A major legal challenge to one of the Obama administration’s most radical assertions of executive power began this morning in a federal courthouse in Washington, DC. Early last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki, to seek a federal court order restraining the Obama administration from killing his son without due process of law. But then, a significant and extraordinary problem arose: regulations promulgated several years ago by the Treasury Department prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as a ”Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special “license” from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation.
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.
Why the Huffington Post will report the story below and not this story here, is no mystery. The left gate-keeping media don’t want you to know that there is good reason to question the official 9/11 story….with science, observation, and experiment.
And to all the Obama supporters- Guantanamo was supposed to be closed a half year ago. (Let alone, it should never have been built, used, or funded.)
Omar Khadr appeared before Military Judge Patrick Parrish in Guantanamo Bay this week to confirm his decision to fire his American legal team. He then stated that he plans to boycott the military commissions because he considers them “unfair” and “unjust.”
In explaining his decision, Khadr read from his own handwritten prepared statement that cited his objections to a proposed plea deal that would have had him admit guilt, saying that such a move would allow the U.S. government to use him to fulfill its goals and would provide the government with an excuse for torturing and abusing him as a child. Khadr asked how he could get justice from a process like the one found in the military commissions.
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 »
The world dramatically changed on 9/11, though, not for the reasons that were given by the Bush administration less than twenty four hours after the attacks, but for reasons that are deeply disturbing, and revealing; reasons that are either unknown, or have been repressed by activists in the peace movement.
As we enter the ninth anniversary of the War on Terror, the war in Afghanistan is intensifying, tensions in Iraq are resurfacing, and the possibility of a U.S. led attack on Iran is growing daily. Reflection upon the central premises and objectives in America’s vast military enterprise in the Middle East has never been more urgent. The stakes have been raised. Questioning the official story of 9/11 is now a matter of human survival. We can not ignore the calling of history any longer. We live in a state of perpetual emergency; every moment is vital, every second counts, every day that passes is a missed opportunity to right a horrible wrong.
Correcting our flawed judgment of the 9/11 events nine years later is not an easy task; raising doubt about the official story challenges assumptions and beliefs that have taken hold in our innermost core. But once we see with new eyes, constructing a new peaceful world becomes possible. Professor David Ray Griffin has made it less hard to see through the lies and propaganda by painstakingly excavating all the facts that are recoverable about 9/11, and then juxtaposing them with details of the official story in his article, “Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?” Professor Griffin calls the war in Afghanistan “an abomination,” and unjustifiable.
There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.” This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.
Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!
There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?
This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.
This week news about the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization armed conflict in Afghanistan, the largest and longest-running war in the world, has begun to penetrate the wall of triumphalism and complacency erected by Washington during the past year’s unparalleled military escalation in the South Asian nation.
Between the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009 and now, the number of American troops in the war zone has almost tripled, from 32,000 to 94,000, with the total to reach 100,000 in upcoming weeks. Late last month U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan for the first time outnumbered those in Iraq, 94,000 compared to 92,000. There will soon also be an aggregate of 50,000 armed forces provided by Washington’s NATO allies and NATO partnership nations.
The 150,000 U.S. and allied troops in place by this summer will exceed by tens of thousands the largest amount of foreign forces ever before stationed in Afghanistan: An estimated 118,000 Soviet troops that constituted the high water mark of the USSR’s deployment between late 1979 and early 1989. [1]
A group is calling for signers to its petition that would have the 9/11 Conspirators trial held in New York. This is from their website:
More than 2,600 people were murdered in New York City on 9/11. The five men accused of planning the 9/11 attacks have been in US custody for several years but have still not been brought to justice. Why? Because the Bush administration held the men for years in secret prisons, and then insisted on trying the men in an untested military commission.
Now the Obama administration is considering holding the trial in a commission, too . These military commissions are not only lacking in fundamental due process guarantees, they are extremely inefficient. Since 9/11, military commissions have tried only three terrorism suspects. US federal courts, by contrast, have successfully completed more than 400 terrorism cases in that time.
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.
Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
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.”
The Telegraph reported that many professionals in Afghanistan believe the U.S. is funding both sides of the war:
It’s near-impossible to find anyone in Afghanistan who doesn’t believe the US are funding the Taliban: and it’s the highly educated Afghan professionals, those employed by ISAF, USAID, international media organisations – and even advising US diplomats – who seem the most convinced.
One Afghan friend, who speaks flawless English and likes to quote Charles Dickens, Bertolt Brecht and Anton Chekhov, says the reason is clear. “The US has an interest in prolonging the conflict so as to stay in Afghanistan for the long term.”
The fighting in Afghanistan this week has resulted in the deaths of Canadian Colonel Geoff Parker, 42, of Oakville, Ontario, and U.S. Colonel John McHugh, 46, of W. Caldwell, New Jersey. It also claimed the lives of Lieutenant Colonels Paul Bartz, 43, of Waterloo, Wis., and Thomas Belkofer, 44, of Perrysburg, Ohio. Other fatalities were Staff Sgt. Richard Tieman, 28, of Waynesboro, Pa., and Specialist Joshua Tomlinson, 24, of Dubberly, La.
The four officers were killed in Kabul, The New York Times reported May 21, when “A suicide bomber in a minibus drove into their convoy (of armored sports utility vehicles), killing the four officers, two other American servicemen and 12 Afghan civilians in a passing bus.” The total number of U.S. service member deaths since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan eight years ago now stands at 1,064. The number of contractors killed in the fighting has been put at around 300. And in 2008 alone it is estimated that nearly 4,000 Afghan civilians perished.
This writer deeply regrets each and every one of those deaths, especially those of the 12 innocent Afghan civilians this week. They likely would all be alive today if President George W. Bush had not chosen to invade a country that never attacked America and which the U.S. oil industry has long coveted for a pipeline route. They would be alive if President Barack Obama had withdrawn U.S. troops. Instead, he has escalated the conflict and increased “defense” spending to a record $708 billion for fiscal 2011—a step which will only make the U.S. military-industrial complex(MIC) more powerful. For those associated with MIC, however, “defense” spending means jobs and prosperity.
A US appeals court has refused to give prisoners at an American military base in Afghanistan the same legal right to challenge their imprisonment as detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
The three-judge panel on Friday sided with the Obama administration, ruling that US courts do not have jurisdiction over the legal petitions by the prisoners at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and ordered that their cases be dismissed.
The administration of Barack Obama, the US president, took the same legal position as the administration of his predecessor, George Bush, arguing that detainees at Bagram have no right to have their cases heard in federal court in Washington.
“If WE SECURE them getting a good harvest, now they’re going to get paid for their hard work. Then we can deal with trafficking afterwords” – U.S. Soldier in new ABC report.
Securing a good harvest and making sure these poppy farmers get paid is why troops are in these fields? What exactly is going on there?
Posted by Brian 
