The American singer and activist Harry Belafonte called President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world” on Sunday and said millions of Americans support the socialist revolution of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez’s television and radio broadcast Sunday.
“No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution,” Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.
The 78-year-old Belafonte, famous for his calypso-inspired music, including the “Day-O” song, was a close collaborator of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. He also has been outspoken in criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
Chavez said he believes deeply in the struggle for justice by blacks, both in the U.S. and Venezuela.
“Although we may not believe it, there continues to be great discrimination here against black people,” Chavez said, urging his government to redouble its efforts to prevent discrimination.
Harsh words for U.S. media
Belafonte accused U.S. news media of falsely painting Chavez as a “dictator,” when in fact, he said, there is democracy and citizens are “optimistic about their future.”
Dolores Huerta, a pioneer of the United Farm Workers labor union also in the delegation, called the visit a “very deep experience.”
Chavez accuses Bush of trying to overthrow him, pointing to intelligence documents released by the U.S. indicating that the CIA knew beforehand that dissident officers planned a short-lived 2002 coup. The U.S. denies involvement, but Chavez says Venezuela must be on guard.
Belafonte suggested setting up a youth exchange for Venezuelans and Americans. He finished by shouting in Spanish: “Viva la revolucion!”
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
In Gaza the shoah goes on / Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers! / Israel's shoah business all over the web / Israel threatens HOLOCAUST
In Gaza the shoah goes on / Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers! / Israel's shoah business all over the web / Israel threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians
Don't panic, Israel to use nukes not gas chambers!
Seasoned zionist watchers will know that hasbara (propaganda) has been elevated to a full blown tenet of the zionist ideology of Israel's supporters. I'm sure all, certainly most, nations have their founding myths, but Israel's are an artform, a science even, whereas other nations tend to settle for folk-lore. But this "shoah" remark by Israel's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, has so sent the hasbara machine into overdrive that it seems to have crashed.
Engage very smartly swept in to demand the resignation of Vilnai for undermining the smear that comparing Israel to the nazis is antisemitic. But there had to be some zionists who would do what zionists do best, denial and projection. Here's Melanie Phillips in the Spectator complaining that to render "shoah" as "holocaust" represents the "Mother of all mistranslations
Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.
But of course, "ha" is simply "the". "Ha-shoah" no matter how it is rendered in Hebrew, is "the holocaust" whereas "shoah" is simply "holocaust". Needless to say, Melanie Phillips didn't give any examples of this more casual, less definite, use of "shoah".
Just as well really, for that we have to turn to the comments of the panic post onEngage or the comments to the rather more skimpy post on the more openly zionist,Simply Jews where a commenter called Noga of the Contentious Centrist blog explains the many many ways in which the word "shoah" is used in Israel:
Shoah means disaster. And it usually comes with its own special verb: "Le-hamit shoah", to bring upon someone or something a disaster. Hebrew speakers use it to describe a nuclear disaster (shoah garinit), among other usages. The Holocaust, when brought up to by Hebrew speakers is always, always, always referred to as "Ha-Shoah", THE Shoah, to differentiate from any other shoah.
Thank goodness Noga has cleared that one up. Israel intends to nuke Gaza, not gas its population. Phew!
// posted by Levi9909 @ 8:44:00 AM Comments (4) | Trackback (0)
Friday, February 29, 2008
Israel's shoah business all over the web
Unlucky little Israel. Yet again a leading Israeli has likened Israel to the nazis, in other words, once again, Israel, by a combination of its structure and its behaviour, has likened itself to the nazis. In know I covered this in my previous post but the person who sent me the story from the Guardian about Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, threatening the Palestinians of Gaza with a holocaust said that he had read the same story in Der Spiegel, but Der Spiegel didn't carry the h-word at all. No surprises there given Germany's post war appeasement of Israel. Then Ellis Sharpposted a comment saying that the BBC has run with the h-word, then dropped it, then picked it up again with an explanation of what the poor misunderstood minister actually meant.
“Speaking on Israel Army Radio, Mr Vilnai said if Palestinians increased rocket fire, they will bring upon themselves what he called a "shoah" - a Hebrew word for catastrophe, and for the Nazi Holocaust. The BBC's Katya Adler in Jerusalem says many of Mr Vilnai's colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay them saying he did not mean genocide.”
I then googled "vilnai shoah" only without the quotes, and the first time, 1,360 sites came up. Maybe two minutes later, 1,370. The top one was the UK's Daily Mirror.
The Mirror article is very similar to the Guardian one except where the Guardian had 32 Palestinians dead in the last two days, the Mirror had 33:
Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days, and Israeli leaders said cross-border rocket fire may leave the Jewish state with little choice but to launch a broader military offensive.
But my main point here, apart from the genocidal nature of the State of Israel and its zionist ideology, is the way the hasbara flock have clearly tried to get at the story and in spite of that, it is all over the web. Of course it's terrifying news, but the good news is that Israel and its apologists can't seem to control the flow of information any more.
There is of course the other little issue that if Israel ever does embark on a final solution type solution to its Palestinian "problem" no one will be able to say that they didn't know.
PS - I just went back to google to get the url for the search "vilnai shoah" and the search now yields 1,440 sites.
// posted by Levi9909 @ 5:29:00 PM Comments (6) | Trackback (0)
Israel threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians
About time too. Israel has been carrying on a creeping, sometimes galloping, genocidal campaign against the Palestinians for many a decade. It has been likened to the nazis by at least one of its own ministers before now. And of course there was the Israel commander who told his troops to learn how the nazis destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto so that they too could learn how to destroy a ghetto. Now, according to the Guardian, we have an Israeli minister threatening to inflict a holocaust on the Gaza population. See this:
"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.
Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.
I was never keen on holocaust uniqueness arguments but the zionists have really blown it this time.
I thought I remembered a letter by Ilan Pappe to the Guardian, saying that the Gaza "disengagement" was a ploy to get Jewish settlers out of the way so that Israel could have a good crack at the native population. I've searched the Guardian site but I can't find it. I also thought that I remembered a bunch of zionists, all of whom (naturally) support, they said, a two state solution, writing to complain that Pappe was exaggerating, scaremongering or some such. I tried google and faired better. See this from Ilan Pappe on the Electronic Intifada site:
The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave few thousands dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign -- the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip -- either in the name of human aid, international intervention or the people's own desire to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be the response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will the Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.
Prophetic and scary stuff written on 2 Sept 2006.
But now can we liken Israel to the nazis? We really are running out of descriptions.
Subject: Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to the New York Times 1948, Protesting the Visit of Menachem Begin
Einstein Letter Warning Of
Zionist Facism In Israel
Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to the New York Times
1948, Protesting the Visit of Menachem Begin
Letters to the Editor
New York Times
December 4, 1948
TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughoutthe world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement. The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants ? 240men, women, and children - and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
Discrepancies Seen
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT
ABRAHAM BRICK
RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO
ALBERT EINSTEIN
HERMAN EISEN, M.D.
HAYIM FINEMAN
M. GALLEN, M.D.
H.H. HARRIS
ZELIG S. HARRIS
SIDNEY HOOK
FRED KARUSH
BRURIA KAUFMAN
IRMA L. LINDHEIM
NACHMAN MAISEL
SEYMOUR MELMAN
MYER D. MENDELSON
M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY
SAMUEL PITLICK
FRITZ ROHRLICH
LOUIS P. ROCKER
RUTH SAGIS
ITZHAK SANKOWSKY
I.J. SHOENBERG
SAMUEL SHUMAN
M. SINGER
IRMA WOLFE
STEFAN WOLF.
New York, Dec. 2, 1948
Zionist Facism In Israel
Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to the New York Times
1948, Protesting the Visit of Menachem Begin
Letters to the Editor
New York Times
December 4, 1948
TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughoutthe world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement. The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants ? 240men, women, and children - and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
Discrepancies Seen
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT
ABRAHAM BRICK
RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO
ALBERT EINSTEIN
HERMAN EISEN, M.D.
HAYIM FINEMAN
M. GALLEN, M.D.
H.H. HARRIS
ZELIG S. HARRIS
SIDNEY HOOK
FRED KARUSH
BRURIA KAUFMAN
IRMA L. LINDHEIM
NACHMAN MAISEL
SEYMOUR MELMAN
MYER D. MENDELSON
M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY
SAMUEL PITLICK
FRITZ ROHRLICH
LOUIS P. ROCKER
RUTH SAGIS
ITZHAK SANKOWSKY
I.J. SHOENBERG
SAMUEL SHUMAN
M. SINGER
IRMA WOLFE
STEFAN WOLF.
New York, Dec. 2, 1948
"Racism has become the norm in Israeli society,"
Racism in Israel on the rise
Association for Civil Rights in Israel publishes annual report; reveals country overwhelmed by racism, restriction of personal freedoms, discrimination, especially towards Israeli-Arabs. Report not surprising, say Arab MKs
Aviram Zino
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel's (ACRI) report on civil rights in Israel paints a bleak picture: Increasing racism, restriction of personal freedoms and discrimination even within the Knesset walls – and that's just scratching the surface.
Published Saturday, the report reveled that Israeli youths are bombarded with stereotypic, racist imagery, and their opinions have developed accordingly: Over two-thirds Israeli teen believe Arabs to be less intelligent, uncultured and violent. Over a third of Israeli teens fear Arabs all together.
Discrimination
Poll: 81% of Israelis want JNF land for Jews only / Ynetnews
Poll shows overwhelming support for JNF policy of selling land to Jews only; strongest support among National Union-NRP, Yisrael Beiteinu, United Torah Judaism and Labor Party voters
Full Story
The report becomes even grimmer, citing the ACRI's racism poll, taken in March of 2007, in which 50% of Israelis taking part said they would not live in the same building as Arabs, will not befriend, or let their children befriend Arabs and would not let Arabs into their homes.
Fifty percent of those polled also said they believed Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate.
Racism in Israel is on the rise, said the report: in 2006 there was a 26% increase in racist incidents towards Arabs and the general sense of hatred towards them has doubled.
Reinforcing a negative image
The media, said the ACRI, played a major part in fanning the flame, intensifying the Arab image as negative and terrorizing.
The Knesset was not absent from the report as well, as it allows bills which delegitimize Israel's Arabs citizens before the plenum, preconditions social rights in IDF or national service and make its Arab MKs swear allegiance to a Jewish State.
The report devotes a special section to the recently approves JNF bill, which allows Jewish National Fund land – which make up 13% of all State owned land – to be allocated to Jews only.
According to the report, Israeli Arabs are subject to constant racial proofing, which defines them as a security threat; resulting in demeaning and degrading treatment at airports and public venues.
Furthermore, in the Second Lebanon War, some 40% of the citizens killed were Israeli-Arabs, mostly due to a severe lack of shelters, but still – the rehabilitation and fortification of Arab towns remains, according to the report, ridiculously low.
"This report doesn’t come as a surprise," Hadash Chairman MK Mohammad Barakeh told Ynet Saturday.
"No one should be surprised by them. These findings are a natural outcome of the racial slurs by political leaders and the racial policy that have been implemented by the Israeli governments towards the Arab population for the past 60 years.
"Such racism," added Barakeh, "can only be cured by changing the Israeli government's racial mentality."
"Racism has become the norm in Israeli society," said MK Ahmad Tibi (United Arab List-Ta'al). "Israel is ridden with discrimination through and thought.
Sharon Roffe-Ofir contributed to this report
Association for Civil Rights in Israel publishes annual report; reveals country overwhelmed by racism, restriction of personal freedoms, discrimination, especially towards Israeli-Arabs. Report not surprising, say Arab MKs
Aviram Zino
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel's (ACRI) report on civil rights in Israel paints a bleak picture: Increasing racism, restriction of personal freedoms and discrimination even within the Knesset walls – and that's just scratching the surface.
Published Saturday, the report reveled that Israeli youths are bombarded with stereotypic, racist imagery, and their opinions have developed accordingly: Over two-thirds Israeli teen believe Arabs to be less intelligent, uncultured and violent. Over a third of Israeli teens fear Arabs all together.
Discrimination
Poll: 81% of Israelis want JNF land for Jews only / Ynetnews
Poll shows overwhelming support for JNF policy of selling land to Jews only; strongest support among National Union-NRP, Yisrael Beiteinu, United Torah Judaism and Labor Party voters
Full Story
The report becomes even grimmer, citing the ACRI's racism poll, taken in March of 2007, in which 50% of Israelis taking part said they would not live in the same building as Arabs, will not befriend, or let their children befriend Arabs and would not let Arabs into their homes.
Fifty percent of those polled also said they believed Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate.
Racism in Israel is on the rise, said the report: in 2006 there was a 26% increase in racist incidents towards Arabs and the general sense of hatred towards them has doubled.
Reinforcing a negative image
The media, said the ACRI, played a major part in fanning the flame, intensifying the Arab image as negative and terrorizing.
The Knesset was not absent from the report as well, as it allows bills which delegitimize Israel's Arabs citizens before the plenum, preconditions social rights in IDF or national service and make its Arab MKs swear allegiance to a Jewish State.
The report devotes a special section to the recently approves JNF bill, which allows Jewish National Fund land – which make up 13% of all State owned land – to be allocated to Jews only.
According to the report, Israeli Arabs are subject to constant racial proofing, which defines them as a security threat; resulting in demeaning and degrading treatment at airports and public venues.
Furthermore, in the Second Lebanon War, some 40% of the citizens killed were Israeli-Arabs, mostly due to a severe lack of shelters, but still – the rehabilitation and fortification of Arab towns remains, according to the report, ridiculously low.
"This report doesn’t come as a surprise," Hadash Chairman MK Mohammad Barakeh told Ynet Saturday.
"No one should be surprised by them. These findings are a natural outcome of the racial slurs by political leaders and the racial policy that have been implemented by the Israeli governments towards the Arab population for the past 60 years.
"Such racism," added Barakeh, "can only be cured by changing the Israeli government's racial mentality."
"Racism has become the norm in Israeli society," said MK Ahmad Tibi (United Arab List-Ta'al). "Israel is ridden with discrimination through and thought.
Sharon Roffe-Ofir contributed to this report
Breaking the Nuremberg Code: The US Military’s Human-Testing Program Returns by Heather Wokusch
Breaking the Nuremberg Code: The US Military’s Human-Testing Program Returns
by Heather Wokusch
The Pentagon is slated to release a suspected toxicant in Crystal City, Virginia this week, ostensibly to test air sensors.
The operation is just the latest example of the Defense Department’s long history of using service members and civilians as human test subjects, often without their consent or awareness.
Gas chambers in Maryland
Wray C. Forrest learned about the US military’s human-testing program the hard way. In 1973, the Army sent then 23-year-old Forrest to its Edgewood Arsenal chemical-research center in Maryland, promising patriotic service and a four-day work week.
Instead, he became one of roughly 6,720 soldiers used as Edgewood Arsenal test subjects between 1950-1975.
Forrest was given a new identity at Edgewood: Research Subject #6692. He says, “That was the number assigned to me … similar to the numbers assigned to the Jews in the concentration/death camps in Germany during WWII.”
The US military tested heart drugs on Forrest, which he says were administered by IV and various types of injections. Forrest was also exposed to “contaminated drinking water, food, and various ground contaminates that permeate Edgewood Arsenal. BZ [a chemical incapacitating agent], napalm, mustard agents, and any number of other contaminates in the ground and drinking water there, from previous testing done there by the military.”
A total of 254 different chemicals were researched on soldiers at Edgewood, and Forrest notes, “We were never informed as to exactly what we were being given. We also did not sign any informed consent prior to the testing. This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention rules for the use of humans in chemical and drug experiments/research.”
The Edgewood Arsenal facility played a role in WWII human subject testing as well. Roughly 4,000 US soldiers were used as human guinea pigs in chemical research which often took place in gas chambers.
US Navy member Nat Schnurman, for example, was sent to an Edgewood gas chamber six times one week in 1942. As The Detroit Free Press reported: “On his last visit, a blend of mustard gas and lewisite was piped in. Schnurman was overcome with toxins, vomited into his mask and begged for release. The request was denied. His next memory is of coming to on a snowbank outside the chamber.”
A pattern of abuse and neglect
If the sagas of Forrest and Schnurman were isolated, they would represent a disgraceful yet closed chapter of US military history. Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s human-testing program has extended far beyond Edgewood Arsenal.
Human Experimentation, a 1994 report from the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), lays out the Defense Department’s sordid history in detail.
Between 1949 and 1969, for example, the Army sprayed bacterial tracers or simulants on unsuspecting populations in hundreds of biological warfare tests. According to the GAO: “Some of the tests involved spraying large areas, such as the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, and others involved spraying more focused areas, such as the New York City subway system and Washington National Airport.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
Between 1952-1975, the CIA tested LSD and other psychochemical agents on “an undetermined number of people without their knowledge or consent.”
No coherent attempt was made to offer follow-up information or care.
Over 235 atmospheric nuclear tests and experiments were conducted on roughly 210,000 personnel affiliated to the US Defense Department from 1945-1962. A further 199,000 “were exposed to radiation through work.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
One of the best known examples of US military human-testing is Project 112, whereby the Pentagon used biological/chemical agents on 5,842 service members in secret trials conducted over a ten-year period (1962-73).
Project 112, and the affiliated Project SHAD, tested everything from Sarin nerve agent to an E. coli simulant aboard Navy ships and in land trials. Tests were conducted in six states (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah) Canada and Britain and often without the consent or awareness of those exposed.
Only in 2003, after crucial documents slowly became declassified, did the veterans’ health complaints start to be acknowledged. By then, over 750 Project 112 veterans were already dead.
The Veterans’ Administration still had not notified more than 40% of those used in Project 112/SHAD human testing by 2004. The Defense Department was blamed for foot-dragging in identifying the potentially affected service members and civilians.
The battle to receive care
Wray Forrest knows firsthand about fighting official neglect and denial over human-testing. When his health started to deteriorate, Forrest was forbidden to get medical support: “We could not tell what we were exposed to due to the classification of the project, nor could we seek medical help due to the alleged non-disclosure papers we signed.”
Forrest was discharged from the military in 1982 for health reasons (deemed “unsuitable for service”). He was still unable to talk to anyone about Edgewood Arsenal, so kept his “agreed silence, and took what the military dished out calling me, UNSUITABLE.”
In July 2006, the Veterans’ Administration (VA) released a document on health care eligibility listing Edgewood Arsenal survivors as a Category 6 disability rating, which meant that affected veterans would be eligible for clinical evaluation and “necessary treatment of conditions related to exposure without copays.” But when Forrest called the VA to seek help, he was told that the publication was an error and in fact Edgewood Arsenal veterans have no VA health care eligibility.
“How sweet, they have killed us, buried us, and now they want us to go away,” he concluded.
Forrest is not the only veteran subjected to human-testing who has fought to receive care. Even in well-documented and recent cases, compensation is elusive.
In December 2007, for example, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the widows of five veterans who died after being enrolled in fraudulent drug studies at the Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, NY.
Stratton had been plagued by allegations of research violations from the early 1990s. Then in 1999, the facility hired Paul Kornak to be its Research Coordinator, despite the fact that Kornak had forged his credentials, falsified his college transcript and been arrested in Pennsylvania years earlier for related fraud. Apparently, background checks for health professionals were minimal at Stratton VA Medical Center.
From 1999-2003, Kornak falsified veterans’ medical records at Stratton, inappropriately enrolling them in studies for drug marketability. In 2001, for example, Stratton tested a powerful three-drug chemotherapy combination on Carl M. Steubing, a 78-year-old Battle of the Bulge veteran, despite his previous bout with cancer and poor kidney function.
Steubing died in early 2002. His widow still wonders if the fraudulent human-test studies at Stratton cost her husband his life.
In court, the five widows’ lawyer argued that Stratton “committed every kind of research ethics violation imaginable,” adding “when you use individuals, humans, as guinea pigs, you do them harm.”
The US government responded by saying there was no way to prove the veterans had experienced pain or died early as a result of the corrupt drug experiments.
Case closed.
Open-air testing
If veterans with solid proof of having been used as test subjects cannot receive compensation, the possibilities are miniscule for service members and civilians used in trials without their consent or awareness.
Open-air testing of chemical and biological (CB) agents is one such case.
After 6,000 sheep died following the apparent release of a nerve agent at an Army facility in Utah in 1969, open-air testing was officially said to have ended in the US.
But the Defense Department’s April 2007 report to Congress on “Chemical and Biological Defense” strongly suggests an imminent resumption.
According to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, at least three passages of the Pentagon’s 2007 report indicate a planned continuance of open-air testing. While one section of the document, for example, mentions the use of “live-CB-agent full system test chambers,” another passage (page 67) reads:
“More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.”
As Dr. Boyle notes, both “test chambers” and “field testing” are mentioned in the report.
In addition, the passage says that improvements in the T&E (testing and evaluation) infrastructure and “better simulated representation of threats” are going to be carried out using “full systems” rather than simulants.
Dr. Boyle says, “It is clear they will be engaging in ‘Field Trials’ (not in test chambers) of ‘full systems,’ which means ‘live CB agents,’ not simulants.”
Another troublesome passage from the Defense Department’s April 2007 report (page 65) is:
“Current shortfalls lie in the full systems and platform test chambers and supporting instrumentation and fixtures. These test fixtures must be able to introduce and adequately control live CB agent challenges and provide a range of environmental and challenge conditions to simulate evolving threats, while performing end-to-end systems operations of CBD equipment.”
Dr. Boyle points out that the passage says “full systems” rather than “simulants,” and it makes a distinction between “test fixtures” and “test chambers.” He adds that talking about “‘a range of environmental and challenge conditions’ in a test chamber” is nonsensical. “A test chamber does not have a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions.’”
“What they are talking about here,” Dr. Boyle concludes, “is testing live CB (chemical and biological) agents in Field Tests — open-air testing, where there will be a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions’ to confront, test and verify.”
Gassing Crystal City
In May 2007, just one month after the Defense Department’s controversial report to Congress, the Pentagon quietly announced it would release “a dust simulating a biological attack in the Pentagon South Parking Lot.” The stated purpose was to study “the subsequent clean-up of roadways, people and equipment after the release.”
The announcement cryptically described the “dust” as containing “a harmless inert bacterium found in soil, water and air.”
Kirt P. Love, Director of the Desert Storm Battle Registry (DSBR), a Gulf War veterans’ group dealing with the exposures of the 1991 conflict, repeatedly phoned the Pentagon to clarify exactly what “dust” would be used in the imminent open-air test.
He soon found, however, that “the departments involved were not communicating with each other … only the people who handled the agent knew anything.”
Love described the situation as “disquieting” and said, “I thought this was very unfair to the Pentagon Police and other innocent bystanders who didn’t need to be kept in the dark about this. How could they conduct an open air test of a microbe and not tell people what it was up front?”
Eventually, Love’s phone calls paid off. A Pentagon representative told him the substance to be tested was Bacillus subtilis, which intriguingly, was also used during the US military’s Project SHAD human testing in the 1960s-70s.
The Pentagon’s announcement was correct in saying that Bacillus subtilis is found in soil. It failed to mention, however, that the bacterium has been linked to pulmonary disease and irreversible lung damage.
The Defense Department quietly carried out its Bacillus subtilis release in early June 2007. A Pentagon spokesperson would not confirm if the roughly 50 test subjects and numerous bystanders had been informed about the possible health risks.
And the open air tests continue.
In the next few days, the Pentagon is slated to release perfluorocarbon tracers and sulfur hexafluoride in Crystal City, Virginia.
Dubbed “Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study,” the operation will test the effectiveness of the city’s chemical sensors, and according to The Examiner newspaper, “ the data will help the Pentagon and Arlington shape their lockdown policies for chemical and biological attacks or accidents.” Lockdown policies.
According to a Pentagon press release from late February 2008, the study “will involve releasing a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and inert tracer gas that poses no health or safety hazards to people or the environment.”
But it’s not quite that simple. Sulfur hexafluoride is a suspected respiratory toxicant; as such, exposure in certain amounts may be harmful for those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory issues. It also is a suspected neurotoxicant, with potential untold consequences for the nervous systems of those vulnerable.
That part is left out of the Pentagon’s press release.
Crystal City is one of the “urban villages” of Arlington County, Virginia. It features upscale offices and residential areas — in other words a lot of civilians. You would think that if the Pentagon is releasing suspected toxicants into such a compressed urban area there would be more warning about potential health risks.
Yet repeated phone calls to the Pentagon yesterday yielded no results. The Force Protection Agency seemed unaware of the upcoming test and the press office was of no help either. No one could – or would – answer basic questions such as how many people could be exposed in the open-air test, if any attempt had been made to brief citizens on potential health risks or if there would be any medical follow-up provided.
Perfectly legal
The Pentagon’s laissez faire approach to these open-air tests raises questions about the possibilities for further testing on the general US population.
There is a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws). Specifically, Section 1520a lists the following cases in which the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans if informed consent has been obtained:
(1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.
(2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
(3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related to riot control.
In other words, there are many circumstances under which the Secretary of Defense can test chemical or biological agents on human beings, but at least informed consent has to be obtained in advance.
Or does it. Section 1515, another part of Chapter 32, is entitled “Suspension; Presidential authorization” and says:
After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President.
Essentially, if the President or Congress decides that we are at war, then the Secretary of Defense does not need anybody’s consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual “war on terror.”
Ominously, in June 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell gained White House approval to update a 1981 presidential order on how US spy agencies operate. Potentially up for review in the highly secretive overhaul, referred to as Order 12333, is the topic of human experimentation.
A surge in US WMD spending
The Bush administration has quietly channeled tens of billions of dollars into chemical and biological weapons. Bush’s 2007 budget, for example, earmarked almost $2 billion for biodefense research and development via the National Institutes of Health alone.
Research aims are often dubious. In October 2005, for example, US scientists resurrected the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which had killed almost 50 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox) just to try stopping the virus once it has been created.
Since the R&D is top secret and oversight limited, the public is rarely aware of escalating dangers. As of August 2007, for example, biological weapons laboratories across the country had reported 36 lost shipments and accidents for that year, almost double the number for all of 2004.
In addition to challenging international non-proliferation agreements and risking a global arms race, the Bush administration’s surge in chemical and biological weapons spending raises questions over what deadly weapons may have been tested on populations abroad. And what may be tested domestically, with or without the public’s consent.
For Wray Forrest, the battle for government accountability continues: “On September 29, 2006, Congress passed a bill that will inform veterans exactly what they were exposed to, within the next two or three years. I can just see it now: They visit my grave site and post it on my tomb stone, in order to inform me of what I was exposed to and just what exposure caused me to die.”
Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now, which went to #1 on Amazon's political activism charts in December 2007. Read other articles by Heather, or visit Heather's website.
This article was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 6:04 am and is filed under Anti-War, Civil Liberties, Fascism, Health/Medical, Justice,
by Heather Wokusch
The Pentagon is slated to release a suspected toxicant in Crystal City, Virginia this week, ostensibly to test air sensors.
The operation is just the latest example of the Defense Department’s long history of using service members and civilians as human test subjects, often without their consent or awareness.
Gas chambers in Maryland
Wray C. Forrest learned about the US military’s human-testing program the hard way. In 1973, the Army sent then 23-year-old Forrest to its Edgewood Arsenal chemical-research center in Maryland, promising patriotic service and a four-day work week.
Instead, he became one of roughly 6,720 soldiers used as Edgewood Arsenal test subjects between 1950-1975.
Forrest was given a new identity at Edgewood: Research Subject #6692. He says, “That was the number assigned to me … similar to the numbers assigned to the Jews in the concentration/death camps in Germany during WWII.”
The US military tested heart drugs on Forrest, which he says were administered by IV and various types of injections. Forrest was also exposed to “contaminated drinking water, food, and various ground contaminates that permeate Edgewood Arsenal. BZ [a chemical incapacitating agent], napalm, mustard agents, and any number of other contaminates in the ground and drinking water there, from previous testing done there by the military.”
A total of 254 different chemicals were researched on soldiers at Edgewood, and Forrest notes, “We were never informed as to exactly what we were being given. We also did not sign any informed consent prior to the testing. This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention rules for the use of humans in chemical and drug experiments/research.”
The Edgewood Arsenal facility played a role in WWII human subject testing as well. Roughly 4,000 US soldiers were used as human guinea pigs in chemical research which often took place in gas chambers.
US Navy member Nat Schnurman, for example, was sent to an Edgewood gas chamber six times one week in 1942. As The Detroit Free Press reported: “On his last visit, a blend of mustard gas and lewisite was piped in. Schnurman was overcome with toxins, vomited into his mask and begged for release. The request was denied. His next memory is of coming to on a snowbank outside the chamber.”
A pattern of abuse and neglect
If the sagas of Forrest and Schnurman were isolated, they would represent a disgraceful yet closed chapter of US military history. Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s human-testing program has extended far beyond Edgewood Arsenal.
Human Experimentation, a 1994 report from the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), lays out the Defense Department’s sordid history in detail.
Between 1949 and 1969, for example, the Army sprayed bacterial tracers or simulants on unsuspecting populations in hundreds of biological warfare tests. According to the GAO: “Some of the tests involved spraying large areas, such as the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, and others involved spraying more focused areas, such as the New York City subway system and Washington National Airport.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
Between 1952-1975, the CIA tested LSD and other psychochemical agents on “an undetermined number of people without their knowledge or consent.”
No coherent attempt was made to offer follow-up information or care.
Over 235 atmospheric nuclear tests and experiments were conducted on roughly 210,000 personnel affiliated to the US Defense Department from 1945-1962. A further 199,000 “were exposed to radiation through work.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
One of the best known examples of US military human-testing is Project 112, whereby the Pentagon used biological/chemical agents on 5,842 service members in secret trials conducted over a ten-year period (1962-73).
Project 112, and the affiliated Project SHAD, tested everything from Sarin nerve agent to an E. coli simulant aboard Navy ships and in land trials. Tests were conducted in six states (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah) Canada and Britain and often without the consent or awareness of those exposed.
Only in 2003, after crucial documents slowly became declassified, did the veterans’ health complaints start to be acknowledged. By then, over 750 Project 112 veterans were already dead.
The Veterans’ Administration still had not notified more than 40% of those used in Project 112/SHAD human testing by 2004. The Defense Department was blamed for foot-dragging in identifying the potentially affected service members and civilians.
The battle to receive care
Wray Forrest knows firsthand about fighting official neglect and denial over human-testing. When his health started to deteriorate, Forrest was forbidden to get medical support: “We could not tell what we were exposed to due to the classification of the project, nor could we seek medical help due to the alleged non-disclosure papers we signed.”
Forrest was discharged from the military in 1982 for health reasons (deemed “unsuitable for service”). He was still unable to talk to anyone about Edgewood Arsenal, so kept his “agreed silence, and took what the military dished out calling me, UNSUITABLE.”
In July 2006, the Veterans’ Administration (VA) released a document on health care eligibility listing Edgewood Arsenal survivors as a Category 6 disability rating, which meant that affected veterans would be eligible for clinical evaluation and “necessary treatment of conditions related to exposure without copays.” But when Forrest called the VA to seek help, he was told that the publication was an error and in fact Edgewood Arsenal veterans have no VA health care eligibility.
“How sweet, they have killed us, buried us, and now they want us to go away,” he concluded.
Forrest is not the only veteran subjected to human-testing who has fought to receive care. Even in well-documented and recent cases, compensation is elusive.
In December 2007, for example, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the widows of five veterans who died after being enrolled in fraudulent drug studies at the Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, NY.
Stratton had been plagued by allegations of research violations from the early 1990s. Then in 1999, the facility hired Paul Kornak to be its Research Coordinator, despite the fact that Kornak had forged his credentials, falsified his college transcript and been arrested in Pennsylvania years earlier for related fraud. Apparently, background checks for health professionals were minimal at Stratton VA Medical Center.
From 1999-2003, Kornak falsified veterans’ medical records at Stratton, inappropriately enrolling them in studies for drug marketability. In 2001, for example, Stratton tested a powerful three-drug chemotherapy combination on Carl M. Steubing, a 78-year-old Battle of the Bulge veteran, despite his previous bout with cancer and poor kidney function.
Steubing died in early 2002. His widow still wonders if the fraudulent human-test studies at Stratton cost her husband his life.
In court, the five widows’ lawyer argued that Stratton “committed every kind of research ethics violation imaginable,” adding “when you use individuals, humans, as guinea pigs, you do them harm.”
The US government responded by saying there was no way to prove the veterans had experienced pain or died early as a result of the corrupt drug experiments.
Case closed.
Open-air testing
If veterans with solid proof of having been used as test subjects cannot receive compensation, the possibilities are miniscule for service members and civilians used in trials without their consent or awareness.
Open-air testing of chemical and biological (CB) agents is one such case.
After 6,000 sheep died following the apparent release of a nerve agent at an Army facility in Utah in 1969, open-air testing was officially said to have ended in the US.
But the Defense Department’s April 2007 report to Congress on “Chemical and Biological Defense” strongly suggests an imminent resumption.
According to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, at least three passages of the Pentagon’s 2007 report indicate a planned continuance of open-air testing. While one section of the document, for example, mentions the use of “live-CB-agent full system test chambers,” another passage (page 67) reads:
“More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.”
As Dr. Boyle notes, both “test chambers” and “field testing” are mentioned in the report.
In addition, the passage says that improvements in the T&E (testing and evaluation) infrastructure and “better simulated representation of threats” are going to be carried out using “full systems” rather than simulants.
Dr. Boyle says, “It is clear they will be engaging in ‘Field Trials’ (not in test chambers) of ‘full systems,’ which means ‘live CB agents,’ not simulants.”
Another troublesome passage from the Defense Department’s April 2007 report (page 65) is:
“Current shortfalls lie in the full systems and platform test chambers and supporting instrumentation and fixtures. These test fixtures must be able to introduce and adequately control live CB agent challenges and provide a range of environmental and challenge conditions to simulate evolving threats, while performing end-to-end systems operations of CBD equipment.”
Dr. Boyle points out that the passage says “full systems” rather than “simulants,” and it makes a distinction between “test fixtures” and “test chambers.” He adds that talking about “‘a range of environmental and challenge conditions’ in a test chamber” is nonsensical. “A test chamber does not have a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions.’”
“What they are talking about here,” Dr. Boyle concludes, “is testing live CB (chemical and biological) agents in Field Tests — open-air testing, where there will be a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions’ to confront, test and verify.”
Gassing Crystal City
In May 2007, just one month after the Defense Department’s controversial report to Congress, the Pentagon quietly announced it would release “a dust simulating a biological attack in the Pentagon South Parking Lot.” The stated purpose was to study “the subsequent clean-up of roadways, people and equipment after the release.”
The announcement cryptically described the “dust” as containing “a harmless inert bacterium found in soil, water and air.”
Kirt P. Love, Director of the Desert Storm Battle Registry (DSBR), a Gulf War veterans’ group dealing with the exposures of the 1991 conflict, repeatedly phoned the Pentagon to clarify exactly what “dust” would be used in the imminent open-air test.
He soon found, however, that “the departments involved were not communicating with each other … only the people who handled the agent knew anything.”
Love described the situation as “disquieting” and said, “I thought this was very unfair to the Pentagon Police and other innocent bystanders who didn’t need to be kept in the dark about this. How could they conduct an open air test of a microbe and not tell people what it was up front?”
Eventually, Love’s phone calls paid off. A Pentagon representative told him the substance to be tested was Bacillus subtilis, which intriguingly, was also used during the US military’s Project SHAD human testing in the 1960s-70s.
The Pentagon’s announcement was correct in saying that Bacillus subtilis is found in soil. It failed to mention, however, that the bacterium has been linked to pulmonary disease and irreversible lung damage.
The Defense Department quietly carried out its Bacillus subtilis release in early June 2007. A Pentagon spokesperson would not confirm if the roughly 50 test subjects and numerous bystanders had been informed about the possible health risks.
And the open air tests continue.
In the next few days, the Pentagon is slated to release perfluorocarbon tracers and sulfur hexafluoride in Crystal City, Virginia.
Dubbed “Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study,” the operation will test the effectiveness of the city’s chemical sensors, and according to The Examiner newspaper, “ the data will help the Pentagon and Arlington shape their lockdown policies for chemical and biological attacks or accidents.” Lockdown policies.
According to a Pentagon press release from late February 2008, the study “will involve releasing a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and inert tracer gas that poses no health or safety hazards to people or the environment.”
But it’s not quite that simple. Sulfur hexafluoride is a suspected respiratory toxicant; as such, exposure in certain amounts may be harmful for those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory issues. It also is a suspected neurotoxicant, with potential untold consequences for the nervous systems of those vulnerable.
That part is left out of the Pentagon’s press release.
Crystal City is one of the “urban villages” of Arlington County, Virginia. It features upscale offices and residential areas — in other words a lot of civilians. You would think that if the Pentagon is releasing suspected toxicants into such a compressed urban area there would be more warning about potential health risks.
Yet repeated phone calls to the Pentagon yesterday yielded no results. The Force Protection Agency seemed unaware of the upcoming test and the press office was of no help either. No one could – or would – answer basic questions such as how many people could be exposed in the open-air test, if any attempt had been made to brief citizens on potential health risks or if there would be any medical follow-up provided.
Perfectly legal
The Pentagon’s laissez faire approach to these open-air tests raises questions about the possibilities for further testing on the general US population.
There is a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws). Specifically, Section 1520a lists the following cases in which the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans if informed consent has been obtained:
(1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.
(2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
(3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related to riot control.
In other words, there are many circumstances under which the Secretary of Defense can test chemical or biological agents on human beings, but at least informed consent has to be obtained in advance.
Or does it. Section 1515, another part of Chapter 32, is entitled “Suspension; Presidential authorization” and says:
After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President.
Essentially, if the President or Congress decides that we are at war, then the Secretary of Defense does not need anybody’s consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual “war on terror.”
Ominously, in June 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell gained White House approval to update a 1981 presidential order on how US spy agencies operate. Potentially up for review in the highly secretive overhaul, referred to as Order 12333, is the topic of human experimentation.
A surge in US WMD spending
The Bush administration has quietly channeled tens of billions of dollars into chemical and biological weapons. Bush’s 2007 budget, for example, earmarked almost $2 billion for biodefense research and development via the National Institutes of Health alone.
Research aims are often dubious. In October 2005, for example, US scientists resurrected the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which had killed almost 50 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox) just to try stopping the virus once it has been created.
Since the R&D is top secret and oversight limited, the public is rarely aware of escalating dangers. As of August 2007, for example, biological weapons laboratories across the country had reported 36 lost shipments and accidents for that year, almost double the number for all of 2004.
In addition to challenging international non-proliferation agreements and risking a global arms race, the Bush administration’s surge in chemical and biological weapons spending raises questions over what deadly weapons may have been tested on populations abroad. And what may be tested domestically, with or without the public’s consent.
For Wray Forrest, the battle for government accountability continues: “On September 29, 2006, Congress passed a bill that will inform veterans exactly what they were exposed to, within the next two or three years. I can just see it now: They visit my grave site and post it on my tomb stone, in order to inform me of what I was exposed to and just what exposure caused me to die.”
Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now, which went to #1 on Amazon's political activism charts in December 2007. Read other articles by Heather, or visit Heather's website.
This article was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 6:04 am and is filed under Anti-War, Civil Liberties, Fascism, Health/Medical, Justice,
The first time I was called a self-hating Jew
It was America in the 1960s, and his parents were civil rights activists who encouraged their children to speak their minds. Until, aged 14, Mike Marqusee criticised Israel. In this extract from his new book, he recalls his father's fury
Mike Marqusee
Mike Marqusee, author of If I Am Not For Myself: a Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew. Photograph: Felix Clay
The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father. It was in the autumn of 1967. Dad was 39, a successful businessman who was also, along with my mother, active in the US civil rights and anti-war movements. I was the oldest of his five children and had already, at age 14, intoxicated by the ideals of justice and equality, begun my career as a footsoldier of the left. It was not only the first time I had been called a self-hating Jew, it was the first time the phrase, the idea, entered my consciousness, and it was a shock.
As a young man, against the family grain, my father had taken an interest in social and especially racial justice and at college was drawn to the Communist party, which is how he met my mother, who was the product of a very different strand of the New York Jewish tapestry. This was in the heyday of anti-communist hysteria, of which my parents were first victims, then accomplices. After giving a speech against the Korean war at a student conference in Prague in 1950, dad was denounced as a traitor. His passport was seized. His father told the press that if his son had said such things, he was no son of his. It was in this period, I think, that he came to rely implicitly on my mother, the girlfriend who stood by his side when his life seemed most precarious.
They were married in 1952 and a year later I was born. Shortly after that, the FBI came knocking on the door. After months of pressure, from his own family as much as from the repressive organs of the state, my father, with my mother by his side, just as before, agreed to name names. "To this day we regret the mutual decision we made," my mother wrote. "It has been a source of incredible pain and shame." When my father, 45 years after the event, lay dying, sapped by chronic pain and humiliating dependence, he went over it yet again, as he had with me many times. "I fucked it up," he moaned. There was no absolution anyone could give him. All the other contributions he had made seemed outweighed by this ineradicable betrayal.
In the early 60s, having a wife and five kids, a big suburban home and a blossoming career as a real estate developer, was not enough, and he and my mother threw themselves into the struggle in the American south, raising money, organising meetings, sheltering young activists, supporting boycotts and pickets. In 1964, my dad went to Mississippi to deliver supplies to the beleaguered grassroots movement. It was a frightening time: they were now killing whites as well as blacks. Years later I learned that my mother was furious with my father over this adventure. She told him he was trying to compensate for his earlier sin, that he had no right to put his life at risk, to put this need for redemption above his obligation to his children. But in my eyes, the Mississippi visit, followed by his participation in the Selma march for voting rights in Alabama a year later, made my father a hero, along with the other heroes of the movement, which for me in those days included everyone from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael.
All of which partly - but only partly - explains why, when he lowered the boom on me in the autumn of 1967 by suggesting I was a self-hating Jew, it came as an uncushioned blow, an attack out of nowhere, or out of a place of which I was previously unaware.
Initially, I was anxious about going to a new synagogue. I didn't know what to expect as we turned down the driveway. The building was purpose-built and sleekly modern, the parking lot crammed with station wagons. Dad escorted me to my classroom, where, at once, I felt relief. The room was filled with kids I knew from school. There was the one who played quarterback, the one who made funny noises, the one who had all the Batman comic books. So they were Jewish too. I hadn't known that. There was a map of Israel alongside a map of the US, but apart from that it looked like the classrooms I knew from school, with colourful posters and a big blackboard.
I felt at home. We all did. We were the most comfortable Jews that had ever walked the planet. Not for us the longing of exile, the pain of dispersal. We were Americans in America. And we were, in particular, suburban American Jewish kids in the early 1960s, blithely self-confident about our privileges and our position in the world. Sublimely safe. That was the beginning of my eight years of Reform Jewish education, which sputtered to an end when I was 15 and declared, in my confirmation speech, that God was dead and man was condemned to be free.
From an early age I conceived of myself as a rationalist and though I made spasmodic efforts at belief, I never felt a divine presence. During "prayer", I was acutely aware of the gap between what I was supposed to be thinking and what was actually going through my head. But in the end what alienated me from the synagogue was not the make-believe of the afterlife or the all-seeing omnipotence of an invisible God. Not in this synagogue. Here the absolutes were kept in the background. God was there, mentioned in the prayers, but he had been discreetly updated and denatured. No one seemed overconcerned about his judgment.
So what was the creed we were taught in Sunday school? It was not about God. It was about the Jews. A singular people who had given wonderful gifts to the world and whom the world had treated cruelly. A people who were persecuted. A people who survived. A people who triumphed. Despite the Holocaust, we were not a nation of losers, of victims. There was a redemptive denouement. There was Israel, a modern Jewish homeland, a beacon to the world. A shiny new state with up-to-date, Coke-drinking people like us. Liberals, like us. Bearers of democracy and civilisation, making the desert bloom. A little America in the Middle East.
Israel was both our own cause, a Jewish cause, and a moral cause, a universal cause. Like America. A land without people for a people without land. Like America. That was the gift we received in Sunday school - an extra country. For us there were two nations and, best of all, we didn't have to choose between them. As Jews and Americans, we enjoyed a double birthright and a double privilege. The coming home of the Jews to the land of our forefathers completed the epic saga stretching back to Genesis and ensured it ended with a huge upswing in mood. From near-annihilation in the Holocaust to the pride of statehood in a few short years. We took this less as a sign of the divine inspiration of the ancient prophets than as another manifestation of the order and justice that generally prevailed in our world. A testament to progress and the Jewish mastery of progress.
Thanks to America and Israel, the Jews were safe at last. We could visit Israel and work on a kibbutz, like a grown-up summer camp. We were taught to revere Ben Gurion and his heir, the Jewish-American farm girl Golda Meir. In our Sunday school textbooks the Israelis looked like us. And the country they were building looked familiar, with modern buildings and girls in jeans. These were Jews who read books but also drove tractors and tanks.
As always, the Jews had enemies. Israel was menaced by Arabs (not Palestinians, a word never uttered in our synagogue). They were exotically attired bedouin - people who did not have or want a home. In our Sunday school texts, they appeared swarthy, coarse, ignorant, duplicitous. These descendants of Pharaoh and the Philistines seemed curiously ungrateful and irrational. For no reason at all, they hated us.
I was intrigued by the Jewish holidays. Simchas Torah, a year marked out in chapters of a book. Succoth, the Jewish Thanksgiving, a harvest festival, a deeply exotic idea to kids who knew food only from supermarkets. Purim, the revenge of integrity. Yom Kippur disturbed me (I knew I should atone for something but wasn't sure what), but Pesach was special. The matzoh balls and latkes my grandmother brought. Elijah's cup. Most of all, it was the story that pulled me in - that epic of liberation, with the oppressed triumphing over their oppressors, right over might. An intoxicating narrative, as exciting and satisfying as the food. People should be careful when they teach this stuff to kids. It sinks in deeper than they realise. It can even turn someone against the land promised them in the Pesach story.
For several years I took twice-weekly Hebrew lessons in preparation for my barmitzvah. Then came a year of lavish celebrations, services, dinners, dances, in marquees on suburban lawns and ballrooms in midtown hotels. Mountains of gifts. Cheques or bonds or little stakes in IBM or ITT. Compared to some, my barmitzvah was a low-key affair; my mother disapproved of the conspicuous display made by our neighbours. I got the cheques, I got a set of left-handed golf clubs, but better yet I got elegant illustrated editions of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Thoreau's Walden.
Within weeks of my barmitzvah, every word of Hebrew vanished from my head. The language had been learned solely to complete a public performance, a rite, that had little meaning for me. I certainly did not feel that I had become a man, an adult, a member of a congregation, that I was enfranchised. Instead, I began to look for and find some of that sense of growth, of emergence as an autonomous human being, in politics, in the world of the left, in battles against racism and for civil liberties. Soon I just could not stop talking about the Vietnam war and how it was wrong on every count. This, in 1966, did not make me popular. So why was I so determined to pursue the course? Was I just showing off, calling attention to myself? Yes, I was. But there were other ways to do that and I did not choose them.
In Sunday school, Israel's victory in the 1967 six-day war was a great moment of Jewish pride. I don't remember much thanking of God, and no mourning for the victims on either side, just a sustained note of elated triumph. To cap all our other Jewish achievements, to confirm our eminence, we had proved ourselves masters in war. Six days to defeat Arab armies attacking from all sides, to sweep across the Sinai, unite Jerusalem, drive the enemy back across the Jordan. No one spoke then, not in my hearing, of the beginning of an occupation. We had redrawn the lines on the map. That was our prerogative. That was justice. We were unbeatable and we were righteous. Israel married moral virtue and military strength - another sign that we lived in an age of order and progress. When a friend who liked to tease me about my anti-Vietnam war views suggested I might not support Israel against the Arabs, I was outraged and offended.
I'm not sure exactly when or how I began to doubt. But I remember what happened the first time I expressed that doubt. It was a few months after the '67 war. A special visitor came to our Sunday school class. He was in his early 20s, with thick fair hair falling over his forehead, a snappy sports jacket and polished loafers. Some of the girls whispered that he was cute. He had an accent but it was nothing like our grandparents' accents. He looked and dressed like us but he had been a soldier in a war and that made him an alien being. Smiling, he perched himself casually on the front of the teacher's desk and told us about the remarkable achievements of the Israeli army. He told us that the Arabs had planned a sneak attack but had met with more than they bargained for. They were bad fighters, undisciplined soldiers. And they were better off now, under Israeli rule. "You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street."
Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white southerners I'd been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I'd been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist.
I felt the eyes of the teacher and the other kids turn on me. They were used to me spouting radical opinions but this time I had gone too far. Angrily, the teacher told me I didn't have any idea what I was saying and that there would be no discourtesy to guests in his classroom. The young Israeli ranted bitterly about Arab propaganda and how the Israelis treated the Arabs better than any of the Arab rulers did.
I can't remember how long it was after that that I decided to share this experience and my thoughts on it with my family. This was something I was usually encouraged to do. We were sitting around the dinner table - all seven of us. I launched into my story about the Israeli in Sunday school and how what he said was racist. I had been thinking about the matter and now added, for my family's benefit, a further opinion. It was wrong for one country to take over another, or part of another, by military force. If the US was wrong in Vietnam - and that was a given around our dinner table - then Israel was wrong in taking over all that Arab land. I was reasoning by analogy, and nobody had yet told me that some analogies were off limits.
For some time I remained unaware that my father was listening to me not with approval but with rising fury. When he barked, "Enough already!" the shift was disturbingly abrupt. Like my Sunday school teacher, he made me feel that I had said something obscene. Then he drew a breath and seemed to soften. "I think you need to look at why you're saying what you're saying," he said, and then the softness vanished. "There's some Jewish self-hatred there."
I felt then - and still feel now, when I look back - deeply and frustratingly misunderstood. My motives had nothing to do with self-hatred or any feeling about being Jewish. Nor did they have anything to do with compassion for a people - the Palestinians - about whom I knew nothing. I was merely following, as best I could, and in typical 14-year-old fashion, what seemed to be the dictates of logic. If in following them, the results appeared to defy assumptions, then that just made them more curious and compelling. Judging people by their colour or religion was wrong. Racism - making a generalisation about a whole people, stereotyping a whole people - was wrong. Taking over other countries was wrong, even if they attacked you (it was years before I learned that it was Israel that had launched this war, justified at the time by Abba Eban, American liberal Jewry's favourite Israeli, as a "pre-emptive" strike). Among the shibboleths I was brought up on was the belief that "my country right or wrong" was wrong. No one liked to insist more than my dad that if you really loved your country you criticised its flaws. Surely that also applied to religion, and "my religion right or wrong" must also be wrong. I was only trying to apply general principles to a particular case. An exercise in logic. An exercise in teenage stubbornness. But I was unprepared for the response, with its implication that I did not know myself, coming from my father's lips. An attack on my selfhood.
I was startled and bewildered by the phrase "Jewish self-hatred". I didn't know what it meant. I hadn't imagined that Jews would hate themselves, or that anyone would think that I hated myself. The charge seemed so far-fetched, yet so personal. And so bitterly unfair. Burning from head to toe, I threw down knife and fork and left the table in a huff, pounding up the stairs to my room, where I hurled myself on my bed and wrestled with my frustration.
Some might by now have concluded that the roots of my anti-Zionism lie in oedipal trauma. For sure, this was a deeply distressing incident. Later, I looked back on it as my first political disagreement with my father. Later still, as one of a number of raw episodes in our relationship, most of which had nothing to do with politics. Now, looking again at the history behind this incident, I see more clearly why the opinions I was expressing would have infuriated nearly everyone in my father's milieu in those days. To me, they were a logical development from the agreed shared ground of democratic liberalism, but to liberals of my father's generation they were an insolent abrogation of that shared ground. Without in the least intending to, I had breached a taboo.
Today, as cracks show in the presumed monolith of Jewish backing for Israel, increasing numbers of Jews are interrogating and rejecting Zionism. Nonetheless, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews strikes many people - Jews and non-Jews - as an anomaly, a perversity, a violation of the first clause in the ethical aphorism of Hillel, the first-century rabbi and doyenne of Jewish teachings: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"
Zionism is an ideology and a political movement. As such it is open to rational dispute. Jews, like others, might view the Jewish claim to Palestine as irrational, anachronistic, and intrinsically unjust. They might consider the Jewish state to be discriminatory or racist or might object - on political, philosophical, or even specifically Jewish grounds - to any state based on the supremacy of a particular religious or ethnic group. As Jews, they might reject the idea that Jewish people constitute a "nation", or at least a "nation" of the type that can or should become a territorial nation-state. Or they might have concluded on the basis of an examination of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians that the underlying cause of the conflict was the ideology of the Israeli state.
Any or all of the above should be sufficient to explain why some Jews would become anti-Zionists. But that doesn't stop critics from placing us firmly in the realm of the irredeemably neurotic. Whenever Jews speak out against Israel, their motives, their representativeness, their authenticity as Jews are questioned. We are pathologised. For only a psychological aberration, a neurotic malaise, could account for our defection from Israel's cause, which is presumed to be our own cause.
Anti-Zionist Jews are not and do not claim to be any more authentic or representative than any other Jews, nor is their protest against Israel any more valid than a non-Jew's. But "If I am not for myself", then the Zionists will claim to be for me, will usurp my voice and my Jewishness. Since each Israeli atrocity is justified by the exigencies of Jewish survival, each calls forth a particular witness from anti-Zionist Jews, whose very existence contradicts the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.
· This is an edited extract from If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew, by Mike Marqusee, published by Verso at £15.99. To order a copy for £14.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
False Flag Prospects, 2008 -- Top Three US Target Cities By Captain Eric H. May
False Flag Prospects, 2008 -- Top Three US Target Cities
By Captain Eric H. May
The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out. As I'll detail below, this is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 "terror" attacks, which were in reality government attacks blamed on "terrorists."
Although ill health keeps me from working as hard in the area of false flag analysis as I used to, the urging of independent editors and brother intelligence officers has prompted me to write this essay. I'll keep it short for readers with limited time, but I will include invaluable links for those who want to delve deeper and understand better.
My aim, as a former military intelligence officer who spent five years with the U.S. Army 75th Division conducting military war games, is to convince the American people that the "next 9/11" -- constantly promised by officials and the media -- is likely to be carried out under the guise of future military exercises. If the American people are aware of pending exercises and the danger they represent, then the exercises cannot "go live" and effect the very terror events that they are supposed to be rehearsing against.
Military Exercises
The 9/11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the 7/7, 2005 attacks in the United Kingdom both have smoking guns proving that the mass murderers were not foreign terrorists but domestic tyrants. Each country's government was conducting military exercises that simulated the exact events that were to occur.
The US 9/11 Commission stumbled across strong evidence of treason by Dick Cheney when it interviewed Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, who was present in Cheney's famous command bunker as Flight 77 sped toward Washington, DC. Cheney was at the center of national military exercises simulating terrorist hijackings of US aircraft -- at the very time that those hijackings were occurring in real life. On May 23, 2003, Secretary Mineta testified:
"During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"
9/11 Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton failed to follow up on the bombshell revelation, and quickly switched the topic. Thanks to YouTube, Mineta's astounding revelation and Hamilton's amazing reaction are both viewable on a three minute clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfdOwt2v3Y
In the case of the 7/7 London railway bombings, there is same-day evidence in a BBC interview with former Scotland Yard anti-terrorism agent, Peter Power, who was a contract employee working in government exercises:
POWER: "At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."
BBC HOST: "To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?"
POWER: "Precisely."
For a one minute excerpt containing the statements above, refer to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKvkhe3rqtc
Mainstream Media
It goes without saying that serious media inquiry would quickly ferret out the facts demonstrating high treason in the cases of 9/11 and 7/7. It also goes without saying, unfortunately, that the traitors behind the two false flag attacks understood this very well, and would not have done what they did without a green light from a collaborative media.
Three World Trade Center buildings collapsed in New York City on September 11, 2001: WTC 1 and WTC 2 (the Twin Towers) in the morning, and WTC 7 (the Salomon Building) at 5:20 p.m. EST. Given that all three buildings were said to be unexpected collapses by all official sources, there is no good reason -- except for complicity -- to explain how it is that the BBC reported the collapse of WTC 7 twenty minutes before it happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7SwOT29gbc&feature=related
Fox news damned itself by announcing that WTC 7 had collapsed -- even as it showed a live shot of downtown New York with WTC 7 still standing. A few seconds later the building collapsed, understandably confusing the newscasters:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwUJ9MhzgK
The owner of all three buildings was Larry Silverstein, who had recently doubled the insurance value of the Twin Towers. Amazingly, "Lucky Larry," later stated in a PBS interview that he and the New York Fire Department agreed to a controlled demolition of WTC 7. Since skyscrapers are not wired for demolition -- unless someone intends to demolish them -- Silverstein's statement is an admission that 9/11 was an inside job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYdAJQV100
"The Noble Lie"
I believe that on the strength of the five YouTube links above an objective investigation would have more than enough evidence to warrant impeachment of Bush and Cheney on a charge of high treason, and to summon a grand jury that would indict many others on charges of high treason against Larry Silverstein and other apparent 9/11 collaborators. I believe that the American people, if presented with a single news story containing the five YouTube links above, would demand that the case of high treason be carried to its logical conclusion.
Congress, though, won't impeach the president. The mainstream media, for which I used to write, will not investigate and report the story. The military that was used as a tool to mass murder American citizens will not take action against traitors in uniform who knew exactly what they were doing on 9/11, or the many more uniformed dupes who thought they were conducting military exercises until the events of 9/11 occurred. To this day there have been no adverse actions -- which would require investigation and evaluation -- against any military person involved in what even official apologists call the greatest defense failure in American history. All of this shows that the fix is in, and that we are in a fix.
The high officials, media executives and military officers who are bound by law and ethics to serve the American people have become a textbook example of a grand conspiracy. To look at it from their point of view, they are historic actors who are beyond good and evil, who must stimulate the American people to a necessary geostrategic adventure by any means necessary. To them, the official account of the 9/11 "terror" attacks is what Plato once described as the "noble lie," a necessary falsehood told to a childlike public in order to direct it maturely. The simple fact is that 9/11 has justified an attempt to seize and control the ultimate geostrategic resource: oil. He who controls Middle East oil controls the world.
Top Three US Target Cities
Last year I published "Next 9/11, Summer 2007?" in response to the same kind of requests that have led me to publish this essay as a 2008 update. My 2007 three most likely cities for the next 9/11 were Houston, Chicago and Portland. This year the same three cities are still most endangered, in light of the fact that the US military has designated Texas, Indiana and Oregon as three of its four target states in the 2008 version of its Noble Resolve military exercises. Granted, Chicago is in Illinois, not Indiana, but Indiana is quite close, and has been used to stage forces for terror exercises conducted in Chicago in recent years.
It may come as a surprise to people not acquainted with military preparations that the same cities remain on the list even though analysts like me have publicized them widely. There are considerable difficulties in setting up the political, police, military and media players necessary to support a false flag attack. While many in the 911 truth movement believes that national military forces can simply hit any city at any time, it's not so easy -- thank God. Fortunately, this means that those of us who study false flag prospects and focus on most likely targets; regrettably, this means that target cities can't breathe easy just because they have detected, exposed and preempted a single false flag attempt.
Here is a brief target analysis of the top three cities:
Primary Target: Houston. Over the past four years military and police veterans like me have been alerting the public to government exercises aiming at the nuclear destruction of Houston petro-suburbs. Five times in those four years we were able to predict to within a day major petrochemical explosions in those petro-suburbs. The odds against this kind of accuracy are astronomical. As the center of Big Oil and the Bush Family, Houston remains the most endangered city in America. Any patriotic group, like mine, trying to alert its home city to the dangers of a false flag attack should read my recent article, "The 1/31 Nuke: Proof for Ron Paul" about the successful interdiction of a 2006 attempt against Texas City:
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/08/01/28/may.htm
Secondary Target: Chicago. While Houston is the most endangered city, the most endangered building -- the best candidate to be the next World Trade Center -- is the Sears Tower. Official sources have pronounced it just that ever since the original 9/11 attack, when they said it was on the Al Qaeda hit list. Larry Silverstein, who bought the Twin Towers two months before 9/11, led a group that purchased the Sears Tower on 3/11, 2004, the day of the Madrid bombings. Federal officials have been pointing to Chicago and its Sears Tower as Al Qaeda targets since the original 9/11 attacks, and have repeated the threat ever since. In May 2006,, the government scheduled secret 9/11-type exercises in Chicago, while Chicago Mayor Daley was docked conveniently away in Israel for his first visit there. I sent a widely read communiqué to Illinois Governor Blagojevich as part of a successful Internet attempt to shut down the pending false flag attack:
http://tekgnosis.typepad.com/tekgnosis/2006/05/ghost_troop_com.html
Tertiary Target: Portland. Portland, called "Little Beirut" by Bush cronies because of its enmity to Bush 41 and Bush 43, only made my top three list last summer, when it was designated as a target for a nuclear attack by successive exercises Noble Resolve and TOPOFF. The language in an official press release stated the case plainly enough: "Noble Resolve will coordinate with officials in Oregon to model a nuclear attack on Portland." In the course of researching Portland for a series of articles I wrote about the city and its exercises. I discovered that Stanford and Harvard had prepared a detailed nuclear fallout map for it, that national military commanders and state National Guard commanders were telling different stories about what the exercises were trying to accomplish, and that Portland's The Oregonian newspaper was doing everything it could to avoid investigating the frightening anomalies. I wasn't at all surprised that the last day of the exercises found the Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff in downtown Portland, which was largely closed down by an "unexpected" bomb threat. For another professional perspective on how great the danger was -- and may be again -- I refer the reader to the analysis of my colleague, Major William B. Fox (USMC):
http://www.lonestaricon.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=2006&z=186
Postscript
"Good morning. At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning new attacks on our country. Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that will make September the 11th pale by comparison." -- George W. Bush, Feb. 13, 2008
I can't think of a more important question than the one of where the next 9/11 will be attempted. Common sense dictates to all of us who understand the truth about 9/11 that its perpetrators must strike again. Indeed, every directive, act and decision of our post-9/11 unitary executive, cowards Congress and Judas judiciary has increased the power of the federal government to wage the Global War and impose the Homeland State.
Why on earth would those already guilty of high treason, mass murder and war crimes fail to follow up on their earlier efforts? They understand quite well that the Global War is going badly and the Homeland State is becoming onerous, and that only a reapplication of false flag terror will force the American people to proceed with our post-9/11 national insanity.
Still, for every one person who republishes or constructively comments on this essay, there will be another who employs division, abuse and ridicule against me or anyone else who asserts the common sense point that false flaggers will continue to false flag, just as murderers will continue to murder and robbers will continue to rob. It's Newtonian in its simplicity: things continue to drift the way they are drifting until they are stopped.
We can only stop the deadly drift of America by understanding 9/11 and anticipating the next 9/11. Many of the vociferous voices impeding our understanding and anticipation are performing a vital service for treason. The federal government once used counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) against the Vietnam era antiwar and civil rights movement, and common sense would suggest that they are using it again in the post-9/11 era, this time against the antiwar and 911 truth movement. The most dangerous voices of all our those from false friends who have infiltrated us to confuse us until the traitors who carried out 9/11 can repeat their performance.
Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His political and military analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine.
For more information, or his interview schedule, refer to his homesite:
http://www.spiritone.com/~pazuu/pow-mia/Ghost_Troop_Captain_Eric_H_May.htm
By Captain Eric H. May
The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out. As I'll detail below, this is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 "terror" attacks, which were in reality government attacks blamed on "terrorists."
Although ill health keeps me from working as hard in the area of false flag analysis as I used to, the urging of independent editors and brother intelligence officers has prompted me to write this essay. I'll keep it short for readers with limited time, but I will include invaluable links for those who want to delve deeper and understand better.
My aim, as a former military intelligence officer who spent five years with the U.S. Army 75th Division conducting military war games, is to convince the American people that the "next 9/11" -- constantly promised by officials and the media -- is likely to be carried out under the guise of future military exercises. If the American people are aware of pending exercises and the danger they represent, then the exercises cannot "go live" and effect the very terror events that they are supposed to be rehearsing against.
Military Exercises
The 9/11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the 7/7, 2005 attacks in the United Kingdom both have smoking guns proving that the mass murderers were not foreign terrorists but domestic tyrants. Each country's government was conducting military exercises that simulated the exact events that were to occur.
The US 9/11 Commission stumbled across strong evidence of treason by Dick Cheney when it interviewed Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, who was present in Cheney's famous command bunker as Flight 77 sped toward Washington, DC. Cheney was at the center of national military exercises simulating terrorist hijackings of US aircraft -- at the very time that those hijackings were occurring in real life. On May 23, 2003, Secretary Mineta testified:
"During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"
9/11 Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton failed to follow up on the bombshell revelation, and quickly switched the topic. Thanks to YouTube, Mineta's astounding revelation and Hamilton's amazing reaction are both viewable on a three minute clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfdOwt2v3Y
In the case of the 7/7 London railway bombings, there is same-day evidence in a BBC interview with former Scotland Yard anti-terrorism agent, Peter Power, who was a contract employee working in government exercises:
POWER: "At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."
BBC HOST: "To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?"
POWER: "Precisely."
For a one minute excerpt containing the statements above, refer to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKvkhe3rqtc
Mainstream Media
It goes without saying that serious media inquiry would quickly ferret out the facts demonstrating high treason in the cases of 9/11 and 7/7. It also goes without saying, unfortunately, that the traitors behind the two false flag attacks understood this very well, and would not have done what they did without a green light from a collaborative media.
Three World Trade Center buildings collapsed in New York City on September 11, 2001: WTC 1 and WTC 2 (the Twin Towers) in the morning, and WTC 7 (the Salomon Building) at 5:20 p.m. EST. Given that all three buildings were said to be unexpected collapses by all official sources, there is no good reason -- except for complicity -- to explain how it is that the BBC reported the collapse of WTC 7 twenty minutes before it happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7SwOT29gbc&feature=related
Fox news damned itself by announcing that WTC 7 had collapsed -- even as it showed a live shot of downtown New York with WTC 7 still standing. A few seconds later the building collapsed, understandably confusing the newscasters:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwUJ9MhzgK
The owner of all three buildings was Larry Silverstein, who had recently doubled the insurance value of the Twin Towers. Amazingly, "Lucky Larry," later stated in a PBS interview that he and the New York Fire Department agreed to a controlled demolition of WTC 7. Since skyscrapers are not wired for demolition -- unless someone intends to demolish them -- Silverstein's statement is an admission that 9/11 was an inside job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYdAJQV100
"The Noble Lie"
I believe that on the strength of the five YouTube links above an objective investigation would have more than enough evidence to warrant impeachment of Bush and Cheney on a charge of high treason, and to summon a grand jury that would indict many others on charges of high treason against Larry Silverstein and other apparent 9/11 collaborators. I believe that the American people, if presented with a single news story containing the five YouTube links above, would demand that the case of high treason be carried to its logical conclusion.
Congress, though, won't impeach the president. The mainstream media, for which I used to write, will not investigate and report the story. The military that was used as a tool to mass murder American citizens will not take action against traitors in uniform who knew exactly what they were doing on 9/11, or the many more uniformed dupes who thought they were conducting military exercises until the events of 9/11 occurred. To this day there have been no adverse actions -- which would require investigation and evaluation -- against any military person involved in what even official apologists call the greatest defense failure in American history. All of this shows that the fix is in, and that we are in a fix.
The high officials, media executives and military officers who are bound by law and ethics to serve the American people have become a textbook example of a grand conspiracy. To look at it from their point of view, they are historic actors who are beyond good and evil, who must stimulate the American people to a necessary geostrategic adventure by any means necessary. To them, the official account of the 9/11 "terror" attacks is what Plato once described as the "noble lie," a necessary falsehood told to a childlike public in order to direct it maturely. The simple fact is that 9/11 has justified an attempt to seize and control the ultimate geostrategic resource: oil. He who controls Middle East oil controls the world.
Top Three US Target Cities
Last year I published "Next 9/11, Summer 2007?" in response to the same kind of requests that have led me to publish this essay as a 2008 update. My 2007 three most likely cities for the next 9/11 were Houston, Chicago and Portland. This year the same three cities are still most endangered, in light of the fact that the US military has designated Texas, Indiana and Oregon as three of its four target states in the 2008 version of its Noble Resolve military exercises. Granted, Chicago is in Illinois, not Indiana, but Indiana is quite close, and has been used to stage forces for terror exercises conducted in Chicago in recent years.
It may come as a surprise to people not acquainted with military preparations that the same cities remain on the list even though analysts like me have publicized them widely. There are considerable difficulties in setting up the political, police, military and media players necessary to support a false flag attack. While many in the 911 truth movement believes that national military forces can simply hit any city at any time, it's not so easy -- thank God. Fortunately, this means that those of us who study false flag prospects and focus on most likely targets; regrettably, this means that target cities can't breathe easy just because they have detected, exposed and preempted a single false flag attempt.
Here is a brief target analysis of the top three cities:
Primary Target: Houston. Over the past four years military and police veterans like me have been alerting the public to government exercises aiming at the nuclear destruction of Houston petro-suburbs. Five times in those four years we were able to predict to within a day major petrochemical explosions in those petro-suburbs. The odds against this kind of accuracy are astronomical. As the center of Big Oil and the Bush Family, Houston remains the most endangered city in America. Any patriotic group, like mine, trying to alert its home city to the dangers of a false flag attack should read my recent article, "The 1/31 Nuke: Proof for Ron Paul" about the successful interdiction of a 2006 attempt against Texas City:
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/08/01/28/may.htm
Secondary Target: Chicago. While Houston is the most endangered city, the most endangered building -- the best candidate to be the next World Trade Center -- is the Sears Tower. Official sources have pronounced it just that ever since the original 9/11 attack, when they said it was on the Al Qaeda hit list. Larry Silverstein, who bought the Twin Towers two months before 9/11, led a group that purchased the Sears Tower on 3/11, 2004, the day of the Madrid bombings. Federal officials have been pointing to Chicago and its Sears Tower as Al Qaeda targets since the original 9/11 attacks, and have repeated the threat ever since. In May 2006,, the government scheduled secret 9/11-type exercises in Chicago, while Chicago Mayor Daley was docked conveniently away in Israel for his first visit there. I sent a widely read communiqué to Illinois Governor Blagojevich as part of a successful Internet attempt to shut down the pending false flag attack:
http://tekgnosis.typepad.com/tekgnosis/2006/05/ghost_troop_com.html
Tertiary Target: Portland. Portland, called "Little Beirut" by Bush cronies because of its enmity to Bush 41 and Bush 43, only made my top three list last summer, when it was designated as a target for a nuclear attack by successive exercises Noble Resolve and TOPOFF. The language in an official press release stated the case plainly enough: "Noble Resolve will coordinate with officials in Oregon to model a nuclear attack on Portland." In the course of researching Portland for a series of articles I wrote about the city and its exercises. I discovered that Stanford and Harvard had prepared a detailed nuclear fallout map for it, that national military commanders and state National Guard commanders were telling different stories about what the exercises were trying to accomplish, and that Portland's The Oregonian newspaper was doing everything it could to avoid investigating the frightening anomalies. I wasn't at all surprised that the last day of the exercises found the Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff in downtown Portland, which was largely closed down by an "unexpected" bomb threat. For another professional perspective on how great the danger was -- and may be again -- I refer the reader to the analysis of my colleague, Major William B. Fox (USMC):
http://www.lonestaricon.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=2006&z=186
Postscript
"Good morning. At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning new attacks on our country. Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that will make September the 11th pale by comparison." -- George W. Bush, Feb. 13, 2008
I can't think of a more important question than the one of where the next 9/11 will be attempted. Common sense dictates to all of us who understand the truth about 9/11 that its perpetrators must strike again. Indeed, every directive, act and decision of our post-9/11 unitary executive, cowards Congress and Judas judiciary has increased the power of the federal government to wage the Global War and impose the Homeland State.
Why on earth would those already guilty of high treason, mass murder and war crimes fail to follow up on their earlier efforts? They understand quite well that the Global War is going badly and the Homeland State is becoming onerous, and that only a reapplication of false flag terror will force the American people to proceed with our post-9/11 national insanity.
Still, for every one person who republishes or constructively comments on this essay, there will be another who employs division, abuse and ridicule against me or anyone else who asserts the common sense point that false flaggers will continue to false flag, just as murderers will continue to murder and robbers will continue to rob. It's Newtonian in its simplicity: things continue to drift the way they are drifting until they are stopped.
We can only stop the deadly drift of America by understanding 9/11 and anticipating the next 9/11. Many of the vociferous voices impeding our understanding and anticipation are performing a vital service for treason. The federal government once used counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) against the Vietnam era antiwar and civil rights movement, and common sense would suggest that they are using it again in the post-9/11 era, this time against the antiwar and 911 truth movement. The most dangerous voices of all our those from false friends who have infiltrated us to confuse us until the traitors who carried out 9/11 can repeat their performance.
Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His political and military analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine.
For more information, or his interview schedule, refer to his homesite:
http://www.spiritone.com/~pazuu/pow-mia/Ghost_Troop_Captain_Eric_H_May.htm
THE $300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC IS A FAKE
Exclusive interview with the
President of Ecuador
THE $300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC IS A FAKE
By Greg Palast
Do you believe this?
This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop – and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million – which they’re using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!
That’s what George Bush tells us. And he got that from his buddy, the strange right-wing President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.
So: After the fact, Colombia justifies its attempt to provoke a border war as a way to stop the threat of WMDs! Uh, where have we heard that before?
The US press snorted up this line about Chavez’ $300 million to “terrorists” quicker than the young Bush inhaling Colombia’s powdered export.
What the US press did not do is look at the evidence, the email in the magic laptop. (Presumably, the FARC leader’s last words were, “Listen, my password is ….”)
I read them. (You can read them here) - http://www.gregpalast.com/farc-documents/ While you can read it all in español, here is, in translation, the one and only mention of the alleged $300 million from Chavez:
“… With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call “dossier,” efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo [slang term for ‘cripple’], which I will explain in a separate note. Let’s call the boss Ángel, and the cripple Ernesto.”
Got that? Where is Hugo? Where’s 300 million? And 300 what? Indeed, in context, the note is all about the hostage exchange with the FARC that Chavez was working on at the time (December 23, 2007) at the request of the Colombian government.
Indeed, the entire remainder of the email is all about the mechanism of the hostage exchange. Here’s the next line:
“To receive the three freed ones, Chavez proposes three options: Plan A. Do it to via of a ‘humanitarian caravan’; one that will involve Venezuela, France, the Vatican[?], Switzerland, European Union, democrats [civil society], Argentina, Red Cross, etc.”
As to the 300, I must note that the FARC’s previous prisoner exchange involved 300 prisoners. Is that what the ‘300’ refers to? ¿Quien sabe? Unlike Uribe, Bush and the US press, I won’t guess or make up a phastasmogoric story about Chavez mailing checks to the jungle.
To bolster their case, the Colombians claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the mysterious “Angel” is the code name for Chavez. But in the memo, Chavez goes by the code name … Chavez.
Well, so what? This is what . . . .
Colombia’s invasion into Ecuador is a rank violation of international law, condemned by every single Latin member of the Organization of American States. But George Bush just loved it. He called Uribe to back Colombia, against, “the continuing assault by narco-terrorists as well as the provocative maneuvers by the regime in Venezuela.”
Well, our President may have gotten the facts ass-backward, but Bush knows what he’s doing: shoring up his last, faltering ally in South America, Uribe, a desperate man in deep political trouble.
Uribe claims he is going to bring charges against Chavez before the International Criminal Court. If Uribe goes there in person, I suggest he take a toothbrush: it was just discovered that right-wing death squads held murder-planning sessions at Uribe’s ranch. Uribe’s associates have been called before the nation’s Supreme Court and may face prison.
In other words, it’s a good time for a desperate Uribe to use that old politico’s wheeze, the threat of war, to drown out accusations of his own criminality. Furthermore, Uribe’s attack literally killed negotiations with FARC by killing FARC’s negotiator, Raul Reyes. Reyes was in talks with both Ecuador and Chavez about another prisoner exchange. Uribe authorized the negotiations. However, Uribe knew, should those talks have succeeded in obtaining the release of those kidnapped by the FARC, credit would have been heaped on Ecuador and Chavez, and discredit heaped on Uribe.
Luckily for a hemisphere on the verge of flames, the President of Ecuador, Raphael Correa, is one of the most level-headed, thoughtful men I’ve ever encountered.
Correa is now flying from Quito to Brazilia to Caracas to keep the region from blowing sky high. While moving troops to his border – no chief of state can permit foreign tanks on their sovereign soil – Correa also refuses sanctuary to the FARC . Indeed, Ecuador has routed out 47 FARC bases, a better track record than Colombia’s own, corrupt military.
For his cool, peaceable handling of the crisis, I will forgive Correa for apologizing for his calling Bush, “a dimwitted President who has done great damage to his country and the world.” (Watch an excerpt of my interview with Correa here.)
Amateur Hour in Blue
We can trust Correa to keep the peace South of the Border. But can we trust our Presidents-to-be?
The current man in the Oval Office, George Bush, simply can’t help himself: an outlaw invasion by a right-wing death-squad promoter is just fine with him.
But guess who couldn’t wait to parrot the Bush line? Hillary Clinton, still explaining that her vote to invade Iraq was not a vote to invade Iraq, issued a statement nearly identical to Bush’s, blessing the invasion of Ecuador as Colombia’s “right to defend itself.” And she added, “Hugo Chávez must stop these provoking actions.” Huh?
I assumed that Obama wouldn’t jump on this landmine – especially after he was blasted as a foreign policy amateur for suggesting he would invade across Pakistan’s border to hunt terrorists.
It’s embarrassing that Barack repeated Hillary’s line nearly verbatim, announcing, “the Colombian government has every right to defend itself.”
(I’m sure Hillary’s position wasn’t influenced by the loan of a campaign jet to her by Frank Giustra. Giustra has given over a hundred million dollars to Bill Clinton projects. Last year, Bill introduced Giustra to Colombia’s Uribe. On the spot, Giustra cut a lucrative deal with Uribe for Colombian oil.)
Then there’s Mr. War Hero. John McCain weighed in with his own idiocies, announcing that, “Hugo Chavez is establish[ing] a dictatorship,” presumably because, unlike George Bush, Chavez counts all the votes in Venezuelan elections.
But now our story gets tricky and icky.
The wise media critic Jeff Cohen told me to watch for the press naming McCain as a foreign policy expert and labeling the Democrats as amateurs. Sure enough, the New York Times, on the news pages Wednesday, called McCain, “a national security pro.”
McCain is the “pro” who said the war in Iraq would cost nearly nothing in lives or treasury dollars.
But, on the Colombian invasion of Ecuador, McCain said, “I hope that tensions will be relaxed, President Chavez will remove those troops from the borders - as well as the Ecuadorians - and relations continue to improve between the two.”
It’s not quite English, but it’s definitely not Bush. And weirdly, it’s definitely not Obama and Clinton cheerleading Colombia’s war on Ecuador.
Democrats, are you listening? The only thing worse than the media attacking Obama and Clinton as amateurs is the Democratic candidates’ frightening desire to prove them right.
******************
President of Ecuador
THE $300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC IS A FAKE
By Greg Palast
Do you believe this?
This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop – and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million – which they’re using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!
That’s what George Bush tells us. And he got that from his buddy, the strange right-wing President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.
So: After the fact, Colombia justifies its attempt to provoke a border war as a way to stop the threat of WMDs! Uh, where have we heard that before?
The US press snorted up this line about Chavez’ $300 million to “terrorists” quicker than the young Bush inhaling Colombia’s powdered export.
What the US press did not do is look at the evidence, the email in the magic laptop. (Presumably, the FARC leader’s last words were, “Listen, my password is ….”)
I read them. (You can read them here) - http://www.gregpalast.com/farc-documents/ While you can read it all in español, here is, in translation, the one and only mention of the alleged $300 million from Chavez:
“… With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call “dossier,” efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo [slang term for ‘cripple’], which I will explain in a separate note. Let’s call the boss Ángel, and the cripple Ernesto.”
Got that? Where is Hugo? Where’s 300 million? And 300 what? Indeed, in context, the note is all about the hostage exchange with the FARC that Chavez was working on at the time (December 23, 2007) at the request of the Colombian government.
Indeed, the entire remainder of the email is all about the mechanism of the hostage exchange. Here’s the next line:
“To receive the three freed ones, Chavez proposes three options: Plan A. Do it to via of a ‘humanitarian caravan’; one that will involve Venezuela, France, the Vatican[?], Switzerland, European Union, democrats [civil society], Argentina, Red Cross, etc.”
As to the 300, I must note that the FARC’s previous prisoner exchange involved 300 prisoners. Is that what the ‘300’ refers to? ¿Quien sabe? Unlike Uribe, Bush and the US press, I won’t guess or make up a phastasmogoric story about Chavez mailing checks to the jungle.
To bolster their case, the Colombians claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the mysterious “Angel” is the code name for Chavez. But in the memo, Chavez goes by the code name … Chavez.
Well, so what? This is what . . . .
Colombia’s invasion into Ecuador is a rank violation of international law, condemned by every single Latin member of the Organization of American States. But George Bush just loved it. He called Uribe to back Colombia, against, “the continuing assault by narco-terrorists as well as the provocative maneuvers by the regime in Venezuela.”
Well, our President may have gotten the facts ass-backward, but Bush knows what he’s doing: shoring up his last, faltering ally in South America, Uribe, a desperate man in deep political trouble.
Uribe claims he is going to bring charges against Chavez before the International Criminal Court. If Uribe goes there in person, I suggest he take a toothbrush: it was just discovered that right-wing death squads held murder-planning sessions at Uribe’s ranch. Uribe’s associates have been called before the nation’s Supreme Court and may face prison.
In other words, it’s a good time for a desperate Uribe to use that old politico’s wheeze, the threat of war, to drown out accusations of his own criminality. Furthermore, Uribe’s attack literally killed negotiations with FARC by killing FARC’s negotiator, Raul Reyes. Reyes was in talks with both Ecuador and Chavez about another prisoner exchange. Uribe authorized the negotiations. However, Uribe knew, should those talks have succeeded in obtaining the release of those kidnapped by the FARC, credit would have been heaped on Ecuador and Chavez, and discredit heaped on Uribe.
Luckily for a hemisphere on the verge of flames, the President of Ecuador, Raphael Correa, is one of the most level-headed, thoughtful men I’ve ever encountered.
Correa is now flying from Quito to Brazilia to Caracas to keep the region from blowing sky high. While moving troops to his border – no chief of state can permit foreign tanks on their sovereign soil – Correa also refuses sanctuary to the FARC . Indeed, Ecuador has routed out 47 FARC bases, a better track record than Colombia’s own, corrupt military.
For his cool, peaceable handling of the crisis, I will forgive Correa for apologizing for his calling Bush, “a dimwitted President who has done great damage to his country and the world.” (Watch an excerpt of my interview with Correa here.)
Amateur Hour in Blue
We can trust Correa to keep the peace South of the Border. But can we trust our Presidents-to-be?
The current man in the Oval Office, George Bush, simply can’t help himself: an outlaw invasion by a right-wing death-squad promoter is just fine with him.
But guess who couldn’t wait to parrot the Bush line? Hillary Clinton, still explaining that her vote to invade Iraq was not a vote to invade Iraq, issued a statement nearly identical to Bush’s, blessing the invasion of Ecuador as Colombia’s “right to defend itself.” And she added, “Hugo Chávez must stop these provoking actions.” Huh?
I assumed that Obama wouldn’t jump on this landmine – especially after he was blasted as a foreign policy amateur for suggesting he would invade across Pakistan’s border to hunt terrorists.
It’s embarrassing that Barack repeated Hillary’s line nearly verbatim, announcing, “the Colombian government has every right to defend itself.”
(I’m sure Hillary’s position wasn’t influenced by the loan of a campaign jet to her by Frank Giustra. Giustra has given over a hundred million dollars to Bill Clinton projects. Last year, Bill introduced Giustra to Colombia’s Uribe. On the spot, Giustra cut a lucrative deal with Uribe for Colombian oil.)
Then there’s Mr. War Hero. John McCain weighed in with his own idiocies, announcing that, “Hugo Chavez is establish[ing] a dictatorship,” presumably because, unlike George Bush, Chavez counts all the votes in Venezuelan elections.
But now our story gets tricky and icky.
The wise media critic Jeff Cohen told me to watch for the press naming McCain as a foreign policy expert and labeling the Democrats as amateurs. Sure enough, the New York Times, on the news pages Wednesday, called McCain, “a national security pro.”
McCain is the “pro” who said the war in Iraq would cost nearly nothing in lives or treasury dollars.
But, on the Colombian invasion of Ecuador, McCain said, “I hope that tensions will be relaxed, President Chavez will remove those troops from the borders - as well as the Ecuadorians - and relations continue to improve between the two.”
It’s not quite English, but it’s definitely not Bush. And weirdly, it’s definitely not Obama and Clinton cheerleading Colombia’s war on Ecuador.
Democrats, are you listening? The only thing worse than the media attacking Obama and Clinton as amateurs is the Democratic candidates’ frightening desire to prove them right.
******************
The Bush Gang knew of the upcoming attack, but did nothing
They knew, but did nothing
Philip Shenon
March 8, 2008
In the American summer of 2001, the nation's news organisations, especially the television networks, were riveted by the story of one man. It wasn't George Bush. And it certainly wasn't Osama bin Laden.
It was the sordid tale of an otherwise obscure Democratic congressman from California, Gary Condit, who was implicated - falsely, it later appeared - in the disappearance of a 24-year-old government intern later found murdered. That summer, the names of the blow-dried congressman and the doe-eyed intern, Chandra Levy, were much better known to the American public than bin Laden's.
Even reporters in Washington who covered intelligence issues acknowledged they were largely ignorant that summer that the CIA and other parts of the Government were warning of an almost certain terrorist attack. Probably, but not necessarily, overseas.
The warnings were going straight to President Bush each morning in his briefings by the CIA director, George Tenet, and in the presidential daily briefings. It would later be revealed by the 9/11 commission into the September 11 attacks that more than 40 presidential briefings presented to Bush from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden.
And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about 300 other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, a newsletter on intelligence issues also prepared by the CIA.
The senior executive briefings contained much of the same information that was in the presidential briefings but were edited to remove material considered too sensitive for all but the President and his top aides to see. Often the differences between the two documents were minor, with only a sentence or two changed between them. Apart from the commission's chief director, Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff was never granted access to Bush's briefings, except for the notorious August 2001 briefing that warned of the possibility of domestic al-Qaeda strikes involving hijackings. But they could read through the next best thing: the senior executive briefings.
During his 2003 investigations it was startling to Mike Hurley, the commission member in charge of investigating intelligence, and the other investigators on his team, just what had gone on in the spring and summer of 2001 - just how often and how aggressively the White House had been warned that something terrible was about to happen. Since nobody outside the Oval Office could know exactly what Tenet had told Bush during his morning intelligence briefings, the presidential and senior briefings were Tenet's best defence to any claim that the CIA had not kept Bush and the rest of the Government well-informed about the threats. They offered a strong defence.
The team's investigators began to match up the information in the senior briefings and they pulled together a timeline of the headlines just from the senior briefings in the northern spring and summer:
"Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations" (April 20)and "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real" (June 30)It was especially troubling for Hurley's team to realise how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. Emails from the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings
"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)
"Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)
"Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (May 26)
"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent"
(June 23)
"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25)
"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile
Attacks" (June 30),
"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)
Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.
But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.
She had not attended the meetings herself. She had asked that the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, receive a special briefing at the Justice Department about al-Qaeda threats. But she did not talk with Ashcroft herself in any sort of detail about the intelligence. Nor did she have any conversations of significance on the issue with the FBI director, Louis Freeh, nor with his temporary successor that summer, the acting director Tom Pickard.
There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush. The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.
Bush seemed to acknowledge as much in an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that Bush almost certainly regretted later. In the interview in December 2001, only three months after the attacks, Bush said that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11" about al-Qaeda and the threat it posed to the United States.
Before the attacks, he said: "I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the previous bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."
If anyone on the White House staff had responsibility for making Bush's blood "boil" that summer about Osama bin Laden, it was Rice.
The members of Mike Hurley's team were also alarmed by the revelations, week by week, month by month, of how close the commission's chief director, Philip Zelikow, was to Rice and others at the White House. They learned early on about Zelikow's work on the Bush transition team in 2000 and early 2001 and about how much antipathy there was between him and Richard Clarke. They They heard the stories about Zelikow's role in developing the "pre-emptive war" strategy at the White House in 2002.
Zelikow's friendships with Rice and others were a particular problem for Warren Bass, since Rice and Clarke were at the heart of his part of the investigation. It was clear to some members of team that they could not have an open discussion in front of Zelikow about Rice and her performance as National Security Adviser. They could not say openly, certainly not to Zelikow's face, what many on the staff came to believe: that Rice's performance in the spring and summer of 2001 amounted to incompetence, or something not far from it.
David Kay, the veteran American weapons inspector sent to Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003 to search for weapons of mass destruction, passed word to the commission that he believed Rice was the "worst national security adviser" in the history of the job.
For Hurley's team, there was a reverse problem with Clarke. It was easy to talk about Clarke in Zelikow's presence, as long as the conversation centred on Clarke's failings at the NSC and his purported dishonesty.
Long before Bass had seen Clarke's files, Zelikow made it clear to the team's investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect.
He argued that Clarke was a braggart who would try to rewrite history to justify his errors and slander his enemies, Rice in particular. The commission had decided that in its private interviews with current and former government officials, witnesses would be placed under oath when there was a substantial reason to doubt their truthfulness. Zelikow argued that Clarke easily fell into that category; Clarke, he decreed, would need to be sworn in.
When he finally got his security clearance and was allowed into the reading room, Bass discovered he could make quick work of Rice's emails and internal memos on the al-Qaeda threat in the spring and summer of 2001. That was because there was almost nothing to read, at least nothing that Rice had written herself.
Either she committed nothing to paper or email on the subject, which was possible since so much of her work was conducted face-to-face with Bush, or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before September 11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter.
Tipped off by an article in The Washington Post, the commission discovered the text of a speech that she had been scheduled to make on September 11, 2001 - the speech was canceled in the chaos following the attacks - in which Rice planned to address "the threats of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday". The speech, which was intended to outline her broad vision on national security and to promote the Bush Administration's plans for a missile defence system, included only a passing reference to terrorism and the threat of radical Islam. On the day that Osama bin Laden launched the most devastating attack on the United States since Pearl Harbour, bin Laden's terrorist network was seen by Rice as only a secondary threat, barely worth mentioning.
But if Rice had left almost no paper trail on terrorism in 2001, Clarke's files were everything that Bass could have hoped for. Clarke wrote down much of what he saw and heard at the White House, almost to the point of obsession when it came to al-Qaeda. Bass and his colleagues could see that Clarke had left a rich narrative of what had gone so wrong at the NSC in the months before September 11, albeit filtered through the writings of the very opinionated Clarke.
Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.
He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden's network and the "nearly existential" threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.
Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke's frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.
"Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?" he asked Rice. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US.
Bass's colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive - and potentially damaging, especially to Rice - that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not "significantly reproduce" the wording of a classified document.
Bass decided he would have to try to memorise it in pieces, several sentences at a time, and then rush back to the commission to bat them out on a computer keyboard.
The day he discovered the document, Bass all but burst into the commission's offices and rushed over to Hurley.
"Holy shit, chief," Bass said excitedly. "You won't believe what I found."
He told Hurley that Clarke's September 4 memo was a "document that grabs you by the throat, a document that you write when you're at the end of your tether - or well past it", as Clarke clearly was in the weeks before September 11. Hurley instantly understood the significance of what he was being told by Bass. The question for both men was whether Zelikow would allow them to share any of it with the public.
Months later, Bass could not take it any longer. He was going to quit, or least threaten to quit, and he was going to make it clear that Zelikow's attempts at interference - his efforts to defend Rice and demean Clarke - were part of the reason why. He marched into the office of Dan Marcus, the general counsel, to announce his threat to leave the investigation.
"I cannot do this," he declared to Marcus, who was already well aware of Bass's unhappiness. "Zelikow is making me crazy."
He was outraged by Zelikow and the White House; Bass felt the White House was trying to sabotage his work by its efforts to limit his ability to see certain documents from the NSC files and take useful notes from them. Marcus urged him to calm down: "Let's talk this through." But Bass made it clear to colleagues that he believed Zelikow was interfering in his work for reasons that were overtly political - intended to shield the White House, and Rice in particular, from the commission's criticism. For every bit of evidence gathered by Bass and Hurley's team to bolster Clarke's allegation that the White House had ignored terrorist threats in 2001, Zelikow would find some reason to disparage it.
Marcus and Hurley managed to talk Bass out of resigning, although the threat lingered until the final weeks of the investigation.
On May 15, 2002, CBS network reported that a daily briefing presented to Bush a few weeks before the September 11 attacks warned him specifically about the threats of a domestic hijacking by al-Qaeda.
Instead of releasing the briefing or at least offering a detailed explanation of what was in the document, the White House chose to have Rice hold a news conference at the White House in which she raised as many questions about the briefing as she answered.
It would later become clear to many of the commission's members and its staff that she had tried to mislead the White House press corps about the contents of the briefing.
She acknowledged that Bush had received a briefing about possible al-Qaeda hijackings, but she claimed that the brief offered "historical information" and "was not a warning - there was no specific time, place, or method".
She failed to mention, as would later be clear, that the briefing focused entirely on the possibility that al-Qaeda intended to strike within the United States; it cited relatively recent FBI reports of possible terrorist surveillance of government buildings in New York.
Tom Kean, the commission's chairman, could not deny the thrill of this. A former governor of New Jersey who had left politics to become president of Drew University in his home state, Kean took a seat in the reading room in the New Executive Office building where the commission was reviewing the White House's most secret files.
Kean was handed a sheaf of presidential briefings from the Clinton and Bush administrations. Here in his hands were the documents that the White House had been so determined for so long to keep from him. Lee Hamilton liked to refer to the briefings as the "holy of holies" - the ultimate secret documents in the government - and Kean assumed that must be the case.
"I thought this would be the definitive secrets about al-Qaeda, about terrorist networks and all the other things that the President should act on," he said. "I was going to find out the most important things that a president had learned." He assumed they would contain "incredibly secretive, precise, and accurate information about anything under the sun."
Each brief was only several pages long, so Kean could read through months of them in a stretch of a few hours.
And he found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified. Here were the digests of the most important secrets that were gathered by the CIA and the nation's other spy agencies at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year.
And there was almost nothing in them.
"They were garbage," Kean said. "There really was nothing there - nothing, nothing."
If students back at Drew turned in term papers this badly researched, "I would have given them an F," he said.
Kean pointed that out to one of his White House minders who accompanied him to the reading room. "I've read all this," he told the minder in astonishment. A lot of the information in the briefings and other supposedly top secret intelligence reports had already been revealed by the nation's big news organisations. "I already knew this."
"Oh, but you're missing the point," the minder replied. "Now you know it's true." It occurred to Kean that this might be the commission's most frightening discovery of all: The emperors of espionage had no clothes. Perhaps the reason the White House had fought so hard to block the commission's access to the briefings was that they revealed how ignorant the Government was of the threats it faced before September 11. Kean could understand their fear. Imagine the consequences if al-Qaeda and its terrorist allies knew how little the US really knew about them.
Commission member Jamie Gorelick, who, along with Zelikow, was given access to the larger universe of briefings, was more impressed by the documents than Kean had been. Or at least she was less unimpressed. She knew the Bush Administration was right to complain that much of the intelligence in the briefs in the months before September 11 was maddeningly non-specific about a possible date or place of an attack. Some of the intelligence in the briefs was "paltry"; sometimes the information contradicted itself from one day to the next, Gorelick said.
But she was astonished by the sheer volume of the warnings. Flood, cascade, tsunami, take your pick of metaphors. She could see that in the spring and summer of 2001, there was a consistent drum beat of warnings, day after day, that al-Qaeda was about to attack the United States or its allies. It was clear to Gorelick that the CIA had gone to Bush virtually every morning for months in 2001 to give him the message that the United States needed to be ready for a catastrophic terrorist strike, and from what she was reading, no one ruled out the possibility of a domestic attack.
"Something is being planned, something spectacular," she said, summarising what the President had been told by George Tenet and what Bush should have read in the briefings. "We don't know what it is, we don't know where it is, but something is happening."
She said CIA analysts were trying to tell Bush, as bluntly as they could, that the threat in those months was "the worst thing they've ever seen - an unprecedented threat," worse than the threats before the millennium.
It seemed to Gorelick that Rice had "assumed away the hardest part of her job" as national security adviser - gathering the best intelligence available to the White House and helping the President decide how to respond to it. Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising him. Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidant - specifically on foreign policy - and to simply translate his words into action. Rice had wanted to be "the consigliere to the President", Gorelick thought.
Domestic issues seemed to bore her. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had told the commission something remarkable in his private interview the month before: He and Rice had not seen themselves as responsible for co-ordinating the FBI and other domestic agencies about terrorism. But if they weren't responsible, who was? There was no separate domestic security adviser in the White House. They had just demoted Clarke.
At the time of her May 2002 news conference, no reporter had a copy of the presidential briefing. CBS had broken the story of its existence but had few details of what was actually in the document. So the White House press corps would have to trust Rice's description of what was in it.
She described it as a "warning briefing but an analytic report" about al-Qaeda threats and said that it contained "the most generalised kind of information - there was no time, there was no place, there was no method of attack" mentioned apart from a "very vague" concern about hijacking. "I want to reiterate," she said. "It was not a warning."
Asked if September 11 didn't represent an intelligence failure by the Administration, she replied almost testily: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Centre, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon - that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."
Rice's news conference came eight months after the attacks. Yet she was suggesting that in all that time, no one had bothered to tell her that there were indeed several reports prepared within the CIA, the aviation administration, and elsewhere in the Government about the threat of planes as missiles.
Had no one told her in all those months that the Department of Defence had conducted drills for the possibility of a plane-as-missile attack on the Pentagon? Had she forgotten that when she and Bush attended the G8 summit in Italy in July 2001, the airspace was closed because of the threat of an aerial suicide attack by al-Qaeda?
Commission member Tim Roemer made it his goal to get the August 6 briefing made public and to prove once and for all that Rice and her White House colleagues had a concept of the truth about September 11 that was, at best, "flexible". To Roemer, Rice had long ago passed the "threshold" between spin and dishonesty.
"She'd lost credibility with me," he said. The question among the Democratic commissioners was whether anybody would be brave enough to go public to question Rice's competence and her honesty.
Much as the staff felt beaten down by Zelikow, so did the other Democratic commissioners. By the end, they had given up the fight to document the more serious failures of Bush, Rice, and others in the Administration in the months before September. Zelikow would never have permitted it. Nor, they realised, would Kean and Hamilton. The Democrats hoped the public would read through the report and understand that September 11 did not have to happen - that if the Bush Administration had been more aggressive in dealing with the threats flooding into the White House from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, the plot could have been foiled. The Clinton administration could not duck blame for having failed to stop bin Laden before 2001.
But what had happened in the White House in the first eight months of George Bush's presidency had all but guaranteed that 19 young Arab men with little more than pocket knives, a few cans of mace, and a misunderstanding of the tenets of Islam could bring the US to its knees.
The Commission - The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation by Philip Shenon (Little, Brown, $35) is published on Monday.
Philip Shenon
March 8, 2008
In the American summer of 2001, the nation's news organisations, especially the television networks, were riveted by the story of one man. It wasn't George Bush. And it certainly wasn't Osama bin Laden.
It was the sordid tale of an otherwise obscure Democratic congressman from California, Gary Condit, who was implicated - falsely, it later appeared - in the disappearance of a 24-year-old government intern later found murdered. That summer, the names of the blow-dried congressman and the doe-eyed intern, Chandra Levy, were much better known to the American public than bin Laden's.
Even reporters in Washington who covered intelligence issues acknowledged they were largely ignorant that summer that the CIA and other parts of the Government were warning of an almost certain terrorist attack. Probably, but not necessarily, overseas.
The warnings were going straight to President Bush each morning in his briefings by the CIA director, George Tenet, and in the presidential daily briefings. It would later be revealed by the 9/11 commission into the September 11 attacks that more than 40 presidential briefings presented to Bush from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden.
And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about 300 other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, a newsletter on intelligence issues also prepared by the CIA.
The senior executive briefings contained much of the same information that was in the presidential briefings but were edited to remove material considered too sensitive for all but the President and his top aides to see. Often the differences between the two documents were minor, with only a sentence or two changed between them. Apart from the commission's chief director, Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff was never granted access to Bush's briefings, except for the notorious August 2001 briefing that warned of the possibility of domestic al-Qaeda strikes involving hijackings. But they could read through the next best thing: the senior executive briefings.
During his 2003 investigations it was startling to Mike Hurley, the commission member in charge of investigating intelligence, and the other investigators on his team, just what had gone on in the spring and summer of 2001 - just how often and how aggressively the White House had been warned that something terrible was about to happen. Since nobody outside the Oval Office could know exactly what Tenet had told Bush during his morning intelligence briefings, the presidential and senior briefings were Tenet's best defence to any claim that the CIA had not kept Bush and the rest of the Government well-informed about the threats. They offered a strong defence.
The team's investigators began to match up the information in the senior briefings and they pulled together a timeline of the headlines just from the senior briefings in the northern spring and summer:
"Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations" (April 20)and "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real" (June 30)It was especially troubling for Hurley's team to realise how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. Emails from the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings
"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)
"Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)
"Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (May 26)
"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent"
(June 23)
"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25)
"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile
Attacks" (June 30),
"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)
Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.
But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.
She had not attended the meetings herself. She had asked that the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, receive a special briefing at the Justice Department about al-Qaeda threats. But she did not talk with Ashcroft herself in any sort of detail about the intelligence. Nor did she have any conversations of significance on the issue with the FBI director, Louis Freeh, nor with his temporary successor that summer, the acting director Tom Pickard.
There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush. The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.
Bush seemed to acknowledge as much in an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that Bush almost certainly regretted later. In the interview in December 2001, only three months after the attacks, Bush said that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11" about al-Qaeda and the threat it posed to the United States.
Before the attacks, he said: "I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the previous bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."
If anyone on the White House staff had responsibility for making Bush's blood "boil" that summer about Osama bin Laden, it was Rice.
The members of Mike Hurley's team were also alarmed by the revelations, week by week, month by month, of how close the commission's chief director, Philip Zelikow, was to Rice and others at the White House. They learned early on about Zelikow's work on the Bush transition team in 2000 and early 2001 and about how much antipathy there was between him and Richard Clarke. They They heard the stories about Zelikow's role in developing the "pre-emptive war" strategy at the White House in 2002.
Zelikow's friendships with Rice and others were a particular problem for Warren Bass, since Rice and Clarke were at the heart of his part of the investigation. It was clear to some members of team that they could not have an open discussion in front of Zelikow about Rice and her performance as National Security Adviser. They could not say openly, certainly not to Zelikow's face, what many on the staff came to believe: that Rice's performance in the spring and summer of 2001 amounted to incompetence, or something not far from it.
David Kay, the veteran American weapons inspector sent to Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003 to search for weapons of mass destruction, passed word to the commission that he believed Rice was the "worst national security adviser" in the history of the job.
For Hurley's team, there was a reverse problem with Clarke. It was easy to talk about Clarke in Zelikow's presence, as long as the conversation centred on Clarke's failings at the NSC and his purported dishonesty.
Long before Bass had seen Clarke's files, Zelikow made it clear to the team's investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect.
He argued that Clarke was a braggart who would try to rewrite history to justify his errors and slander his enemies, Rice in particular. The commission had decided that in its private interviews with current and former government officials, witnesses would be placed under oath when there was a substantial reason to doubt their truthfulness. Zelikow argued that Clarke easily fell into that category; Clarke, he decreed, would need to be sworn in.
When he finally got his security clearance and was allowed into the reading room, Bass discovered he could make quick work of Rice's emails and internal memos on the al-Qaeda threat in the spring and summer of 2001. That was because there was almost nothing to read, at least nothing that Rice had written herself.
Either she committed nothing to paper or email on the subject, which was possible since so much of her work was conducted face-to-face with Bush, or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before September 11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter.
Tipped off by an article in The Washington Post, the commission discovered the text of a speech that she had been scheduled to make on September 11, 2001 - the speech was canceled in the chaos following the attacks - in which Rice planned to address "the threats of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday". The speech, which was intended to outline her broad vision on national security and to promote the Bush Administration's plans for a missile defence system, included only a passing reference to terrorism and the threat of radical Islam. On the day that Osama bin Laden launched the most devastating attack on the United States since Pearl Harbour, bin Laden's terrorist network was seen by Rice as only a secondary threat, barely worth mentioning.
But if Rice had left almost no paper trail on terrorism in 2001, Clarke's files were everything that Bass could have hoped for. Clarke wrote down much of what he saw and heard at the White House, almost to the point of obsession when it came to al-Qaeda. Bass and his colleagues could see that Clarke had left a rich narrative of what had gone so wrong at the NSC in the months before September 11, albeit filtered through the writings of the very opinionated Clarke.
Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.
He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden's network and the "nearly existential" threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.
Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke's frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.
"Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?" he asked Rice. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US.
Bass's colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive - and potentially damaging, especially to Rice - that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not "significantly reproduce" the wording of a classified document.
Bass decided he would have to try to memorise it in pieces, several sentences at a time, and then rush back to the commission to bat them out on a computer keyboard.
The day he discovered the document, Bass all but burst into the commission's offices and rushed over to Hurley.
"Holy shit, chief," Bass said excitedly. "You won't believe what I found."
He told Hurley that Clarke's September 4 memo was a "document that grabs you by the throat, a document that you write when you're at the end of your tether - or well past it", as Clarke clearly was in the weeks before September 11. Hurley instantly understood the significance of what he was being told by Bass. The question for both men was whether Zelikow would allow them to share any of it with the public.
Months later, Bass could not take it any longer. He was going to quit, or least threaten to quit, and he was going to make it clear that Zelikow's attempts at interference - his efforts to defend Rice and demean Clarke - were part of the reason why. He marched into the office of Dan Marcus, the general counsel, to announce his threat to leave the investigation.
"I cannot do this," he declared to Marcus, who was already well aware of Bass's unhappiness. "Zelikow is making me crazy."
He was outraged by Zelikow and the White House; Bass felt the White House was trying to sabotage his work by its efforts to limit his ability to see certain documents from the NSC files and take useful notes from them. Marcus urged him to calm down: "Let's talk this through." But Bass made it clear to colleagues that he believed Zelikow was interfering in his work for reasons that were overtly political - intended to shield the White House, and Rice in particular, from the commission's criticism. For every bit of evidence gathered by Bass and Hurley's team to bolster Clarke's allegation that the White House had ignored terrorist threats in 2001, Zelikow would find some reason to disparage it.
Marcus and Hurley managed to talk Bass out of resigning, although the threat lingered until the final weeks of the investigation.
On May 15, 2002, CBS network reported that a daily briefing presented to Bush a few weeks before the September 11 attacks warned him specifically about the threats of a domestic hijacking by al-Qaeda.
Instead of releasing the briefing or at least offering a detailed explanation of what was in the document, the White House chose to have Rice hold a news conference at the White House in which she raised as many questions about the briefing as she answered.
It would later become clear to many of the commission's members and its staff that she had tried to mislead the White House press corps about the contents of the briefing.
She acknowledged that Bush had received a briefing about possible al-Qaeda hijackings, but she claimed that the brief offered "historical information" and "was not a warning - there was no specific time, place, or method".
She failed to mention, as would later be clear, that the briefing focused entirely on the possibility that al-Qaeda intended to strike within the United States; it cited relatively recent FBI reports of possible terrorist surveillance of government buildings in New York.
Tom Kean, the commission's chairman, could not deny the thrill of this. A former governor of New Jersey who had left politics to become president of Drew University in his home state, Kean took a seat in the reading room in the New Executive Office building where the commission was reviewing the White House's most secret files.
Kean was handed a sheaf of presidential briefings from the Clinton and Bush administrations. Here in his hands were the documents that the White House had been so determined for so long to keep from him. Lee Hamilton liked to refer to the briefings as the "holy of holies" - the ultimate secret documents in the government - and Kean assumed that must be the case.
"I thought this would be the definitive secrets about al-Qaeda, about terrorist networks and all the other things that the President should act on," he said. "I was going to find out the most important things that a president had learned." He assumed they would contain "incredibly secretive, precise, and accurate information about anything under the sun."
Each brief was only several pages long, so Kean could read through months of them in a stretch of a few hours.
And he found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified. Here were the digests of the most important secrets that were gathered by the CIA and the nation's other spy agencies at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year.
And there was almost nothing in them.
"They were garbage," Kean said. "There really was nothing there - nothing, nothing."
If students back at Drew turned in term papers this badly researched, "I would have given them an F," he said.
Kean pointed that out to one of his White House minders who accompanied him to the reading room. "I've read all this," he told the minder in astonishment. A lot of the information in the briefings and other supposedly top secret intelligence reports had already been revealed by the nation's big news organisations. "I already knew this."
"Oh, but you're missing the point," the minder replied. "Now you know it's true." It occurred to Kean that this might be the commission's most frightening discovery of all: The emperors of espionage had no clothes. Perhaps the reason the White House had fought so hard to block the commission's access to the briefings was that they revealed how ignorant the Government was of the threats it faced before September 11. Kean could understand their fear. Imagine the consequences if al-Qaeda and its terrorist allies knew how little the US really knew about them.
Commission member Jamie Gorelick, who, along with Zelikow, was given access to the larger universe of briefings, was more impressed by the documents than Kean had been. Or at least she was less unimpressed. She knew the Bush Administration was right to complain that much of the intelligence in the briefs in the months before September 11 was maddeningly non-specific about a possible date or place of an attack. Some of the intelligence in the briefs was "paltry"; sometimes the information contradicted itself from one day to the next, Gorelick said.
But she was astonished by the sheer volume of the warnings. Flood, cascade, tsunami, take your pick of metaphors. She could see that in the spring and summer of 2001, there was a consistent drum beat of warnings, day after day, that al-Qaeda was about to attack the United States or its allies. It was clear to Gorelick that the CIA had gone to Bush virtually every morning for months in 2001 to give him the message that the United States needed to be ready for a catastrophic terrorist strike, and from what she was reading, no one ruled out the possibility of a domestic attack.
"Something is being planned, something spectacular," she said, summarising what the President had been told by George Tenet and what Bush should have read in the briefings. "We don't know what it is, we don't know where it is, but something is happening."
She said CIA analysts were trying to tell Bush, as bluntly as they could, that the threat in those months was "the worst thing they've ever seen - an unprecedented threat," worse than the threats before the millennium.
It seemed to Gorelick that Rice had "assumed away the hardest part of her job" as national security adviser - gathering the best intelligence available to the White House and helping the President decide how to respond to it. Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising him. Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidant - specifically on foreign policy - and to simply translate his words into action. Rice had wanted to be "the consigliere to the President", Gorelick thought.
Domestic issues seemed to bore her. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had told the commission something remarkable in his private interview the month before: He and Rice had not seen themselves as responsible for co-ordinating the FBI and other domestic agencies about terrorism. But if they weren't responsible, who was? There was no separate domestic security adviser in the White House. They had just demoted Clarke.
At the time of her May 2002 news conference, no reporter had a copy of the presidential briefing. CBS had broken the story of its existence but had few details of what was actually in the document. So the White House press corps would have to trust Rice's description of what was in it.
She described it as a "warning briefing but an analytic report" about al-Qaeda threats and said that it contained "the most generalised kind of information - there was no time, there was no place, there was no method of attack" mentioned apart from a "very vague" concern about hijacking. "I want to reiterate," she said. "It was not a warning."
Asked if September 11 didn't represent an intelligence failure by the Administration, she replied almost testily: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Centre, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon - that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."
Rice's news conference came eight months after the attacks. Yet she was suggesting that in all that time, no one had bothered to tell her that there were indeed several reports prepared within the CIA, the aviation administration, and elsewhere in the Government about the threat of planes as missiles.
Had no one told her in all those months that the Department of Defence had conducted drills for the possibility of a plane-as-missile attack on the Pentagon? Had she forgotten that when she and Bush attended the G8 summit in Italy in July 2001, the airspace was closed because of the threat of an aerial suicide attack by al-Qaeda?
Commission member Tim Roemer made it his goal to get the August 6 briefing made public and to prove once and for all that Rice and her White House colleagues had a concept of the truth about September 11 that was, at best, "flexible". To Roemer, Rice had long ago passed the "threshold" between spin and dishonesty.
"She'd lost credibility with me," he said. The question among the Democratic commissioners was whether anybody would be brave enough to go public to question Rice's competence and her honesty.
Much as the staff felt beaten down by Zelikow, so did the other Democratic commissioners. By the end, they had given up the fight to document the more serious failures of Bush, Rice, and others in the Administration in the months before September. Zelikow would never have permitted it. Nor, they realised, would Kean and Hamilton. The Democrats hoped the public would read through the report and understand that September 11 did not have to happen - that if the Bush Administration had been more aggressive in dealing with the threats flooding into the White House from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, the plot could have been foiled. The Clinton administration could not duck blame for having failed to stop bin Laden before 2001.
But what had happened in the White House in the first eight months of George Bush's presidency had all but guaranteed that 19 young Arab men with little more than pocket knives, a few cans of mace, and a misunderstanding of the tenets of Islam could bring the US to its knees.
The Commission - The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation by Philip Shenon (Little, Brown, $35) is published on Monday.
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