Coleen Rowley | HuffingtonPost.com 

In a sad commentary on the currently disintegrating state of “main stream media”, I found myself ambushed on Saturday, March 6th, just ten minutes after I arrived at a conference outside Philadelphia on “9-11, the Wars and Our Broken Constitution”.

When young, smiling female producer Katie Hinman identified herself as being with ABC and asked for an interview, I had only just arrived at the conference. So although I was a little surprised that theNightline TV crew was there, I immediately consented to an interview before anyone had a chance to warn me that the TV show was trying to concoct a connection between the conference and the mentally ill young man who had been killed a few days before while shooting at Pentagon guards.

From the very first question Mr. Bury launched, it was clear, however, that he was not interested in the truth, and that I would not fare any better than someone who consents to go on Bill O’Reilly’s or Glenn Beck’s show.

In the interest of journalistic ethics, let me list a few of the departures from how a decent, ethical, objective journalist would have covered the story of this conference:

1) Chris Bury and his news crew left right after interviewing me. They apparently only spent a couple hours at the conference that morning (before I arrived) and did not interview any of the sick 9-11 rescue workers or 9-11 victim family members. It turns out that while castigating the victims’ quest for more facts about 9-11, they had refused to interview these folks!

2) Bury did not let me answer any of his questions, but repeatedly cut me off after I got only a couple words out. He asked totally leading questions using loaded terms with pejorative connotations like “conspiracy” in connection with the search for facts and evidence. Within a couple minutes, it was clear that Nightline’s Chris Bury was only interested in furthering his pre-determined agenda and conducting a hit type interrogation just as Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and other radio-TV talk shows are fond of doing.

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CLICK ON LINK BELOW TO WATCHhttp://framingtheworld.com/videos/politicalvideos/911videos/confrontedpo…WATCH ORIGINAL 3 PART VIDEO ON WACLA.ORGhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O-Haw6Wb50 Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Raimondo | AntiWar.com

Is the Afghan war already lost? Well, not quite, says the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, but almost:

“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) – while Afghan security capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

That’s the gist of a memo [.pdf] sent to the White House by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which was leaked to Bob Woodward and published – with “unclassified ” stamped all over it – in redacted form (redacted, according to Woodward, “at the request of the government”). The fact that it was leaked is receiving far more attention than the actual content, as everyone tries to decipher who leaked it and why. The conventional explanation is the simplest: it was leaked by someone who supports McChrystal’s position – more troops, more resources, more casualties – in order to back the president into a corner. Then there are those who speculate this was a “reverse leak,” i.e., someone was trying to get the president mad at the general for presumably having something to do with the leak. Not to forget the “fake leak” theory, whose adherents accuse the administration itself of being the source of the leak: the assumption being they’re trying to back themselves into a corner and cut short any congressional debate.

I like the “fake leak” theory myself, although I readily admit there’s no evidence to support it – except, that is, for the character of people we’re talking about. Yet the true significance of the McChrystal memo is that, in spite of the general’s conclusion victory is “achievable,” the rest of his memo refutes that contention.

The Afghan government – the government our troops are fighting and dying to protect – is described by McChrystal as riddled with corruption and “malign.” This has led to a “crisis of confidence among Afghans. Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents.”

But of course the Afghans are “reluctant” to welcome foreign invaders with open arms – yes, even if they are Americans. When have they ever done so?

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Harry Weber | Google | AP
A federal judge ruled Thursday that airlines and other companies in the industry that are being sued by families of terrorism victims can’t question FBI agents about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The defendants wanted to depose the agents and sought access to other evidence related to the investigation of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in order to show at trial that the government’s failure to catch the terrorists and prevent the attacks mitigates and excuses any alleged fault on the aviation companies’ part.

The government objected.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in New York said the defendants have also argued that the terrorists likely would have succeeded even if the defendants had exercised due care.

“The issues to be tried relate to the acts and omissions of the aviation defendants, not the government,” Hellerstein wrote in his ruling. “The government’s failures to detect and abort the terrorists’ plots would not affect the aviation defendants’ potential liability.”

There was no immediate comment from the defendants or their lawyers. Spokespersons for UAL Corp.’s United Airlines, AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and US Airways Group Inc. declined to comment. Lawyers for several airlines did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Other defendants include Delta Air Lines Inc., Continental Airlines Inc., AirTran Airways, Boeing Co. and several airport authorities and security companies.

The judge said he plans to set a trial date for the lawsuits involving three wrongful death cases and 19 property damage cases on July 28.

Many relatives of victims of the attacks received money from a special national fund established to compensate victims’ families, though some relatives chose to sue instead.
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Coleen Rowley | RawStory.com

In the absence of my being there in New York City to stand with the 9/11 families, first responders and survivors, I offer the following statement in support of your goal of a new investigation into the attacks of September 11th and the NYC CAN campaign to place it on the ballot for November.

At the time of 9-11, I had been an FBI agent for over 20 years. My main responsibilities by then were teaching criminal procedure to FBI agents and other law enforcement officers, mostly about 4th Amendment search and seizure, 5th and 6th Amendment law of interrogation, right to attorney and constitutional protection of rights to “free speech”, due process, habeas corpus, and against cruel and unusual punishment. A week before 9-11, I and the rest of the FBI’s ethics instructors were mandated (as a result of an earlier public FBI scandal) to give a one hour PowerPoint presentation, a form of remedial training on “law enforcement ethics” which I accomplished in a fairly perfunctory way, just reading the slides.

After 9-11, with the knowledge I had of the bitter internal dispute inside the FBI that was being hushed up but had kept some of our better agents from possibly uncovering more of the 9-11 plot before it happened, I couldn’t forget two of the slides in that Law Enforcement ethics curriculum:

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911blogger.com

In a letter signed by Michael J. Heimbach, Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counterterrorism Division, National Security Branch, it is claimed that a hypothesis regarding exclusive GPS guided autopilot control of the four aircraft destroyed during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is under review. The FBI notice is in response to receipt of a twenty page thesis describing the aircraft attacks of September 11, 2001 being potentially within the capability solely of autopilot and navigation systems of American Airlines and United Airlines Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft and upgraded Global Positioning System (GPS) technology circa 2001.

More info here

David Edwards & Stephen Webster | RawStory.com

Editor’s note: It is interesting we have heard virtually nothing about the KKK — documented to have been heavily infiltrated by the FBI since the 1960s — in the recent past, but all of a sudden they have become active again, peddling their anachronistic racist nonsense now that “white supremacists” have become a threat according to the government.

A collection of black homeowners in a Tennessee town are upset and fearful after the Ku Klux Klan targeted their neighborhood with hate-filled fliers, dropped on their lawns in the dead of night.

The fliers, which call for whites to secure the future for “white, Christian children,” denounce interracial marriage and homosexuality, along with calling for an end to “white discrimination.”

Complaints to the police in Greeneville, Tennessee did not help. In an interview with local news channel WJHL, Greenville police officer Terry Webb said that the fliers, perceived by residents to be threatening in nature, “possibly” rise to the criminal level of littering. However, he claimed, it’s their First Amendment right to advertise racially-motivated hated on a person’s doorstep.
“The Devil is busy and (the KKK) talk about being Christians, how can you say you’re a Christian displaying all this hatred,” homeowner Leroy Ripley told the station.

“Littering, are you kidding me?” jeered CNN’s Kyra Philips during a Thursday segment. “Here we are in 2009. We have a black president, gay leaders, successful interracial marriages. We have come a long way, folks. Still, in this country, you can spew hate, make innocent black residents fearful to come out their doors and all these punks get busted for is littering.”

The FBI admits James Cromit was a wannabe terrorist with “limited means.”

Kurt Nimmo | Infowars.com 

As it turns out the so-called Muslim terrorists busted in New York, who supposedly wanted to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the New York Air National Guard base, were petty criminals set-up by the FBI.

“Last year, the four men began communicating with an FBI informant who sold them fake explosives and inactive missiles,” reports theChristian Science Monitor. “While the bombs these terrorists attempted to plant tonight were — unbeknownst to them — fake, this latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In other words, the men were patsies that posed absolutely no threat to New York and without the involvement of the FBI there would have been no terror plot. In fact, as Paul Joseph Watsonnotes today, the men “have turned out to be semi-retarded potheads” that did not possess the intelligence or wherewithal to engage in terrorist activities. Even the Associated Press admits they were “amateurs every step of the way. They had trouble finding guns and bought cameras at Wal-Mart to photograph their targets. One was a convicted purse snatcher, another smoked marijuana the day the plot was to be carried out.”

The New York terror plot is reminiscent of the so-called Miami Seven case. In that case, the FBI promised a group of semi-retards and losers money and explosives for an FBI-cooked up plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. It took two hung juries before 5 of the 7 supposed terrorists were convicted earlier this month.

It didn’t take long for officials to exploit the alleged terror plot and call for Congress to “increase anti-terror funding to New York and other areas that suffered a significant reduction a few years ago,” according to Fox News.

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

Exactly as we predicted in our headline story yesterday, two of the ringleaders in the “deadly” New York terror plot salaciously hyped by the media and government officials have turned out to be semi-retarded potheads.

“The men will likely turn out to be semi-retarded dropouts,” we stated in our article yesterday, basing our forecast on the fact that in every other major terror sting in the west given so much prominence by officials and the corporate media, the poor suckers rounded up by the feds always turn out to be low IQ petty criminals down on their luck, provocateured and armed by federal agents.

We already knew that the men were provided with an inert rocket launcher and fake C4 explosives by an FBI informant, and now as more details emerge, our original summation of the case is proving accurate.

According to an Associated Press report, the four men charged with planning to blow up synagogues and military planes, “Were amateurs every step of the way. They had trouble finding guns and bought cameras at Wal-Mart to photograph their targets. One was a convicted purse snatcher, another smoked marijuana the day the plot was to be carried out.”

The report continues,”Relatives said the defendants were down-on-their-luck men who worked at places like Wal-Mart, a landscaping company and a warehouse when they weren’t behind bars. Payen’s lawyer said he was “intellectually challenged” and on medication for schizophrenia. Marilyn Reader said he has “a very low borderline” IQ.”
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John Byrne | RawStory.com

Poisonous anthrax that killed five Americans in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks doesn’t match bacteria from a flask linked to Bruce Ivins, the researcher who committed suicide after being implicated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a scientist said.

Spores used in the deadly mailings “share a chemical ‘fingerprint’ that is not found in the flask linked to Bruce Ivins,” Roberta Kwok wrote in Nature News, citing Joseph Michael, a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Michael analyzed letters sent to the New York Post and offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, and found a distinct “chemical signature” not present in the flask known as RMR-1029, which Ivins could access in his laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

“Spores from two of those show a distinct chemical signature that includes silicon, oxygen, iron, and tin; the third letter had silicon, oxygen, iron and possibly also tin,” Kwok wrote. “Bacteria from Ivins’ RMR-1029 flask did not contain any of those four elements.”
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Jim Loney | Reuters/YahooNews 

Six men plotted in a poor Miami neighborhood to join al Qaeda and wage war against the United States, a U.S. prosecutor told jurors Wednesday at the opening of the third trial of an alleged scheme to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and U.S. government buildings.

A defense lawyer countered that the men were set up in a crime “manufactured” by the FBI and two government informants she referred to as “The Muscle” and “The Little Thug.”

Government prosecutors have tried and failed twice in the last two years to persuade juries that the men conspired with the Islamic militant group to wage holy war against the United States. The previous attempts ended in mistrials when the jurors could not decide guilt or innocence.

The failures were a blow to the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and drew criticism that the government was guilty of overzealous prosecution.

When federal agents arrested the men from Miami’s poor Liberty City neighborhood in June 2006, Washington officials touted the case as a major blow against terrorism and a breakthrough in efforts to dismantle domestic sleeper cells.

Prosecutor Jacqueline Arango told jurors Wednesday the group’s alleged ringleader, Narseal Batiste, recruited soldiers who wore uniforms, marched together and engaged in “military-type training.”

“They all agreed to sell out their country for money,” she said.

She told the jurors they would see the men taking oaths of allegiance to the world’s “deadliest terrorist organization.”

“Each and every one of these men pledged, on videotape, their loyalty to al Qaeda,” she said.

‘A 100 PERCENT SET-UP’

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Peter Finn | WashingtonPost.com

The military judge overseeing proceedings against five of the men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks signed an order designed to protect classified information that is so broad it could prevent public scrutiny of the most important trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to lawyers and human rights groups.

The protective order, which was signed on Dec. 18 by Judge Stephen R. Henley, an Army colonel, not only protects documents and information that have been classified by intelligence agencies, it also presumptively classifies any information “referring” to a host of agencies, including the CIA, the FBI and the State Department. The order also allows the court in certain circumstances to classify information already in the public domain and presumptively classifies “any statements made by the accused.”Three of the accused, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, are defending themselves and, under the order, anything they say during the course of the trial could be shielded from the public.”These rules turn the presumption of openness on its head, making what is perhaps the most important trial in American history presumptively closed to the public and the press,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. “If these rules applied in all cases, there would be no such thing as an open trial in America.”

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The Memory Hole

By Russ Kick at 30 September, 2008, 2:41 pm

For the first time, Martin Luther King’s entire FBI file is now online - all 16,659 pages, posted by The Memory Hole.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE INTERNET ARCHIVE PAGE CONTAINING THE FILE

The FBI’s Freedom of Information Act office elected not to post the entire file to its website; instead, they’ve posted only the first 201 pages here.

For a long time, if you wanted to view the whole thing, you had to pay the FBI FOIA office over $1,600 (10 cents/page) to get a paper copy, which isn’t a very convenient format for a huge file, or you had to go to a library that had it on microform, or you could view it in the reading room at FBI HQ in Washington, DC. Now you can get it online in PDF format. The FBI has divided MLK’s file into 121 sections, and they’ve made an Acrobat file for each section. But as mentioned above, they’ve posted only the first two sections to their site. The Memory Hole has put all 121 PDF files into a dozen zip files and posted them here. Read the rest of this entry »

WashingtonPost.com 

Ivins Could Not Have Been Attacker, Some Say

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick’s Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects.

Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins’s former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed numerous times. < Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away.The FBI eventually focused on Ivins, whom federal prosecutors were planning to indict when he committed suicide last week. In interviews yesterday, knowledgeable officials asserted that Ivins had the skills and access to equipment needed to turn anthrax bacteria into an ultra-fine powder that could be used as a lethal weapon. Court documents and tapes also reveal a therapist's deep concern that Ivins, 62, was homicidal and obsessed with the notion of revenge.

Yet, colleagues and friends of the vaccine specialist remained convinced that Ivins was innocent: They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the fine, lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in the late summer and fall of 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are deeply skeptical that the bureau has gotten it right this time.

"I really don't think he's the guy. I say to the FBI, 'Show me your evidence,' " said Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, former director of the bacteriology division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, on the grounds of the sprawling Army fort in Frederick.

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AP | International Herald Tribune

Government lawyers say the ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks could be compromised if the airline industry is allowed to seek more information from the FBI to defend itself against lawsuits brought by terrorism victims.

In papers filed late Tuesday, the government urged a judge to block aviation companies from interviewing five FBI employees who the companies say will help them prove the government withheld key information before the 2001 attacks.

The lawyers said it would be impossible to interview the employees without disclosing classified or privileged material that could “cause serious damage to national security and interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings.”

“The harm described is not hypothetical and cannot be lightly dismissed,” according to the court papers submitted by the office of U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia. “Investigators continue to seek out those parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks who remain at large.”
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William F. Jasper | TheNewAmerican.com

For six years, Sibel Edmonds has been carrying out an heroic crusade to protect her adopted country from national security threats within the top levels of the American government. Hired as an FBI translator in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, Edmonds, a Turkish American, threw herself into the daunting task of translating thousands of hours of recordings of backlogged intercepts in Turkic, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. What she heard on the tapes was alarming: Turkish agents in the United States bribing high-level U.S. officials and obtaining our military and intelligence secrets. What she witnessed at the FBI was even more appalling: translators who were intentionally filing false translations and passing information to foreign powers; and, what’s even worse, FBI superiors who did nothing about it when these serious breaches were brought to their attention.

Unwilling to settle for the bureaucratic “don’t rock the boat” response she faced from immediate supervisors, Sibel Edmonds decided to take her concerns higher up the FBI chain of command. The result? She was fired, and those she tried to have investigated got off scot-free; some fled the country to avoid potential prosecution, while others continued their alleged criminal and treasonous activities. Some of the FBI colleagues who blocked her efforts were promoted.

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Carrie Johnson and Christopher Lee | WashingtonPost.com 

Nearly two dozen federal agents yesterday raided the Washington headquarters of the agency that protects government whistle-blowers, as part of an intensifying criminal investigation of its leader, who is fighting allegations of improper political bias and obstruction of justice.
Agents fanned out yesterday morning in the agency’s building on M Street, where they sequestered Office of Special Counsel chief Scott J. Bloch for questioning, served grand-jury subpoenas on 17 employees and shut down access to computer networks in a search lasting more than five hours.

Bloch, who was nominated to his post by President Bush in 2003, is the principal official responsible for protecting federal employees from reprisals for complaints about waste and fraud. He also polices violations of Hatch Act prohibitions on political activities in federal offices.Bloch has long been a target of criticism, some of it by his agency’s career officials, but the FBI’s abrupt seizure of computers and records marked a substantial escalation of the executive branch’s probe of his conduct. Retired FBI agents and former prosecutors called the raid an unusual, if not unprecedented, intrusion on the work of a federal agency.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive “blanket” administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit  released Thursday.

Top officials at the FBI’s counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas “retroactively to justify the FBI’s acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests,” the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine found.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine’s 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.

With the flawed follow-up letters, the Counterterrorism division attempted to provide retroactive legal justification for telephone data the division had gotten on 3,860 phone numbers, gotten either through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests.

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TheBlotter | ABC NEWS | Justin Rood Reports:

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago.  But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn’t keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn’t generally like to talk about it.  (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)

But if the ACLU’s figure isn’t accurate, it’s also unlikely to be off by that much.  Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.

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Larisa Alexandrovna | rawstory.com

Hijacker had post-9/11 flights scheduled, files say

 Newly-released records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request contradict the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and raise fresh questions about the role of Saudi government officials in connection to the hijackers.The nearly 300 pages of a Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline used by the 9/11 Commission as the basis for many of its findings were acquired through a FOIA request filed by Kevin Fenton, a 26 year old translator from the Czech Republic. The FBI released the 298-page “hijacker timeline” Feb. 4.The FBI timeline reveals that alleged hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi, who was aboard the United Airlines flight which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, had booked a future flight to San Francisco. He also had a ticket for a trip from Casablanca to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.Though referenced repeatedly in the footnotes of the final 9/11 Commission report, the timeline has not previously been made available to the public.The FBI timeline is dated Nov. 14, 2003 but appears to have been put together earlier (since the last date mentioned in the document is Oct. 22, 2001) and was provided to the 9/11 Commission during its 2003 investigation. The final Commission report cites the FBI timeline 52 times. Read the rest of this entry »