WASHINGTON — The Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege Friday to try to stop a lawsuit over Bush-era wiretapping – the first time the Obama administration has done so under its new policy on such cases.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision in a California lawsuit challenging the warrantless wiretapping program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Under the state secrets privilege, the government can have a lawsuit dismissed if hearing the case would jeopardize national security. Read the rest of this entry »
Israel’s occupation and destruction of Palestine, and the US supplying arms and money to Israel are just as big an elephant in the room as 9/11, in my humble opinion. -Brian
San Francisco – More than 22 activists, including several CODEPINKers, were arrested after disrupting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s speech to the World Affairs Council on Thursday, October 22, 2009 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel (Union Square). Inside the auditorium, activists read the names of the children killed in Gaza last winter, publicly charging Olmert with killing innocent civilians, held up bloody hands, and displayed banners that read “Lift the Siege on Gaza” and “War Crimes are Not Free Expression!” The protests began when three activists approached the stage and read a citizen’s arrest warrant for Olmert’s arrest (see warrant below). The activists were charged with “disrupting public assembly”, held at the Tenderloin police station, and released after the event had finished. Read the rest of this entry »
This story is about a Canadian group of journalists that call themselves Press For Truth, it should not be confused with the movie Press For Truth, which covers the Jersey Widows story of pushing the Government into organizing the Commission Report hearings of 9/11. I have posted this particularstory because they are doing a wonderful job of covering a side of a current situation that is not getting enough coverage, much like the 9/11 truth movement work. -Brian
Press for Truth reporter and director of the upcoming film United We Fall Bryan Law covers the first day of a mass vaccination program which has begun in Toronto Canada. Thousands of Canadians in the so-called at risk group are being encouraged to line up right away. Bryan spoke with the concerned Canadians about why they were lining up to get the shot and it quickly became clear that the propaganda machine is kicking the fear state into overdrive.
When President Ronald Reagan was asked about Iran-Contra, he replied that he did not remember whether he had authorized two illegal arms sales to Iran in 1985. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated “I don’t recall” or similar phrases 64 times in one memorable day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — a performance so memorable that it has since been set to music as a cantata.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney may now have joined their illustrious company, with the release of a redacted summary (pdf) of his May 8, 2004 interview by the FBI concerning the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame in July 2003.
The summary was released on Friday afternoon in response to a Freedom of Information request from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. It consists, however, almost entirely of things that Cheney asserted he either did not know or could not recall.
This was written in response to the recent interview with FBI agent, turned whistleblower Coleen Rowley and the Real News Network. For that original interview click here. This is a key part to add to her story, and it is a key part of the story in whole. -Brian
The Real News Network recently carried an interview of former FBI lawyer Coleen Rowley by Paul Jay (part 1, part 2 and part 3), dealing with what it called the “unanswered questions about the lead up to 9/11.” Rowley was stationed at the bureau’s Minneapolis office during the Zacarias Moussaoui case in August and September 2001, but later became a whistleblower and left the organisation.
While many aspects of the interview are good and interesting, it leaves out what is probably the most important known fact about the Moussaoui case: the identity of the most senior FBI headquarters official involved fully involved in the case.
The official, a CIA officer named Tom Wilshire who was on loan to the bureau, is ubiquitous in the intelligence failures before 9/11. He was involved not just in the Moussaoui case, but also in the deliberate withholding from the FBI of visa information about one of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, in January 2000; the failure to notify the FBI of Alhazmi and Almihdhar’s entry into the US after he reviewed the Malaysia cables in May 2001; the preparations for the 11 June 2001 “shouting match” meeting between CIA officers and the bureau’s Cole investigators; and the failed hunt for Almihdhar in the weeks before the attacks.
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama Wednesday signed the fiscal 2010 National Defence Authorization Act during a ceremony at the White House.
Obama hailed the act, which contains $680.2 billion in military budget authority, as transformational legislation that targets wasteful defence spending.
The authorization act contains $130 billion to fund overseas contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and it also provides $6.7 billion for thousands of all-terrain, mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles now arriving in Afghanistan.
The United Nations cannot account for tens of millions of dollars provided to the troubled Afghan election commission, according to two confidential U.N. audits and interviews with current and former senior diplomats. (Read both audits)
As Afghanistan prepares for a second round of national voting, the documents and interviews paint the fullest picture to date of the finances of the election commission, which has been accused of facilitating election fraud and operating ghost polling places. The new disclosures also deepen the questions about the U.N.’s oversight of money provided by the United States and other nations to ensure a fair election in Afghanistan.
“Everybody kept sending money” to the elections commission, said Peter Galbraith, the former deputy chief of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan. “Nobody put the brakes on. U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a fraudulent election.” Galbraith, a deputy to the senior U.N. official in Afghanistan, was fired last month after protesting fraud in the elections.
Sherwangei, Pakistan (CNN) – A passport bearing the name of Said Bahaji, a suspect linked to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, has been found in a town captured by the Pakistani military.
The passport was found in South Waziristan, where the Pakistani military has been battling to wrest territory from the Taliban in Pakistan. It contained a Pakistani visa issued in August 2001 showing that the bearer entered Pakistan on September 4, 2001, and appeared unusually new for a document eight years old.
WASHINGTON – The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.
Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.
The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.
The covert Bush administration program that used retired military analysts to generate favorable wartime news coverage may not have been terminated, Raw Story has found.
In interviews, Pentagon officials in charge of the press and community relations offices — which worked in partnership on the military analyst program — equivocated on the subject of whether the program has ended.
Last May, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General issued a memorandum rescinding a Bush administration investigative report on the retired military analyst program because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” The now-retracted report had exonerated officials of using propaganda and referred to the program as just “one of many outreach groups.”
Post-9/11, Muslims have been victimized, vilified, and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, activism, and charity. They’ve been targeted, hunted down, rounded up, held in detention, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted in their right to counsel, tried on secret evidence, convicted on bogus charges, given long sentences, then incarcerated for extra harsh treatment as political prisoners in segregated Communication Management Units (CMUs) in violation of US Prison Bureau regulations and the Supreme Court’s February 2005 Johnson v. California decision.
Parts 2 and 3 of TheRealNews interview with Coleen Rowley are being reposted from Waarheid911’s blog entry of Part 1 on 10/23/2009. My comment there triggered a long discussion about controlled demolition, which unfortunately pushed these two important videos to the end of the section.
This is something you have not yet seen in any US media. French independent media La Télé Libre interviews two of the most prominent 9/11 truth activists, Cynthia McKinney and Niels Harrit. To understand the context of the interview, you need to know what is happening in France right now, because 9/11 is surely becoming a hot topic.
A year ago, French comedian Jean-Marie Bigard publicly questionned the official 9/11 story on a popular TV show and said a new investigation is needed. That was enough for him to be called a revisionist by a myriad of journalists and he even received many death threats along the way. Nine months later, Bigard came back on the topic, but this time he went as far as creating 11 videos in which he uses humor to ask questions about disturbing elements of the 9/11 Commission report. He is invited on several TV shows to talk about this and each time he gets vilified by journalists.
Recently, actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz also questioned the foundations of the official version of 9/11 in another TV show. He got the same treatment from the French press.
Both Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Marie Bigard will debate this hot topic on France 2 this October 28th (we will post a video of this show as soon as we receive it). Originally, France 2 was supposed to air a debate including two other people who also question the official story: Éric Laurent and Niels Harrit. A few days before the debate, France 2 announces that Harrit and Laurent are excluded from the debate.
One important question remains and journalists from La Télé Libre ask it: in a free society, can we question the official version of 9/11?
On October 22, 2009, George W. Bush came to Montreal to give a speech. Under Canadian law, once someone who has authorized or engaged in torture enters Canada, they can be tried in Canada for torture even if they are not Canadian. Montreal 9/11 Truth was ready with all the paperwork and that morning, the charges were filed.
More info after the jump…
Our court date will most likely be in January or February 2010 and we will receive a notice informing us of the exact date one month before the actual court date. We will keep you informed with new developments as we get them.
Posted by Brian 
