September 11, 2001

By Dave Lindorff

Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the
Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime
Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain
is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British
leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in
2003.

Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday,
news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that
the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the
public about the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published
documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British
special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been
instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

Guess who Bush never mentioned at his final press conference? Eric Boehlert writes:

Noticing anything missing from that list? Like the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, which for years, we were told, was the administration's top priority since bin Laden was behind the terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 Americans.

Since the press conference though, I haven't seen or heard any press reports mention that glaringly obvious gap in Bush's list. Instead, reading off the White House play sheet, the press no longer thinks bin Laden matters.

Lapdogs to the end.

UPDATE: A check of the transcript shows that Osama bin Laden, the man who defined Bush's presidency, was never mentioned by either Bush or anyone in the press corps during the president's expansive, 45-minute farewell press conference.

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

By Dave Lindorff

When I lived in China in the early 1990s, there were things that you could not discuss. One was Tibet. Another was Taiwan, "referred to in my daughter's public elementary school in Shanghai as "China's largest island." Another was the 1989 massacre of students and workers in Beijing. I used to be grateful at the time that I was an American and that back home, we could talk about anything.

Except that in a way we can't. Not in public discourse, anyhow.

Take the silly broughhaha on the Right, in the media, and in the Democratic primary campaign, over the statements of Obama's "spiritual mentor" the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Everyone is all worked up--and Obama has sacked Wright from his campaign's religious advisory committee--because of some statements Wright has made that crossed an invisible line of permissible discourse.

The New York Times called Mitt Romney a liar today, but not CIA Director Michael Hayden.

What was Romney’s big one? He ran an ad in New Hampshire this week saying Sen. John McCain had called for allowing illegal workers in the US to collect Social Security, and the the paper of record said he was lying. That’s not what McCain had said. But When Gen. Hayden told a much bigger whopper, saying that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of the “interrogations” of two suspected Al Qaeda leaders because of concerns that the tapes might disclose the identities of CIA agents, thus exposing them and their families to danger, the Times, in the same issue of the paper, let it pass.

By Dave Lindorff

The State Department’s top internal investigator, Inspector General Howard Krongard, revealed in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Tuesday, that his brother, Alvin B. Krongard, was a member of the advisory board of Blackwater, the very private mercenary company whose bloody, murderous behavior the IG office was supposed to be investigating.

Unmentioned in reports on this tainted relationship was the fact that Alvin Krongard, the former third-ranking leader of the CIA from 2001-2004, has also been the subject of some speculation regarding possible foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks by some within the intelligence establishment.

From our friends at 911pressfortruth.com: 

Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just announced that he will begin holding new hearings into 9/11 beginning in September because "the Commission Final Report... never resolved certain conflicts." The acclaimed film 9/11 Press For Truth details those conflicts like no other movie has, featuring five members of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee (the small group of victim's relatives who forced the creation of the 9/11 Commission), who revealed for the first time in the movie that "70% of our questions" were not answered by the Final Report.

By David Swanson

It did. Her name was Sibel Edmonds. This is her story, as she told it to me. Edmonds discusses what she knows, whom it implicates, and what she's been through and what hope there is in the new Congress to start an investigation.

Here's the audio.

Swanson: This is David Swanson with Sibel Edmonds. It's great to talk with you, thanks for being here.

Edmonds: Thanks for asking me for this interview, David.

So there I was over the weekend electronically leafing through the Senate's Congressional Record from last week to see if I missed anything newsworthy and I saw something that kind of took me aback -- and you're not easily surprised when you read the Record every day and see what kind of stuff from the Senate floor can slip under the news radar.

But there was Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, speaking for the record and suggesting that anyone who believes political compromise may be in order in Iraq wants to play nice with al Qaeda and, for a real oldie (and not a goodie), Gregg also went back to the playbook of linking Iraq and September 11.