Jon Korein
Sott.netThu, 13 Apr 2006 12:00 UTC
There seems to be a strong feeling on the left that, somehow, 9/11 is irrelevant. That to focus on it distracts from "real" issues such as Iraq and domestic spying. Again, almost to minimize the importance of 9/11, treat it as bygone history, and concentrate only on the misuse of the event by the administration.
There are a number of problems with this approach. It leaves in place the people that did it, and the mechanisms used for covering it up. It leaves in place the use of the "war on terror" as justification for the current administration's abuses, and allows the 9/11 rallying cry to continued to be used, and often accepted, to justify these abuses. And it leaves open the very distinct possibility that this kind of attack will be used again to justify further abuses.
"We must comply with the local law, indeed we have all made a commitment to the government that we will absolutely follow the Chinese law. We don't have any alternatives.
"It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you."
The White House has angrily denied a newspaper report that suggested President George W Bush in 2003 declared the existence of biological weapons laboratories in Iraq while knowing it was not true.
On May 29, 2003, Bush hailed the capture of two trailers in Iraq as mobile biological laboratories and declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The report in The Washington Post said a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. The newspaper cited government officials and weapons experts who participated in the secret mission or had direct knowledge of it.
George W. Bush is at it again. This time, reports Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, it'll be Iran. (Those of us who guessed it would have been Syria first apparently underestimated his hubris.) And this time he wants to be able to use nukes.
In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by keeping the nation in a constant state of war. Cynics suggest the lesson wasn't lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both, they say, extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime President's party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a President in peacetime.
Joe Quinn
SOTTWed, 12 Apr 2006 12:00 UTC
Today, in an example of the joke that the Western 'justice' system has become, a Spanish judge passed down sentences on 29 Moroccon patsies for their alleged yet wholly uncorroborated part in the Madrid Train bombings:
CNNWed, 12 Apr 2006 12:00 UTC
The United States has condemned Iran's announcement it has successfully enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, saying "once again they have chosen the pathway of defiance."
On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirmed Iran had produced low-grade enriched uranium to power nuclear plants, a move greeted with jubilation on the streets of Tehran.
But the West, led by the United States, believes that Iran plans to build nuclear weapons, and says the move only underscores why the global community has serious concerns about Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Thomas Krumenacker
ReutersFri, 07 Apr 2006 08:47 UTC
Berlin - Nazi Germany planned to expand the extermination of Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine during World War Two, two German historians say.
In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe, the historians argue in a new study.
The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin historian Martin Cueppers say an Einsatzgruppe was all set to go to Palestine and begin killing the roughly half a million Jews that had fled Europe to escape Nazi death camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau.
In the study, published last month, they say "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the "Afrika Korps" led by the famed desert commander General Erwin Rommel.
The Middle East death squad, similar to those operating throughout eastern Europe during the war, was to be led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Walther Rauff, the historians say.
Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover.
In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. Fifty-three orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage.
Part of the struggle for self-determination by Palestinians has been to tell the truth about Palestinians as victims of Zionism. For too long their history has been denied, and this denial has only served to further oppress and deliberately dehumanize Palestinians in Israel, inside the occupied territories, and outside in their diaspora.
Some progress has been made. Westerners now realize that Palestinians, as a people, do exist. And they have come to acknowledge that during the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were killed and over 700,000 were driven or frightened from their homes and lands on which they had lived for centuries.
In part two of our conversation with Jean-Pierre Petit on the Ummites, we start by looking at some of the problems such a communication might entail, look at what the effects on society might be if an extra-terrestrial presence were made known, and discuss the possibilities of a future cometary impact.
Running Time: 00:44:07
Download: MP3
In this two part podcast, we continue our conversation with astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit. We begin by looking at the use of RFID chips as a means of controlling individuals by lodging them in the brain. Jean-Pierre then recounts some of his experiences with the Ummite letters. The Ummite letters claim to be written by extra-terrestrials from the planet Ummo fifteen light years from earth. They claim they have been living here among us since 1950. Are they what they say they are, or is it a vast manipulation?
Running Time: 00:42:24
Download: MP3
