Since it began a decade ago, the federal government’s massive investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks has been plagued by missteps and complications.
Investigators initially focused on the wrong man, then had to pay him a nearly $6 million settlement. In 2008, they accused another man, Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself before he could go to trial.
Now, in the latest twist, the government has argued against itself.
In documents deep in the files of a recently settled Florida lawsuit, Justice Department civil attorneys contradicted their own department’s conclusion that Ivins was unquestionably the anthrax killer. The lawyers said the type of anthrax in Ivins’s lab was “radically different” from the deadly anthrax. They cited several witnesses who said Ivins was innocent, and they suggested that a private laboratory in Ohio could have been involved in the attacks.
“Martin Luther King Jr. warned that a country in continuous war approaches spiritual death. I wonder if he realized that this extinction would play out in the nation’s shopping malls as, like the Romans, we distract ourselves with bread and circuses from the crimes and catastrophes that surround us, and the responsibilities we avoid”
Celebrating Spiritual Death On Black Friday
How many remember that this “Black Friday” marks the 10th anniversary of George Bush’s famous presidential advisory just after 9/11 for citizens to do their patriotic duty by pushing their worries aside and going shopping? The idea of asking the American people to make sacrifices in the face of the coming “War on Terror” was too ’70s, too Jimmy Carter.
The 2001 attacks were quickly seized upon by hard-core propagandists and “shock doctrine” advocates as the “new Pearl Harbor,” sparking a decade of blatant social-psychological manipulation. The media onslaught has proved sadly effective in getting Americans to support the ongoing series of bloody and bankrupting wars and to overlook the root causes of this violence in today’s world.
By incessantly pushing on the emotional hot-buttons of fear, hate, greed, false pride and blind loyalty (in that order), warmongers and flim-flam men have, since time immemorial, sought to bring out the worst in human beings. Up to now the propaganda has worked, persuading most Americans to accept with minimal visible coercion the enormous corruption and cruelty at the heart of the corporate-military-industrial-congressional-media complex.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I played a small role back in late October 2001 in stoking the national shopping addiction, which worked so well to distract the American citizenry from looking closely at 9/11. At that time, the officially endorsed shopping compulsion served to prevent people from asking questions about how and why the attacks had occurred, and from paying full attention to the horrendously wrongheaded initial responses. These included the mass roundup of innocents; the establishment of indefinite, due process-free, Kafkaesque detention zones at Guantanamo and elsewhere; and the initial conspiracy to go to the “dark side” and resort to systematic torture — all of which served to morally bankrupt the United States.
At that time, Minnesota’s Mall of America boasted of being the largest shopping complex in the world. Soon after 9/11, its stores, like others around the country, fell victim to the “Halloween terrorist threat hoax,” which mall owners feared, would scare off would-be shoppers. And so, as our FBI office spokesperson, I dutifully participated in a hastily organized press conference instigated by the Mall. I merely spoke the truth at the press conference, assuring the gathered media that the warning that terrorists would target malls in the United States was just a hollow rumor that had gone viral, without any real evidence or intelligence behind it.
October 7th marks the ten year anniversary of the commencement of NATO operations in Afghanistan. Although the impending illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was enough to drive millions of people worldwide into the streets in protest, there has never been the same widespread resistance to the Afghan war.
This war has been deemed the “right war” and given a broad measure of support from across the political spectrum because it is still linked in the popular imagination with the events of 9/11. Even a cursory interrogation of these assumptions, however, reveals the absurd nature of this pretext for what has been all along an illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation.
On the evening of 9/11, the North Atlantic Council issued a statement offering the assistance of all 18 NATO member states to the United States, calling the attacks “without precedent in the modern era.”
The next day the Council met again, making the extraordinary decision to invoke Article 5 of the Washington Treaty for the first time in NATO’s history. The carefully worded statement contained the important stipulation that Article 5 would only apply if it could be determined that the attacks were directed from abroad, something that NATO Secretary General Robertson noted had not been determined.
The trial of five Guantánamo captives accused of the Sept. 11 mass murder won’t begin until next year at the earliest under a timetable set out Monday by the legal authority in charge of the war court.
Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald notified lawyers on both sides of the case that he will accept recommendations on whether the case should go forward as a death penalty prosecution until Jan 15, 2012. Moreover, he also set the same deadline for Pentagon-appointed lawyers to offer their opinions on whether all five men should be tried simultaneously.
Prosecutors swore out a capital case against confessed 9/11 plot mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators in May after Attorney General Eric Holder abandoned a plan to have a civilian judge and jury hear the case in a Manhattan federal court.
Since then, the case has been mired in delay while some members of the Pentagon-paid defense teams try to obtain security clearances to meet the accused at Guantánamo and start work on their cases.
Hummingbird drones fly at 11 mph and can perch on windowsills. The 3-foot-long Raven can be tossed into the air like a model airplane to spy over the next hill in Afghanistan. The Air Force’s new Gorgon Stare aerial drone sensor technology can capture live video of an entire city. From the RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-1 Predator to considerably smaller aerial drones in recent years, the Air Force has experienced an unmanned aircraft revolution in the decade since Sept. 11, 2001.
….
Long before 9/11, former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper, then U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander, envisioned giving unmanned aerial vehicles offensive capability that would allow immediate action when their surveillance cameras spotted high-value targets. In 1999, RQ-1 Predators flew over Kosovo 24 hours per day in surveillance of hostile forces.
Almost seven months before 9/11, a Predator successfully fired a Hellfire missile in flight near Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. The same Predator was among the first three UAVs to deploy overseas on Sept. 12, 2001. By the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2005, Jumper told Congress he wanted to buy every Predator the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego could build, and the Air Force announced it would buy 144 Predators and increase the squadrons of robotic spy planes from three to 12 in the next five years.
As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many Americans have unfortunately had a casual disregard for infringements on our civil liberties that have occured since that fateful day.
The most glaring examples of government abuses include the TSA, warrantless wiretaps and searches, and the violations of financial and personal privacy by the PATRIOT Act.
But there are also smaller and creeping threats to civil liberties that have not surfaced, but threaten to radically change basic constitutional protections in America. The Department of Justice recently arrested and indicted Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, for the dangerously vague crime of “providing material support” to a designated terrorist organization. Ahmad uploaded a YouTube video showing Abu Ghraib photos, U.S. Iraqi war footage, and Islamic prayers. For this, he faces more than twenty years in prison.
A large majority of Americans believes the United States has spent too much in troops and treasure in the last decade responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that as a result, American economic strength and power abroad have declined, according to a new poll by the University of Maryland and the Program on International Public Attitudes.
“Overall, two in three (66 percent) believe U.S. influence has diminished in the world over the last decade, and this view is highly correlated with the belief that the U.S. over-invested in responses to 9/11,” wrote Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull, the poll’s key architects, in a summary of the key findings released on Thursday.
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)
The former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged Tuesday to testify against former Vice President Dick Cheney if he is ever tried for war crimes.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson told Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman that he would participate in a trial even if it meant personal repercussions.
“I, unfortunately — and I’ve admitted to this a number of times, publicly and privately — was the person who put together Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations Security Council on 5 February, 2003,” Wilkerson said. “It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it to this day. I regret not having resigned over it.”
In an interview that aired on NBC Monday, Cheney told Jamie Gangel that unlike President George W. Bush, he did not have a “sickening feeling” when they discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq.
“I think we did the right thing,” Cheney said.
Joining Wilkerson and Goodman to discuss Cheney’s new book “In My Time,” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald said that it was disturbing to see the former vice president treated simply as an “elder statesman.”
“The evidence is overwhelming… that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder — his word — of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about,” Greenwald explained.
“And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.”
“Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?” Goodman asked.
“I certainly do,” Wilkerson replied. “And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything [Greenwald] just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like ‘exploding heads all over Washington.’ This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney.”
Wilkerson was referring to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested in London in 1998 after being indicted for crimes against humanity. It was the first time the principle of universal jurisdiction had been applied to a former foreign head of state.
Watch this video from Democracy Now, broadcast Aug. 30, 2011.
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.
I would say the report was balanced, though imperfect in details. Thanks to Huffington Post and reporter Ana Compain-Romero! Allow me to fill in some of those erred-details:
Overall, the teamwork involved in this project has been a great source of enjoyment for myself.
The screen-shots below are from the Huffington Post article. I almost forgot to mention that this very blog is featured in that Huffington Post report…
The UK’s Daily Mail reported that the U.S. dropped charges against Bin Laden for the USS Cole and US Embassy bombings:
U.S. District Court judge Lewis Kaplan, who had been presiding over the bin Laden case in Manhattan federal court, issued an order called ‘nolle prosequi’, which means ‘do not prosecute’ in Latin, a typical legal move once a defendant is deceased.
Bin Laden was indicted back in 1998 in the Southern District of New York for his role in the al Qaeda attack on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed more than 200 people, including a dozen Americans.
The indictment was later revised to charge bin Laden in the dual bombings of two American embassies in East Africa that killed 224 on August 7, 1998, and in the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000. None of the charges involved the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
It was 5 long years ago that author Ed Haas had noticed that the FBI web page for Bin Laden did not mention the attacks of 9/11. He called the FBI to find out more:
On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.
Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
Since that report, the FBI has not displayed bin Laden’s web-page with information connecting him to the 9/11 attacks. Even further, the FBI has acknowledged evidence of controlled demolitions as “backed by thorough research” when presented by Richard Gage. That letter from the FBI is downloadable here. Watch Richard Gage here.
Lack of evidence to connect Bin Laden to 9/11 aside, many are wondering why the death of Usama does not translate into the death of the ill-named “War of Terror.” Quite the opposite has become the case actually.
Within days of killing Bin Laden a NATO air-strike was launched on Tripoli, Libya killing one of Gaddafi’s sons. The death was not confirmed by NATO and there are questions as to the veracity of the report as Al Jazeera noted, however the article also pointed out the following:
Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, when it was hit by at least one missile fired by a NATO warplane late on Saturday, Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said on Sunday.
Al-Arab’s compound in Tripoli’s Garghour neighbourhood was attacked “with full power” in a “direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country”, Ibrahim said, calling the strike a violation of international law.
“What we have now is the law of the jungle,” he told a news conference. “We think now it is clear to everyone that what is happening in Libya has nothing to do with the protection of civilians.”
Alongside the Libya campaign were drone strikes in Yemen; barely remembered at this point but not completely forgotten. Karen Greenburg reports at Salon:
The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)
The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council - also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office. And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.”
The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11. Indeed, former Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke told Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig:
After 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.
The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.
Posted by Brian 
