January 2010

by David Edwards and John Byrne
January 8, 2010
Raw Story

UPDATE: ABC’s George Stephanopoulos has taken responsibility for not challenging former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the mayor’s assertion on Good Morning America Friday that “we had no domestic attacks under Bush.”As noted below, a Giuliani spokesman “clarified” the mayor’s statement later in the day, arguing that the mayor meant no attacks after 9/11.”Whatever the mayor meant, it’s not what he said,” Stephanopoulos wrote on his ABC blog. “All of you who have pointed out that I should have pressed him on that misstatement in the moment are right. My mistake, my responsibility.”Original story follows below
The former New York City mayor who has sometimes been mocked for using “a noun,
a verb and 9/11″ in stump speeches appears to have forgotten — or has mentally
reclassified — the worst terrorist attack on American soil. “We had no domestic
attacks under Bush,” Rudy Giuliani told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Friday.
Even if Giuliani doesn’t consider the attacks on 9/11 a “domestic” attack then surely he forgot about the anthrax attacks of 2001 or an Egyptian national who attacked the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002.While ABC’s George Stephanopolous let Giuliani get away with his misstatement both during the interview and on his blog, ABC’s Jake Tapper called the former mayor out. “Giuliani’s comments that there were zero terrorist attacks under Bush, 1 under Obama, is false no matter how you slice it,” tweeted Tapper.

January 08, 2010
by Paul Craig Roberts
Information ClearingHouse.info
What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo,
and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and
implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida’s
expertise in pulling off 9/11.
If we are to believe the U.S. government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged
al-Qaida "mastermind" behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed
all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies as well as those of all U.S. allies including
Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security
four times on one morning, and Dick Cheney, and with untrained and inexperienced
pilots pulled off skilled piloting feats of crashing hijacked airliners into
the World Trade Center towers, and the Pentagon, where a battery of state of
the art air defenses somehow failed to function.
After such amazing success, al-Qaida would have attracted the best minds in
the business, but, instead, it has been reduced to amateur stunts.
The Underwear Bomb plot is being played to the hilt on the TV media and especially
on Fox "news." After reading recently that The Washington Post allowed
a lobbyist to write a news story that preached the lobbyist’s interest,
I wondered if the manufacturers of full body scanners were behind the heavy
coverage of the Underwear Bomber, if not behind the plot itself. In America,
everything is for sale. Integrity is gone with the wind.

January 5th, 2010by Maidhc Ó Cathail
Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

All too often, official inquiries are conducted by the very people who should themselves be under investigation.
In this respect, Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war bears a distressing similarity to the 9/11 Commission.
In a remarkable symmetry, both inquiries involve a Jewish Zionist historian, who not only advised his country’s leader to go to war against Iraq, but actually provided the ideological justification for that unnecessary war.
Preemptive Wars
Perhaps Philip Zelikow was one of the few people who was not surprised by his appointment as executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. After all, the Professor of History at the University of Virginia had shown uncanny prescience in foreseeing an event such as 9/11 itself. In 1998, as project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism Group, Zelikow had written:

January 6, 2010
by Larry Neumeister, Associated Press Writer
LATimes
NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly completed settlements of two of the remaining three lawsuits brought by families of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks are likely to include language requiring evidence to be displayed at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, a lawyer said Wednesday.

Attorney Mary Schiavo said the public display of evidence collected for trial by lawyers in the case was important to the families.

She called the museum a fitting place for it and said the materials were likely to be put in the museum’s reading room.

She commented outside a court hearing where lawyers announced they had settled 15 of 18 property damage cases stemming from the terrorism attacks for an undisclosed amount, including claims by the Windows on the World restaurant.

by James Ridgeway
Published Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by Mother Jones

Scan, baby, scan. That’s
the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted
terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to
conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been
stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body
scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached
to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.
Within days or even hours of the bombing
attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the
magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by
the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use
of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the “big, urgent
questions that we are holding this hearing to answer” was “Why isn’t
whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider
use?” Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post,

“You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body
that aren’t easy to get at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or
otherwise hoping that bad guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad
guys have figured it out.”
Since the alternative is being groped by
airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The
Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images “are friendly enough to post in a preschool,” though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous organizations
have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy
issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really
work-and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes
to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of
enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are
signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.Known by their opponents as “digital strip search” machines, the full-body scanners use one of two technologies-millimeter
wave sensors or backscatter x-rays-to see through clothing, producing
ghostly images of naked passengers. Yet critics say that these, too,
are highly fallible, and are incapable of revealing explosives hidden in body cavities-an
age-old method for smuggling contraband. If that’s the case, a
terrorist could hide the entire bomb works within his or her body, and
breeze through the virtual strip search undetected. Yesterday, the London Independent

reported on “authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department
for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and
were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against
terrorist threats to aviation.” A British defense-research firm
reportedly found the machines unreliable in detecting “low-density”
materials like plastics, chemicals, and liquids-precisely what the
underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs.