Daniel Tencer | RawStory.com

The Pentagon has gone into damage control mode after Defense Secretary Robert Gates appeared to confirm that security contractor Blackwater is operating in Pakistan.

The admission, quickly denied by Defense Department officials, has set fire to long-simmering rumors inside Pakistan about the involvement of for-profit contractors in the war against the Taliban.

Defense Department officials say Gates did not mean to suggest that Blackwater is now operating on Pakistani soil when a journalist from Pakistan’s Express TV asked him about military contractors’ activities.

In the interview, which took place Thursday, Gates was asked “about another issue that has come up and again … about the phone security companies [sic] that have been operating in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan. Xe International, formerly known as Blackwater or Data Corp. Under what rules are they operating here in Pakistan?”

“Well, they’re operating as individual companies here in Pakistan, in Afghanistan and in Iraq,” Gates replied. “If they’re contracting with us or with the State Department here in Pakistan, then there are very clear rules set forth by the State Department and by ourselves.”

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Kurt Nimmo | InfoWars.com

Read the entire executive order here (in PDF format).

Obama has issued another executive order, this time establishing a so-called “Council of Governors.”
The order, signed on January 11, further diminishes the sovereignty of the states and builds on a framework for possible martial law. The executive order was completely ignored by the corporate media.

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1822 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-181), and in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments to protect our Nation and its people and property,” the order reads.

The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security.
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David Rogers | Politico.com

The White House formally asked Congress late Thursday to shift at least $1 billion within next year’s defense budget to expand the Army’s active duty forces by another 15,000 troops in 2010.

This would be the first installment toward Defense Secretary Robert Gates decision last month to seek 22,000 more active Army troops over the next few years to relieve the strain of continued deployments overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The increase — which the Pentagon insists is only temporary — follows on already approved steps by Gates to permanently increase Army manpower by 65,000 and add another 27,000 Marines.

With the added 15,000 troops, the Army’s active end strength will rise from 547,400 to 562,400, but to cover the cost, about $1.013 billion, the White House is also proposing cuts from chiefly procurement accounts.
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David Hambling | NewScientist.com

THE Pentagon’s enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee. The ADS was unveiled in 2001, but it has not been deployed owing to legal issues and safety fears.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, has now called for it to be upgraded. The US air force, whose radar technology the ADS is based on, is increasing its annual funding of the system from $2 million to $10 million.

The transmitting antenna on the current system is 2 metres across, produces a single beam of similar width and is steered mechanically, making it cumbersome. At the heart of the new weapon will be a compact airborne antenna, which will be steered electronically and be capable of generating multiple beams, each of which can be aimed while on the move.

The new antenna will be steered electronically and is capable of generating multiple heat beams

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AFP | Yahoo.com

Defying a possible presidential veto, the USHouse of Representatives on Thursday approved a 2010 defense spending bill that would continue to fund a weapons program targeted by the Obama administration.

Lawmakers voted 389 to 22 to pass the 550.4-billion-dollar measure, despite veto warnings from the White House unless a provision to build more F-22 stealth jet fighters is dropped.

The White House also balked at 603 million dollars added to the House bill to continue developing a backup engine for the F-35 strike fighterbeing built by General Electric, Co. and Rolls Royce Group.

The bill, which also includes 130 billion dollars to fund the wars in Iraqand Afghanistan for the fiscal year beginning on October 1, still requires the Senate to pass the bill and for the chambers to agree on a compromise version before it can go to President Barack Obama to be signed into law.

The House Armed Services Committee passed an amendment last week to provide 369 million dollars over two years to purchase parts to construct 12 more of the F-22 fighters, which are built by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved on Thursday its version of the Pentagon budget resolution, which included 1.7 billion dollars to fund seven more of the premier US fighter jets. The Senate bill also included a 3.4 percent salary increase for military personnel.

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PressTV.ir

As Washington gets updates on Israeli plans to strike Iran, US President Barack Obama orders the Pentagon to rejuvenate contingency plans for the use of military in Iran.

Despite the prospects of diplomatic engagement with Tehran over its nuclear program, Defense Secretary and Pentagon chief Robert Gates said Friday that the White House has not ruled out the possibility of a military strike if diplomacy was to fail.

“Presidents always ask their military to have a range of contingency plans available to them,” Gates told NBC television. “And all I would say is that, as a result of our dialogue with the president, we’ve refreshed our plans and all options are on the table.”

In a turnabout from the policies of the Bush administration, President Obama says he seeks to diplomatically engage Iran over its disputed nuclear program.

Iran, which favors diplomacy to resolve the nuclear differences with the West, says the program is directed at the civilian applications of the technology.

The US and Israel, however, accuse the country of seeking military objectives in its pursuit.

The defense secretary’s remarks come shortly after a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington.

Netanyahu’s visit exposed deep differences between the two administrations over issues such as the stalled peace talks with the Palestinians and the US approach to deal with Iran.

According to the Israeli Radio, Netanyahu told Obama that Israel reserves the right to take unilateral military action against Iran, refusing to make a promise to follow the US lead.

The nuclear issue aside, President Obama’s decision to engage Tehran in direct talks has raised concern in Israel that rapprochement between the two rivals — which have not had diplomatic ties for nearly three decades — would ultimately cool Tel Aviv’s relations with its main ally.

Netanyahu’s visit to the US has raised fears that the US president may have failed to avert an impending war in the volatile Middle East.

Israel, the possessor of Middle East’s sole nuclear arsenal, has long strived to portray Iran as a regime hell-bent on an imminent nuclear war.

Iran says it has no plans to attack any country but continues to beef up its military capabilities to deter threats such as those originating from Israel.

David Edwards and Muriel Kane | RawStory.com

Video @ RawStory.com

Last year, The New York Times revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon program which used retired officers who served as military analysts on television news programs to disseminate Bush administration talking points.

The Defense Department inspector general’s office issued a report this January attempting to refute the Times expose, but it was widely derided as a “whitewash.” In an unusual move, the Pentagon has now withdrawn that report, acknowledging its inaccuracies and flawed methodology.

Times columnist Frank Rich believes that this one apparent coverup may be only the tip of the iceberg and that it may have been carried out in response to “orders from above.”

Rich, who has written extensively on the Bush administration’s use of propaganda to sell its war in Iraq, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday that “there were a lot of suspect reports” from the inspector general’s office.

“In 2005, [Senator] John Warner … was incredulous at a Pentagon inspector general’s report that cleared Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz of knowing anything about the huge procurement scandal involving Boeing,” Rich noted. “That inspector general [Joseph Schmitz] then left and went to work for Blackwater.

“We have to know what other suspect IG reports there were over the past five or six years during the war in Iraq,” Rich insisted. “There may be a much bigger story here.”

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Fred Kaplan | Slate.com

Much remains unknown about the shape of President Barack Obama’s debut defense budget. Details won’t be announced—several key decisions won’t be made—until April. But from the broad numbers released this morning, two things seem clear:

First, it is larger than it appears to be at first glance.
Second, not counting the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are projected to decline significantly—in other words, looking just at the Defense Department’s base-line budget for weapons production, research and development, uniformed personnel, and so forth—Obama’s estimates for military spending over the next few years are roughly the same as George W. Bush’s.

If huge change is in the works at the Pentagon, it will come in the form of budgets reshuffled, not reduced.
And yet, there are signs—they can be gleaned from the numbers—that serious changes are in the offing, that some lumbering weapons programs will be slashed, perhaps canceled, though it’s probably also the case that other programs will be boosted or accelerated to compensate.

The basic outlines are these. The Obama administration is requesting $533.7 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2010—a $20.4 billion, or 4 percent, increase over its budget this year, the last budget passed by the Bush administration.
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Jim Wolf | GlobalResearch.ca 

The U.S. Senate approved William Lynn, a former Raytheon Co lobbyist, to be deputy secretary of defense after he received a special White House waiver from strict new rules meant to close a “revolving door” between government and big business.

Lynn, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer from November 1997 to January 2001 under former President Bill Clinton, was confirmed by a vote of 93 to 4 on Wednesday.

At Raytheon, the world’s biggest missile-maker and the Pentagon’s No. 6 supplier by sales, he was registered as the company’s top lobbyist to the Defense Department from July 2002 until last year.

President Barack Obama’s new ethics rules bar lobbyists for two years from working as appointees on matters they had lobbied about. The White House Office of Management and Budget gave Lynn a waiver to further “the public interest.”

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Stephen C. Webster  | RawStory.com

A career Army specialist who survived the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, claims that no evacuation was ordered inside the Pentagon, despite flight controllers calling in warnings of approaching hijacked aircraft nearly 20 minutes before the building was struck.

According to a time-line of the attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration notified NORAD that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked at 9:24 a.m. The Pentagon was not struck until 9:43 a.m.

On behalf of Spc. April Gallop, who served in the Network Infrastructure Services Agency as an administrative specialist, California attorney William Veale has filed a civil suit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and former US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11. It alleges they engaged in conspiracy to facilitate the terrorist attacks and purposefully failed to warn those inside the Pentagon, contributing to injuries she and her two-month-old son incurred.
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Pentacon.com

This follow-up presentation to “The First Known Accomplice?” is a surreal, intense, and disturbing personal experience with the famous taxicab driver Lloyde England who claims his cab was hit by a light pole that was allegedly hit by the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

The physical impossibility of Lloyde’s story is exposed as we deconstruct the details and take a road trip with Lloyde to physically examine the actual cab that he still has preserved under a tarp on his property in the country. In light of the now proven north side approach we now know why Lloyde’s story simply doesn’t add up.

The Corbett Report has created a new video explaining why people should be angry about more than just the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. One reason, of course, is the $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon the day before 9/11, when the Pentagon’s Budget Analyst Office was destroyed. Watch the video below: 

By Eric Lipton

Published: September 14, 2008

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration is pushing through a broad array of foreign weapons deals as it seeks to re-arm Iraq and Afghanistan, contain North Korea and Iran, and solidify ties with onetime Russian allies.

From tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to missiles, remotely piloted aircraft and even warships, the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Russert, Dick Cheney, and 9/11
During an informal interview in 2007, incidentally, Mineta reaffirmed that Cheney was already there when he arrived in the PEOC, saying “absolutely.”  When he was told that the Commission had said that Cheney did not arrive
until 9:58, Mineta expressed surprise and said: “Oh no, no, no; I don’t know how that came about.” Although Mineta said he “might have been mistaken on the 9:25,” he said that Cheney was definitely there before the Pentagon was
struck, and “so was Mrs. Cheney.”

While we are remembering Tim Russert and his years as moderator of “Meet the Press,” we would do well to recall his interview with Vice President Dick Cheney at Camp David on September 16, 2001, just five days after the 9/11 attacks.1 In fact, Cheney himself, during an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer the morning after Russert died, reminded us of that Camp David interview, saying: “I always, when I think of Tim and think of ‘Meet the Press,’ that’s the show that always comes to mind. . . . It was a remarkable moment in American history.”2  

Commenting that he himself “remember[ed] that interview vividly,” Lauer asked: “Anything stand out from that interview?” In his reply, Cheney said: “We went back and reminisced to some extent about what had actually happened on the morning of 9/11. So it was—it was a remarkable moment in my career.”3 

It was indeed. In reminiscing about his movements that morning, Cheney contradicted what was to become a crucial element of the account that the 9/11 Commission would give of those movements.  

In praising Russert’s tenure on “Meet the Press,” Cheney said: “He would ask you tough questions, he would remind you of quotes you made previously in other settings or on earlier shows, so you never got away with anything going up vis-à-vis Tim.”4 

Given Cheney’s appraisal of his interview with Russert as a “remarkable moment” in both American history and Cheney’s own career, we should apply Russert’s method to this interview, reminding ourselves of exactly what Cheney said, then comparing it with what was said about Cheney by the 9/11 Commission.  

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International Herald Tribune.com

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the U.S. Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the U.S. military spent about $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another case, $11.1 million was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

Mary Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told the committee that the absence of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment without any basis for the payment.”
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John Stauber | Center For Media and Democracy   

This Sunday’s stunning, front-page New York Times revelations of the Pentagon military analyst program have been met with a wall of silence and cover-up on network television news. America’s TV networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and FOX — are where most Americans get most of their news, and they are the main culprits in allowing Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark to turn them into the primary propaganda tool for selling the Iraq war to the public.PBS NewsHour covered this issue in a televised debate April 24 pitting me against Robert Zelnick, former ABC Pentagon correspondent and now chair of the Boston University journalism department. (Zelnick is also affiliated with the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank.) No one from the Pentagon would agree to appear on the PBS show, nor would anyone appear from any of the guilty TV networks. Read the rest of this entry »

Jon Gold | 911blogger.com

As we all know, Norman Mineta’s testimony was never investigated or mentioned in the 9/11 Report. You would think that the “young man” that was involved in such an important moment during the 9/11 attacks would be named, and brought before the 9/11 Commission. He was not.

This clip is from C-SPAN’s 5/26/2005 taping of the “Washington Journal”. The caller clearly states that at the time the Pentagon was hit, Cheney was aware of the incoming plane according to Norman Mineta’s testimony. At the end of this segment, Lee Hamilton says that Cheney was “in the key position at the time”. Prior to that, he said that “the Vice President was in the operation room”, and “when the impact did occur.” To me, this sounds like Lee Hamilton just confirmed Norman Mineta’s testimony.

ABC News | Jonathan Karl 

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention.  This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors.  No more.  The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. 

It won’t be emailed to reporters and it won’t be posted online.

Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: “We’re making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we’ll send it out via CD in the mail.”

Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it “too politically sensitive.”

ABC News obtained the comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorism on Tuesday.  Read the report’s executive summary HERE.

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“Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions,” Pentagon general counsel William Haynes to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions.

Ross Tuttle | TheNation.com

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes–and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials have been rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned in October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior Defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

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From 9/11blogger

This is actually a very positive piece. I guess they saw the shirt on MTV’s Made, because within 24 hours this guy was asking for a copy of the movie and permission to use it in a piece.

Too bad the American coverage can’t be more like this.
Check out the link, Johnny on 9/11 here