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General Accuses White House of War Crimes
2008-06-18, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/06/18/BL2008061801546....

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability. In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in The New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement. Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation. The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes."

Note: For many revealing reports on the brutal realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, click here.

Guantanamo: Policy goals trumped law
2008-06-18, Miami Herald/McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/574074.html

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers. It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council," drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone ... from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes. The international conventions ... to which [the US is] a party, were abandoned in secret meetings among the five men in one another's offices: ... David Addington, the ... longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney [whose] primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was to push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn't check; Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general; William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, [and] Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gonzales.

Note: Virtually no major media other than the Herald picked up this key story.

Documents indicate U.S. hid terror suspects from Red Cross
2008-06-17, Miami Herald/McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/574075.html

The U.S. military hid the locations of ... detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released. "We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said. [Another] person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world. "In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said. The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods. Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.

Note: For many revealing reports on the brutal realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, click here.

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
2008-04-09, ABC News
http://www.abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4583256

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on [captives] who proved difficult to break, sources said. The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them. The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the [infamous] 2002 memo.

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.

U.S. Payments To Pakistan Face New Scrutiny
2008-02-21, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/20/ST2008022002819...

Once a month, Pakistan's Defense Ministry delivers 15 to 20 pages of spreadsheets to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. They list costs for feeding, clothing, billeting and maintaining 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistani troops in the volatile tribal area along the Afghan border. No receipts are attached. In response, the Defense Department has disbursed about $80 million monthly, or roughly $1 billion a year for the past six years, in one of the most generous U.S. military support programs worldwide. But vague accounting, disputed expenses and suspicions about overbilling have recently made these payments to Pakistan highly controversial -- even within the U.S. government. Questions have already been raised about where the money went and what the Bush administration got in return. In perhaps the most disputed series of payments, Pakistan received about $80 million a month in 2006 and 2007 for military operations during cease-fires with pro-Taliban tribal elders along the border, including a 10-month truce in which troops returned to their barracks. U.S. officials say the payments to Pakistan -- which over the past six years have totaled $5.7 billion -- were cheap compared with expenditures on Iraq, where the United States now spends at least $1 billion a week on military operations alone. Congressional officials and others are concerned that the administration has been so eager to prop up Musharraf that it overlooked U.S. foreign aid and accounting standards. A congressional oversight subcommittee is also set to begin an investigation next month, while the Government Accountability Office plans to finish its own inquiry in April.

How the spooks took over the news
2008-02-11, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-the-spooks-took-over-the-news-780...

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war. The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world. There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media. This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new ... structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed ... in the Pentagon and Nato.

Note: This article is an edited excerpt from investigative journalist Nick Davies' new book, Flat Earth News: an award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media. To read about or purchase it, click here. For a highly revealing two-page summary of 20 award-winning journalists describing how huge stories they tried to report were shut down by corporate media ownership, click here.

Rule by fear or rule by law?
2008-02-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/04/ED5OUPQJ7.DTL

Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees. According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists." What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people? The 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) ... gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 ... allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who ... speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike. What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?

Note: This important warning from former U.S. Congressman Dan Hamburg and Lewis Seiler should be read in its entirety. For more chilling reports on serious threats to our civil liberties, click here.

CIA director investigating watchdog
2007-10-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/12/MNP1SOQI9.DTL

CIA Director Michael Hayden has mounted a highly unusual challenge to his agency's chief watchdog, ordering an internal investigation of an inspector general who has issued a series of reports sharply critical of top CIA officials. Hayden is seeking to rein in an inspector general who has used the office to bring ... scrutiny upon CIA figures from former Director George Tenet to undercover operatives running secret overseas prison sites. The investigation is focused on ... CIA Inspector General John Helgerson and his office, particularly whether they were fair and impartial in their scrutiny of the agency's terrorist detention and interrogation programs. Officials said that the investigation also will span other subjects and that it already has expanded since its start months ago. U.S. intelligence officials concerned about the inquiry said it is unprecedented and could threaten the independence of the inspector general position. The investigation "could at least lead to appearances he's trying to interfere with the IG, or intimidate the IG, or get the IG to back off," one U.S. official familiar with the investigation said. Frederick Hitz, who served as the CIA's inspector general from 1990 to 1998, said the move will be perceived as an attempt by Hayden "to call off the dogs." "What it would lead to is an undercutting of the inspector general's authority and his ability to investigate allegations of wrongdoing," Hitz said. "The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the inspector general's ability to get the truth from them." Hayden has been a staunch defender of the Bush administration's counterterrorism programs.

Note: What does it say about an agency when they accuse their own internal investigator of being corrupt?

Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire.
2007-07-08, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR20070706019...

The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror" have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. In April, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed -- and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show. Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune ... of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals [say] that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover identities and control the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide case officers and watch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers who control clandestine operations worldwide. As The Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations -- Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan -- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA parlance. Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS have been outsourced to private industry.

Judges OK warrantless monitoring of Web use
2007-07-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/07/BAGMNQSJDA1.DTL

Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves. In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages. The search is no more intrusive than officers' examination of a list of phone numbers or the outside of a mailed package, neither of which requires a warrant, Judge Raymond Fisher said in the 3-0 ruling. Defense lawyer Michael Crowley disagreed. His client, Dennis Alba, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of operating a laboratory in Escondido that manufactured the drug ecstasy. Some of the evidence against Alba came from agents' tracking of his computer use. The court upheld his conviction and sentence. Expert evidence in Alba's case showed that the Web addresses obtained by federal agents included page numbers that allowed the agents to determine what someone read online, Crowley said. The ruling "further erodes our privacy," the attorney said. "The great political marketplace of ideas is the Internet, and the government has unbridled access to it."

Note: So now every email you send and read can be monitored legally. Why didn't this make news headlines?

Nuking Iran: The Republican Agenda?
2007-06-06, Washington Post
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/nuking_iran_the_republica...

At the Republican debate, almost all the candidates said that they would not rule out a nuclear attack on Iran as a means to prevent it from getting its own nuclear weapons. Only one [candidate] would say that attacking Iran -- indeed even threatening to nuke Iran -- is not the right strategy. "We have to come to our senses about this issue of war and preemption," he said. The audience applauded, but he didn't get much support from his fellow candidates. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was the starkest: "I would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons if there was no other way to preempt those particular centrifuges," he said. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ... added that "you can't rule out anything and you shouldn't take any option off the table." Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore also [stated] "all options are on the table" with regard to Iranian nuclear weapons. Said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: "I wouldn't take any options off the table." After the debate, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who did not particpate, added his name to the list of candidates who would consider a preemptive attack against Iran. Only Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the "Dennis the Menace" of his party, said he opposed a nuclear strike on moral grounds and because he believed Iran "has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security." The Iraq war and the war against terrorism are the central battles of our time, these candidates say. They all profess their faith in God and the United States, and speak of a moral struggle between good and evil, between the United States and "radical Islam." Yet they are not willing to say that nuclear weapons have no place in modern confrontations.

Note: For what a top US general has to say about war manipulations, click here.

20-year seal put on Columbine depositions
2007-04-03, Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_5580190

The depositions of the parents of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold will be kept under seal in the National Archives for 20 years, a federal judge ruled Monday. No one, including violence prevention experts, will be able to see them until they are unsealed, U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock ruled. They will be kept permanently in the National Archives, where they are considered to be of historical value. The depositions of the parents took place in 2003 in connection with a lawsuit filed by the families of five slain Columbine High School students. Brian Rohrbough, the father of slain student Daniel Rohrbough, said he was angered by the ruling. Rohrbough, who watched as attorneys interviewed the parents during the deposition sessions, said there is nothing in them that would cause any harm. Instead, their release could prevent further school shootings, he said. Rohrbough is under court order not to divulge details. "There is no rational reason to lock them up," Rohrbough said. "It's just the idea that it would be OK in 20 years, and can't be OK today."

Note: Why all the secrecy? Could it be to hide evidence showing it could have been stopped?

A monstrous war crime
2007-03-28, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2044345,00.html

Our collective failure has been to take our political leaders at their word. This week the BBC reported that the government's own scientists advised ministers that the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable. Published in the Lancet ...it estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the American and British led invasion in March 2003. Immediately after publication, the prime minister's official spokesman said that the Lancet's study "was not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate". The foreign secretary ... said that the Lancet figures were "extrapolated" and a "leap". President Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report". Scientists at the UK's Department for International Development thought differently. They concluded that the study's methods were "tried and tested". Indeed, the Johns Hopkins approach would likely lead to an "underestimation of mortality". The Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser ... recommended "caution in publicly criticising the study". When these recommendations went to the prime minister's advisers, they were horrified. Tony Blair was advised to say: "The overriding message is that there are no accurate or reliable figures of deaths in Iraq". At a time when we are celebrating our enlightened abolition of slavery 200 years ago, we are continuing to commit one of the worst international abuses of human rights of the past half-century. Two hundred years from now, the Iraq war will be mourned as the moment when Britain violated its delicate democratic constitution and joined the ranks of nations that use extreme pre-emptive killing as a tactic of foreign policy.

Note: This article is written by Richard Horton, the editor of the highly esteemed British medical journal Lancet.

[N.Y.] City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention
2007-03-25, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?ex=1332475200&en...

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews. From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists. They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law. These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports. In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. In addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe. To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

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.

Mind Games
2007-01-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR20070110013...

A community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds ... may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that. An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of [such] a weapon. "The signal can be a 'message from God' that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender." In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone's head. The patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. The official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet ... the military's use of weapons that employ electromagnetic radiation to create pain is well-known. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one element of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagnetic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. While its exact range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, such as aluminum. Given the history of America's clandestine research, it's reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.

Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the little-known, yet critical topic of nonlethal weapons, click here. For an excellent two-page summary of government mind control programs, 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.

Why did the 9/11 Commission ignore "Able Danger"?
2005-11-17, Wall Street Journal Article by Former FBI Director Louis Freeh
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007559

The Able Danger intelligence, if confirmed, is undoubtedly the most relevant fact of the entire post-9/11 inquiry. Even the most junior investigator would immediately know that the name and photo ID of Atta in 2000 is precisely the kind of tactical intelligence the FBI has many times employed to prevent attacks. Yet the 9/11 Commission inexplicably concluded that it "was not historically significant." This astounding conclusion -- in combination with the failure to investigate Able Danger and incorporate it into its findings -- raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself. The Able Danger team had identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers by mid-2000 but were prevented by military lawyers from giving this information to the FBI. The Pentagon...blocked several military officers from testifying...about the Able Danger program. The chairman of the 9/11 Commission reacted to Able Danger with the standard Washington PR approach. [He] demanded that the Pentagon conduct an "investigation" to evaluate the "credibility" of Col. Shaffer and Capt. Phillpott. The final 9/11 Commission report...concluded that "American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks." This now looks to be embarrassingly wrong. The Joint Intelligence Committees should reconvene and, in addition to Able Danger team members, we should have the 9/11 commissioners appear as witnesses so the families can hear their explanation why this doesn't matter.

Court Rules U.S. Can Indefinitely Detain Citizens
2005-09-09, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR20050909007...

A federal appeals court ruled today that the president can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil in the absence of criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital to protect the nation from terrorist attacks. The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit came in the case of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. The decision by a three-judge panel was written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, who is one of a number of people under consideration by President Bush for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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