

Administration Asserted a Terror Exception on Search and Seizure
2008-04-04, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR20080403041...

The Justice Department concluded in October 2001 that military operations combating terrorism inside the United States are not limited by Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, in one of several secret memos containing new and controversial assertions of presidential power. The memo, sent on Oct. 23, 2001, to the Defense Department and the White House by the Office of Legal Counsel, focused on the rules governing any deployment of U.S. forces inside the country "in the event of further large-scale terrorist activities." Administration officials declined to detail what domestic military operations were being contemplated at the time. The memo has not been formally withdrawn. The Fourth Amendment assertion is one of several far-reaching legal arguments revealed by the disclosure Tuesday of a 2003 Justice Department memo that authorized harsh military interrogations. In its footnotes, asides and central text, that 81-page memo asserted nearly unlimited presidential powers during a time of war. The document disclosed, for example, that the administration's top lawyers had declared that the president has unfettered power to seize oceangoing ships as commander in chief; that Congress has no ability to pass legislation governing the interrogations of enemy combatants; and that federal laws prohibiting assault and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators. One section discussed to what extent the president might be allowed to legally maim a prisoner, such as through the use of a "scalding, corrosive, or caustic substance." A footnote argued that Fifth Amendment guarantees of due-process rights "do not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation's enemies."

Note: For further disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties, click here.