Torture Bill Gives Bush Retroactive War Crimes ImmunityJack Cafferty: "What Are We Becoming?"
http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/torture_bill_gives_bush_retroactive_war_crimes_immunity.htm
Wiretap Bill Sets up the End of the Fourth Amendment
http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/wiretapping_bill_sets_up_end_of_fourth_amendment.htm
Senate gives final approval to detainee bill
Senate gives final approval to detainee bill
Next Event is Sept.30
NC PRIDE
http://www.ncpride.org/pride/index.shtml
We will have a booth at the pride event on East Duke Campus.
See link above for more details.
We will follow up the weekend with a film presentation and discussion on
Wednesday Oct. 11.
Durham Public Library downtown
300 North Roxboro Rd Durham.
6:30pm -meet and greet
7:00pm -- 9:00pm film and questions and answers.
Please spreed this news. Bring those you know that are curious.
9 comments:
Our government condones torture...invasion of privacy...things are getting bad.
Check out this video I put together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvi-sovgVD4
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bill_dou_060924_living_in_the_land_o.htm
This essay will reveal how the false flag operation of 9/11 will transform our nation and world away from a sick war based poverty imposing global order into an era of truth and hope that will begin a global healing unseen by humanity.
Being from Kansas and having written guest columns for the Kansas City Star, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz metaphors come naturally for me. Fortunately for my essay, the Land of Oz metaphor is dead on.
About 40 percent of Americans have now woken up to the unfolding reality that facts regarding the 9/11/2001 attacks increasingly point to complicity at the highest levels of this current Bush Administration (Scripps-Howard Poll). For that 40 percent, and growing numbers of Americans, we now find ourselves living in the land of Oz. We have seen that the "great and powerful Oz," which sent us all scurrying for duct tape and stumbling all over ourselves to give up the precious civil liberties our father's fought for . . . is a manufactured illusion run by a few rather pathetic figures in this current administration, and at the top of our media . . . hiding behind an ever thinning curtain of diminishing credibility.
We see on the Sunday morning talk shows, and the "informed" guests they have on, whether Democrat or Republican, a discussion of a "terrorist threat" that we now know has been largely manufactured by the pathetic little men behind the control room curtains. The discord this sets up in our minds and hearts is hard to bear. We feel our minds pulled back into the matrix. Their flashy TV sets and well dressed "experts" try to help us forget what we know, that 9/11 was an inside job. They ask us day in and day out, to join them in the grand illusion that the "great and powerful terrorist threat," is a reality that really does demand endless hundreds of billions of military spending, illegal wars, and the destruction of our constitutional rights and liberties.
However, ultimately it is a good thing that is happening. The good this bizarre scenario is creating, is that for the first time in decades tens of millions of Americans are realizing that the corporate media that controls 99.999999% of the information read, heard or viewed in corporate media outlets (including so called "alternative" media) is part of a grand charade. A charade meant to fool us into sacrificing our children and our neighbor's children for wars of conquest, distorted with beautiful faces, Brooks Brothers Suits, and flashy video graphics, into "wars of democracy and freedom." We are beginning to see that squeezed in that "control booth behind the curtain" of the Great and Powerful Oz, is also this corporate media, which is increasingly looking desperate and pathetic as well.
The corruption of corporate media is a long lived reality. Perhaps it began in earnest with Kennedy's assassination. Why did the media choose not to interview key witnesses who saw shots coming from the grassy knoll, and courageously tried to apprehend those shooters before being stopped by Secret Service agents who gave the shooters time to escape? Why did the corporate media begin using the term "grassy knoll" as a derogatory slap at anyone questioning obvious lies our government has spewed upon us for decades? Even now, corporate media often uses the term "grassy knoll" to attack people demanding answers regarding the events on 9/11. Yes, corporate media has been a co-criminal in attacks on American democracy for decades.[...]
(Consortium News)
"Often when we write about the Iraq War and the “war on terror,” we receive angry e-mails from George W. Bush’s supporters who insist there is no alternative but to follow the President’s lead in crushing Islamic militants and fighting World War III.
Typical was one e-mail that asserted, “they started it; now we’re going to finish it.”
But I’m never clear who “they” are or exactly what “it” is. If “they” are the Sunni Islamic fundamentalist terrorists of al-Qaeda and “it” is 9/11, U.S. forces could have concentrated on al-Qaeda strongholds along the Afghan-Pakistani border until Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and their followers were captured or killed."
Read more...
Torture Bill States Non-Allegiance To Bush Is Terrorism
Legislation tolls the bell for the day America died, birth of the dictatorship
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2006/290906torturebill.htm
Buried amongst the untold affronts to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the very spirit of America, the torture bill contains a definition of "wrongfully aiding the enemy" which labels all American citizens who breach their "allegiance" to President Bush and the actions of his government as terrorists subject to possible arrest, torture and conviction in front of a military tribunal.
In section 950j. the bill criminalizes any challenge to the legislation's legality by the Supreme Court or any United States court. Alberto Gonzales has already threatened federal judges to shut up and not question Bush's authority on the torture of detainees.
"No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever, including any action pending on or filed after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions under this chapter."
The Bush administration is preemptively overriding any challenge to the legislation by the Supreme Court.
The definition of torture that the legislation cites is US code title 18 section 2340. This is a broad definition of torture and completely lacks the specific clarity of the Geneva Conventions. This definition allows the use of torture that is, "incidental to lawful sanctions." In alliance with the bill's blanket authority for President Bush to define the Geneva Conventions as he sees fit, this legislates the use of torture.
The media has spun the bill as if it outlaws torture - it only outlaws torture for "enemy combatants," and in fact outlaws the retaliation of any military against the United States as "murder." Those deemed "enemy combatants" are not even allowed to fight back yet the government affords itself every power including the go-ahead to torture.
[...]
9/11: Press For Truth (DVD)
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)
Amidst all the different theories as to what led up to 9/11, what happened that day, and what actions followed it, there is one thing that every BuzzFlash reader can agree upon: The "official" version of 9/11 is a politically fabricated narrative.
We may each have our own theory on the true story, but we know the "official" story is not true.
As to what really led up to 9/11, who were all the parties involved, who financed it, and how the government responded, we can only say as one of the "Jersey Girls" says in this documentary: "They lied, they all lied."
The makers of "9/11: Press for Truth" do an excellent job of combining two key forces that have raised crucial and still unanswered questions about 9/11: the mission of the "Jersey Girls" to know who was really behind the murder of their loved ones -- and the exhaustive 9/11 Terror Timeline assembled by Paul Thompson. Interweaving these two efforts makes for an eye-opening journey through how the Bush Administration and the 9/11 Commission successfully obstructed a fully independent and unbiased examination of the events surrounding 9/11.
One of the great strengths of "Press for Truth" is that it makes such a credible case because it points out how much evidence and how many questions were just flat out shoved aside by the "official" version of 9/11 events, which was created to enhance the political positioning of the Bush Administration and the Republicans. But the film also implies that the Democratic members of the 9/11 Commission didn't want to aggressively pursue a full investigation either. Not to mention that Cheney and Bush tried to prevent even a "stacked" "independent" 9/11 Commission from being created.
"Press for Truth" connects the dots of what we don't know and should know with such tantalizing professionalism that we became angered once again at how we have been given historical revisionism in the form of a heroic Bush myth, rather than a chance at knowing the facts.
"Press for Truth" would probably be considered a mainstream 9/11 theory film because it doesn't imply government planning of 9/11, but it does clealy indicate government negligence leading up to 9/11 and during the day of the disaster itself. Futhermore, it raises questions that leave you strongly thinking that the Bush Administration never really wanted to capture Osama bin Laden -- and willfully let him and hundreds of his fighters escape into Pakistan. The evidence on that score is pretty damning.
The documentary raises the likelihood of close Pakistani intelligence service involvement in 9/11. After the tragedy, the Bush Administration gave Pakistan a pass and decided to use the horrifying event as an excuse to invade Iraq.
This is both an emotionally compelling account, as it is credible.
Is it true? We don't know yet what version of 9/11 is true, because our government will only give us lies, not the facts.
Strongly recommended.
Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
The Washington Post, October 1, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282_pf.html
On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.
Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.
For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called "findings" that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance -- Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice -- would get her attention.
Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.
He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."
But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.
Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."
Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.
The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.
Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.
As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot.
Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.
Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.
The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.
Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department.
Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.
Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."
Editor's Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush's "neocons" and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that "what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years."
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=101230&ntpid=2
9/11 conspiracy theories aired
Barrett, Minn. prof speak at UW
By Ellen Williams-Masson
Correspondent for The Capital Times
A lightning rod in the tempest surrounding 9/11 conspiracy theories, University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer Kevin Barrett Sunday divided the public into "sheeple," those who believe the official version of events, and TMMs, those who subscribe to the "truth movement."
Barrett said such disparate worldviews often lead to "mutual accusations of insanity."
He called on scientists like his co-presenter and fellow Scholars for 9/11 Truth member James Fetzer, a professor emeritus from the University of Minnesota, to provide empirical evidence to fuel the 9/11 debate.
Barrett stepped outside his official role at the university to present a discussion titled "A Folklorist Looks at 9/11 'Conspiracy Theories' " with Fetzer at the Social Sciences building on campus Sunday.
Barrett's talk was carefully couched as the study of a folk movement, whereas Fetzer's presentation, "9/11: What We Know Now That We Didn't Know Then," was a no-holds-barred look at the evidence that conspiracy theorists posit to challenge official accounts of 9/11 events.
Billed as "9/11: Folklore and Fact," the joint lecture was sponsored by the UW-Madison Folklore Department. Folklore program director James Leary, who spoke of other "dark periods" in American history, introduced Barrett.
"In mass societies where corporations and governments often control the media ... it's on the folk level that alternative voices are often heard," Leary said.
"I'm somewhat skeptical of the 9/11 truth movement, but I am very much interested in hearing more about it. At the same time, I'm more than skeptical of our government that has made a career out of lying and calling it the truth."
In his talk, Barrett discussed the difference between myths, sacred narratives held to be true, and legends, "a narrative that is told as true, but at whose core is a debate on belief."
He suggested that more and more Americans are beginning to regard the official account of 9/11 as a legend instead of myth.
"From the standpoint of folkloristics, it is interesting how the myth is energetically promulgated, and heretics castigated, in official institutions - while the folk are increasingly viewing it as a legend, if not a lie," Barrett said.
Fetzer's version of 9/11: Fetzer preceded his talk with the presentation of a check for $8,472 to the university from the Veterans for 9/11 Truth, who raised the money to offset the amount withheld from the UW Extension program by the Ozaukee County Board in protest of Barrett's employment.
Fetzer has spent 35 years teaching scientific reasoning and critical thinking and has published several books on his studies of the JFK assassination.
He believes that the events of 9/11 were engineered by the government for financial and political gain, and presented analyses of photographic and video footage, seismic data and other evidence to challenge the official story of terrorist attacks.
In brief, Fetzer believes that the twin towers were brought down by a distinctive kind of controlled demolition from the top down after being hit by what were most likely radio-controlled military planes.
In regard to the Pentagon crash, Fetzer believes that a small, likely remote-controlled military plane fired a missile into the Pentagon immediately before impact.
In the case of United Airlines Flight 93 reported to have crashed near Shanksville, Pa., Fetzer cited a report that the plane was shot down by the military using sidewinder missiles.
A detailed discussion and examples of Fetzer's analyses can be found at www.st911.org.
He said after his talk that he believes the attacks were engineered for a combination of reasons, including as justification for plundering the Middle East.
"There were multiple motives involved, but a very important one was the ideological belief that the United States stood at a unique opportunity as the sole remaining super power, and that it had the opportunity to create an empire greater than any the world had ever seen," Fetzer said.
Audience reaction: The Social Sciences auditorium was comfortably filled with hundreds of spectators and not a sheeple in sight, at least according to questions asked during the question/answer period after the talks.
Brent Arnold of Evansville described himself as an "ultraconservative, right-wing Christian" who is "ashamed of what my government has done since Sept. 11."
"I don't think our government, even though they claim to be Christian, represents the Christian standpoint," Arnold said. "I don't believe that Jesus said to do harm to those that spitefully use you, but rather to pray and to do good to them that are your enemies."
Barrett, who converted to Islam in 1993, said that his participation in the truth movement and the subsequent media attention has not been a distraction for his class.
"If anything, it's enhancing my ability to teach a really first-rate class on Islam," Barrett said. He added that 9/11 and the war on terror will only be discussed for a couple of weeks of the semester.
"I expected that there would be a gigantic media hoopla at some point when 9/11 truth started breaking into the media, but I just didn't realize I would be in the middle of it," he said.
9/11 Panel Members Weren’t Told of Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON, 10/02/06 "New York Times" --
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01cnd-book.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1159761600&en=797d904aeadd4206&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin
-- WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.
Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.
The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.
Since release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.
“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”
“It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account,” he said.
Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book.
Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.
He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.
The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”
The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.
In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.
“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”
Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”
“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.
He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.
Mr. Zelikow said that it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.
But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.
“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he said. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”
Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too little attention to terrorist threats in the months before Sept. 11.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS that there had been “rumors” of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.
Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that and they didn’t.”
To the anonymous troll
We make no pretensions like Fox news, Giving a few minutes to a twisted version of the truth and then countering with 45 minutes of Lies.
You pointed out that " Al Quedia" made a video, showing Mohammad Atta. then they show another film showing Osama Bin Lying in front of a large group of people. No proof of what had happened at that gathering, and no real association between the two pictures. We are just to believe what they say when we already know and have documented more lies than can be counted.
You are no more really asking questions then your Antichrist leader is. You are trying to supplant our efforts to save this country from the fascism that you belong to. Why do you oppose yourself? You can not stop the truth, and you will continue to be deleted. Trust me it is much less of an effort for me to delete your crap then it is for you to write them.
Post a Comment