“It’s a system that lies automatically, at every level from bottom to top – from sergeant to commander in chief – to conceal murder.” Daniel Ellsburg, Secrets, (Viking, 2002)
“Beneath all the fakes and lies and all the mental aberrations, however deeply hidden or wildly deformed, the truth still breaks through, still glitters, still breathes.” (Mihail Sebastian, Romanian playwright, as quoted by Nickolson Baker, Human Smoke, Simon & Schuster, 2008)
In the movie, Fair Game, about the travails of Valerie Plame, and her outing as a CIA agent by the Bush administration, Sean Penn, in the character of Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband, exhorts a group of students to “Demand the Truth!” Yet, very few of us have demanded to know the truth about 9/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center. We have been content with the officially sanctioned explanation. Those who are not so content are ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists.”
It was a conspiracy – 9/11. That is indisputable. There is no “lone gunman” to confuse matters. To say anything meaningful about 9/11, you have to be a conspiracy theorist. It is only a question of whose theory of the conspiracy you are prepared to believe. It is incredible that anyone still believes anything the Bush administration said about that tragic day.
The statement from Colleen Kelley also included a few words about Wikileaks - I have not included those words in my re-posting below. Please visit the source for the statement in its entirety.
Statement by Colleen Kelley, a founding member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was formed around the core issue of civilian casualties: We did then and we do not now condone the killing of civilians in other lands. Our organization was founded to oppose any action that would necessitate the deaths of civilians. Worse, still, is the denial of any value of these Iraqi lives, through the concealment of their very existence.
For 9/11 families, the rough number 2,996 was rounded up to 3000 through addition. For the Iraqi people, their numbers were alluded to as a subtraction vastly different from any attempt at reality.
As people who are well aware of the suffering, we say stop killing civilians now and take responsibility for those whose lives are already lost.
Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director of MI5 from 2002 to 2007.
by Brian Romanoff July 21, 2010
Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former Director of the British Intelligence Agency known as MI5, has stated that there was no evidence linking Iraq and Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11:
This is a nice gesture 7 years after the fact that American and British (NATO) forces led the invasion into Iraq in 2003; of which we still have over 80,000 American troops deployed to , plus the 100,000 American troops deployed in Afghanistan.
And just like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Manninghan-Buller was confident that this war would be long, so long that she was not sure that it could be won, saying, “ifthis is a warthat canbe won,it is not going to be won soon.”
“But the world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives..”
Manninghan-Buller resigned after the London 7/7/05 bombings due to the obviously inept, and quite possibly criminal, intelligence failures. This is from a Daily Mail article in 2006:
The head of MI5 has resigned weeks before full details of the role of her agents in a surveillance operation involving two of the July 7 bombers are due to be revealed.
Wait a minute……What happened to only 100 Al Qaeda members in the region? Was the 50-100 years of war prediction by John McCain on the Presidential campaign trail accurate? Stop paying your taxes yesterday people!
The United States may still be in the Afghanistan and Iraq region for another ten years, according to Gen. George Casey.
“The types of conflict that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think are likely to be fighting here for a decade or so, are focused on the people,” Casey, the army’s Chief of Staff, said Friday night at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.
“We are not going to succeed in either place by military means alone. You are only going to succeed when the people perceive there is a government represented by their interests, when there is an economy that can give them a job to support their families, when there are educational systems that can educate their family. All those things are essential to the long term success of the military operation.” Read the rest of this entry »
Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist hailed as a hero in the Arab world for throwing his shoes at the then President Bush, claims, “Under US pressure, Iraqi media covered up my torture and supporters were arrested.”
Pentagon officials announced today that for the first time since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are more troops in Afghanistan than Iraq, officially making Afghanistan the ‘Big War’ and Iraq ‘that other war.’
Given President Obama’s campaign pledges to escalate the war in Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq, it is a wonder that it took over 16 months to reach this point, but a snail’s pace in the Iraq drawdown coupled with logistics problems in the latest Afghanistan escalation conspired to make it a long, difficult road.
Indeed, were it not for the endless surges into Afghanistan this day might never have come at all, as 92,000 troops remain in Iraq and the numbers are still not dropping in any sort of serious way. Rather Obama started with only 30,000 troops in Afghanistan but is rapidly approaching 100,000, with more expected all the time.
An average of 18 US military veterans are taking their lives every day as the Obama administration and the Pentagon grow increasingly defensive about the epidemic of suicides driven by Washington’s wars of aggression.
The stunning figure was reported last week by the Army Times, citing officials in the US Veterans Affairs Department.
The department estimates that there are 950 suicide attempts every month by veterans who are receiving treatment from the department. Of these, 7 percent succeed in taking their own lives, while 11 percent try to kill themselves again within nine months.
The US commander in Afghanistan said Friday that the military is wasting money by employing too many private contractors to do jobs better done by soldiers or local Afghans.
“We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be,” General Stanley McChrystal told an audience of French officers and military experts at France’s defence university in Paris.
“I think we’ve gone too far. I think that the use of contractors was done with good intentions so that we could limit the number of military. I think in some cases we thought it would save money. I think it doesn’t save money.”
The whisteblower website WikiLeaks — which exploded onto the national stage earlier this month after it released avideo recording showing US servicemembers shooting two reporters and six others to death – says they plan to release another, even more harrowing clip. Collateral Murder was the title give to the project which released the video earlier this month and can be viewed by going to the following link:
Now, this new clip about to be released will show previously classified footage from US warplanes that had been tapped to bomb Taliban positions in Farah province, Afghanistan last year.
Adds the UK Telegraph: “The Afghan government said at the time that the strikes by F-18 and B1 planes near Granai killed 147 civilians. An independent Afghan inquiry later put the toll at 86.”
Update #3. Iraqi journalists want probe of taped US shooting. (click here)
Update #2. AP Military Source confirms video authenticity. (click here)
Update #1. Unedited long version of video below.
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.
Medical records which would shed light on the death of government scientist David Kelly will be kept secret for 70 years, it emerged yesterday.
The unprecedented move has been ordered by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry which controversially concluded that the mysterious death was suicide.
It means vital evidence, including the results of Dr Kelly’s post-mortem examination - which have never been made public - will remain under wraps until 2073, by which time anyone involved in the case will almost certainly be dead.
The body of 59-year- old UN weapons inspector Dr Kelly was found in July 2003 in woods near his Oxfordshire home. Days earlier he had been revealed as the source of a BBC story claiming evidence against Iraq had been ‘sexed up’ to justify invasion.
When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.
During a visit to Ramallah a year ago while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza was underway, I shared my fears with a close Palestinian friend. “It may sound insane, but I think the Israelis’ real objective is to see them all dead.”
My friend told me not to be silly, the assault was horrific, but it was not mass killing. I said that wasn’t the issue: This was a population already very vulnerable to disease, ill-health, and malnutrition after years of siege, with its infrastructure rotted, its water and food contaminated. Israel’s war would surely push the people over the brink, especially if the siege was maintained — as it has been.
In other words, Israel would not directly kill tens of thousands of Palestinians, but it would create the conditions for tens of thousands to die. Any epidemic could finish the job. My friend fell silent at these words, but still shook his head in disbelief.
Two things have changed since last year: More people have started to apply the term “genocide” to what Israel is doing to Gaza. And not only is Israel being directly accused but also, increasingly, Egypt.
Is it genocide? “The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” — a clear, concise document adopted by the United Nations in December 1948 — states that genocide is any of five acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Posted by Brian 
