WASHINGTON—Explaining that the preventative measure was totally unnecessary, Department of Homeland Security officials announced Friday that they were not about to raise the country’s alert level for the 14th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. “Let’s be honest, if groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS were planning an attack to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11, they would choose one of the big ones like the fifth or the 10th, not this one,” said Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson, adding that as far as symbolically meaningful anniversaries go, the 14th “doesn’t even come close.” “Trust us, when 9/11 rolls around again next year the threat level will be through the roof, but we should be fine today. If you’re going to worry about anything, it should be the big 2-0 coming up in 2021.” Johnson later confirmed that a large-scale attack on American soil would pretty much be unavoidable on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, but told reporters that it should be smooth sailing from then until the 50th.
How many people have died because of what happened on this day fourteen years ago? In addition to the 3,000 Americans on that day, how many have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and Ukraine as a direct result of what happened that day? Those brilliant blue skies have darkened dramatically over the last fourteen years as this Fourth Turning Winter deepens by the day.
Where were you on that day and how did you feel when viewing the tragedy?
“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:
Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
Cultural distress, with the media plunging into a dizzying decay, and a decency backlash in favor of state censorship
Technological distress, with cryptoanarchy, high-tech oligarchy, and biogenetic chaos
Ecological distress, with atmospheric damage, energy or water shortages, and new diseases
Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction”
September 2015 marks the seventh anniversary of this Fourth Turning Crisis. The economic, social, cultural, ecological, political, and military distress propagates by the minute as the globe is besieged by economic turmoil, increased human suffering, and endemic corruption of the political and ruling classes. The Federal Reserve/Wall Street created global economic implosion was the spark which catalyzed this fourth Crisis period in U.S. history in September 2008. Neil Howe in a 2012 essay assessed the beginning of this Fourth Turning and why 9/11 was not the catalyst:
“Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.” ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance State.
The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time, but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to life in a society where government agents routinely practice violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives.
Ironically, the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks occurs just days before the 228th anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution. Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9/11, there is virtually nothing to celebrate.
The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—which has historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.
There’s nobody running for President under the GOP ticket that I could even consider supporting other than Rand Paul. Although I’ve become disillusioned with him as of late, particularly with the way his campaign is being managed, he did an excellent job defending the 4th Amendment in the Republican debate last night against the incredibly corrupt, neocon thug Chris Christie.
What’s so amusing about the exchange is that Christie couldn’t talk for one minute about NSA surveillance without lying. He stated that:
I was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001, and the world changed enormously the next day, and that happened in my state.
Never mind that most US Attorneys don’t, themselves, go before the FISC to present cases (usually it is people from the National Security Division, though it was OIPR when Christie was US Attorney), never mind that the name of the court is the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The real doozie here is Chris Christie’s claim that he “was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001.”
On December 7, 2001 — three months after the attacks — President Bush released this notice of nomination.
Now, maybe Bush spoke with his big New Jersey fundraiser Chris Christie and assured him the payoff — in the form of a key appointment — would be coming. Maybe that conversation even happened on September 10.
But it is not the case that he was nominated on September 10.
In the 14 years since 9/11, you can count about six real terrorist attacks in the United States. These include the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, as well as failed attacks, such as the time when a man named Faisal Shahzad tried to deliver a car bomb to Times Square. In those same 14 years, the Bureau, however, has bragged about how it’s foiled dozens of terrorism plots. In all, the FBI has arrested more than 175 people in aggressive, undercover counterterrorism stings.
These operations, which are usually led by an informant, provide the means and opportunity, and sometimes even the idea, for mentally ill and economically desperate people to become what we now term terrorists.
These informants nab people like Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh. Both are mentally ill. Abdul-Latif had a history of huffing gasoline and attempting suicide. Mujahidh had schizoaffective disorder, he had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. In 2012, the FBI arrested these two men for conspiring to attack a military recruiting station outside Seattle with weapons provided, of course, by the FBI. The FBI’s informant was Robert Childs, a convicted rapist and child molester who was paid 90,000 dollars for his work on the case. This isn’t an outlier. – Trevor Aaronson, TED Talk, March 2015
Coming off the Patriot Act fight, the presidential hopeful is sponsoring a bill to declassify 28 pages of a 9/11 report that may blame Saudi Arabia.
Senator Rand Paul, the man of the hour when it comes to pushing back against government secrecy, is throwing his weight behind a fresh push to declassify 28 pages from a 2002 Senate inquiry into the causes of 9/11.
The Kentucky Republican is sponsoring legislation called the “Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Act,” which would force the release of the disputed pages. With his support, an important issue that has languished far too long may be finally gaining traction.
Paul is a big catch for the 28 pages movement, as advocates describe their effort. Former Florida senator Bob Graham, who has been banging the drum on the classified pages for years, will appear alongside Paul at a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday morning to lend his gravitas to the occasion.
Graham led the Senate inquiry and drafted the pages that have been kept under wraps. Without violating his oath of secrecy about specifics, the Democrat has been quite outspoken, saying the redacted pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier” of the 9/11 attacks. He has also said the U.S. government’s protective stance toward the Saudis allows them to continue spreading the extreme Wahhabi version of Islam that has led to the rise of ISIS.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has long been on record supporting the disclosure, and he is co-sponsoring the legislation. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is described as “definitely interested,” and as the 9/11 family members continue to press for answers, they hope the moment is coming when this long-festering report will see the light of day, either by legislative action or by President Obama deciding enough is enough.
Graeme MacQueen’s 2014 book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, has been vindicated by the head of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation.
Four and one-half months ago I posted a review of MacQueen’s book. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/12/02/2001-anthrax-deception-case-domestic-conspiracy/ The hired government apologists, the despicable presstitute media, and the usual gullible patriots greeted the book with screams of “conspiracy theory.” In fact, MacQueen’s book was a carefully researched project that established that there indeed was a conspiracy–a conspiracy inside the government.
It was obvious to any person familiar with the techniques that governments use to erode liberty by destroying the protection given to citizens by law that the purpose of the anthrax letters, especially the letters to senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, was to raise the fear level in order to guarantee the passage of the tyrannical PATRIOT Act.
The PATRIOT Act was a decisive blow against American liberty. The act has served to negate the US Constitution in the 21st century and to endow the federal government with unaccountable and tyrannical powers.
Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who in 2002 chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, maintains the FBI is covering up a Saudi support cell in Sarasota for the hijackers. He says the al-Hijjis’ “urgent” pre-9/11 exit suggests “someone may have tipped them off” about the coming attacks.
Graham has been working with a 14-member group in Congress to urge President Obama to declassify 28 pages of the final report of his inquiry which were originally redacted, wholesale, by President George W. Bush.
“The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” he said, adding, “I am speaking of the kingdom,” or government, of Saudi Arabia, not just wealthy individual Saudi donors.
Sources who have read the censored Saudi section say it cites CIA and FBI case files that directly implicate officials of the Saudi Embassy in Washington and its consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks — which, if true, would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government.
One of the strangest aspects of the post 9/11 period has been the number of very intelligent people who intimately appreciate and fight against the innumerable crimes and thefts committed by the American oligarchy, yet simply can’t comes to terms with the fact that the official story of September 11, 2001 is a heaping pile of bullshit. At the end of the day, I think it’s just a function of managing career risk. Having already achieved some level of public success, not many people will want to give the mainstream media the opportunity to attach “9/11 truther” to their name, thus tarnishing all the other work they do in the mind of the general public.
How come Saudi Arabia keeps popping up as a common denominator on Muslim terrorism around the world. The 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. A large majority of ISIS are Saudis. They have fomented much of the violence in Iraq. Some ally. They hate Iran. Do you notice which country is missing from the chart as supporters of ISIS?
According to a study by the Brookings Institute dealing with a 20,000 sample size, Saudi Arabia is the top location claimed by Twitter users supporting ISIS in 2015. Syria follows and Iraq rounds off the top three. Read more on the Independent.
In the modest and unassuming manner natural to this column, I advance a small proposal for the emendation of such tatters of the Constitution as can be found: For voting in federal elections, we should employ a literacy test to disenfranchise the majority of the population, to the infinite betterment of the country. This wise move should be accompanied by an increase in the voting age to twenty-five.
The necessity cannot be denied. Consider the following:
These numbers may be understood in various ways. To a curmudgeon, who obtains a sour satisfaction from the endless repetition of human folly, they provide the satisfactions of confirmation. We all enjoy being right. In practical terms, they mean that democracy, or our mild approximation thereto, is a sham, a fraud, an impossibility, and a bad idea. No one so blankly ignorant, so mentally without furniture, so muddle-headed, limited, and barren, should be allowed within hailing range of a voting booth.
Such people cannot possibly know anything of national questions. Those who live in a featureless tundra of the mind usually do so from stupidity. It is unreasonable to blame them for a genetic condition over which they have no control, but it is equally unreasonable to allow them to vote. As for the fairly intelligent who through intellectual shiftlessness learn nothing, I have no patience with them. What possible cause is there for thinking the willfully dull, the deliberately ignorant, or the dull and ignorant, are ompetent to influence policy on matters that they cannot spell? Given that everyone today has access to virtually every book ever written and to the internet, there is little excuse for living in Oprah fog and Eminem darkness.
Enjoy the sub $3.00 gas prices while they last. The Saudis know what they are doing. Oil was $25 per barrel and gas prices were below $2.00 when the Saudis took down the twin towers. Know your enemy.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/26/2014 15:41 -0500
Despite the constant blather that lower oil prices are “unequivocally good” for America, we suspect companies working and people living these 19 Shale regions will have a different perspective…
Drilling for oil in 19 shale regions loses money at $75 a barrel, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Those areas pumped about 413,000 barrels a day, according to the latest data available from Drillinginfo Inc. and company presentations.
“Everybody is trying to put a very happy spin on their ability to weather $80 oil, but a lot of that is just smoke,” said Daniel Dicker, president of MercBloc Wealth Management Solutions with 25 years’ experience trading crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange. “The shale revolution doesn’t work at $80, period.”
Everything is going according to plan. The military industrial complex must feed continuously like a shark, or it will die. When there are no real enemies, we just create them out of thin air (ISIS, Russia). It’s all part of the game plan. We don’t need no stinkin Constitution.
U.S. General Wesley Clark (ret.) revealed that he was informed following 9/11 of a dramatic plan of aggressive war.
U.S. General Wesley Clark (ret.) revealed that he was informed, in the days following 9/11/2001, that the Department of Defense was planning wars with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, & Iran.
Clark was regarded as an esteemed commander during his service from 1966 to 2000, and obtained the rank of 4-star general. He discussed the matter in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now on March 2, 2007.
Here is the transcript of Gen. Clark’s account.
CLARK: About 10 days after 9/11, I went to the Pentagon, and I saw [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary [Paul] Wolfowitz. I went downstairs to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff that used to work for me.
One of the generals called me in and said, “Sir, you gotta come in and talk to me.” I said, “Sir, you’re too busy.” And he said, “No, no! We’ve made the decision — we’re going to war with Iraq!” This is on or about the 28th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why!?” He said, “I don’t know!” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Did they find some information connecting Saddam to al Qaeda?” He said, “No, no, there’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess its like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time, we were bombing in Afghanistan. And I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, its worse than that.” He said– he reached over on his desk and he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, “I just got this from upstairs,” meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office. And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years. Starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.”
What can be made of this?
One explanation, as some suggest, is that it is not unexpected for the Pentagon to maintain ongoing contingency plans; keeping ready to pursue various far-fetched wars at all times. But even if that much is true, why would this seven-country invasion plan be put into official memos in the weeks following the 9/11/2001 attack? Those countries had nothing to do with the hijackings — yet American generals were being briefed about serious plans to attack. Why?
The proposed plan obviously did not pan out exactly as written, but it may have very well given us a look at the agenda of some very bloodthirsty policy-makers, as they tried to exploit the anguish felt following the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Disturbingly, we cannot even be sure that “the plan” is not still being pursued. The Pentagon has maintained a steady course of aggressive foreign interventionism throughout both the Bush and Obama administrations. As we have witnessed, much of what General Clark revealed has ultimately moved forward, albeit with a modified timeline.
Iraq’s government was toppled by the U.S. during the bloody full-scale invasion in 2003. U.S. commandos have been operating clandestinely in Sudan since at least 2005. The U.S. has been operating Somalia since 2007, clandestinely and through missile strikes. Libya’s government was toppled with the help of U.S. missile support in 2009. The U.S. began its bombing campaign in Syria in 2014. Iran’s fate remains yet to be determined, but was a frequent target of pro-war rhetoric in the ’12 election cycle.
If one subscribes to the idea that it is the U.S. military’s proper role (and the U.S. taxpayers’ economic burden) to clean up every undemocratic cesspool on the planet, then this brand of foreign policy might make sense or seem appealing. But even if that much is accepted, one must acknowledge that the leaders and policymakers clamoring for war are the same folks who gave us the Patriot Act, the NDAA, the ACA, the TSA, mass domestic spying, giant bailouts, exponential debt growth, and so many other harmful policies.
Americans’ patriotism and support of democracy have long been exploited by leaders with a far less altruistic foreign policy agenda. The country is not being kept in a state of perpetual conflict because it is good for the USA, good for the world, or destined to promote freedom.
Could it be that the purpose of pursuing war is to be at war? War is the perfect tool to centralize and expand government, degrade civilian liberties, suppress dissenting voices, maintain high levels of state secrecy, unaccountably disperse large sums of taxpayer money, militarize law enforcement, spy on the people, among other things. As Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the state.”
