[8-3-11 sent to Web Site,
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OMNI
9-11 NEWSLETTER,
PEACEFUL TOMORROWS DAY #4,
September 3, 2011,
COMPILED BY Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace.
See Newsletters on e: Interdependence Day/9-11 Families for
Peaceful Tomorrows.
Here is the link to all OMNI
newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Contents of #4
Collapse Conspiracy?
CONSEQUENCES of Bombings:
Fear
Book by Engelhardt:
Foreign and Domestic McCarthyism
Film by Pena:
Unconstitutional Attacks on Civil Liberties
9-11 Commission: 2 Books
John Farmer
Philip Shenon
ALTERNATIVES to Retaliation, Invasion, and Occupation:
September 12:
Interdependence Day
Potorti’s
Book: September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows
International Police: Ali Soufan’s Book
Peace Rallies 2010 from NYC to
9-11 1973:
NYC FAILURES LEADING TO UNNECESSARY SUFFERING
“The 9/11 Conspiracists:
Vindicated at Last?”
Nation of
Change September 2, 2011
[Most of
this article dismisses the conspiracy theories regarding the collapse of the
Towers. Here is the conclusion.] Alexander Cockburn, Op-Ed: “What Barrett and
Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani's
watch: the favoritism to Motorola, which saddled the firemen with radios that
didn't work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection; the
mayor's catastrophic failure in the years before Sept. 11, 2001, to organize an
effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen
could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn't have unnecessarily entered
the towers; that people in the towers wouldn't have been told by 9/11 emergency
operators to stay in place; that firemen could have heard the helicopter
warnings and the final mayday messages that prompted most of the New York
policemen to flee the towers.” READ
| DISCUSS |
SHARE http://www.nationofchange.org/911-conspiracists-vindicated-last-1314978054
CONSEQUENCES
FEAR-BORN DISTORTIONS
--Engelhardt, Tom. The
ATTACK ON CIVIL LIBERTIES
FILM: UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Unconstitutional is an hour-long documentary produced by Robert Greenwald in
conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union. According to Greenwald, the film explores how the "civil
liberties of American citizens and immigrants alike have been infringed upon,
curtailed, and rolled back since 9/11 and the passage of the USA Patriot
Act." Directed by
journalist/filmmaker Nonny de la Peña, Unconstitutional won the Grand
Festival Award for documentary at the 2004 Berkeley Video and Film Festival. It is the third in a series of Public Interest
Pictures films that follows Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election
and Uncovered: The War on Iraq.
MORE BOOKS
-- E.A. Blayre III,
--Sarkar, Deepak.
Real Path To 9 11. Trafford, 2010.
9-11 COMMISSION REPORT
ADEQUATE? NO!
--Kean, Thomas and Lee Hamilton. Without
Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9-11 Commission. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYTimes
Book Review (8-20-06): “one of the
problems with the book: an over-abundance of self-censorship by the authors.”
--Farmer, John. The
Ground Truth. See below.
--Shenon, Phillip. The Commission: The Uncensored History of
the 9/11 Investigation. Rev.:
Grady Jim Robinson,
John Farmer’s Book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America ’s
Defense on 9/11″
The
book unveils how “the public had been seriously misled about what occurred
during the morning of the attacks,” and Farmer himself states that “at some
level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement
not to tell the truth about what happened.”
Only the very naive would dispute that an agreement not to tell the truth is
an agreement to lie. Farmer’s contention is that the government agreed to
create a phony official version of events to cover-up the real story behind
9/11.
The publisher of the book, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, states that, “Farmer
builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is
almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and
security.”
In August 2006, the Washington
Post reported, “Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel
concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001
terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the
commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that
day, according to sources involved in the debate.”
The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected
deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to
the Justice Department for criminal investigation.
“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command]
told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey
Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth.
. . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.
As
we also reported in August 2006, released portions of NORAD tapes from
9/11, which were featured in a Vanity Fair article, do little to answer
skeptic’s questions about the impotence of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 and if
anything only increase focus on the incompatibility of the official version of
events with what is actually known to have taken place on that day.
Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job,
however, Farmer’s testimony, along with that of his fellow 9/11 Commission
members, conclusively demonstrates that, whatever really happened on
9/11, the official story as told to the public on the day and that which
remains the authorities’ version of events today, is a lie – according
to the very people who were tasked by the government to investigate it. This is
a fact that no debunker or government apologist can ever legitimately deny.
read the rest here …9/11
Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11.
Books of The Times
“Tragicomic Tale of the 9/11 Report”
By EVAN THOMAS Published: February 4, 2008
Journalists
like to talk about the back story, the story behind the story. The back story
can be nothing more than vaguely sourced gossip traded among pundits and
politicos before they go on talk shows. But sometimes the back story is the
real, whole truth, a tale of conniving or official blundering that the
headlines can only hint at. Journalists often conceal the whole truth because
they need to protect their sources.
The Uncensored History of the
9/11 Commission
Philip Shenon,
a reporter in the
When
the 9/11 Commission announced its findings in the summer of 2004, the response
was by and large respectful. Reprinted as a book, “The 9/11 Commission Report”
was an instant best seller, unusual for a document written by committee. But
its popularity was owed mostly to a spare, riveting narrative of the shocking
events on Sept. 11, 2001, not to its policy recommendations or revelations
about official malfeasance. So why go over it all again?
Mr.
Shenon is a skillful writer and storyteller as well as a dogged reporter. In
“The Commission” he makes bureaucratic warfare exciting, largely because he has
a keen grasp of human frailty and folly. He opens with a desperate, almost
pathetic scene of Samuel
R. Berger, President Bill
Clinton’s national security adviser, sneaking documents out of the National Archives.
Mr.
Berger had actually been more attentive to the threat of Al Qaeda
than most government officials, including his successors in the Bush
administration, but he apparently feared that he and his boss would become
scapegoats. “Beneath his gruff amiability,” Mr. Shenon writes of Mr. Berger,
“there was deep insecurity that, even he admitted, bordered on paranoia.”
In a
memorable scene Mr. Shenon depicts the widows of 9/11 victims, a group that
called itself the Jersey Girls, meeting Henry
A. Kissinger, President Bush’s choice to be chairman of the 9/11
Commission, in the posh offices of Mr. Kissinger’s international consulting
firm in New York. When one of the Jersey Girls asks Mr. Kissinger if he has any
clients named bin Laden, Mr. Kissinger spills his coffee and nearly falls off
his sofa. “It’s my bad eye,” Mr. Kissinger explains, as the women rush to clean
up the mess — “like good suburban moms,” Mr. Shenon says one widow recalls. The
next morning Mr. Kissinger telephoned the White House to resign from the
commission.
The
black hat of Mr. Shenon’s story is the commission’s executive director, Philip
Zelikow. Brilliant but abrasive and secretive, he is regarded by
some commission staff members as a White House mole, compromised by his close
ties to Condoleezza
Rice, then President Bush’s national security adviser. The book’s
portrait of Mr. Zelikow is harsh, but Mr. Shenon seems to have reached out to
Mr. Zelikow to get both sides of the story. (Mr. Zelikow scoffs at charges of
conflict and conspiracy made by Mr. Shenon’s sources.)
The
official ineptitude uncovered by the commission is shocking. Dubbed
“Kinda-Lies-a-Lot” by the Jersey Girls, Ms. Rice comes across as almost
clueless about the terrorist threat. “Whatever her job title, Rice seemed
uninterested in actually advising the president,”
Mr. Shenon writes. “Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante —
specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into
action.”
The C.I.A. has some inkling that Osama
bin Laden is stirring to strike the United States, but for many
crucial months fails to tell the F.B.I. that two terrorists (who later turned
out to be 9/11 hijackers) are actually in the United States. The popular image
of the C.I.A. as dashing and all-knowing is for the movies only. After much
dickering with the White House, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas
H. Kean, the mild-mannered patrician who succeeded Mr. Kissinger as
commission chairman, is allowed to read pre-9/11 copies of the President’s
Daily Brief, the C.I.A.’s digest of its most important secrets. “He found
himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified,” Mr. Shenon writes.
“There was almost nothing in them.”
Of the
briefings, Mr. Kean said, “They were garbage,” adding, “There really was
nothing there — nothing, nothing.”
The
C.I.A. director George
J. Tenet is depicted as evasive and exhausted, both from chasing Al
Qaeda and trying too hard to please everyone he worked with. The F.B.I.
bumbling verges on the tragicomic. Haunted by missed chances to stop the 9/11
hijackers, the F.B.I.’s acting director, Thomas J. Pickard, keeps a list of the
bureau’s numerous mistakes. At least Mr. Pickard was bothered by his agency’s
ineptitude.
Attorney
General John
Ashcroft appears more interested in protecting gun owners from
government intrusion than in stopping terrorism, and dismissively tells Mr.
Pickard that he doesn’t want to hear any more about threats of attacks.
Not
wanting to point fingers and name names — and set off partisan wrangling among
the commissioners — the 9/11 Commission shied away from holding anyone
personally accountable. The commission ended up blaming structural flaws for
the government’s failure to protect the nation and recommended appointing a
national intelligence director to ride herd.
The
nation now has such a director, but with weaker authority than what the
commission proposed, and the position may turn out to be no more than another
layer of bureaucracy. Ultimately, as Mr. Shenon shows, the failure at the
highest levels of the
Evan
Thomas is editor at large at Newsweek.
INSTEAD OF REVENGE, RETALIATION,
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