9-11 NEWSLETTER, PEACEFUL TOMORROWS DAY #4,

 

[8-3-11 sent to Web Site, What’s Happening, and Blog]

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 Fayetteville, AR

9-11 1973: Chile

 

 

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 United States of Fear.  Haymarket, 2011.   Advert.: “How the country—gripped by terror fantasies—was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite profited while America quietly burned.”

 

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, America Deceived II. [I could not find a review of this book.]

--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, Northwest Arkansas Times (Feb. 13, 2008).  See below.

 

 

 

John Farmer’s Book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″

April 14, 2009

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.

Skip to next paragraph Philip Shenon, THE COMMISSION

The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission

Philip Shenon, a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, set out to get behind the scenes of the 9/11 Commission. The inside story of a government commission doesn’t sound very promising; most commission reports wind up unread on dusty shelves.

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 United States government was human. That is the real back story of 9/11.

Evan Thomas is editor at large at Newsweek.

 

 

 

 

INSTEAD OF REVENGE, RETALIATION,