9/11 – A Cheap Magic Trick

One World Trade Center, 90 floors up so far and scheduled for completion in 2013.

Under a new agreement, the bankruptcy of American Airlines’ parent company won’t completely halt pending litigation from the World Trade Center’s developer over claims the carrier failed to prevent the hijacking of Flight 11 during the Sept. 11th terrorist attack.

In a long-running legal battle, World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein has accused AMR Corp. and its American Airlines subsidiary of failure to put into place safeguards — such as securing the cockpit — to prevent terrorists from seizing control of its airplane. Flight 11 crashed into the site’s North Tower with 81 passengers and 11 crew members on board.

AMR’s Chapter 11 filing last November automatically put a stop to all pending litigation against the company, including the World Trade Center suit. But under the deal AMR filed in bankruptcy court Thursday, plaintiffs may continue pursuing injury and damage claims “solely to the extent of available and collectible [insurance] coverage.”

Court papers show the agreement, which isn’t subject to court approval, precludes plaintiffs from trying to recover for “intentional conduct or punitive damages.”

Silverstein’s 9/11 Lawsuit Against Airline Continues

By Pepe Escobar
Feb. 3, 2012
Asia Times Online.com

Persian Gulf? Khaleej-e-Fars? Forget it; time to call it the American Gulf – to the delight of the vultures, jackals and hyenas of war, Israeli and Anglo-American. The House of Saud wouldn’t be too displeased either.

So much for the Pentagon’s “pivoting” strategy from the Middle East to East Asia – recently announced by United States President Barack Obama. The confrontation against China starts in Southwest Asia – in the American Gulf; and goes way beyond Washington cheerleading the hardcore Sunni sectarian killers of Jundallah in Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan province, Israeli Mossad agents posing as US Central Intelligence Agency operatives, serial assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, computer viruses, and ludicrous accusations of Tehran helping al-Qaeda and vice-versa.

MOP it all up

Time to review the evidence. In roughly one month, no less than three US aircraft carriers and their strike groups will be sloshing around the American Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea; the USS Abraham Lincoln, USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise, plus good ol’ French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. And yet one more Pacific-based US aircraft carrier can be swiftly dispatched.

Apart from this naval hajj of US aircraft carrier groups, the 40-year-old USS Ponce is being retrofitted into a special ops amphibious hub – to be dispatched to the American Gulf.

The Pentagon’s CENTCOM is fast upgrading the 14,000-kilogram Orwellian bunker-buster monster known as Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP), theoretically capable of taking out Iran’s underground nuclear installations.

Link to the rest of the article Fear and loathing in the American Gulf

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 1, 2012

Prior to James Clapper’s intelligence report before the Senate warning of Iranian attacks inside the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations posted an article on its Foreign Affairs website pushing the idea that al-Qaeda and Iran are working together.

Iran's alleged cooperation with al-Qaeda adds scary dimension to its unsubstantiated nuclear threat.

“Iran appears willing to expand its limited relationship with al Qaeda. Just as with its other surrogate, Hezbollah, the country could turn to al Qaeda to mount a retaliation to any U.S. or Israeli attack,” Seth G. Jones wrote on January 29.

Jones argues that Iran’s Quds Force initiated the relationship with al-Qaeda by importing several hundred of its members. He notes that the U.S. was engaged in talks with Iran and demanded it deport al Qaeda leaders to their countries of origin. Iran allegedly refused to do this.

Iran would later arrest and either imprison or put al-Qaeda member under house arrest. Despite this crack-down, Jones argues, Iran is today an important al-Qaeda hub, even though the purportedly late Anwar al-Awlaki denounced Iran in 2010.

Jones’ assertion on a nefarious Iran-al-Qaeda nexus is the stuff of official conspiracy theories arising from the 9/11 Commission report and from accusations made by Bush-era neocons. Much of the information used to establish the Iran-al-Qaeda relationship was gained during the interrogation of supposed al-Qaeda detainees. The U.S. claims a number of alleged 9/11 hijackers and al-Qaeda operatives traveled to Iran to and from Afghanistan, but does not offer any direct evidence of links between flights and the Iranians.

Link to the rest of the article CFR and Neocons Work Together to Hype al-Qaeda Iran Link

University of Florida – Rudy Giuliani Confronted on Building 7
January 26th, 2012

This was covered in the local mainstream newspaper:The Independent Florida Alligator

By Russ Baker
Aug 17, 2011
WhoWhatWhy : Investigative Journalism

The father the New Yorker writer who got the exclusive inside story of the bin Laden raid

The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.

The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.

To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: “Operation Neptune’s Spear”

Here’s the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and suggest the most intimate reportorial access:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

On and on went the “tick-tock.” Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James—nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed–even from behind–to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:

Click on link for the rest of the article Doubts On “Official Story” Of Bin Laden Killing

January 22, 2012
By Chris Mondics,
Inquirer Staff Writer

In a ferocious legal battle pitting government lawyers against victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Justice Department is fighting to block thousands of individuals and businesses from taking $6.6 million in frozen al-Qaeda assets seized from an alleged terrorism financier.

Frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2007, the money is sought by the attorneys for 6,000 individual victims and insurers who suffered billions in losses from the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The money, in a Chicago brokerage account controlled by senior al-Qaeda operative Abu al-Tayyeb until his arrest in Saudi Arabia in 2006, drew little public notice until lawyers for 9/11 victims moved in June to collect on a 2007 default judgment.

Link to the rest of the article U.S. fights to keep $6.6 million in al-Qaeda assets from 9/11 victims

By Pepe Escobar
January 20, 2012
Asia Times Online

There’s no way to understand the larger-than-life United States-Iran psychodrama, the Western push for regime change in both Syria and Iran, and the trials and tribulations of the Arab Spring(s) – now mired in perpetual winter – without a close look at the fatal attraction between Washington and the GCC. [1]

GCC stands for Gulf Cooperation Council, the club of six wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates – UAE), founded in 1981 and which in no time configured as the prime strategic US backyard for the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, for the long-drawn battle in the New Great Game in Eurasia, and also as the headquarters for “containing” Iran.

The US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain and Central Command’s forward headquarters is based in Qatar; Centcom polices no less than 27 countries from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia – what
the Pentagon until recently defined as “the arc of instability”. In sum: the GCC is like a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf magnified to Star Trek proportions.

I prefer to refer to the GCC as the Gulf Counter-revolution Club – due to its sterling performance in suppressing democracy in the Arab world, even before Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia over a year ago.

Cueing to Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, the Rosebud inside the GCC is that the House of Saud sells its oil only in US dollars – thus the pre-eminence of the petrodollar – and in exchange benefits from massive, unconditional US military and political support. Moreover the Saudis prevent the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – after all they’re the world’s largest oil producer – to price and sell oil in a basket of currencies. These rivers of petrodollars then flow into US equities and Treasury bonds.

For decades virtually the whole planet has been held hostage to this fatal attraction. Until now.

Gimme all your toys
The GCC, essentially, is the core of the empire in the Arab world. Yes, it’s essentially about oil; the GCC will be responsible for over 25% of global oil production within the next few decades. Their tiny ruling classes – from monarchies to business associates – function as a crucial annex to the mighty projection of US power all across the Middle East and beyond.

Link to the rest of the article The US-GCC fatal attraction

By Patrick J. Buchanan
January 19, 2012

On Sept. 21, 1976, as his car rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was assassinated by car bomb. Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old American women who worked with Letelier at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, died with him.

Michael Townley, an ex-CIA asset in the hire of Chile’s intelligence agency, confessed to using anti-Castro Cubans to murder Letelier, in what was regarded as an act of terrorism on U.S. soil.

Which raises a question: Are not the murders of four Iranian scientists associated with that nation’s nuclear program, by the attachment of bombs to their cars in Tehran, also acts of terrorism?

Had the Stalin- or Khrushchev-era Soviets done this to four U.S. scientists in Washington, would we not have regarded it as acts of terrorism and war?

Iran has accused the United States and Israel of murder. But Hillary Clinton emphatically denied any U.S. complicity: “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

Link to the rest of the article http://www.vdare.com/articles/who-wants-war-with-iran

Written by Adam Taylor
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth

We first frame the issue by noting that the answer to this question does not negate the evidence that the Towers were destroyed through controlled demolition. The massive amount of evidence gathered by AE911Truth and countless others demonstrates that the combined effects of the impacts and the ensuing fires do not account for the complete and explosive destruction of the WTC skyscrapers.

The explosive destruction of the Twin Towers actually began at floors with minimal damage from the planes. In regards to the North Tower, the collapse initiated at the 98th floor, which in fact had minimal structural damage. Only the tip of the right wing cut through that floor.

Left: WTC1 north face; Right: Damage relative to a Boeing 767. Note that only the tip of the starboard (right) wing cut through the 98th floor.

According to the NIST report (NCSTAR 1, pg. 87), the collapse of the North Tower began at this floor. Though the NIST report never specifically states that the 98th floor was the least damaged, the information provided in their report clearly demonstrates this as the case. The 98th floor had only five perimeter columns severed, and the table provided in NCSTAR 1-2, pg. 205 indicates that NIST does not list floor 98 as having any of its core columns severed.

Click on link for the rest of the article What about the planes that slammed into the Twin Towers? Wouldn’t they have disturbed the demolition devices?

Saman Mohammadi
Infowars.com
January 13, 2012

“This year we are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. This year we are witnessing something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. This year we are witnessing the orchestrated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaffolding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War II.” – William F. Schulz, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, speaking in 2003. (1).

There is a conspiracy of silence about the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, otherwise known as the “Indefinite Detention Bill.”
This treasonous violation of the rights of American citizens and all human beings on “Battlefield Earth” must be understood in the larger political and historical context of the American Deep State, which professor and author Peter Dale Scott says “refers to a parallel secret government, organized by the intelligence and security apparatus, financed by drugs, and engaging in illicit violence, to protect the status and interests of the military against threats from intellectuals, religious groups, and occasionally the constitutional government,” (2).

The American Deep State has covertly created an indefinite detention regime in the United States based on acts of state terrorism and other forms of political violence such as assassinations.

The false flag September 11 attacks in 2001 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 stand as the pivotal historical events in the bureaucratic formation of the American Deep State and its total takeover of the American constitutional republic.

Link to the rest of the article Systematic Silence About NDAA Proves Plot To Destroy U.S. Is Real, Vindicating Conspiracy Theorists