In response to my essays documenting that war is harmful to the American economy and produces a huge carbon footprint, some commentators have argued that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are necessary to combat Muslim extremists.
Even putting aside the fact that Saddam was an atheist who hated Muslims, the argument holds no credibility.
“Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism.”
And key war on terror architect Douglas Feith has now confirmed Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Wesley Clark in admitting that the so-called War on Terror is a hoax.
In fact, starting right after 9/11 — at the latest — the goal has always been to create “regime change” and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon so as to protect Israel. And the goal was never really to destroy Al Qaeda.
WASHINGTON – President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.
The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the “family jewels.’’
The documents in question – all more than 25 years old – were scheduled to be declassified on Dec. 31 under an order originally signed by President Bill Clinton and amended by President George W. Bush.
But now Obama finds himself in the awkward position of extending the secrecy, despite his repeated pledges of greater transparency, because his administration has been unable to prod spy agencies into conformance.
Please visit the more recent civil libertiy violations via Obama and the Patriot Act; 2011 saw the Obama administration asking for a longer Patriot Act extension than most other individuals in Government. Visit the Patriot Act category page here on Nor Cal Truth!
Key components in the USA Patriot Act are set to expire at the end of the year, but President Barack Obama is seeking to extend them, reversing his stark opposition in the past to the same provisions.
“The president’s reversal on Patriot Act reform is a major travesty,” said Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel for the leading civil rights group ACLU, in an interview with Raw Story. “There have been many, many abuses of power in the last four years.”
These three main aspects in question allow the government to acquire private information about civilians through warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and emails, as well as seizure of records from credit reporting companies, banks, internet service providers and libraries. Another component includes the loosening of conditions under which an individual can be accused of providing “material support” to terrorists.
European Union governments have given in to the pressure and appear set to make a last-minute agreement with the United States to allow its intelligence agencies to monitor bank accounts and transactions across the bloc.
Actually, the EU has been clandestinely allowing US intelligence agencies to have access to these financial records since 2001, allegedly to fight terrorism.
However, EU citizens were outraged when this invasion of privacy was revealed in 2006.
Now, however, interior ministers and security officials of the 27-member bloc are going to meet on November 30 to make a decision on legally allowing the United States to have access to bank data across the EU. Read the rest of this entry »
The true divides in Latin America – between justice and injustice, democracy and dictatorship, human rights and corporate rights, people’s power and imperial domination – have never been more visible than today. People’s movements throughout the region to revolutionize corrupt, unequal systems that have isolated and excluded the vast majority in Latin American nations, are successfully taking power democratically and building new models of economic and social justice. Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador are the vanguard of these movements, with other nations such as Uruguay and Argentina moving at a slower pace towards change. Read the rest of this entry »
This show was broadcast on No Lies Radio on November 29, 2009 and is now archived — Listen here.
Interview with writer and researcher, Peter Dale Scott, on his book, “The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America”. We touch on a few of the subjects in this new book, including the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger, Pakistan, Chile, Iraq, Continuity of Government and the increasing secret control of American foreign and domestic policy by fewer and fewer people.
You’ve heard that – according to the U.S. Senate – Bin Laden was “within the grasp” of the U.S. military in Afghanistan in December 2001, but that then-secretary of defense Rumsfeld refused to provide the soldiers necessary to capture him.
This is not news: it was disclosed in 2005 by the CIA field commander for the area in Afghanistan where Bin Laden was holed up.
In addition, French soldiers allegedly say that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but that the American commanders stopped them.
And the oldest – and second-largest – French newspaper claims that CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Read the rest of this entry »
On Friday, I provided some specifics about who had loaned Dubai money, and the potential fallout from Dubai’s debt crisis.
But I just found another interesting tidbit.
Specifically, 7 Days – one of the largest papers in Dubai – wrote in March:
The US public will be “outraged” by Citibank’s $8 billion loan to Dubai just six weeks after the bank was bailed out, US House of Representatives domestic policy subcommittee chair-man has said. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are a selection of quotes from the emails stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia. Many involve Phil Jones, head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit.
From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of “trick” has been misinterpreted
From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Read the rest of this entry »
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash regarding statistics for global warming.
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
We have found the famous “What Do I Do Now?” memo drafted by 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow on March 2, 2003. The memo advised staffers newly hired by the commission what they should do after starting work.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.
The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.
Posted by Brian 
