Walmart owns more wealth than 90 million Americans

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From Bernie Sanders on the floor of the Senate:

Today the wealthiest 400 individuals in America own more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people. 

Today, the six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune now own more wealth than the bottom 30% of the American people. One family owns more wealth than the bottom 30%, 90 million Americans. 

Today the top 1% own 40% of all of the wealth in America. The top 1% owns 40% of all the wealth in America. What do we think the bottom 60% of the American people own?

I ask this question a lot around Vermont.  People say maybe they own 15%, maybe they own 20%. Well, the answer is they own less than 2%. Less than 2%. So you got the bottom 60% of the American people owning less than 2% of the wealth, top 1% own 40% of the wealth. 

Here's another astounding fact and we don't see this too much in the media. Many of my colleagues don't talk about it too often but incredibly, the bottom 40% of the American people own 0.3% of the wealth of this country. And I know we have some of my colleagues coming up here and say look, not everybody in America is paying taxes.

We have millions of people not paying any taxes. No kidding. They don't have any money. Because all of the money is on the top.  

According to a new study from the Federal Reserve, median net worth for middle-class families dropped by nearly 40% from 2007 to 2010, primarily because of the plummeting value of homes. That is the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle-class family. Now, I talked a moment about distribution of wealth. That's what you accumulate in your lifetime. Let me say a word about income, which is what we earn in a year. The last study on income distribution showed us that between the years 2009 and 2010 -- 2009 and 2010 -- 93% of all new income created went to the top 1%, while the 99% had the privilege of enjoying the remaining 7%. In other words, the wealthy people in this country are becoming wealthier, the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing. Now, when we talk about an oligarchic form of government, what we're talking about is not just a handful of families owning entire nations. We're also talking about the politics of the nation.

Wayne Madsen - uncovering the criminal actions of the shadow state

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Former National Security Agency analyst and Naval intelligence officer Wayne Madsen has unique inside sources on major stories on 9/11 as well as on President Obama's family background and his alleged CIA links.
Madsen is a rare hero among journalists who is prepared to follow the money to where it leads, do the work (ie use primary sources) and to name the suspects. He has comprehensively identified the web of individuals, companies and foreign intelligence services involved in the criminal network using terrorism to manipulate democracy and create conflict.
I recently asked Madsen to confirm his most explosive story, which is that Mossad 'ran' the 9/11 cell that carried out the attacks on New York and Washington. The source for the story was British intelligence. Madsen spent time in New York and Israel following up the 'Israeli art students' story in 2002, he explained to me. "One of my prime British Intel sources dropped dead from a heart attack at 63. He was in contact with several other 'old mates'.
"My NSA. CIA, DIA and State Department contacts our of varying degrees of opinions on the Israeli angle but all suspect Israeli involvement at some level."
Madsen is frequently interviewed by Alex Jones and Russia Today, and seems to have some remarkable sources deep inside the security state and intelligence services. Not surprisingly he says he cannot reveal these sources as they will lose their job or worse. He himself has catalogued a number of suspicious deaths leading back to the Bush network and Israel.
I was shocked to recently discover news of the death of Dutch demolition expert Danny Jowenko, killed when his car hit a tree in 2011. He was one of the most experienced demolition experts to go on the record in a Dutch film confirming that WTC7 was a controlled demolition.

Who says big business works for customers - Sky doesn't

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I am sometimes amazed at the bureaucratic incompetence and Kafkaesque daftness of big business. Our ideological masters have been telling us for years how inherently inefficient the state or public sector is, but have you dealt with a large corporation lately? How does the corporate accountability structure differ from a badly run state organisation? I generally find dealing with the local council or Post Office far more satisfactory than dealing with most private utilities.
We have just had a month of wasted phone calls and nonsense from Sky when their sales team convinced my beloved wife to switch from Virgin. It turned out that their subcontracted engineers refused to put a satellite dish on our roof. We were faced with paying £200 to an independent contractor to do this - so the whole savings offer of switching to Sky was bogus. As of June 1 we have had no phone line because Sky could not install it without the right socket. Now we are going back to Virgin, but they cannot get the phone to work again. I have been on the phone for an hour this morning trying to sort it out. Sky have charged us for phone services we never used. The customer service woman initially refused to refund then offered me an address or fax number to contact the complaints department. I said - what, you are telling me that your complaints department doesn't have a phone number? Come on! She stuck with it then went to her line manager. Then she came back saying we could have a refund but we would have to call back again. She claimed that Virgin had not requested our phone number back from Sky and told me to ring them to do this or we would lose our number. So I rang Virgin, and they told me they had requested the number. So I have wasted another morning dealing with this nonsense when I could be working. I still have no phone and I am being billed by two different media companies! And people say market competition is the best way to serve customers. 

A coup by any other name - this time in Paraguay

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Dressing up the removal of an elected president with impeachment is a subtle form of overturning the democratic choice of the people. That is what has just happened in Paraguay. I did not know about the coup in Paraguay until today when I was attending a conference on Venezuela's upcoming elections in London. President Lugo, the country's first left-wing leader and a former priest, was removed by the Senate in a so-called trial, following a violent confrontation over land rights that left 17 dead. Lugo's supporters have protested outside Parliament but Lugo has said he will step aside and not contest the next election in August 2013. He served less than 4 years of his five year term. Paraguay was ruled by a single authoritarian regime for more than five decades. The elite's dislike of Lugo's pro -poor policies have now led to his ouster. Latin American leaders have denounced the coup, which resembles a similar institutional coup against Honduras's elected president in 2010 by that country's conservative elite. There is a pattern here, that rightwing forces are trying to turn back the popular socialist tide in Latin America. Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and others have said they will not recognise the new government, led by Lugo's estranged liberal deputy. Not surprisingly the US has failed to condemn the move. 

When the facts don't suit our worldview

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Last Sunday I did a talk called 'Cognitive Dissonance and 9/11' in Brighton, which I enjoyed very much. Cognitive dissonance looks at how people adjust or reject the facts to suit their worldview. We all do it sometimes, because our worldview is so important to us. One man - a journalist and author - put me through my paces as a real and articulate believer in the official story. He was someone who, with all his intelligence, did not see anything in my presentation to change his view. I reviewed my talk with friends and realised I had perhaps assumed too much and needed to lay down the most obvious problems and omissions from the official 9/11 accounts. As he said, it's not the layman or woman's job to research or investigate the events. It's up to those who feel that we have been deceived to convince others. All that is really required is to raise significant questions which require answers.

The piece below from 9/11Truth.org sums up the doubts - it's from 2006 so there are some updates required and also new evidence, such as the paper on nanothermite traces in 9/11 dust by Stephen Jones and Niels Harrit of Copenhagen University from 2009. As Harrit said in the BBC documentary Conspiracy Files last year, "once you've seen Building 7, there's no way back". Unless of course you choose the path of cognitive blindness because your worldview cannot cope with knowing that 9/11 was a Big Lie. This is something former US Treasury official and Wall Street Journal associate editor David Ray Griffin addresses in his new book, 9/11 - TenYears Later.


THE TOP 40 REASONS TO DOUBT THE OFFICIAL STORY OF SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001

... An outline in simple talking points ...

We are continuing to compile the best documentation links for every single point on this page, and intend to post the updated version as soon as possible, and create teaching tools and more from the info. This is a significant and time-consuming process--if you have useful links, please send them to janice@911truth.org. Thanks for your help!
If you use the search function with title key words, you will discover that 911Truth.org is home to articles backing virtually every point made below. Much of the basic research is available at the Complete 9/11 Timeline (hosted by cooperativeresearch.org), the 9/11 Reading Room (911readingroom.org), and the NY Attorney General Spitzer petition and complaint (Justicefor911.org). For physical evidence discussion, see Point 7.


THE DAY ITSELF - EVIDENCE OF COMPLICITY

1) AWOL Chain of Command
a. It is well documented that the officials topping the chain of command for response to a domestic attack - George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, Montague Winfield - all found reason to do something else during the actual attacks, other than assuming their duties as decision-makers.
b. Who was actually in charge? Dick Cheney, Richard Clarke, Norman Mineta and the 9/11 Commission directly conflict in their accounts of top-level response to the unfolding events, such that several (or all) of them must be lying.
 2) Air Defense Failures
a. The US air defense system failed to follow standard procedures for responding to diverted passenger flights.
b. Timelines: The various responsible agencies - NORAD, FAA, Pentagon, USAF, as well as the 9/11 Commission - gave radically different explanations for the failure (in some cases upheld for years), such that several officials must have lied; but none were held accountable.
c. Was there an air defense standdown?
3) Pentagon Strike
How was it possible the Pentagon was hit 1 hour and 20 minutes after the attacks began? Why was there no response from Andrews Air Force Base, just 10 miles away and home to Air National Guard units charged with defending the skies above the nation''s capital? How did Hani Hanjour, a man who failed as a Cessna pilot on his first flight in a Boeing, execute a difficult aerobatic maneuver to strike the Pentagon? Why did the attack strike the just-renovated side, which was largely empty and opposite from the high command?

4) Wargames
a. US military and other authorities planned or actually rehearsed defensive response to all elements of the 9/11 scenario during the year prior to the attack - including multiple hijackings, suicide crashbombings, and a strike on the Pentagon.
b. The multiple military wargames planned long in advance and held on the morning of September 11th included scenarios of a domestic air crisis, a plane crashing into a government building, and a large-scale emergency in New York. If this was only an incredible series of coincidences, why did the official investigations avoid the issue? There is evidence that the wargames created confusion as to whether the unfolding events were "real world or exercise." Did wargames serve as the cover for air defense sabotage, and/or the execution of an "inside job"?

5) Flight 93
Did the Shanksville crash occur at 10:06 (according to a seismic report) or 10:03 (according to the 9/11 Commission)? Does the Commission wish to hide what happened in the last three minutes of the flight, and if so, why? Was Flight 93 shot down, as indicated by the scattering of debris over a trail of several miles?


THE DAY - POSSIBLE SMOKING GUNS
6) Did cell phones work at 30,000 feet in 2001? How many hijackings were attempted? How many flights were diverted?

7) Demolition Hypothesis
What caused the collapse of a third skyscraper, WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane? Were the Twin Towers and WTC 7 brought down by explosives? (See "The Case for Demolitions," the websites wtc7.net and 911research.wtc7.net, and the influential article by physicist Steven Jones. See also items no. 16 and 24, below.)

FOREKNOWLEDGE & THE ALLEGED HIJACKERS

8) What did officials know? How did they know it?
a. Multiple allied foreign agencies informed the US government of a coming attack in detail, including the manner and likely targets of the attack, the name of the operation (the "Big Wedding"), and the names of certain men later identified as being among the perpetrators.
b. Various individuals came into possession of specific advance knowledge, and some of them tried to warn the US prior to September 11th.
c. Certain prominent persons received warnings not to fly on the week or on the day of September 11th.

9) Able Danger, Plus - Surveillance of Alleged Hijackers
a. The men identified as the 9/11 ringleaders were under surveillance for years beforehand, on the suspicion they were terrorists, by a variety of US and allied authorities - including the CIA, the US military''s "Able Danger" program, the German authorities, Israeli intelligence and others.
b. Two of the alleged ringleaders who were known to be under surveillance by the CIA also lived with an FBI asset in San Diego, but this is supposed to be yet another coincidence.

10) Obstruction of FBI Investigations prior to 9/11
A group of FBI officials in New York systematically suppressed field investigations of potential terrorists that might have uncovered the alleged hijackers - as the Moussaoui case once again showed. The stories of Sibel Edmonds, Robert Wright, Coleen Rowley and Harry Samit, the "Phoenix Memo," David Schippers, the 199i orders restricting investigations, the Bush administration''s order to back off the Bin Ladin family, the reaction to the "Bojinka" plot, and John O''Neil do not, when considered in sum, indicate mere incompetence, but high-level corruption and protection of criminal networks, including the network of the alleged 9/11 conspirators. (Nearly all of these examples were omitted from or relegated to fleeting footnotes in The 9/11 Commission Report.)

11) Insider Trading
a. Unknown speculators allegedly used foreknowledge of the Sept. 11th events to profiteer on many markets internationally - including but not limited to "put options" placed to short-sell the two airlines, WTC tenants, and WTC re-insurance companies in Chicago and London.
b. In addition, suspicious monetary transactions worth hundreds of millions were conducted through offices at the Twin Towers during the actual attacks.
c. Initial reports on these trades were suppressed and forgotten, and only years later did the 9/11 Commission and SEC provide a partial, but untenable explanation for only a small number of transactions (covering only the airline put options through the Chicago Board of Exchange).

12) Who were the perpetrators?
a. Much of the evidence establishing who did the crime is dubious and miraculous: bags full of incriminating material that happened to miss the flight or were left in a van; the "magic passport" of an alleged hijacker, found at Ground Zero; documents found at motels where the alleged perpetrators had stayed days and weeks before 9/11.
b. The identities of the alleged hijackers remain unresolved, there are contradictions in official accounts of their actions and travels, and there is evidence several of them had "doubles," all of which is omitted from official investigations.
c. What happened to initial claims by the government that 50 people involved in the attacks had been identified, including the 19 alleged hijackers, with 10 still at large (suggesting that 20 had been apprehended)? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-worldtrade-50suspects,0,1825231.story


THE 9/11 COVER-UP, 2001-2006
13) Who Is Osama Bin Ladin?
a. Who judges which of the many conflicting and dubious statements and videos attributed to Osama Bin Ladin are genuine, and which are fake? The most important Osama Bin Ladin video (Nov. 2001), in which he supposedly confesses to masterminding 9/11, appears to be a fake. In any event, the State Department''s translation of it is fraudulent.
b. Did Osama Bin Ladin visit Dubai and meet a CIA agent in July 2001 (Le Figaro)? Was he receiving dialysis in a Pakistani military hospital on the night of September 10, 2001 (CBS)?
c. Whether by Bush or Clinton: Why is Osama always allowed to escape?
d. The terror network associated with Osama, known as the "base" (al-Qaeda), originated in the CIA-sponsored 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. When did this network stop serving as an asset to covert operations by US intelligence and allied agencies? What were its operatives doing in Kosovo, Bosnia and Chechnya in the years prior to 9/11?

14) All the Signs of a Systematic 9/11 Cover-up
a. Airplane black boxes were found at Ground Zero, according to two first responders and an unnamed NTSB official, but they were "disappeared" and their existence is denied in The 9/11 Commission Report.
b. US officials consistently suppressed and destroyed evidence (like the tapes recorded by air traffic controllers who handled the New York flights).
c. Whistleblowers (like Sibel Edmonds and Anthony Shaffer) were intimidated, gagged and sanctioned, sending a clear signal to others who might be thinking about speaking out.
d. Officials who "failed" (like Myers and Eberhard, as well as Frasca, Maltbie and Bowman of the FBI) were given promotions.

15) Poisoning New York
The White House deliberately pressured the EPA into giving false public assurances that the toxic air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe. This knowingly contributed to an as-yet unknown number of health cases and fatalities, and demonstrates that the administration does consider the lives of American citizens to be expendable on behalf of certain interests.
16) Disposing of the Crime Scene
The rapid and illegal scrapping of the WTC ruins at Ground Zero disposed of almost all of the structural steel indispensable to any investigation of the collapse mechanics. (See also item no. 23, below.)
17) Anthrax
Mailings of weapons-grade anthrax - which caused a practical suspension of the 9/11 investigations - were traced back to US military stock. Soon after the attacks began in October 2001, the FBI approved the destruction of the original samples of the Ames strain, disposing of perhaps the most important evidence in identifying the source of the pathogens used in the mailings. Were the anthrax attacks timed to coincide with the Afghanistan invasion? Why were the letters sent only to media figures and to the leaders of the opposition in the Senate (who had just raised objections to the USA PATRIOT Act)?
18) The Stonewall
a. Colin Powell promised a "white paper" from the State Department to establish the authorship of the attacks by al-Qaeda. This was never forthcoming, and was instead replaced by a paper from Tony Blair, which presented only circumstantial evidence, with very few points actually relating to September 11th.
b. Bush and Cheney pressured the (freshly-anthraxed) leadership of the Congressional opposition into delaying the 9/11 investigation for months. The administration fought against the creation of an independent investigation for more than a year.
c. The White House thereupon attempted to appoint Henry Kissinger as the chief investigator, and acted to underfund and obstruct the 9/11 Commission.

19) A Record of Official Lies
a. "No one could have imagined planes into buildings" - a transparent falsehood upheld repeatedly by Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush.
b. "Iraq was connected to 9/11" - The most "outrageous conspiracy theory" of all, with the most disastrous impact.
20) Pakistani Connection - Congressional Connection
a. The Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, creator of the Taliban and close ally to both the CIA and "al-Qaeda," allegedly wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta just prior to September 11th, reportedly through the ISI asset Omar Saeed Sheikh (later arrested for the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was investigating ISI connections to "al-Qaeda.")
b. This was ignored by the congressional 9/11 investigation, although the senator and congressman who ran the probe (Bob Graham and Porter Goss) were meeting with the ISI chief, Mahmud Ahmed, on Capitol Hill on the morning of September 11th.
c. About 25 percent of the report of the Congressional Joint Inquiry was redacted, including long passages regarding how the attack (or the network allegedly behind it) was financed. Graham later said foreign allies were involved in financing the alleged terror network, but that this would only come out in 30 years.
21) Unanswered Questions and the "Final Fraud" of the 9/11 Commission:
a. The September 11th families who fought for and gained an independent investigation (the 9/11 Commission) posed 400-plus questions, which the 9/11 Commission adopted as its roadmap. The vast majority of these questions were completely ignored in the Commission hearings and the final report.
b. The membership and staff of the 9/11 Commission displayed awesome conflicts of interest. The families called for the resignation of Executive Director Philip Zelikow, a Bush administration member and close associate of "star witness" Condoleezza Rice, and were snubbed. Commission member Max Cleland resigned, condemning the entire exercise as a "scam" and "whitewash."
c.The 9/11 Commission Report is notable mainly for its obvious omissions, distortions and outright falsehoods - ignoring anything incompatible with the official story, banishing the issues to footnotes, and even dismissing the still-unresolved question of who financed 9/11 as being "of little practical significance."

22) Crown Witnesses Held at Undisclosed Locations
The alleged masterminds of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM) and Ramzi Binalshibh, are reported to have been captured in 2002 and 2003, although one Pakistani newspaper said KSM was killed in an attempted capture. They have been held at undisclosed locations and their supposed testimonies, as provided in transcript form by the government, form much of the basis for The 9/11 Commission Report (although the Commission''s request to see them in person was denied). After holding them for years, why doesn''t the government produce these men and put them to trial?

Since then these men have gone on trial - but their testimony is tainted due to torture used to extract it,

23) Spitzer Redux
a. Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York State, snubbed pleas by New York citizens to open 9/11 as a criminal case (Justicefor911.org).
b. Spitzer also refused to allow his employee, former 9/11 Commission staff member Dietrich Snell, to testify to the Congress about his (Snell''s) role in keeping "Able Danger" entirely out of The 9/11 Commission Report.
24) NIST Omissions
After the destruction of the WTC structural steel, the official Twin Towers collapse investigation was left with almost no forensic evidence, and thus could only provide dubious computer models of ultimately unprovable hypotheses. It failed to even test for the possibility of explosives. (Why not clear this up?)

NIST report on WTC7 finally released in November 2008.

25) Radio Silence
The 9/11 Commission and NIST both allowed the continuing cover-up of how Motorola''s faulty radios, purchased by the Giuliani administration, caused firefighter deaths at the WTC - once again showing the expendability, even of the first responders.
26) The Legal Catch-22
a. Hush Money - Accepting victims'' compensation barred September 11th families from pursuing discovery through litigation.
b. Judge Hallerstein - Those who refused compensation to pursue litigation and discovery had their cases consolidated under the same judge (and as a rule dismissed).

27) Saudi Connections
a. The 9/11 investigations made light of the "Bin Ladin Airlift" during the no-fly period, and ignored the long-standing Bush family business ties to the Bin Ladin family fortune. (A company in which both families held interests, the Carlyle Group, was holding its annual meeting on September 11th, with George Bush Sr., James Baker, and two brothers of Osama Bin Ladin in attendance.)
b. The issue of Ptech.
28) Media Blackout of Prominent Doubters
The official story has been questioned and many of the above points were raised by members of the US Congress, retired high-ranking officers of the US military, the three leading third-party candidates for President in the 2004 election, a member of the 9/11 Commission who resigned in protest, a former high-ranking adviser to the George W. Bush administration, former ministers to the German, British and Canadian governments, the commander-in-chief of the Russian air force, 100 luminaries who signed the "9/11 Truth Statement," and the presidents of Iran and Venezuela. Not all of these people agree fully with each other, but all would normally be considered newsworthy. Why has the corporate-owned US mass media remained silent about these statements, granting due coverage only to the comments of actor Charlie Sheen?


GEOPOLITICS, TIMING AND POSSIBLE MOTIVES
29) "The Great Game"
The Afghanistan invasion was ready for Bush''s go-ahead on September 9, 2001, with US and UK force deployments to the region already in place or underway. This followed the failure earlier that year of backdoor diplomacy with the Taliban (including payments of $125 million in US government aid to Afghanistan), in an attempt to secure a unity government for that country as a prerequisite to a Central Asian pipeline deal.
30) The Need for a "New Pearl Harbor"
Principals in US foreign policy under the current Bush administration (including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and others) have been instrumental in developing long-running plans for worldwide military hegemony, including an invasion of the Middle East, dating back to the Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. They reiterated these plans in the late 1990s as members of the "Project for a New American Century," and stated a clear intent to invade Iraq for the purpose of "regime change." After 9/11, they lost no time in their attempt to tie Iraq to the attacks.
31) Perpetual "War on Terror"
9/11 is supposed to provide carte-blanche for an open-ended, global and perpetual "War on Terror," against any enemy, foreign or domestic, that the executive branch chooses to designate, and regardless of whether evidence exists to actually connect these enemies to 9/11.
32) Attacking the Constitution
a. The USA PATRIOT Act was written before 9/11, Homeland Security and the "Shadow Government" were developed long before 9/11, and plans for rounding up dissidents as a means for suppressing civil disturbance have been in the works for decades.
b. 9/11 was used as the pretext to create a new, extra-constitutional executive authority to declare anyone an "enemy combatant" (including American citizens), to detain persons indefinitely without habeas corpus, and to "render" such persons to secret prisons where torture is practiced.
33) Legal Trillions
9/11 triggers a predictable shift of public spending to war, and boosts public and private spending in the "new" New Economy of "Homeland Security," biometrics, universal surveillance, prisons, civil defense, secured enclaves, security, etc.

34) Plundered Trillions?
On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced a "war on waste" after an internal audit found that the Pentagon was "missing" 2.3 trillion dollars in unaccounted assets. On September 11th, this was as good as forgotten.
35) Did 9/11 prevent a stock market crash?
Did anyone benefit from the destruction of the Securities and Exchange Commission offices at WTC 7, and the resultant crippling of hundreds of fraud investigations?
36) Resource Wars
a. What was discussed in the Energy Task Force meetings under Dick Cheney in 2001? Why is the documentation of these meetings still being suppressed?
b. Is Peak Oil a motive for 9/11 as inside job?
37) The "Little Game"
Why was the WTC privatized just before its destruction?


HISTORY
38) "Al-CIA-da?"
The longstanding relationship between US intelligence networks and radical Islamists, including the network surrounding Osama Bin Ladin. (See also point 13d.)

39) Historical Precedents for "Synthetic Terror"
a. In the past many states, including the US government, have sponsored attacks on their own people, fabricated the "cause for war," created (and armed) their own enemies of convenience, and sacrificed their own citizens for "reasons of state."
b. Was 9/11 an update of the Pentagon-approved "Project Northwoods" plan for conducting self-inflicted, false-flag terror attacks in the United States, and blaming them on a foreign enemy?

40) Secret Government
a. The record of criminality and sponsorship of coups around the world by the covert networks based within the US intelligence complex.
b. Specifically also: The evidence of crime by Bush administration principals and their associates, from October Surprise to Iran-Contra and the S&L plunder to PNAC, Enron/Halliburton and beyond.

Gunwalker scandal - ATF supplied Mexico drug gangs with guns

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What we seem to be witnessing in Mexico and in other parts of the world is a so-called strategy of tension, creating mayhem in order to serve geostrategic US goals. It's the modern equivalent of divide and rule as used in the British empire. The strategy of tension is just as pernicious and leads to countless deaths. Now Obama is in trouble over 'Fast and Furious' - the ATF gun running scandal in Mexico. When people doubt that US agencies would infiltrate and orchestrate terror plots, just look at Fast and Furious, then laugh or weep.

From Tim Stanley in the Daily Telegraph 

Fast and furious hasn’t been discussed a lot in the mainstream media, which is why the facts can seem so preposterous when you read them for the first time. But the story is slowly unraveling and the public is catching up with the madness. On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over his decision to withhold documents related to the “gun walking” operation – documents that President Obama tried to keep secret by invoking executive privilege. The question of why the Prez intervened in this way will surely hang over the investigation and the White House for many months to come. Be patient, conservatives. It took nearly eight months for the Watergate break in to become a national news story. But when it finally did, it toppled a President.


Here’s what Fast and Furious is all about – and for the uninitiated, be prepared for a shock. In 2009, the US government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales but to allow the arms to “walk” across the border into the arms of Mexican drug-traffickers. According to the Oversight Committee’s report, “The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…. [The ATF] initially began using the new gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy. The case was soon renamed ‘Operation Fast and Furious.”
Tracing the arms became difficult, until they starting appearing at bloody crime scenes. Many Mexicans have died from being shot by ATF sanctioned guns, but the scandal only became public after a US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in a fire fight. ATF whistle blowers started to come forward and the Department of Justice was implicated. It’s estimated that the US government effectively supplied 1,608 weapons to criminals, at a total value of over $1 million. Aside from putting American citizens in danger, the AFT also supplied what now amounts to a civil war within Mexico.

Three elections bad, one good

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I am the eternally disappointed optimist. I try to follow Gramsci's dictum - pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will - at times I find this goes into reverse. Four elections come along - France, Egypt, Mexico, Greece. All matter for different reasons. The first was a victory for the left, although the stakes were not quite as high as the others. Still, I am happy for the French, which is rare for an Englishman.
The second marked a tragic reversal of the high hopes of the revolution of early 2011. The Egyptians who occupied Tahrir and died in their hundreds were faced with a choice of candidates that 70% did not want. Barely 20% voted. Muslim Brotherhood vs Mubarak henchman was not what the young generation who took on and defeated a dictator had in mind for the future of their country. The best candidate was knocked out in the first round.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, the election is still 10 days away but the candidate of the party that ruled for 70 years has a safe lead over his rivals. AMLO - Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador - candidate of the leftwing PRD movement, has fallen back from the high point of electoral and popular hopes in 2006, then dashed by electoral fraud. This time, his performance in debates has - according to reports - not given him the momentum he requires to beat the establishment candidates. After six years of extreme violence, Mexicans are opting for a safe pair of hands. Cynics might wonder whether launching a militaristic war on drug gangs was part of a deeper strategy to instill fear into the population so that they never again flirt with the idea of radical social change. If that was the strategy, which has been practised worldwide since 9/11, it has worked.
Then Greece. The new leftwing bloc Syriza were being held up as the party who could destroy the euro. Again, the message to the Greeks was clear, if you vote for this party, you can kiss your future goodbye. The fear tactics worked, even though nearly 28% voted for an exciting new political formation, which was something of a revolution anyway. It was born of the extremity of the punishment imposed on Greece for its debt crisis. Now it has a government that will continue a policy that has been disastrous.

So, in the end, we are in a morass, a financial crisis, one step forward (France) and probably three steps back (Greece, Egypt, Mexico). How can ordinary people make political choices within the so-called democratic system that will actually bring concrete improvements to their situation? This is the trap that has been set - vote however you want as long as it is for what we, the global elite, tell you. If you don't there will be hell to pay. One day people will stop listening to this message of fear. There are always new unexpected turns in the road that raise new possibilities. Whenever my pessimism takes hold, something usually comes along to cheer me up. As poor Syria burns, the news that a ship full of Russian helicopter gunships was turned back gave me that rare feeling that Britain could, just occasionally, do something that was unequivocally good. I hope the story does not turn out to be a piece of PR.

Explosive connections of WTC tenants on 9/11

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This fascinating, disturbing video - based on work by 911 whistleblower Kevin Ryan - provides a lot of information on the family and military-political links to the Bush clique of corporations who were directly hit by planes striking the World Trade Centre. At the least they constitute a series of strange coincidences.

World's number 1 insurance broker Marsh & Maclennan occupied floors 94 to 99 on the north face of the North Tower that was struck by American Airlines Flight 11.  Marsh was known to be highly secretive. Its CEO was Jeffrey Greenberg, son of AIG boss Maurice Greenberg, who later stood down after being implicated in a massive fraud at the firm. Paul L Bremer, later viceroy of Iraq during the occupation, was an executive of Marsh & Maclennan; Stephen Friedman, President George W. Bush's top economic adviser and former Goldman, Sachs & Co. co-chairman, who was an MMC senior principal; and Craig Stapleton, the husband of George W. Bush's cousin Dorothy, who was an MMC president. He was one of several highly connected neoconservatives who had offices in the towers but were not at work on 9/11. Instead, Bremer was on MSNBC that morning, blaming Osama bin Laden for the attack and calling for the hardest possible military response. It seems unimaginable that anyone would knowingly let hundreds of their own employees die in a terrorist attack and there is no direct evidence of this.

Jerry Hauer, managing director of Kroll Associates, which controlled security at the World Trade Centre, was also interviewed that morning by Dan Rather on CBS. He explained to Rather that what we were seeing was not a controlled demolition but a collapse caused by fire. He also ruled out state involvement and said it was likely the work of Osama Bin Laden:

 Dan Rather: Based on what you know, and I recognize we’re dealing with so few facts, is it possible that just a plane crash could have collapsed these buildings, or would it have required the, sort of, prior positioning of other explosives in the, uh, in the buildings? I mean, what do you think?

Jerome Hauer: No, I, uh, my sense is just the velocity of the plane and the fact that you have a plane filled with fuel hitting that building, uh, that burned, uh, the velocity of that plane, uh, certainly, uh, uh, had an impact on the structure itself, and then the fact that it burned and you had that intense heat, uh, probably weakened the structure as well, uh, and I think it, uh, was, uh, simply the, uh, the planes hitting the buildings, and, and causing the collapse. 

.....

Dan Rather: What perspective can you give us? I mean, there have been these repeated reports that, well, yes, Osama Bin Laden, but some think he’s been over-emphasized as, as responsible for these kinds of events. I know many intelligence, uh, people at very high levels who say, listen, you can’t have these kinds of attacks without having some state, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, somebody involved. Put that into perspective for us.

Jerome Hauer: Yeah, well I’m not sure I agree that, umm, this is necessarily state-sponsored. Umm, it, as I mentioned earlier, certainly has, umm, the, uh, fingerprints of somebody like Bin Laden. 

Hauer was formerly the director of Office of Emergency Management under New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1996 to 2000. The OEM had offices in WTC7 but these were moved just prior to 9/11. The center had been temporarily relocated to Pier 92 on Manhattan’s West Side, due to a FEMA drill scheduled to begin on the day after 9-11, according to statements made by Mayor Giuliani. In 2002 Hauer was appointed as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), where he led the response to the anthrax attacks on government offices.

Several other senior executives and WTC tenants in the Bush clique were by good fortune not at work at the Towers that day, including Jim Pierce, cousin of President Bush, whose meeting on floor 105 of the South Tower that morning was moved the night before to the Millennium Hotel. Unfortunately 10 or more people were not informed about the venue change and perished when the planes hit.

The South Tower impact zone between floors 78 and 83 was occupied by Baseline Financial Services and Fuji Bank. Baseline's CEO Joseph Kasputys was the founder of IHS intelligence services. Kasputys was highly connected to the Department of Defence and worked for the Nixon administration. Baseline was acquired by Kasputys's Primark Corp in 1996. Primark owned Triad International Maintenance Company (TIMCO), a company that, among other things, modified Boeing 757s and 767s.

What is more interesting is the evidence of prior warnings of plans to bring down the buildings as early as 1996:

As Ryan writes: "Evidence suggests that the period of interest [in terms of access to WTC for possible demolition] should include the years between the 1993 WTC bombing and September 11th, 2001. This evidence includes the warning from 1993 bombing conspirator Nidal Ayyad, who reportedly wrote — “next time it will be more precise.” [8] Additionally, evidence of a multi-year plot included the detailed information that FBI informant and mafia kingpin Gregory Scarpa Jr. received while in jail, as early as 1996, from Al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, while imprisoned in the adjacent cell. Yousef described plans to “bring New York to its knees” by blowing up the World Trade Center with American-owned “flying massive bombs.” Scarpa Jr. provided this information to Assistant US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI Counsel Valerie Caproni, who were apparently not interested. [9] Another example is the recorded conversation between FBI informant Randy Glass and Pakistani ISI agent Raja Gulum Abbas, in which Abbas claimed “Those towers are coming down”, indicating that a plan was in progress as of July 1999. [10]

US military: making Islam the enemy

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A Pentagon course for US officers taught that Islam, not just Islamic extremism, is the enemy of the US. Since a student objected to the material last month the course was suspended. It nevertheless showed the thinking of some in the US military elite about Islam and the Islamic world - perceiving the need for a 'total war' against Islamic countries.

As Wired.com's Danger Room blog reported:

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

....The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.
“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

Guardian reveals payments to TV channel to boost Mexico's Nieto

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The Guardian has received documents from a source at Televisa, Mexico's largest TV network, that appear to show the network was paid to promote the Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto with favourable coverage in a multi-million dollar deal dating back to 2005. The documents also include a paid for campaign to denigrate the leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador to ensure he did not win the previous presidential election in 2006. In the event, AMLO was beaten by a whisker in what was widely seen by supporters as a election stolen by the governing PAN party. The paper reports:

Mexico's leftwing presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has called on Enrique Peña Nieto, the current favourite to win the election on 1 July, to come clean about the alleged purchase of favourable coverage on Mexico's biggest television network.

His comments came a day after the Guardian published documents implicating the Televisa network in the sale of news and entertainment content to promote Peña Nieto's national profile when he was the governor of Mexico state and preparing his presidential bid.

"They should hand over all the information, the contracts, that they haven't wanted to show," López Obrador told reporters. "Of course they have them, and we need to see how much they paid, for what kind of message, and if they include all the promotion of Peña Nieto on the television."

López Obrador, who represents a coalition of leftist parties called the Progressive Movement – and who in the past has also been criticised for failing to release details of his own publicity budget – said he wanted to study the documents before saying anything more.

A Guardian News & Media spokesperson said: "The Guardian is committed to reporting on issues in Mexico, and we stand by the article in question. The report is based on documents given to our reporter, in addition to information provided by a former Televisa employee.

"In the story, we acknowledge that it is not possible to confirm the authenticity of the documents – which were passed to the Guardian by a source who worked with Televisa. However, the Guardian carried out extensive cross checks to confirm that the names, dates and situations mentioned in the documents largely lined up with events."

Obama's drone wars - killing the innocent for votes

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Every time you read a report about US drones killing 'militants', remember that the truth is they are just as likely to be children or workers - innocents blown up to help Obama's re-election campaign. Clive Stafford Smith has been to Waziristan to find out who is actually being killed by Obama's drones.
At least so-called terrorists are fighting to remove foreign occupiers - you might not like their ideology but from time immemorial it has been the right of people to resist aggressors and occupiers. Given most so-called terror plots against America are actually orchestrated by the FBI and CIA, there is simply no justification for drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or anywhere else. These countries need peace, security and development. Instead, the West supports corrupt regimes and funds security forces to suppress their own people in the name of anti-terrorism. The results are well known as far apart as the Gulf of Aden to the Gulf of Mexico - chaos, conflict and social breakdown.