January 2010

1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for a Real 9/11 Investigation Press Conference and Dinner February 19, 2010
January 25, 2010
Architects and Engineers for 9/11truth.org
AE911Truth will hold a press conference on Friday,
February 19, at 11:00 AM at the Marines
Memorial Club and Hotel in San Francisco. We will announce and honor the
milestone of our achievement of obtaining 1,000
architects and engineers (A/E’s) petitioning for a real investigation into
the destruction of the 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers.

The Marine Memorial Club and Hotel in the heart of San Francisco provides
a first-class backdrop for announcing AE911Truth’s achievement

Invitations are being sent to more than 400 local AIA members, to many local,
national, and international media outlets, and to more than 15,000 AE911Truth.org
petition signers and supporters from around the world.

The press conference will include a large-screen scrolling display of all 1,000
A/E’s; statements by Richard Gage, AIA, founder of AE911Truth and several petition
signers; and a short ten-minute presentation of “9/11: Blueprint for Truth”
— the explosive evidence for the engineered destruction of the 3 World Trade
Center skyscrapers. A press kit including the AE911Truth DVD will be made available
to all attendees.

By Glenn GreenwaldJanuary 27, 2010
Salon.com
(updated below – Update II)

The Washington Post’s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.” That’s no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .
The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value
Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture.
The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic
cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months
ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official
said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.

January 26, 2010
By Michael McAuliff
New York Daily News blog

Firefighter Brian McCauley died yesterday of cancer at the age of 42.

Today, his friends brought their grief and anger to the Long Branch, N.J., office of one of the congressmen who has failed to move legislation that would permanently help other people who sacrificed at Ground Zero.

“They’re turning their backs on guys like Brian,” said Larry Feilich, an FDNY dispatcher from the Bronx, who last saw McCauley about a month ago.

“I’m on my second set of widows,” said the Rev. Bill Minson, who offered counseling after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and finds himself doing it again and again.

The panty bomber mystery deepens
by Justin Raimondo
January 11, 2010
Antiwar.com
What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become
a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that
plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display
as a whole string of unusual events and unexplained phenomena were visited
on us. The 9/11 Commission did little to clear these matters up, for the most
part because they didn’t address them. Just a few for the record: Bush reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren after being told of the attacks, the sudden
appearance of the “Israeli art students” – and their buddies, the
“laughing Israelis” – in the months and weeks leading up to the attacks,
and the apparent passivity of US air defenses on that fateful day.

By Daniel Tencer
January 13, 2010
RawStory.com

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” according to the White House Web site.Sunstein’s article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that “our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources.”By “crippled epistemology” Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public — the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.
Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government “enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.”Download a PDF of the article here.