Noam Chomsky: No Evidence that Al-Qaeda Carried Out the 9/11 Attacks

November 5, 2010

Many people in the 9/11 community will be      a)shocked     b)happy    c)suspicious     d) all of the above        from this news report.  Please visit 9/11 Blogger to see peoples’ reactions. 

source: Washingtons Blog       Nov 5, 2010

Leading liberal intellectual Noam Chomsky just told Press TV:

As Wired wrote on September 27, 2001:

President Bush has said he has evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, so it would seem obvious that the FBI would include him and other suspects on its 10 most wanted fugitives Web page.

Think again.

Bin Laden is listed, but only for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. There is no mention of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the attacks on the USS Cole in October 2000, both of which he is widely believed to have orchestrated. And forget about Sept. 11.

The reason? Fugitives on the list must be formally charged with a crime, and bin Laden is still only a suspect in the recent attacks in New York City and Washington.

“There’s going to be a considerable amount of time before anyone associated with the attacks is actually charged,” said Rex Tomb, who is head of the FBI’s chief fugitive publicity unit and helps decide which fugitives appear on the list. “To be charged with a crime, this means we have found evidence to confirm our suspicions, and a prosecutor has said we will pursue this case in court.”Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer who was deputy director of the U.S. State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993, said in a Sept. 12 interview conducted by Frontline that there is no concrete proof that bin Laden is responsible for the USS Cole and the 1993 WTC attacks, but bin Laden celebrates those attacks and associates himself with people who are responsible for it.

President Bush promises to reveal evidence linking bin Laden to the suicide hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bin Laden has applauded the attacks but denies direct involvement.

The Bush administration never provided such evidence.

As I wrote last December:

President Obama said Tuesday night as justification for the surge in troops in Afghanistan:

We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people.

Al Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban”, who refused to turn over Osama bin Laden.

Is that true?

 On October 14, 2001, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted bombing if the Taliban were given evidence of Bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11.

Specifically, as the Guardian writes:

Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban “turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over.” He added, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty” …

Afghanistan’s deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.

“If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved” and the bombing campaign stopped, “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”, Mr Kabir added.

However, as the Guardian subsequently points out:

A senior Taliban minister has offered a last-minute deal to hand over Osama bin Laden during a secret visit to Islamabad, senior sources in Pakistan told the Guardian last night.

For the first time, the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden for trial in a country other than the US without asking to see evidence first in return for a halt to the bombing, a source close to Pakistan’s military leadership said.

And yet … the U.S. turned down the offer and instead prosecuted war.

And in 2006, FBI agent Rex Tomb told reporter Ed Haas that the FBI still did not have enough evidence:

The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.

 

In fact, many leading liberals have expressed doubts about 9/11, including Daniel Ellsberg, Ray McGovern, William Blum, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Lewis Lapham, Dan Hamburg, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Amy Goodman, Thom Hartmann, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Marc Crispin Miller, Howard Zinn, Robert McChesney, Gore Vidal, Chris Floyd, Robert Fisk, Medea Benjamin, Doris “Granny D” Haddock, Paul Hawken, David Cobb, Randy Hayes, Ernest Callenbach, Dennis Bernstein, Paul H. Ray, Michael Franti, Janeane Garafalo and Ed Asner.

As have many prominent old-fashioned conservatives. And the 9/11 Commissioners themselves. See this.

“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program a Simple Question.

We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.”

The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.

“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany.”

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News Outlests Appeal Pentagon’s Ban on Guantanamo Coverage

May 13, 2010

McChrystal Clear

April 16, 2010

April 16, 2010

The Raw Story had this to report today:

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.”

2 Weeks ago Rory O’Conner reported this at Alternet:

We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” says Afghan commander McChrystal.

Read the rest of this entry »


The Case for the Impeachment of Barack Obama

April 15, 2010
by Dave Lindorff   source: Global Research   April 15, 2010
 
Back in 2005-06, I wrote a book, The Case for Impeachment, in which I made the argument that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as other key figures in the Bush/Cheney administration–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales–should be impeached for war crimes, as well as crimes against the Constitution of the United States. 

These days, when I mention the book’s title, people sometimes ask, half in jest, whether I’m referring to the current president, Barack Obama. 

Sadly, it is time to say, just 14 months into the current term of this new president, that yes, this president, and some of his subordinates, are also guilty of impeachable crimes–including many of the same ones committed by Bush and Cheney. 

Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.

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Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal

April 10, 2010

By Charlie Savage  source: NY Times   April 10, 2010

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.

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Senate Votes to Extend Patriot Act

February 25, 2010

 Update #1: With no modification and little debate, Democrats send Patriot Act extension to Obama , Kucinch Jeers.  (Raw Story Link)

If the corrupted one-party politcal system we have right now is not abundantly clear to you yet, I hope it will be soon.

source: MSNBC   Feb 25, 2010

Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the primary U.S counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations.

The proposed protections were cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Dashing the hopes of liberals, the Senate Wednesday night instead passed — by voice vote without debate — a one-year extension of key parts of the USA Patriot Act that would have expired on Sunday.

Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.

Read the rest of this entry »


Afghanistan: If the Enemy Vanishes — Kill Civilians

February 16, 2010
by Robin Beste  Feb 16, 2010,  source: Glabal Research

The civilian deaths in Kandahar and Marjah are a brutal reminder of the heavy price many Afghans will pay in the months and years to come to save the face of those responsible for prosecuting a futile and unjustifiable war. 

NATO’s current offensive in the Afghan town of Marjah is being portrayed as a low casualty mission in the “good war” to get rid of the Taliban.

 If you were to believe the news broadcasts, it’s already a success.

 Since the assault was always intended to be as much a publicity stunt as serving any military objective, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will certainly be pleased at how the media has snapped into line and acted as stenographers for Nato press releases. Read the rest of this entry »


The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

January 19, 2010

by Scott Horton   source: Global Research   Jan 19, 2010

1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”

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.

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A Sign of Empire Pathology

January 13, 2010
by Finian Cunningham   source: Global Research   Jan 13, 2010
More US military personnel have taken their OWN lives than have died in action

Here is a shocking statistic that you won’t hear in most western news media: over the past nine years, more US military personnel have taken their own lives than have died in action in either the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. These are official figures from the US Department of Defence, yet somehow they have not been deemed newsworthy to report. Last year alone, more than 330 serving members of the US armed forces committed suicide – more than the 320 killed in Afghanistan and the 150 who fell in Iraq (see wsws.org).

 Since 2001, when Washington launched its so-called war on terror, there has been a dramatic year-on-year increase in US military suicides, particularly in the army, which has borne the brunt of fighting abroad. Last year saw the highest total number since such records began in 1980. Prior to 2001, the suicide rate in the US military was lower than that for the general US population; now, it is nearly double the national average.

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Iraqis Rightfully Outraged at Blackwater Ruling- Iraq to Sue Ex-Blackwater Guards

January 2, 2010

source: CNN

Iraq said Friday that it will file a lawsuit against five Blackwater security guards cleared of manslaughter charges in the 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians, an act a government official called murder.

The Iraqi government also will ask the U.S. Justice Department to appeal a federal judge’s “unfair and unacceptable” dismissal of the charges Thursday, spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

An Iraqi man wounded in the 2007 incident also voiced his anger Friday, saying U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina’s dismissal of the charges showed “disregard for Iraqi blood.”

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The Bush Crime Syndicate

December 28, 2009

  Part 1 of 2

  Part 2 of 2

source: We Are Change


Hillary Clinton: We’ll Still Be In Afghanistan in 50 or 60 Years

December 24, 2009

source: Washingtons Blog

On December 1st, President Obama talked about withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan within 18 months.

Everyone now knows that there is no firm withdrawal date from Afghanistan. See this and this.

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Lithuania Hosted Secret CIA Jails

December 23, 2009

source: Al Jazeera

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran at least two secret detention facilties in the Baltic nation of Lithuania, a parliamentary inquiry has found.

The sites were set up by Lithuanian intelligence services for the CIA, according to the report published on Tuesday.

But the head of the inquiry said he was not able to confirm whether al-Qaeda suspects had ever been interrogated at either location

The sites existed … and planes landed,” Arvydas Anusauskas, the head of parliament’s national security and defence committee, told reporters.

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Can Nobel Prize Winner Obama At LEAST Stop the Torture?

December 11, 2009

On Thursday, President Obama said:

 We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend.

 Presumably, complying with American and international law are some of the ideals that we fight to defend.

Torture is a violation of both international and American law. Specifically, the Geneva Convention makes it illegal to inflict mental or physical torture or inhuman treatment.

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