It would seem that the U.S. Government found itself in a conundrum when they allowed prisoners, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), to be tortured in secret prisons around the world. Once tortured, any confession or testimony from KSM, or others, could not be deemed reliable. Furthermore, the focus of the eventual proceedings would become a trial about the practice of torture, instead of being a trial about alleged terrorist crimes. That would have been untenable for the U.S. Government, which wants to avoid any and all accountability for their own crimes of torture.
In order to bypass potential discussion of torture, the latest Chief Prosecutor for the Military Commissions, Brig. General Mark Martins, found a willing witness in Majid Khan, a fellow GITMO inmate to KSM. Khan himself was not involved in the 9/11 plot. He supposedly got his information from time spent behind bars at GITMO with KSM. Kahn will be allowed to give this hearsay evidence against KSM in return for a reduced sentence. However, Khan’s sentencing won’t take place for four years. It seems the Prosecution is pinning their hopes and dreams on Khan’s upcoming performance. None of this lends credibility to an already suspect system.
Additionally, with campaigning for the upcoming Presidential elections heating up, the timing of this latest attempt at justice for 9/11 is exploitive at best.
Cheney gave an order to shoot down any aircraft on 9/11 contrary to what the 9/11 Commission Report was left to believe. The order was still given way too late, but more importantly is who it was given by. It would be illegal for the military to listen to the VP for a shootdown order because only the President and Sec. of Def. Rumsfeld had the legal ability. Our military followed protocol. The importance comes because it is most likely that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew this would be the case, and planned it to be such. Bush and Rumsfeld were impossible to be found or contacted in the critical moments where they might have stopped the 9/11 attacks…..where is the media folks? This story does not get to the meat of the matter. - Brian @ Nor Cal
Newly published audio this week reveals that Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous Sept. 11, 2001 order to shoot down rogue civilian aircraft was ignored by military officials, who instead ordered pilots to only identify suspect aircraft.
That revelation is one of many in newly released audio recordings compiled by investigators for the 9/11 Commission, published this week by The Rutgers Law Review. Featuring voices from employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and American Airlines, the newly released multimedia provides a glimpse at the chaos that emerged as the attack progressed.
Most striking of all is the revelation that an order by Vice President Dick Cheney was ignored by the military, which saw his order to shoot down aircraft as outside the chain of command. Instead of acknowledging the order to shoot down civilian aircraft and carrying it out, NORAD ordered fighters to confirm aircraft tail numbers first and report back for further instructions.
Cheney’s order was given at “about 10:15″ a.m., according to the former VP’s memoirs, but the 9/11 Commission Report shows United flight 93 going down at 10:06 a.m. Had the military followed Cheney’s order, civilian aircraft scrambling to get out of the sky could have been shot down, exponentially amplifying the day’s tragedy.
I have outlined it below in short; further down is the longer version with explanation details for each main and sub-category. It is stated that many of these categories are conservative calculations and that many categories are certain to rise in cost.
Note: $5 trillion dollars is equal to 5 million millions.
Counting the Cost: $5,000,000,000,000 ($5 Trillion)
Nearly half of the approximately $300 billion of taxpayer money the Department of Defense spent on projects in 2010 was awarded for no-bid contracts — some of which weren’t necessary, the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News reported on Monday.
The cost of the non-competitive contracts the U.S. military has tripled in the last 10 years, now tallying up to $140 billion of taxpayer money per year on quick solution defense spending.
Though competition amongst companies saves taxpayer money, the stated urgent nature of the military’s needs pushed aside fiscal concerns. In 2001, the Pentagon’s non-competitive contracts cost around $50 billion. In 2010, nearly a decade after the war on terror began, that spending has risen to around $140 billion. Only 55 percent of contracts awarded in the first two quarters of 2011 were competitive.
Al-Qaeda’s number two Atiyah abd al-Rahman has been killed in Pakistan, the United States said, claiming another “tremendous” blow to the group following the death of Osama bin Laden.
News of Rahman’s demise comes as the US gears up to mark the 10th anniversary of Al-Qaeda’s most spectacular attack, on September 11, 2001 on landmarks in Washington and New York, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Rahman, a Libyan, was killed in the northwest tribal Waziristan area on August 22 after being heavily involved in directing operations for Al-Qaeda, a senior US official said, without divulging the circumstances of his death.
However, local officials in the region told AFP last week that a US drone strike on August 22 on a vehicle in North Waziristan killed at least four militants. It was not clear if the two incidents were connected.
Of the many unanswered questions about the attacks of September 11, one of the most important is: Why were none of the four planes intercepted? A rough answer is that the failure of the US air defenses can be traced to a number of factors and people. There were policy changes, facility changes, and personnel changes that had recently been made, and there were highly coincidental military exercises that were occurring on that day. But some of the most startling facts about the air defense failures have to do with the utter failure of communications between the agencies responsible for protecting the nation. At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), two people stood out in this failed chain of communications. One was a lawyer on his first day in at the job, and another was a Special Operations Commander who was never held responsible for his critical role, or even questioned about it.
The 9/11 Commission wrote in its report that – “On 9/11, the defense of U.S. airspace depended on close interaction between two federal agencies: the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).”[1]
According to the Commission, this interaction began with air traffic controllers (ATCs) at the relevant regional FAA control centers, which on 9/11 included Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. In the event of a hijacking, these ATCs were expected to “notify their supervisors, who in turn would inform management all the way up to FAA headquarters. Headquarters had a hijack coordinator, who was the director of the FAA Office of Civil Aviation Security or his or her designate. “
The hijack coordinator would then “contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center (NMCC)” and “the NMCC would then seek approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance. If approval was given, the orders would be transmitted down NORAD’s chain of command [to the interceptor pilots].”[2]
An Indian leader Saturday said that the US, and Zionists were the prime suspects of 9/11 attacks. In an exclusive interview with IRNA Asif Mohd Khan, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Delhi said: “US should respond those hundreds of unanswered questions which indicated that the September 11 attacks in 2001 were either intentionally allowed to happen or were orchestrated by the US and Zionists”. Expressing his full support for the stands taken by the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Indian leader urged UN as well as Obama administration to formate a fact-finding committee to probe into the events.
A fortnight ago Ahmadinejad in a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, raised the issue of the many conspiracy theories still surrounding 9/11. He had also proposed that a fact-finding mission be set up by the UN to investigate the events. Asif said that subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq provided the fodder to the suspicion that US might have attack to justify military action in the Middle East. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.”
Many people protest war and promote ending it sooner by NOT PAYING their taxes. If you have not seen Aaron Russo’s final film before he died, “America: Freedom to Fascism“, now might be a good time.
If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military.
The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3 trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has included the Social Security Trust Fund in the budget as a way to make the cost of America’s imperial military adventures seem smaller in comparison to the total cost of government). Meanwhile, the military share of the budget works out to about $1.6 trillion.
That figure includes the Pentagon budget request of $717 billion, plus an estimated $200 billion in supplemental funding (called “overseas contingency funding” in euphemistic White House-speak), to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some $40 billion or more in “black box” intelligence agency funding, $94 billion in non-DOD military spending (that would include stuff like military activies funded through NASA, military spending by the State Department, etc., miilitary-related activities within the Dept. of Homeland Security, etc.), $123 billion in veterans benefits and health care spending, and $400 billion in interest on debt raised to pay for prior wars and the standing military during peacetime (whatever that is!).
The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out war footing.
“The American Bar Association believes that Article III courts are the preferred forum for trying detainees accused of criminal responsibility for the 9/11 attacks on the United States.”
Posted by Brian 
