Monday, September 26, 2011

The Terrible Post-9/11 Truth: Our Government's Been Hijacked. Democracy has been commandeered by a self-interested gang.

Smirking Chimp


by Michael Winship | September 26, 2011 - 8:55am

About a year after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, I visited Oklahoma City and went to the bombsite with a friend who had covered the attack as a television news cameraman. No memorial or museum had yet been built; fencing covered with teddy bears, flags and scrawled messages surrounded an empty, grass-covered lot.

There was a simplicity to that empty lot that appealed, an understated eloquence that, to me at least, said all that needed to be said. Now, despite all the hubbub and handwringing surrounding its design and construction, in many ways, the new 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in Manhattan captures some of that same, straightforward plainness -- the names of the dead punched into bronze, the waterfalls gracing two great voids where the towers used to be, muting the noise of visitors’ voices and quieting the surrounding city. No filigree or statues.

We went to the new memorial for the first time last week. It was a perfect, end-of-summer day. Sunlight sparkled in the two pools, and you could see in one of them the wavy reflection of an American flag hanging from across the street. When the breeze was just right, a light mist from the waterfalls caressed your face.

I was pleased, too, by the vast plaza, so reminiscent of the one that used to separate the original towers, the wind corkscrewing around their height and sending hats into orbit. In the next few years, when all the construction around the site has ceased and the landscaped trees and other greenery have more fully grown, this will be the place for contemplation that was intended. And perhaps those who come here will reflect not only on the events of 9/11 but their unexpected consequences and whether we as a nation are ever prepared for what comes next.

On the afternoon we visited the memorial, I was already downtown, attending a daylong conference on post 9/11 worker protection and community health, sponsored by the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a coalition of labor, civil rights, medical, faith-based and environmental organizations.

"Are we ready for another 9/11?" Dr. Linda Rae Murray, president of the American Public Health Association, asked us. "Hell, no! Were we ready for Katrina? Or the tornadoes? Or the H1N1 flu? We don’t have the resources; we’ve let our infrastructure disappear. No, we’re not ready."

The World Trade Center collapse created the largest number of workplace fatalities in the history of the United States. Government bumbling and dissembling about air quality downtown and conditions at the site, the rush back to business as usual, may have irreparably killed and injured countless others. In the words of Bruce Lippy, formerly with the International Union of Engineers, who spent weeks working on the pile, "They didn’t want to turn Manhattan into a Superfund site." Chip Hughes of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (part of the NIH) added, "There should be an apology."

Many of the health consequences for those who survived and continued as rescue and recovery workers have been summed up in a recent study of 27,449 participants in the World Trade Center Screening, Monitoring, and Treatment Program. The stark statistics were published in the September 3 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet:

"Findings: 9-year cumulative incidence of asthma was 27.6% (number at risk: 7027), sinusitis 42.3% (5870), and gastro-esophageal reflux disease 39.3% (5650). In police officers, cumulative incidence of depression was 7.0% (number at risk: 3648), PTSD 9.3% (3761), and panic disorder 8.4% (3780). In other rescue and recovery workers, cumulative incidence of depression was 27.5% (number at risk: 4200), PTSD 31.9% (4342), and panic disorder 21.2% (4953). 9-year cumulative incidence for spirometric [lung capacity] abnormalities was 41.8% (number at risk: 5769); three-quarters of these abnormalities were low forced vital capacity."

This doesn’t include all the others who lived, worked or studied at or near Ground Zero, inhaling smoke, ash and dust -- air some have described as more caustic than Drano. Nor does it include the cases of neurological disorders, mesothelioma, and other cancers appearing more and more among 9/11 survivors -- illnesses that legislators and activists are now battling to add to the list of conditions covered by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

It was hard enough passing the Zadroga Act in the first place, beating back years of resistance and wrangling in Congress, a GOP filibuster and so-called "compassion fatigue" around the rest of the country (at the NYCOSH conference, Jon Stewart was applauded as a local hero for his role shaming opponents of Zadroga into approval). Seeking new coverage for 9/11 cancer patients is another uphill fight against indifference and overt hostility.

So for those who will come to Manhattan from everywhere else to pause and reflect at the new 9/11 Memorial, better perhaps to consider some other implications and side effects of the terrorist attacks that impact not just the greater New York area but the entire country and beyond. In fact, many of the issues being battled over in Washington and across the Dr. Seuss-like landscape of the 2012 election campaign have a direct bearing on future 9/11’s in America, no matter where and when they may happen. (And why do all the Republican presidential debates remind me of those cheesy paintings of dogs playing poker?)

Infrastructure? Think of all those decaying roads, bridges and tunnels, and the chaos if they fail during an evacuation. Deregulation? If anything, 9/11 demonstrates that certain OSHA and EPA rules on safety, clean air and water need expansion and better enforcement. Conservative attacks on public employees and organized labor? The first at the scene on 9/11 were the firemen, police, emergency medical technicians and union construction workers who stayed on the pile until the last scrap of steel was gone, not to mention the Communication Workers of America members who risked their lives restoring phones, microwave links and IT; the electricians, plumbers, and engineers.

Budget cuts adversely affect training and response times. Politics interfere with scientific research. State labs are underfunded or closing. Universal health care, if it existed, already would have taken care of many of the doctor’s appointments, tests, treatments and medications being funded, but still only in part, by Zadroga and other programs.

Another article in that September 3 issue of The Lancet chronicles "Adverse health consequences of US Government responses to the 2001 terrorist attacks." According to its authors, Dr. Barry S. Levy and Dr. Victor W. Sidel, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "caused many deaths of non-combatant civilians, further damaged the health-supporting infrastructure and the environment (already adversely affected by previous wars), forced many people to migrate, led to violations of human rights, and diverted resources away from important health needs."

In Iraq, "Oil spillages, contaminated ash, unexploded ordinance, and depleted uranium at and around US military bases have all caused environmental damage." The health status of Afghans is "lower than almost any other country," life expectancy at birth is 48 years, only 27 percent of the population has access to clean water.

According to the report, "The initial $204 billion spent on the Iraq War could have reduced hunger throughout the world by 50% and provided enough funds to cover the needs for HIV/AIDS medicine, clean water and sanitation, and immunization for all children in developing countries for almost 3 years. Within the USA, the federal budget for the 2011 fiscal year for the war in Afghanistan -- $107 billion -- could have provided medical care for 14 million US military veterans for 1 year."

Domestically, "After 9/11 and the anthrax outbreak shortly afterwards, the USA and other countries have improved emergency preparedness and response capabilities, but these actions have often diverted attention and resources from more urgent health issues."

The coalitions and alliances that have formed in the decade since 9/11 -- the professionals and ordinary citizens who from day one have stepped up when official bureaucracy has not -- are the one bright light shining through tragedy. But it’s not enough. "Do we understand that we’ve been hijacked by a small group of people using government for their own benefit? This is our government," the Public Health Association’s Linda Rae Murray declared. "It doesn’t work well but it’s ours and we have to seize control of it and put in place what we need to keep ourselves and our neighbors healthy."

When you visit the 9/11 Memorial, think about that simple, fundamental truth as you remember the fallen, the heroes -- and everyone else struggling to survive.
_______

About author Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11

LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Reports

How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11






Posted on Sep 8, 2011
AP / Brennan Linsley

An unidentified detainee peers out from his cell inside the Camp Delta detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

By Robert Scheer

For a decade, the main questions about 9/11 have gone unanswered while the alleged perpetrators who survived the attacks have never been publicly cross-examined as to their methods and motives. It is not conspiratorial but rather obviously plausible to suggest that they have been kept out of sight because legal due process, constitutionally guaranteed to even the most heinous of criminals, might provide information that our government would find embarrassing.

We remain in ignorance as to what drove religious zealots formerly allied with the United States to turn against us, and what was the role of our ally, Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for most of the hijackers and their financing. Why in the aftermath of the attack did the United States embrace Pakistan, which was one of only three governments (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the others) to diplomatically recognize the Taliban and which turned out to be harboring the fugitive Osama bin Laden? And why did we instead invade Iraq, a nation known to be engaged in a deadly war with bin Laden and his al-Qaida?

How little we know about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks is laid out in the disclaimer on Page 146 of the official 9/11 presidential commission report. A box on that page states clearly that the conventional narrative of how those portentous events unfolded is based largely on the interrogation under torture of key witnesses who have never been permitted a single moment in a publicly observed court of law.

As the bipartisan commissioners ruefully conceded, their examination of the motives, financing and actions of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators had to “rely heavily on information from captured al Qaeda members” that the commissioners, despite having been granted the highest security clearance, were never allowed to seriously vet:

“We submitted questions for use in the interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.”

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That sensitive interrogation process included the waterboarding of the key witnesses, led by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was scheduled to go on public, civilian trial in Manhattan last spring, until the Obama administration caved in to hysterical Republican-led pressure and called off the trial.

The fear of a public trial is apparently that it will be an occasion to humanize the presumed perpetrators of barbaric acts, but by that standard no alleged murderer should ever be tried in civilian court. The counterargument is that we as a society have, from the drafting of our Constitution, been committed to due process of law. But an even more compelling objection to the present secrecy flows not from the inalienable rights of the accused to justice but rather from the need to fully inform the public as to the dangers faced by our society.

Major policy developments, including two undeclared wars, were conducted in the name of defeating the perpetrators of 9/11 without the public being made aware of the relevant facts. Surely a public trial would have revealed, to the deep embarrassment of the Bush administration, that there was no connection between the 9/11 hijackers and the government of Iraq that the United States overthrew.

At the very least, such testimony would have shed light on the cozy relationship between the U.S. government and the key leaders of al-Qaida, particularly the American-educated Mohammed, recruited by the CIA to join the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It certainly could also have proved embarrassing to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who, during the Bush administration, opposed public trials and managed last March to get President Barack Obama to reverse his pledge of civilian trials. Gates boasted in his 1996 memoir of his long history of working with Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, dating to his days in the Carter administration. As his book publisher bragged at the time, Gates exposed “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Of course 9/11 changed everything; nations were invaded, trillions of dollars were wasted, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives were lost, torture became acceptable and the public has come to tolerate a daily governmental assault on privacy as normal. But for all of the high drama and cost of the U.S. response, when it comes to understanding the forces behind the attack, we still do not know what we are talking about.

Robert Scheer’s column has moved to Thursday. Sign up for our newsletter and get Scheer in your inbox.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Secrecy Killed on 9/11

Secrecy Kills

WHO IS RICH BLEE?

What do they have to say?

Read the joint statement in response to the video by CIA Director George Tenet, CTC Director J. Cofer Black, and Richard Blee of Alec Station.

Also see our email back and forth with Tenet, Black and Blee, and our reply to their joint statement.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

Get the latest news from @SecrecyKills and our Facebook page.





Joint Statement
from George J. Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee

August 3, 2011

Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well for many years. But his recently released comments about the run up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.

Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.

He wildly speculates that it must have been the CIA Director who could have ordered the information withheld. There was no such order. In fact, the record shows that the Director and other senior CIA officials were unaware of the information until after 9/11.

The handling of the information in question was exhaustively looked at by the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, the CIA Inspector General and other groups.

The 9/11 Commission quite correctly concluded that “...no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case.”

In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.

Since 9/11 many systemic changes have been made to improve the watchlisting process and enhance information sharing within and across agencies.

Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate--which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination--that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.

Many years after testifying himself at length before the 9/11 Commission and writing several books but making no mention of his wild theory, Mr. Clarke has suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.

We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't know. We stand by that testimony.

###

AP Review Finds No WikiLeaks Sources Threatened

CommonDreams.org

Published on Saturday, September 10, 2011 by the Associated Press
by Bradley Klapper and Cassandra Vinograd

WASHINGTON — Federica Ferrari Bravo's story of meeting American diplomats in Rome seven years ago hardly reads like a James Bond spy novel or a Cold War tale of a brave informant sharing secrets to help the United States.

In this July 14, 2011 photo, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks to members of the media during a news conference in central London. The U.S. has condemned the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks for putting lives in danger. But how many is unclear. An Associated Press review of some of the hundreds of U.S. diplomatic contacts deemed especially sensitive turns up several people who are either comfortable with their names out in the open or even surprised that their information was so highly valued, Friday, Sept. 9, 2011. So it came as a something of a surprise to her to hear that in one of the 250,000-odd State Department cables released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, she was deemed a source so sensitive U.S. officials were advised not to repeat her name.

"I don't think I said anything that would put me at risk," the Italian diplomat said.

There are similar stories involving other foreign lawmakers, diplomats and activists cited in the U.S. cables as sources to "strictly protect."

An Associated Press review of those sources raises doubts about the scope of the danger posed by WikiLeaks' disclosures and the Obama administration's angry claims, going back more than a year, that the revelations are life-threatening. U.S. examples have been strictly theoretical.

The question of whether the dire warnings are warranted or overblown became more acute with the recent release all of the 251,287 diplomatic memos WikiLeaks held.

Tens of thousands of confidential exchanges were dumped, emptying a trove of documents. They were released piecemeal since last year, initially with the cooperation of a select group of newspapers and magazines that blacked out some names and information before publishing the documents.

The latest cables were published in full, without names blacked out. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland branded the action "irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous," and the U.S. said the release exposed the names of hundreds of sensitive sources.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has blamed Britain's Guardian newspaper for publishing a secret encryption code, allowing intelligence agencies to access the cables and forcing WikiLeaks to provide the people affected the same information.

But the AP's review of the sources found several of them comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death. Others are dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations. Some have written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the U.S. government.

The AP survey is selective and incomplete; it focused on those sources the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky.

The AP did not attempt to contact every named source in the new trove. It's generally up to the embassies themselves to decide which identities require heightened vigilance, officials say.

Hadzira Hamzic, a 73-year-old Bosnian refugee, wasn't bothered about being identified as one of thousands of victims from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

"I never hid that," she told the AP. "It is always hard when I have to tell about how I had been raped, but that is part of what happened and I have to talk about it."

In Asia, former Malaysian diplomat Shazryl Eskay Abdullah was shocked that an "unofficial lunch meeting" he had several years ago with a U.S. official meant his name ended up on a formal report. But he said his role in southern Thailand peace talks was well known. "I don't see why anyone would come after me," Shazryl said.

Ferrari Bravo's subject matter was also by no means mundane. A veteran of her nation's embassy in Tehran, Ferrari Bravo worked at the time on the Italian Foreign Ministry's Iran desk and discussed with the U.S. her government's view of the Iranian nuclear standoff. She urged continued dialogue.

"There is nothing that we said that was not known to our bosses, to our ministers, to our heads of state," she said. On having her identity protected, she said: "We didn't ask. There is nothing to protect."

U.S. officials say they have two criteria for sensitive sources. The first deals with people in totalitarian societies or failed states who could be imprisoned or killed, or perhaps denied housing, schooling, food or other services if exposed as having helped the United States.

The State Department also has sought to censor names of people who might lose their jobs or suffer major embarrassment even in friendly countries, if they were seen offering the U.S. candid insights or restricted information.

One such case involved the dismissal in December of a top aide to German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle after he provided details on coalition talks and debates over issues such as U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.

Still, the total damage appears limited and the State Department has steadfastly refused to describe any situation in which they've felt a source's life was in danger. They say a handful of people had to be relocated away from danger but won't provide any details on those few cases.

Units throughout the department have been scouring the documents since last year to find examples where sources are exposed and inform them that they may be "outed." Some, such as Hamzic, Sharzyl and Ferrari Bravo, say they were never contacted. Presumably, endangered individuals would have been prioritized.

Clearly, sensitivities depend on context. Revelations that may cause personal or political discomfort for a U.S. embassy contact in Western Europe may be life-threatening for an informant in an undemocratic nation. In the cables, they may both be "strictly protected" sources, highlighting relative danger levels in different places.

In Vietnam, the U.S. seemed to be dealing with sources whose names demanded vigilance: the wife of a dissident sentenced to five years in prison; a Buddhist leader condemning the arrest of a fellow priest; a dissident who says people "held his family hostage" until he renounced his activism; a Christian preacher complaining of police pressure on him to renounce his faith; another who speaks of a colleague forcibly sent to a mental institute.

A Syrian human rights activist warned the U.S. of a looming crackdown on anti-government activists as far back as 2009. If the activist wasn't threatened by the disclosure last year, he may be now that the country is in the throes of a brutal five-month security operation.

In Mexico, the term "strictly protect" appeared to be attached to interlocutors indiscriminately, even when officials offered only flattering assessments of their government or said little that wasn't common knowledge. It perhaps makes more sense in the context of a country where organized crime networks have essentially fought an insurgency against the government, where allowing a valued source's name to get out could affect that person's safety.

Assange, an Australian, has defended his actions by saying no one has died as a result of WikiLeaks.

Current and former American officials say that argument misses the point.

Making people think twice before providing the U.S. with information — or simply refuse ever again to help — hurts the good causes of human rights and democracy that American officials are promoting, they argue.

Take Arnold Sundquist, a Swede whose life isn't in danger. He provided the U.S. Embassy with sensitive details on an Iranian attempt to buy helicopters and said he was unhappy that his actions were now public. Last year, Swedish media with access to the WikiLeaks trove reported on the incident but didn't mention him by name.

"It is what it is," he said. "I can't do anything about it."

But will he or others in a similar situation, be as ready to help American authorities again?

Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda thinks not. His identity was exposed in a document describing how he told the U.S. ambassador in 2009 that according to one of his sources, Colombian rebel leaders had visited Caracas for secret meetings with senior Venezuelan government officials. Bocaranda published the account in one of his newspaper columns.

"I feel betrayed by WikiLeaks," Bocaranda told the AP on Friday. But he said that as a journalist it's natural for him to talk with diplomats from various countries. "I think the ones who have been betrayed basically are the American diplomats," he said.

"It's going to be more difficult for them because I think no one is going to want to talk for fear of coming out in print with their name," he said, adding that would apply those who might otherwise supply sensitive information.

He said he doesn't feel his work or personal security face additional threats as a result of his name being exposed but said he suspects President Hugo Chavez's government could try to "cast doubts on me, to say that I am a member of the CIA."

Bocaranda said that he has nothing to hide and that the information he publishes in his newspaper columns and on the Internet is public. "I don't think my sources are going to shut me out," he said.

Other governments have echoed the U.S. criticism of WikiLeaks, saying it jeopardizes invaluable diplomacy — the exchanges that aim to promote understanding, avoid war and improve global security.

The anger from Assange's home nation, Australia, was prompted not by the release of sources, but of 23 Australians who had been in contact with a Yemen-based al-Qaida offshoot and were being monitored. Still, a government statement couldn't point to a direct threat from the disclosure, only a potential danger.

"The large-scale distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified United States government documents is reckless, irresponsible and potentially dangerous," Australian Attorney-General Robert McClelland said.

Vinograd reported from London. Associated Press writers Nicole Winfield in Rome; Sean Yoong in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Sabina Niksic in Sarajevo, Bosnia; Ian James in Venezuela; and Karl Ritter in Stockholm contributed to this report.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

How the Internet is destroying the middle class

andEdge





Topic:

Internet Culture

How the Internet is destroying the middle class

Artist and theorist Jaron Lanier argues that high-tech "innovations" are making us poorer and less ambitious