At least five witnesses questioned by the Defense Department's Inspector General told Fox News that their statements were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report – or it left out key information, backing up assertions that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was identified a year before 9/11.
Atta is believed to have been the ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. Claims about how early Atta first tripped the radar of the Department of Defense date back to 2005, but those claims never made it into the Inspector General's report. The report was completed in 2006 and, until now, has been available only in a version with the names of virtually all of the witnesses blacked out.
No Plane, No Seats, No Bodies, No Luggage....Go Figure...
IBD: Did We Know About Mohamed Atta? Why would the Pentagon buy and destroy copies of a book by a former Army intelligence officer? Could it be perhaps because it contained information on how the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented?
The impulse to dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory is overwhelming. Yet the fact is that the Pentagon bought and destroyed 10,000 copies of a book, “Operation Dark Heart,” written by Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a Bronze Star recipient and career Army intelligence officer, that contained a chapter on a pre-9/11 intelligence operation, Able Danger.
Tip of the Hat to the Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO)
Phi Beta Iota: The precision hit allegedly wiped out all the computers holding all the forensic evidence on the missing $2.3. trillion that Rumsfeld was being grilled on the day before, 10 September, by Cynthia McKinney. One day, between this and the $240 billion “settled” without record, this will be known as the Mother of All Atrocities.
In what i2 called a “multiyear scheme of fraud and industrial espionage,” Palantir knowingly used fraudulently obtained software to design new intelligence products that would help Palantir compete directly and…
One of the most interesting open source information documents in some time….the day will come when the beltway bandits are brought to justice as well, one can only hope that happens before they go bankrupt.
Economic historians have long recognized that one of the biggest mistakes deepening and prolonging the Great Depression was the establishment of beggar-thy-neighbour policy wars, like trying to protect domestic production by imposing protective tariffs. But these tariffs hurt everyone, because the reduction in world trade depressed demand and production to a greater extent than tariffs protected production. The US contribution to this debacle was the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in June 1930. Smoot-Hawley raised the already high tariffs of the US by an average tariff by 20%. This prompted retaliatory — i.e., beggar-thy-neighbour — tariff increases in about two dozen other countries, thereby contributing materially to a collapse of world trade by two-thirds between 1930 and 1934 and materially worsening the global depression. FDR began to reverse course by reducing tariffs in 1934, but the damage was done. Some historians have argued that nationalistic beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the Depression's early years contributed to the rise in political extremism in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US.
The information contained in the attached report by Professor Michael Hudson suggests beggar-thy-neighbor policies are again raising their ugly heads. This time, they are taking the form of the predatory financial policies evolved by the US and its copycats in the Eurozone, who are trying to handoff the pain to each other and others in the world economy. Whereas Smoot-Hawley related directly to the real economy of production and consumption, and in that sense was at least theoretically related to the well being of the working class, the predatory financing policies described below are both parasitic and speculative. They benefit an already wealthy financial class that does not produce things. Moreover, the pattern of speculation described below may be even more dangerous economically, because, it is being financed by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy, which like TARP, has the effect of postponing inevitable asset revaluations (downward) and debt liquidations, thereby feeding a festering cancer that is threatening to metastasize into a full-blown global debt deflation — i.e., a collapse of demand and consumer confidence via a massive repudiation and/or liquidation of debts.
Ominously, like the 1930s, right-wing political extremism is again on the march, but this time that extremism is evolving more rapidly in the US than in Europe.
I urge you to read the attached report carefully and … fasten your seat belts.
October 11, 2010
A CounterPunch Special Report
“Who Needs an Army When You Can Obtain the Usual Objective (Monetary Wealth and Asset Appropriation) Simply by Financial Means?”
What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.
Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? All that is required is for central banks to accept dollar credit of depreciating international value in payment for local assets. Victory promises to go to whatever economy’s banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources. The key is to persuade foreign central banks to accept this electronic credit.
Phi Beta Iota: The obvious global response could be–should be–the immediate nationalization and expropriation of all US corporate “assets” derived from a history of predatory capitalism in the context of virtual colonialism and unilateral militarism. This means that the US stock market will crash again. It could mean that domestically the US could begin to see local movement expropriating land from absentee landlords such as the mega-agriculture companies that have destroyed agriculture, communities, and the land. These are interesting times. Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information, lacks integrity, and has zero focus on “the public interest.”
China-US-Vietnam: Defense Minister Liang Guanglie held talks with US Defense Secretary Gates in Hanoi on Monday on the sidelines of the 1st ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting Plus (ADMM-Plus) on bilateral military ties.
Defense Minister Liang invited Gates to visit China early next year, a Chinese official said. Gates accepted the invitation, according to the deputy head of external relations in the Chinese Defense Ministry.
The meeting in which the Chinese made the offer is the first meeting between the two senior defense officials in a year.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The Chinese characterization of US ties bears attention. Liang said Sino-U.S. relations have maintained momentum of stable development in recent years as China and the United States have agreed to build a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship for the 21st century. China-U.S. relations are of increasing global influence, he added.
Liang said military relations constitute an important part of bilateral ties. Currently, the two countries are facing some obstacles in developing military relations, with the U.S. arm sales to Taiwan being the main reason.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: This part of Liang's remarks glosses over the brittleness of the “obstacles” involving Taiwan. The opening part of the comment minimizes the extent of US concern about China's lack of opacity and unwillingness to cooperate. The Chinese definition of a “positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship” does not match the US definition. In the US definition, a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship does not yet exist. To try to develop such a relationship is the reason for Gates' persistence in soliciting an invitation.
NIGHTWATCH Comment on perception management: The US media has made clear that the US is the supplicant seeking a Chinese invitation for the US Secretary, after several Chinese rejections, most sensationally in Singapore by a low ranking Chinese general. Ties were set back by a US decision to sell Taiwan $6.4 billion in defensive arms, to which the Chinese objected strongly and froze defense contacts.
The imagery in Asia is that the rulers of the Central Kingdom finally granted the request for an audience from a recalcitrant supplicant because of his persistence. This is a scenario out of Chinese folklore. The folklore imagery and analogy suggest the Secretary should expect little because he is a player in a modern version of an old folk tale whose primary purpose was to showcase the superiority of the Central KIngdom.
The US is prone to interpret an invitation as a small political breakthrough. That might be an exaggeration. The Chinese are more likely to interpret it as their politicial victory that requires kneeling, head knockings (the imperial kowtow ritual was 3 kneelings and nine knocking of the head) and gifts.
Regarding Southeast Asia, Defense Minister Liang played to the audience and was his most unctuous. His purpose was to reassure China's Southeast Asian neighbors about China' s peaceful intentions. A quick look at Chinese territorial sea claims in the South China Sea puts the lie to China's peaceful intentions, but the Southeast Asian memory of resisting Chinese hegemony is long and fresh.
Phi Beta Iota: China is a perfect and worthy counter-part for thinking about Whole of Government and 21st Century Leadership, both of which escape the US Government and its two-party political monopoly. Strategic analytics is not something that CIA is capable of, nor is it something that the White House or Congress “compute” as essential to their still-imperial view of hegemony by right and ideological fantasy. Beyond Chna lie Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Wild Cards such as Turkey. The incapacity of the US Government to get its act together is brutally obvious and viscerally troubling.
Phi Beta Iota: Our newest Contributing Editor, Defense Dog (DefDog), thought to add to Chuck Spinney's earlier sharing of the Pentagon spagetti charts by adding a touch of colorful salad–such good salad it has even been covered by WIRED Magazine.
There are some problems that neither pure capitalism nor charity can solve. Social capital is a new way of looking at solving those problems. This month, people from all over the world came to SOCAP10 in San Francisco to talk about social capital, and put their money where their mouths are.
Over the next several days we’ll be posting stories about companies that have what is called a “triple bottom line” — where they measure results not just in profit, but also in the business impact on people and the planet.
Our first video focuses on just what the social capital movement is about. We talk with people who run social capital companies such as Firefox maker Mozilla, people who are seeking funding for their businesses, and journalists who are covering the social capital movement.
Witnesses in Defense Department Report Suggest Cover-Up of 9/11 Findings. A document obtained and witnesses interviewed by Fox News raise new questions over whether there was an effort by the Defense Department to cover up a pre-9/11 military intelligence program known as “Able Danger.”
