| Event Date: | Sep. 11, 2006 |
| Event Name: | Breaking the 9/11 Myth |
| Event Type: | Meeting |
| Time: | 9:30 AM |
| Sponsored by: | McClendon Group |
| Event Location: | Murrow Room |
| Details: | On the Fifth Anniversary of the Attacks and just three hours before the Kean-Hamilton luncheon address, the former top Air Force officer who won Florida’s 15th District Democratic primary with 54% of the vote on an explicit platform to expose the fraud of the Kean Commission Report, and top 9/11 researchers, authors and activists will present hard proof that the official narrative of the Kean-Hamilton Commission and Bush-Cheney Administration is a fraud of world historic proportions.
Proposed legislation for a new and genuinely independent expert investigation, the first reality-based 9/11 feature film, and the International Grand Jury on the Crimes of 9/11 will be announced. Speakers will make brief presentations and take questions from the press: Dr. Robert Bowman, Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.), one of the nation’s foremost authorities on national security, directed all ‘Star Wars’ programs under Presidents Ford and Carter, flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, has a Ph.D. Jim Marrs, award-winning Texas journalist and author of the 9/11 expose Inside Job and just-released sequel The Terror Conspiracy, which includes “The Pentagon Attack Papers”, is a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer. Barbara Honegger, former White House Policy Analyst to President Reagan and Senior military affairs journalist is the author of The Pentagon Attack Papers that has transformed the understanding of what happened inside the Pentagon on 9/11. Lynn Pentz, producer/creative director, breakthrough consultant, and grass-roots organizer, has been centrally involved in some of the largest transformation entertainment events of recent times, including Live Aid, Hands Across America, and the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution. Ms. Pentz is co-founder of 9/11 Truth Los Angeles, director of the film documentary “Connecting the Dots: Awakening to the Crimes of 9/11”, and convener of the Citizens Grand Jury on 9/11. A national speaker in the 9/11 Truth movement, Ms. Pentz will announce the upcoming International People’s Grand Jury on the Crimes of 9/11: Contact – Barbara Honegger (831)-659-3058 bhonegger@nps.edu |
Author: admin
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US Press Club calls for new 9/11 investigation
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Gaza is dying
A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.
Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.
It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.
Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm here, said: "They even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep." He pointed sadly to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers, where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a small house.
His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. "Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near," he said. "They killed one of my neighbours called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out to get water."
Sometimes the Israeli army gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.
But it is not the Israeli incursions alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face "a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population." Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (£1.06) a day.
There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that once employed thousands.
"It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves."
The few ways that Gazans had of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis "have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order to create security zones." Carnations and strawberries, two of Gaza’s main exports, were thrown away or left to rot. An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so 55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.
The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.
Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean. Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel. Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These were organised by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. "Abu Mazen you are brave," they shouted. "Save us from this disaster." Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.
The Israeli siege and the European boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his neck, legs, chest and stomach. "I was laying an anti-tank mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli drone," he said. "I will return to the resistance when I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr and go to paradise."
His father, Adel, said he was proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: "Arab and Western countries want to destroy this government because it is the government of the resistance."
As the economy collapses there will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi’s place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible in the Middle East for generations to come.
The deadly toll
* After the kidnap of Cpl Gilad Shalit by Palestinians on 25 June, Israel launched a massive offensive and blockade of Gaza under the operation name Summer Rains.
* The Gaza Strip’s 1.3 million inhabitants, 33 per cent of whom live in refugee camps, have been under attack for 74 days.
* More than 260 Palestinians, including 64 children and 26 women, have been killed since 25 June. One in five is a child. One Israeli soldier has been killed and 26 have been wounded.
* 1,200 Palestinians have been injured, including up to 60 amputations. A third of victims brought to hospital are children.
* Israeli warplanes have launched more than 250 raids on Gaza, hitting the two power stations and the foreign and Information ministries.
* At least 120 Palestinian structures including houses, workshops and greenhouses have been destroyed and 160 damaged by the Israelis.
* The UN has criticised Israel’s bombing, which has caused an estimated $1.8bn in damage to the electricity grid and leaving more than a million people without regular access to drinking water.
* The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says 76 Palestinians, including 19 children, were killed by Israeli forces in August alone. Evidence shows at least 53 per cent were not participating in hostilities.
* In the latest outbreak of violence, three Palestinians were killed yesterday when Israeli troops raided a West Bank town in search of a wanted militant. Two of those killed were unarmed, according to witnesses.
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Ferguson pushes ALP toward nuclear
This calls for rational debate: Mr Ferguson told parliament there needed to be a debate about whether Australia was "mature enough to select a site where we should store our low-level and intermediate-level nuclear waste".
Party divided: The Labor frontbencher’s comments come only weeks after the deputy Labor leader Jenny Macklin, used an accident at the Lucas Height reactor in Sydney to campaign against nuclear reactors. "This accident is a stark reminder that things can go wrong with nuclear reactors," Ms Macklin said.
Nuclear medicine needs fair hearing: But on 7 September, Mr Ferguson said in a debate about radioactive waste sites in the Northern Territory that the Australia, Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights, played a vital role in nuclear medicine. "ANSTO is too often pilloried for their own political purposes by those who should know better," Mr Feguson said.
No place for "fearmongering": "It is one thing to run an anti-nuclear campaign under-pinned by sound science logic and belief. It is quite another to stoop to ludicrous fearmongering about ANSTO and the Lucas Heights nuclear facility." He said the amendments dealing with ANSTO dealt with "the unavoidable consequences of nuclear medicine and nuclear technology in industry".
Long running issue: The federal, state and territory governments have long debated the site of a low- to medium-level nuclear waste facility for radioactive material from medicine and research.
"It’s time," says Ferguson: "It is time the games stopped at a state, territory and national level and at a political level," Mr Ferguson said.
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US eyes Australia as carbon dump
Aust project details:
# Monash/Latrobe Valley: Paleogene-Eocene Latrobe group fluvial/deltaic sandstones
# Gorgon: Jurassic Dupuy Fm. deep-water sandstones.Other potential test projects:
North America:
# Illinois/ORV: Cambrian Mt. Simon Sandstone.
# GOM: Miocene Frio or Vicksburg Fms.; other Neogene shelf sands.
# Rocky Mts: Mississippian Madison shelf carbonates or Pennsylvanian Tensleep/Weber eolian sandstones.
# Alberta: Deep-water Triassic Viking Fm. Or Devonian/Mississippian reef complexes.
Europe:
# UK: DF1/Miller: Jurassic Miller Fm. deep-water sandstone.
# Netherlands: K12B: Permian Rotliegende eolian sandstone.
China and India:
# China: Bohai: Eocene-Miocene Shahejie – Guantao fluvial-lacustrine sandstones.
# China: Sichuan: Triassic Jialingjiang Fm., shelf carbonates.
# India: Ganga: Eocene-Miocene Murree – Siwalik Fms. fluvial sandstones
Huge return on investment claimed: The study says the value of information derived from large scale injection studies relative to their cost would be "enormous".
US capacity questions would be largely answered: For the three projects suggested above in the US, the price tag would range between $300 -700 million over eight years. Five large tests could be planned and executed for less than $1 billion, and address the chief concerns for roughly 70 per cent of potential US capacity.
Basis for regulatory decision making: The study continues: "Information from these projects would validate the commercial scalability of geological carbon storage and provide a basis for regulatory, legal, and financial decisions needed to ensure safe, reliable, economic sequestration."
Aid for developing nations? It adds that on a global basis, the case for OECD countries to help developing nations test their most important storage sites is strong, though mechanisms remain unresolved and are likely to vary case to case.
Reference: The scientific case for large CO2 storage projects worldwide: Where they should go, what they should look like, and how much they should cost, by S. Julio Friedmann, Carbon Management Program, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, L-640, 7000 East St., Livermore, California, U.S.A. 94550. Corresponding author: friedmann2@llnl.gov
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U.S. Losing Control in Iraq
"We are talking about nearly a third of the area of Iraq," Ahmed Salman, a historian from Fallujah told IPS. "Al-Anbar borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and the resistance there will never stop as long as there are American soldiers on the ground."Salman said the U.S. military is working against itself. "Their actions ruin their goal because they use these huge, violent military operations which kill so many civilians, and make it impossible to calm down the people of al-Anbar."
The resistance seems in control of the province now. "No government official can do anything without contacting the resistance first," government official in Ramadi Abu Ghalib told IPS.
"Even the governor used to take their approval for everything. When he stopped doing so, they issued a death sentence against him, and now he cannot move without American protection."
Recent weeks have brought countless attacks on U.S. troops in Haditha, Ramadi, Fallujah and on the Baghdad-Amman highway. Several armoured vehicles have been destroyed, and dozens of U.S. soldiers killed in the al-Anbar province, according to both Iraqi witnesses and the U.S. Department of Defence.
Long stretches of the 550km Baghdad-Amman highway which crosses al-Anbar are now controlled by resistance groups. Other parts are targeted by highway looters.
"If we import any supplies for the U.S. Army or Iraqi government, the fighters will take it from us and sell it in the local market," trader Hayder al-Mussawi said. "And if we import for the local market, the robbers will take it."
Eyewitnesses in Ramadi say many of the attacks are taking place within their city. They say that the U.S. military recently asked citizens in al-Anbar to stop targeting them, and promised to withdraw to their bases in Haditha and Habaniyah (near Fallujah) soon, leaving the cities for Iraqi security forces to patrol.
"I do not think that is possible," retired Iraqi police Brigadier-General Kahtan al-Dulaimi from Ramadi told IPS. "I believe no local unit could stand the severe resistance of al-Anbar, and it will be the last province to be handed over to Iraqi security forces."
According to the group Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 964 coalition soldiers have been killed in al-Anbar, more than in any other Iraqi province. Baghdad is second, with 665 coalition deaths.
Residents of Ramadi told IPS that the U.S. military has knocked down several buildings near the government centre in the city, the capital of the province.
In an apparent move to secure their offices, U.S. Army and Marine engineers have started to level a half-kilometre stretch of low-rise buildings opposite the centre. Abandoned buildings in this area have been used repeatedly to launch attacks on the government complex.
"They are trying to create a separation area between the offices of the puppet government and the buildings the resistance are using to attack them," a Ramadi resident said. "But now the Americans are making us all angry because they are destroying our city."
U.S. troops have acknowledged their own difficulties in doing this. "We’re used to taking down walls, doors and windows, but eight city blocks is something new to us," Marine 1st Lt. Ben Klay, 24, said in the U.S. Department of Defence newspaper Stars and Stripes.
In nearby Fallujah, residents are reporting daily clashes between Iraqi-U.S. security forces and the resistance.
"The local police force which used to be out of the conflict are now being attacked," said a resident who gave his name as Abu Mohammed. "Hundreds of local policemen have quit the force after seeing that they are considered a legitimate target by fighters."
The U.S. forces seem to have no clear policy in the face of the sustained resistance.
"The U.S. Army seems so confused in handling the security situation in Anbar," said historian Salman. "Attacks are conducted from al-Qa’im on the Syrian border to Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, all the way through Haditha, Hit, Ramadi and Fallujah on a daily basis."
He added: "A contributing factor to the instability of the province is the endless misery of the civilians who live with no services, no infrastructure, random shootings and so many wrongful detentions."
According to the new Pentagon quarterly report on Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq, Iraqi casualties rose 51 percent in recent months. The report says Sunni-based insurgency is "potent and viable."
The report says that in a period since the establishment of the new Iraqi government, between May 20 and Aug. 11 this year, the average number of weekly attacks rose to nearly 800, almost double the number of the attacks in early 2004.
Casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces averaged nearly 120 a day during the period, up from 80 a day reported in the previous quarterly report. Two years ago they were averaging roughly 30 a day.
On Aug. 31 the Pentagon announced that it is increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to 140,000, which is 13,000 more than the number five weeks ago.
At least 65 U.S. soldiers were killed in August, with 36 of the deaths reported in al-Anbar. That brought the total number killed to at least 2,642. (END/2006)
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IMF the world’s viceroy
The fund is a body with 184 members. It is run by seven of them – the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Canada and Italy. These happen to be the seven countries that (with Russia) promised to save the world at the G8 meeting in 2005. The junta sustains its control by insisting that each dollar buys a vote. The bigger a country’s financial quota, the more say it has over the running of the IMF. This means that it is run by the countries that are least affected by its policies.A major decision requires 85% of the vote, which ensures that the US, with 17%, has a veto over the fund’s substantial business. The UK, Germany, France and Japan have 22% between them, and each has a permanent seat on the board. By a weird arrangement permitting rich nations to speak on behalf of the poor, Canada and Italy have effective control over a further 8%. The other European countries are also remarkably powerful: Belgium, for example, has a direct entitlement to 2.1% of the vote and indirect control over 5.1% – more than twice the allocation of India or Brazil. Europe, Japan, Canada and the US wield a total of 63%. The 80 poorest countries, by contrast, have 10% between them.
These quotas no longer even reflect real financial contributions to the running of the IMF: it now obtains much of its capital from loan repayments by its vassal states. But the G7 nations still behave as if it belongs to them. They decide who runs it (the managing director is always a European and his deputy always an American) and how the money is spent. You begin to wonder why the developing countries bother to turn up.
In principle, this power is supposed to be balanced by something called the "basic vote" – 250 shares (entitling them to $25m worth of votes) are allocated to every member. But while the value of the rich countries’ quotas has risen since the IMF was founded in 1944, the value of the basic votes has not. It has fallen from 11.3% of the total allocation to 2.1%. The leaked paper passed to me by an excellent organisation called the Bretton Woods Project (everything we know about the IMF has to be leaked) shows that the fund intends to democratise itself by "at least doubling" the basic vote. That sorts it all out, then – the 80 poorest countries will be able to claim, between them, another 0.9%. Even this pathetic concession was granted only after the African members took a political risk by publicly opposing the fund’s proposals. Doubtless the US government is currently reviewing their trading status.
All this is compounded by an internal political process that looks as if it was contrived in North Korea, not Washington. There are no formal votes, just a "consensus process" controlled by the Dear Leaders of the G7. The decisions taken by each member state cannot be revealed to the public. Nor can the transcripts of the board’s meetings and the "working papers" on which it bases its internal reforms. Even reports by the IMF’s ombudsman – the "independent evaluation office" – are censored by the management, and their conclusions are changed to shift the blame for the fund’s failures to its client states. Needless to say, the IMF insists that the states it lends to must commit themselves to "good governance" and "transparency" if they are to receive its money.
None of this would matter so much if it had stuck to its original mandate of stabilising the international monetary system. But after the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971 the IMF more or less lost its mission to maintain exchange rates, and began to look for a new role. As a paper by the law professor Daniel Bradlow shows, when it amended its articles of asso-ciation in 1978 they were so loosely drafted as to grant the IMF permission to interfere in almost any aspect of a country’s governance. It lost its influence over the economic policies of the G7 and became instead the rich world’s viceroy, controlling the poorer nations at its behest. It began to micro-manage their economies without reference to the people or even their governments. Since then, no rich country has required its services, and few poor countries have been able to shake it off.
This casts an interesting light on the decision – to be endorsed at the IMF’s meeting in Singapore next week – to enhance the quota for the four middle-income countries. After the fund "helped" the struggling economies of east and south-east Asia in 1997, by laying waste to them on behalf of US hedge funds and investment companies, the nations of that region decided that they would never allow themselves to fall prey to it again.
They began indemnifying themselves against the fund’s tender loving care by building up their own reserves of capital. Now, just as China and South Korea have ensured that they will never again require the IMF’s services, they have been granted more power to decide how it operates. In other words, they are deemed fit to govern when – like the G7 – they can exercise power without reaping the consequences. The smaller your stake in the outcome, the greater your vote.
None of this seems to cause any difficulties to the gatekeepers of mainstream opinion. On Saturday a leading article in the Washington Post observed that "to be legitimate, multilateral institutions must reflect the global distribution of power as it is now, not as it was when these institutions were set up more than half a century ago". What a fascinating definition that is, and how wrong we must have been to imagine that legitimacy requires democracy. Hurrah for corporatism – it didn’t die with Mussolini after all.
I am among those who believe that the IMF is, and always will be, the wrong body – inherently flawed and constitutionally unjust. But if its leaders and supporters are to persuade us that it might, one day, have a legitimate role in running the world’s financial systems, they will have to do a hell of a lot better than this.
· George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning is published this month Monbiot.com