9/11 – A Cheap Magic Trick

An article from 2010 that is just as relevant today.
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By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
August 13, 2010

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will release the names and roles of retired generals and admirals it hires to advise the military, the No. 2 Defense official announced today in an opinion piece in USA TODAY.

As late as Monday, the Pentagon had considered shielding the names of its “senior mentors” and their roles in consulting active-duty commanders on war games and other exercises.

Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn called release of the information “a step toward transparency.”

“We believe that these steps address previous concerns about how the program was administered,” he wrote.

A USA TODAY investigation found that the mentor program had been run largely unregulated for years.

MILITARY MENTORS: Pentagon revises rules

Many retired officers were hired by defense contractors and thus were not subject to government ethics rules preventing conflicts of interest.

The services did not have to identify them, and many mentors made hundreds of dollars per hour while collecting six-figure pensions. Of the 158 retired generals and admirals identified as mentors, 80% had financial ties to defense contractors, including 29 who were full-time executives of defense industry companies.

Click on link to read the rest of the article on Pentagon to release names, roles of ‘senior mentors’

Associated Press
Monday, March 12, 2012

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney canceled a Canadian speaking appearance because of security concerns sparked by demonstrations during a visit he made to Vancouver last fall.

Cheney was scheduled to talk about his experiences in office and the current American political situation at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on April 24.

But Ryan Ruppert of Spectre Live Corp. said on Monday that Cheney and his daughter Elizabeth had begged off through their agent.

“After speaking with their security advisers, they changed their mind on coming to the event,” Ruppert said. He said they had “decided it was better for their personal safety they stay out of Canada.”

Last Sept. 26, Cheney was forced to stay holed up in the Vancouver Club for seven hours before it was deemed safe for him to leave. Demonstrators blocked the entrances and at one point scuffled with police.

Cheney critics accuse him of endorsing the use of water boarding and sleep deprivation against detainees while serving in former President George W. Bush’s administration.

Before the Vancouver event, Human Rights Watch urged the federal government to bring criminal charges against Cheney, accusing him of playing a role in the torture of detainees.

Source

“In a way, the worldview of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.

By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
George Orwell (1984)

Americans have fallen for the lie of 9/11 just as they have fallen for the lies about so many other issues. They have been taught to trust the government and authority figures rather than pursue the truth on their own. They may also be afraid of learning the truth because it involves a basic betrayal of trust. It’s somewhat like a family hiding the truth that the father is a wife beater or child molester. The truth is too awful to bear as is the need to take action. So it’s easier to live in a dream world where everything is fine. Fear of being ostracized for not thinking the same as everyone else also plays a part. Those who have researched the truth and have spoken out are frequently shunned by colleagues, friends, and family. They may also suffer a loss of their profession as have such as Dr. Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan.

Americans are also largely ignorant of the entirely of their false consciousness regarding historical events, race, religion, crime, and politics. The media whitewashes or fails to report accurately and comprehensively on taboo topics because the elite establishment owns the media and it’s not in their interest for the public to know the extent of the betrayal. The balkanization and tribalization of America also prevents the truth to be revealed as each groups demands that only their version of events be told and anything else is labeled as ‘hate speech’, anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Thus political discourse or indeed any discourse is largely devoid of content or is polarized in order to avoid any real discussion of facts and consequences. The dumbing down of public discussion is a directly outcome of the tribalizing of America which was largely at the direction of the Jewish establishment.

As with Pavlovian conditioning, the questioning of events or identifying of particular groups as being responsible for 9/11 is labelled and dismissed as conspiracy talk or anti-Semitism. Americans have been conditioned to avoid all sensitive topics that question what the government tells us in the same way

by Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online
March 9, 2012

Forget the past (Saddam, Osama, Gaddafi) and the present (Assad, Ahmadinejad). A bet can be made over a bottle of Petrus 1989 (the problem is waiting the next six years to collect); for the foreseeable future, Washington’s top bogeyman – and also for its rogue North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners and assorted media shills – will be none other than back-to-the-future Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And make no mistake; Vlad the Putinator will relish it. He’s back exactly where he wants to be; as Russia’s commander-in-chief, in charge of the military, foreign policy and all national security matters.

Anglo-American elites still squirm at the mention of his now legendary Munich 2007 speech, when he blasted the then George W Bush administration for its obsessively unipolar imperial agenda “through a system which has nothing to do with democracy” and non-stop overstepping of its “national borders in almost all spheres”.”

So Washington and its minions have been warned. Before last Sunday’s election, Putin even advertised his road map The essentials; no war on Syria; no war on Iran; no “humanitarian bombing” or fomenting “color revolutions” – all bundled into a new concept, “illegal instruments of soft power”. For Putin, a Washington-engineered New World Order is a no-go. What rules is “the time-honored principle of state sovereignty”.

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By Pepe Escobar
March 6, 2012
Asia Times Online

Even before their fateful encounter at the White House this Monday, US President Barack Obama made it clear, on the record, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu wouldn’t face him down.

Or did he?

No matter what the rhetorical gymnastics performed by Obama, a case can be made that Bibi the Bully wags the American dog full-time. Worse; the Likud-dominated Israeli administration, single-handedly, is playing with dispatching vast spheres of the global economy into total depression, as its hysterics progressively hurl oil prices towards the stratosphere.

The world is a hostage of Israel’s whims even as the 120-plus members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) support Iran’s right to enrich uranium and BRICS members Russia, China and India, as well as Turkey, dismiss the US and the EU’s oil embargo – a true declaration of economic war – on Iran.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) get-together in Washington takes place in an intimidating, cavernous Colosseum where the wealthy crowd ululates in unison for Iranian blood. A passable tactician but a lousy strategist, Bibi the Bully’s only game in town is “Bomb Iran”.

This is justified by the “existential threat” posed by non-nuclear Iran to a nuclear-armed garrison state/settler colony that is literally, graphically wiping a whole people (the Palestinians) off the map.

Still one more proof of the “existential threat” fallacy was provided last week by Iran’s Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even before the absolute victory of his supporters in Friday’s parliamentary elections – which effectively turned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into a lame duck.

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by Philip Giraldi,
March 01, 2012
Antiwar.com

I have long nurtured this thoroughly depressing conviction that the United States, far from being a shining city on the hill, has become one of the most corrupt of nations. Why does America have more lawyers than the rest of the world combined? It is because the corruption has been institutionalized at every level of political life and is protected by laws and procedures created precisely to enable elites to maintain dominance over the rest of us. I appreciate that my viewpoint may be regarded as somewhat simplistic as I am neither a judge nor a lawyer, and I do concede that many of those in the legal profession are both honest and dedicated to the Constitution. Still, the bad taste of the past 11 years continues to remind me that there is something seriously wrong with how our political system and rule of law operate.

Take, for example, the issues of lobbying and political contributions. Lobbying, which essentially consists of advocacy on behalf of groups that promote their own interests at others’ expense, is legal and even encouraged at the federal, state, and local levels in the United States. It distorts the perception of the public interest and lines the pockets of both the lobbyists and those who possess the resources to commission the lobbying. The politicians who are corrupted are frequently rewarded after their terms of office expire. Lobbying rarely serves the people of the United States, and in many parts of the world it would be regarded as what it in fact is — a particularly pervasive form of political corruption.

And then there is the corruption of the system caused by the perceived need by politician-aspirants to raise vast sums of money to get nominated and elected to office. Once in office, the politicians reward their financial supporters, awarding ambassadorships at the top end, providing patronage-level government jobs lower down the food chain, and relying on earmarks to generate returns in a more direct fashion. Does anyone seriously think the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s funding of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich with tens of millions of dollars is disinterested? Adelson is a passionate Israel-firster, so much so that he has said he is ashamed of having served in the U.S. Army and would prefer to have the Israeli Defense Forces on his resumé. Gingrich is his man because Adelson perceives that Newt will do Israel’s bidding in the Middle East. It is as simple as that. Rick Santorum is likewise largely funded by multi-millionaire Foster Friess, who recently described the best method of birth control as an aspirin placed between a woman’s knees. He will no doubt cash in his markers if the nomination and electoral process are successful for his candidate.

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By Glenn Greenwald
Feb. 28, 2012
Salon.com

In 2009, The New York Times‘ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for his two-part series on the use by television networks of retired Generals posing as objective “analysts” at exactly the same time they were participating — unbeknownst to viewers — in a Pentagon propaganda program. Many were also plagued by undisclosed conflicts of interest whereby they had financial stakes in many of the policies they were pushing on-air. One of the prime offenders was Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was not only a member of the Pentagon’s propaganda program, but also, according to Barstow’s second stand-alone article, had his own “Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” deeply invested in many of the very war policies he pushed and advocated while posing as an NBC “analyst”:

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey. . . . General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism. . . .

Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.

On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.

Despite Barstow’s Pulitzer, neither Brian Williams nor anyone else at NBC News ever mentioned any of these groundbreaking stories to their viewers (even as Williams reported on other Pulitzer awards that year); the controversy over the Pentagon propaganda program was simply suppressed. And NBC continued to feature those same ex-Generals as “analysts” — including McCaffrey — as though the whole thing never happened.

Apparently, not only does NBC continue to present McCaffrey to its viewers as some sort of objective analyst, but NBC News executives use him as some kind of private consultant and briefer on the news. On January 12, 2012, McCaffrey presented a seminar to roughly 20 NBC executives and producers — including NBC News President Steve Capus — entitled “Iran, Nukes & Oil: The Gulf Confrontation.” We’ve obtained the Power Point document McCaffrey prepared and distributed for his presentation, and in it, he all but predicts war with Iran within the next 90 days: one that is likely to be started by them. The first page of the breathlessly hawkish document is entitled “Iran & the Gulf: Creeping Toward War,” and the first sentence excitedly proclaims (click to enlarge):

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See also this story

February 26, 2012
Author: Cosmos
Source: 9/11 Truth News

One of the first juicy bits to trickle out of Wikileaks release of 5 million Stratfor emails is the comment from Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President of Intelligence, that the Imam of the controversial so-called Ground Zero mosque is an “FBI operational asset.” Burton, who was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and the Deputy Chief of their counterterrorism division, made the comment on an email chain regarding a New York Observer article, Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque. The controversy surrounding the “Ground Zero mosque” overwhelmingly dominated the news and discussion surrounding the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

UPDATE: The above was posted about an hour after the GI Files had been announced. It seems relatively minor compared to some of the other items coming out, but still quite interesting and perhaps important. Now, 12 hours later, it’s apparent that the scope of issues involved in the GI Files release will be immense. Spying on activists, insider trading, money laundering, “sexual control” of assets and mind-boggling arrogance and incompetence seem to be only the tip of the iceberg.

Here is the full Wikileaks GI Files press conference, which took place a few hours ago:

Click for more information

Feb. 18, 2012
The Corbett Report.com

Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com joins James Corbett to discuss the problem facing us in the wake of the financial coup d’etat — the breakaway civilization who believes themselves to be history’s actors — and the solution, what she calls Rethinking Diversification. They discuss what a decentralized, wealth-building society would look like and what we can do to take the power away from our would-be tyrants.

Click on link for interview ?powerpress_pinw=3927-podcast

Jan. 19, 2012
John Pilger.com

January 20, 2012 — Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labor government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitized” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertilizer: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette’s youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction,” the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “re-classifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along.” Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime — in exchange for a $14 million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine — was not on the agenda of a group of British “defense” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defense when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said a ministry official, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantánamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

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