World for 9/11 TruthThe 2010 Colorado Democratic Party platform (page 31/54), approved by the 146 member platform committee states:
“Whereas many disturbing facts were consciously ignored by the 9/11 Commission; Be it resolved, therefore, that the CDP calls for the establishment of a truly independent Grand Jury and public investigation into these and other anomalies in order to find the truth of the September 11, 2001 attacks, so that we have a greater probability of preventing attacks of this nature in the future.”
This controversial plank was added to the State Democratic Party Platform after evidence supporting the critical need for a new investigation was presented at several caucuses in 2004, 2008, and 2010.
The citizens who presented arguments for a new investigation at their precinct caucuses are signatories to the Architect and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization (www.ae911truth.org) which calls for a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.
The quality of evidence contradicting the official 9-11 story is substantiated in part by the 2010 Platform Committee Chairman Hal Bidlack’s statement: “ ….this platform represents the consensus of the 2010 Platform Committee, guided by the results of county assemblies across our state. The folks who worked tirelessly on the Committee can rightly be proud of their efforts, and deserve our special thanks.” (Bidlack’s statement can be found on page one of the 2010 platform.)
In the upcoming Colorado election, Green Party U.S. Senatorial candidate Bob Kinsey and District One U.S. Representative candidate Gary Swing have publicly stated they would support a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.
PDF of RulingComedy thinly masks an agenda for only so long. To me, this event makes the whole John Stewart rally lose its lustre. Here they are, apt to make fun of the 9/11 Truth movement, but they fail to make any hay when seriously confronted with their willful ignorance.
What do we get instead? Tempy tantrums. Hmm. Wha' Happened?
Monday 23 August 2010
Larry FlyntWhat moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, U.S. citizens one and all, who are daring to vote—and daring to vote Democratic by more than two to one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters… directed by one Jan Brewer.
Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time, jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.
So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution? No, not one.
Which raises the question:Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, noncitizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?
The answer was provided by a New Mexico federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the western mesas looking for these illegal voters. “We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, and I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case.”
This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove. Iglesias told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.
“They wanted some splashy preelection indictments,” Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.
But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as Prop. 200, which required proof of citizenship to register. The Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, is just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.
(By the way, no one elected Brewer.Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona’s Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the governor’s office.) State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, “There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country.”
How many? Pearce’s PR flak told me 5 million. All Democrats too. Again, I asked Pearce’s office to give me their names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I’d happily make a citizen’s arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn’t have 5 million names. He didn’t have five. He didn’t have one.
The horde of 
5 million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican Web site extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote; they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law. The illegal voters, “wetback” welfare moms and alien job thieves are just GOP Web site wet dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party’s electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.
Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.
But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: Because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.
According to a study by University of Washington professor Matt Barreto, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.
Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer’s or Pearce’s help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters—that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her U.S. birth certificate was nowhere to be found, as it never existed.
In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County Jail, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially charged and legally suspect methods.
I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors. A big sign reads: “NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL.” I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are as illegal as they come, but Arpaio’s sophisticated deportee- sniffer didn’t stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Not to stop noncitizens from entering Arizona—after all, who else would care for the country club lawn?—but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.
Greg Palast, whom the Chicago Tribune has called “the most important investigative reporter of our time,” has covered the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for Rolling Stone (with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), Harper’s, The Nation and TruthOut.org (which first published the preceding article). Palast, whose investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television’s Newsnight, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow and the author of Armed Madhouse and the New York Times best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. For more, visit GregPalast.com.
NPRLast year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.
Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.
"The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."
But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?
"They talked like they didn't have any doubt they could fill it," Nichols said.
That's because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona's immigration law.
SIGAR News Room
CNNThe group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels.
The new estimate is mainly due to the incorporation of new data from recent exploration drilling revealing gas occurrence rather than oil in much of the area, the geological survey said.
"These new findings underscore the challenge of predicting whether oil or gas will be found in frontier areas," USGS Director Dr. Marcia McNutt said in a statement. "It is important to re-evaluate the petroleum potential of an area as new data becomes available."
The organization also estimates 8 trillion cubic feet less gas than a 2002 estimate of 61 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, conventional, non-associated gas -- meaning gas found in discrete accumulations with little to no crude oil in the reservoir.
"Recent activity in the NPRA, including 3-D seismic surveys, federal lease sales administered by the Bureau of Land Management and drilling of more than 30 exploration wells in the area provides geological information that is more indicative of gas than oil," the geological survey said.
The petroleum reserve in Alaska has been the focus of significant oil exploration during the past decade, stimulated by the mid-1990s discovery of the largest onshore oil discovery in the U.S. during the past 25 years, the organization said.
The former Prime Minister is likely to be asked to clarify the political build-up to the 2003 American-led invasion.
He is also expected to further explain the legality of Britain's participation in the controversial war.
Sir John Chilcot will write to Mr Blair next month to ask him to attend a public hearing in early 2011, reported The Times.During his six-hour testimony earlier this year, Mr Blair mounted a vigorous defence of the invasion and insisted he had no regrets over removing Saddam Hussein.
He denied he took the country to war on the basis of a 'lie' over the dictator's supposed weapons of mass destruction.At the end of his session one member of the audience shouted: 'What, no regrets? Come on' while others heckled 'You are a liar', 'And a murderer'.
Sir John has previously explained that as his team pores through thousands of secret government documents relating to the Iraq invasion, should they find 'conflicts or gaps within the evidence' then they will recall witnesses.
Liam Fox, the current Defence Secretary, asked Sir John to recall Gordon Brown to the inquiry earlier this year after he was forced into an humiliating admission that he had slashed defence spending while British troops were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The then-PM told MPs he had been wrong to tell the inquiry that defence spending under Labour was 'rising in real terms every year'.
In January, an unrepentant Mr Blair was heckled and jeered by families of Britain's war dead as he declared he had 'not a regret' about invading Iraq.
He made it clear he would do the same again and warned world leaders they may soon have to take similar decisions over Iran.
Despite the deaths of up to 700,000 Iraqis and 179 British troops, Mr Blair said he felt 'responsibility but not a regret' at the end of his six hours of evidence. There was no hint of remorse.
Saddam had been a 'monster' and it had been right to remove him even to prevent the 'possibility' that he could acquire weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair said.
He warned that Iran's nuclear weapons programme now poses an even greater threat.
American Free Press
Intel HubEditors Note (Intel Hub): Adam Gadahn, the grandson of former Anti-Defamation League board member Carl K. Pearlman, is a complete patsy, trained by rogue elements of the Mossad to help further the fraudulent war on terror. The ADL was caught spying on the United States in 1993 and openly works for the interests of Zionist Israel.
Sadly, most people refuse to do the little research that it takes to realize that this is no conspiracy theory. Our government funded/created Al Qaeda. This is open knowledge that cannot be debunked.CAIRO — A U.S.-born spokesman for al-Qaida on Saturday urged Muslims living in the United States and Europe to carry out attacks there, calling it a duty and an obligation.
In a 48-minute video posted on militant websites, Adam Gadahn directed his appeal to Muslim immigrants in what he called the “miserable suburbs” of Paris, London and Detroit, as well as those traveling to the West to study or work.
“It is the duty of everyone who is sincere in his desire to defend Islam and Muslims today, to take the initiative to perform the individual obligation of jihad … by striking the Zio-Crusader interests,” he said, referring to Western and Jewish interests.
Gadahn, who has been hunted by the FBI since 2004, also sought to discredit attempts by moderate Muslim leaders to suppress the “jihadi awakening.”
Source story refusing to reveal Adam Gadahn's background.
Oct. 24, 2010
BBC
After several days of wrangling, the UN Security Council agreed to the destruction of the VX gas left behind by UN weapons inspectors (Unscom) when they withdrew from Baghdad last year.
The UN secretary-general's envoy to Iraq, Prakash Shah, said: "The team completed its task late last evening and left this morning for Amman on its way to The Hague.
"The remaining task of destroying seven vials of VX standards was completed yesterday after instructions were received to that effect from (the UN Security Council in) New York," he said.
The presence of the samples in a UN laboratory had sparked a controversy, with Iraq and Russia suggesting that Unscom inspectors might have used the nerve gas to contaminate Iraqi warheads in order to justify American and British air strikes last December. ![[ image: Mr Shah said the nerve agent had been sealed off in the laboratory]](http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/405000/images/_406321_shah150.jpg)
Mr Shah said the nerve agent had been sealed off in the laboratory
Unscom denied the contamination charge, saying the diluted VX was used exclusively to test against Iraqi chemicals.
The Security Council finally ordered the destruction of the vials after Russia dropped its demand for an analysis of the gas found in the Unscom laboratory.
Reports said the US and Britain had opposed the Russian demand, considering it an effort to discredit Unscom.
The disarmament experts had delayed their departure from Iraq for a few days until the Security Council gave them the go-ahead to destroy the nerve gas.
Mr Shah said the waste of the destroyed agents had been "put into concrete and left in the laboratory which has been sealed off".
'Erasing evidence'
Iraq's Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan said on Wednesday that he was sure the VX was brought to Iraq to contaminate Iraqi warheads and make it look as though Iraq possessed prohibited weapons.
"America's blackmail, robbery and accusations (against Iraq) in order to prolong the unjust embargo on Iraq are well known," he said. ![[ image: VX can cause death by suffocation]](http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/405000/images/_406321_mask150.jpg)
VX can cause death by suffocation
The official Iraqi News Agency said that the VX was destroyed under US pressure "to erase evidence" that UN inspectors were "involved in contaminating a number of scrapped (Iraqi) missile warheads."
The team of independent experts last week discovered seven vials of diluted samples of VX, three of them opened. Each vial contained less than 0.1 milligrams of concentrated VX.
The team, recruited for the UN by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, found other toxic materials including mustard gas. These were destroyed and packed in concrete and sand to render them harmless last week.
Lethal agent
VX is a nerve agent involving organic phosphorous compounds and sulphur. It works essentially by penetrating the skin and disrupting the transmission of nerve impulses.
At a high concentration, symptoms progress through coughing, increased perspiration, vomiting and death by suffocation.
The agent attacks both the muscles around the lungs and the respiratory part of the central nervous system. In liquid form, a drop the size of a pinhead is lethal.
When the UN's weapons inspection and destruction process began in Iraq after the Gulf War, the Iraqis initially denied that they had been working on VX.
Subsequently, they admitted to having carried out research, and finally conceded that nearly four tonnes of the agent had been produced.
But Baghdad has consistently denied having deployed VX in missile warheads - what the Americans call "weaponisation".
Islam Times
CNBCThe sheriff for Cook County, Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago, said on Tuesday he will not enforce foreclosure evictions for Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase and Co. and GMAC Mortgage/Ally Financial until they prove those foreclosures were handled "properly and legally."
Bank of America, the largest U.S. mortgage servicer, and GMAC, on Monday both announced rollbacks from their foreclosure moratoriums.
The announcement by Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart comes after weeks of damaging accusations of shoddy paperwork that may have caused some people to be illegally evicted from their homes.
"I can't possibly be expected to evict people from their homes when the banks themselves can't say for sure everything was done properly," Dart said in the statement.
"I need some kind of assurance that we aren't evicting families based on fraudulent behavior by the banks. Until that happens, I can't in good conscience keep carrying out evictions involving these banks," he added.
Bank of America, GMAC and JPMorgan Chase along with their subsidiaries, make up around a third of the roughly 3,700 eviction orders filed at the Cook County sheriff's office, the statement said.
The foreclosure controversy, which has drawn public outrage and sparked government probes, has threatened bank earnings and the health of the fragile housing market.
Two years ago Dart refused to carry out foreclosure evictions in cases where renters apparently had not been informed that they were about to be evicted from buildings in which their landlords had fallen into foreclosure.
Some 20 Cook County sheriff's deputies execute around 14,000 foreclosure and rental eviction notices every year.
Herald SunMr Bracken sparked outrage yesterday when he told Jon Faine's ABC talk-back program the attacks were not the result of terrorist activity.
He said the story was a conspiracy that "didn't stand up" to scientific scrutiny.
This morning Mr Bracken phoned into Faine's program again for a right of reply.
He said he wasn't phoning as the president of the Trades Hall council or as secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia.
Mr Bracken stood by his comments and said he had the support of 50 per cent of the community.
He also attacked Faine, claiming he was ridiculed on yesterday's program.
"Unfortunately cowards like yourself have set the political agenda in this country for too long," said Kevin Bracken.
"I won't be cowered down to bullies like yourself."
Yesterday, Julia Gillard has dismissed as "stupid and wrong" Mr Bracken's belief.
The Federal Opposition seized on the comments in Parliament, with Victorian MP Josh Frydenberg asking Ms Gillard what action she would take against Mr Bracken “to send a message that such remarks are unacceptable”, The Australian reported.
“Obviously I don’t agree with the remarks, obviously they are stupid and wrong,” Ms Gillard said.
“The Labor Party is a large organisation, people join it as individuals – we don’t dictate what people think.”
After being accused by Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne of not answering the question on discipline, Ms Gillard said: “If it is the intention of the Leader of the Opposition to expel every member who says something stupid, I’ll start sending him a weekly list.”
In Victoria, Shadow Attorney General Robert Clarke said Mr Bracken's comments were a direct insult to Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
"It strikes at the very heart of the West's struggle against terrorism and it is a disgrace that while Australian soldiers are serving and dying in Afghanistan that Mr Bracken make these wild claims that undermine the very reason for their presence in Afghanistan," he said.
Mr Clarke called on Premier John Brumby to condemn these comments in the strongest possible terms and for the outspoken union leader to be disciplined.
"The Trades Hall Council needs to consider Mr Bracken's future as its president and the MUA needs to consider his future as their secretary,'' he said.
"These comments can't stand they need to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.''
Trades Hall secretary Brian Boyd said Mr Bracken did not speak on behalf of the organisation.
"The official Trades Hall position is not to entertain that theory," Mr Boyd said.
"We had almost 3000 working people killed in that terrorist attack. It was a terrorist attack, and we condemn it."
Mr Boyd said Mr Bracken's views had caused many debates behind the walls of Trade Hall.
"He is welcome to his views and we've discussed his theories," he said.
"But I totally disagree."
Mr Boyd said he stood by his colleague despite his extremist views.
"99 per cent of the time Kevin's a very good president," he said.
MUA national secretary Paddy Crumlin distanced the union from the comment, releasing a statement saying its position on the attack was "unambiguous".
"The 9/11 tragedy was a result of a terrorist attack by international terrorists who claimed responsibility," he said.
"It is the MUA's position - one that I passionately support as national secretary - that this attack is one of the greatest affronts and abuses of human and civil rights in contemporary history."
This is not the first time Mr Bracken has voiced his controversial opinions on the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon.
In 2006 he told The Australian he believed the attacks only worked because the US Government was in some way involved.
"If they want to stop terrorism they've got to look at who was really behind September 11," Mr Bracken said at the time.
"It couldn't have happened unless there was participation from key elements of the American military and government and security services. I am not saying the whole lot were involved. But I believe the official story for September 11 doesn't stack up."
Mr Bracken said in 2006 his views on the terror laws and September 11 were his own, and he was not speaking on behalf of the union.
TelegraphIt will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.
Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state.
The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them.
It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason".
Any suggestion of a central "super database" has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time.
That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism.
The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.
The move was buried in the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which revealed: "We will introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework.
"This programme is required to keep up with changing technology and to maintain capabilities that are vital to the work these agencies do to protect the public.
"Communications data provides evidence in court to secure convictions of those engaged in activities that cause serious harm. It has played a role in every major Security Service counterterrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations.
"We will legislate to put in place the necessary regulations and safeguards to ensure that our response to this technology challenge is compatible with the Government’s approach to information storage and civil liberties."
But Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: "One of the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage of internet and email records’.
"Any move to amass more of our sensitive data and increase powers for processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy of law abiding Britons.”
Guy Herbert, general secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: "We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.
"It is disappointing that the new ministers seem to be continuing their predecessors' tradition of credulousness."
Militant arrested last year described dozens of meetings between ISI officers and senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operativesPakistan's powerful intelligence services were heavily involved in preparations for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008, according to classified Indian government documents obtained by the Guardian.
A 109-page report into the interrogation of key suspect David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant arrested last year and detained in the US, makes detailed claims of ISI support for the bombings.
Under questioning, Headley described dozens of meetings between officers of the main Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, and senior militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group responsible for the Mumbai attacks.
He claims a key motivation for the ISI in aiding the attacks was to bolster militant organisations with strong links to the Pakistani state and security establishment who were being marginalised by more extreme radical groups.
Headley, who undertook surveillance of the targets in Mumbai for the operation, claims that at least two of his missions were partly paid for by the ISI and that he regularly reported to the spy agency. However, the documents suggest that supervision of the militants by the ISI was often chaotic and that the most senior officers of the agency may have been unaware at least of the scale and ambition of the operation before it was launched.
More than 160 people were killed by militants from LeT who arrived by sea to attack luxury hotels, a Jewish centre, a café, a hospital and the main railway station in Mumbai, the Indian commercial capital. Casualties included citizens from 25 countries, including four Americans killed and seven Britons injured. The attacks dominated media for days and badly damaged already poor Indian-Pakistan relations.
European and American security services now fear that LeT, which has thousands of militants, runs dozens of training camps and has extensive logistic networks overseas, is moving from what has been a largely regional agenda – focused on the disputed Himalayan former princely state of Kashmir – to a global agenda involving strikes against the west or western interests. The documents suggest the fierce internal argument within the organisation over its strategic direction is being won by hardliners.
Headley, interviewed over 34 hours by Indian investigators in America in June, described how "a debate had begun among the terrorist outfits" and "a clash of ideology" leading to "splits".
"The aggression and commitment to jihad shown by several splinter groups in Afghanistan influenced many committed fighters to leave [LeT]," Headley said. "I understand this compelled the LeT to consider a spectacular terrorist strike in India."
Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, told the investigators that the ISI hoped the Mumbai attack would slow or stop growing "integration" between groups active in Kashmir, with whom the agency had maintained a long relationship, and "Taliban-based outfits" in Pakistan and Afghanistan which were a threat to the Pakistani state.
"The ISI … had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India," Headley is reported to have said. The aim of the agency was "controlling further split in the Kashmir-based outfits, providing them a sense of achievement and shifting … the theatre of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India."
Headley describes meeting once with a "Colonel Kamran" from the military intelligence service and having a series of meetings with a "Major Iqbal" and a "Major Sameer Ali". A fellow conspirator was handled by a Colonel Shah, he claims. Headley also alleges that he was given $25,000 by his ISI handler to finance one of eight surveillance missions in India.
However, Headley describes the ISI director general, Lt General Shuja Pasha, visiting a key senior militant from LeT in prison after the attacks in a bid "to understand" the operation, implying that, as many western security agencies suspect, the top ranks of the agency were unaware of at least the scale of the planned strike.
The Pakistani government has repeatedly denied any involvement of any security official in the Mumbai attacks. Last night, an ISI spokesman told the Guardian the accusations of the agency's involvement in the Mumbai attacks were "baseless".
LeT was banned in Pakistan in 2002. Jamat-ud Dawa, the social welfare wing of LeT, has been blacklisted in the wake of the Mumbai attacks although it continues to function.
The revelations could prove embarrassing to the US government as well as to the Pakistanis. Reports in American newspapers over the weekend claimed that Headley's wife had tried to alert American authorities to her husband's activities but had been ignored.
Border BeatAnd it appears families are moving out of state. At Los Amigos, one of the biggest elementary schools in the Sunnyside Unified School District, enrollment hovered at 760 students the past few years. This year, however, almost 8 percent less students can be found in their classrooms. School records show that more than 50 children moved out of state, according to second-grade teacher Allison Stirling.
“You had kids last year, and now they just disappeared,” Stirling says.
However, it’s nearly impossible to document whether they left because of SB 1070.
A confusing provision that has not been suspended by Bolton states: a person “in violation of a criminal offense” – such as possibly speeding or not filing taxes – cannot transport, harbor, conceal or shield an illegal immigrant, when he or she knows or suspects the person to be illegal.
But what does this mean? According to Chin, you may be committing a crime if you are speeding to get a dying illegal immigrant to the hospital. Even an off-duty EMT, who parks his or her car and obstructs traffic in the process of helping an unconscious illegal immigrant at an accident, could be arrested for violating SB 1070.
The drafters’ central idea behind SB 1070 was, “what is wrong with a state helping the federal government carrying out its own law?” Chin said.
But SB 1070 eliminates many of the rights an immigrant would have under federal law, since Arizona is not equipped to take over the full spectrum of federal immigration laws. Bolton points out in her court order that, “Congress has created and refined a complex and detailed statutory framework regulating immigration.” This means that immigration law is a complex and multi-layered body of rules implemented by federal institutions such the Department of Homeland Security.
It is designed this way to guarantee that a life-changing decision, like deportation, is not made in haste.
Raw StoryCongress will pass a bill to "forgive" banks the potentially criminal errors made in foreclosure proceedings, a senior CNBC editor predicts.
In a blog column Friday, John Carney argues that lawmakers in DC won't allow the country's largest issuers of mortgages to suffer financial losses following revelations of numerous mishandled foreclosure proceedings, especially when bailing them out this time "won't cost taxpayers a dime."
Here’s what is going to happen: Congress will pass a law called something like “The Financial Modernization and Stability Act of 2010” that will retroactively grant mortgage pools the rights in the underlying mortgages that people are worried about. All the screwed up paperwork, lost notes, unassigned security interests will be forgiven by a legislative act....
The [foreclosure] crisis is not driven by economics. It is driven by legal rights. And there’s simply zero probability that the politicians in Washington are going to let Bank of America or Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase fail because of a legal issue.
Carney predicts that the lame-duck session of Congress following this November's elections will pass the law. "Every member of Congress ... who has been voted out of office will cast a vote for the bill. And the President will sign it."
Major banks' stocks have suffered losses this week as an increasingly large body of evidence has emerged suggesting that banks and their contractors may not have done the most basic vetting of foreclosure paperwork, instead using "robo-signers" to rubber-stamp whatever foreclosure applications were brought forward.
The Associated Press reported this week:
In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.
In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.
The result has been a steady stream of allegations of wrongly foreclosed homes. In one notorious incident last month, a Florida man who had bought his home for cash and carried no mortgage was stunned to find his home in foreclosure. In another incident, a woman who was behind on payments but not in foreclosure called 911 when she heard what she thought was a burglar, but was in fact a JPMorgan contractor coming to change the locks on her home.
In many instances, those shortcuts and mistakes may have violated laws. Attorneys general in all 50 states have now launched probes into foreclosure practices. Bank of America has halted foreclosure proceedings in all states, while Ally Financial (formerly GMAC), JPMorgan and others have announced partial suspensions.
Carney admits that, with outrage growing over unscrupulous foreclosure practices, a second bailout of banks would be politically unpopular.
"Will the public be outraged?" he writes. "Probably. Financial bloggers will scream from the high heavens against another bailout of the banksters. Congress may try to create some cost for banks in exchange for the forgiveness, perhaps requiring more mortgage modifications. But the much feared [foreclosure] apocalypse will be laid to rest."
Voices of America
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 14, 2010
U.S. troops now being trained to boss communities and run local governments are being readied to oversee a post-collapse America in which riots and civil unrest similar to that now exploding in Europe over austerity measures and pension cuts ravage the United States and are met with the iron fist of a militarized police state.
Reaction to our earlier story about the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division being prepared for a situation where “in essence they will become the local government” by working with local officials has been strong, with some refusing to believe that the program is geared towards anything other than operations overseas.
However, as we outlined in our article, similar deployments by Northcom are admittedly focused around “homeland patrols” and training troops to deal with “civil unrest” and “crowd control”.
We have documented numerous incidents over the past several years where active duty troops or national guard have been used in domestic law enforcement operations.
The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence, in preparation for them to be used should the United States enter a post-collapse period of turmoil and unrest.
We covered a case in Kingman Arizona last September, where National Guardsmen were filmed “providing security” and directing traffic.
Another example occurred in Newport Kentucky, when military checkpoints suddenly appeared downtown on September 6 last year. Military Police from the U.S. Army National as well as Marines were purportedly conducting “traffic control” because the city was strapped for funds and did not have enough police to do the job.
The excuse that troops are stepping in to help because there is a lack of police doesn’t wash. Crime is down over the last 20 years, there are around three times more police and the state is not calling out the National Guard, they are being put on the streets as a result of the harmonization of police and military, a process that has been ongoing for decades, long before the economic recession hit. Troops also have guns and their primary function is to search people and vehicles, not direct traffic.
Members of the WeAreChange Ohio group interviewed some of the troops, who when asked if they would be prepared to “confiscate guns, shoot resisters in the back of the head, or throw people into ovens to incinerate bodies,” refused to categorically deny that they would follow such orders.
However, this was by no means the first time that troops have been used to fulfill roles normally ascribed to police in Kentucky.
During the Kentucky Derby on May 2 last year, Military Police were on patrol to deal with crowd control. An Associated Press photograph shows armed MP’s detaining a man who ran onto the track following the 135th Kentucky Derby horse race at Churchill Downs.
“The military has NO BUSINESS policing the citizens except during extraordinarily exceptional times of national emergency by an executive order. This is very disturbing and completely un-American. Maybe even more disturbing is that no one seems to care how quietly and easily we have accepted the burgeoning police state,” one respondent to the photo stated.
As we reported in 2008, U.S. troops returning from Iraq are now occupying America, running checkpoints and training to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” under the auspices of a Northcom program that by 2011 will have no less than 20,000 active duty troops deployed inside America to “help” state and local officials during times of emergency.
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