President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department's reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.
In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.
But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency's 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section "in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said it's appropriate for the administration to know what reports go to Congress and to review them beforehand. "There can be a discussion on whether to accept a change or a nuance," she said. "It could be any number of things."
The American Bar Association and members of Congress have said Bush uses signing statements excessively as a way to expand his power.
The Senate held hearings on the issue in June. At the time, 110 statements challenged about 750 statutes passed by Congress, according to numbers combined from the White House and the Senate committee. They include documents revising or disregarding parts of legislation to ban torture of detainees and to renew the Patriot Act.
Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg said Bush is trying to subvert lawmakers' ability to accurately monitor activities of the executive branch of government.
"The Homeland Security Department has been setting up watch lists to determine who gets on planes, who gets government jobs, who gets employed," said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
He said the Homeland Security Department has the most significant impact on citizens' privacy of any agency in the federal government.
Homeland Security agencies check airline passengers' names against terrorist watch lists and detain them if there's a match. They make sure transportation workers' backgrounds are investigated. They are working on several kinds of biometric ID cards that millions of people would have to carry.
The department's privacy office has put the brakes on some initiatives, such as using insecure radio-frequency identification technology, or RFID, in travel documents. It also developed privacy policies after an uproar over the disclosure that airlines turned over their passengers' personal information to the government.
The last privacy report was submitted in February 2005.
Bush's signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill.
Bush, for example, said he'd disregard a requirement that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and "demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security."
His rationale was that it "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."
Existence of "Al-Qaeda" Is Crap; Quite Literally Did Osama really choose to name his terror network after potty humor or was it a computer database he used to chat with his CIA handlers?
The origins of the name "Al-Qaeda," and its real arabic connotations prove that every time the Bush administration, Fox News, or any individual who cites the threat of "Al-Qaeda," as a mandate for war and domestic authoritarianism, they are propagating the myth that such a group ever existed.
An organization by the name of "Al-Qaeda" does not exist and has never existed outside a falsely coined collective term for offshoot loose knit terror cells, the majority of which are guided by the Pakistani ISI, Mossad, the Saudis, MI6 and the CIA, that were created in response to America's actions after 9/11 - as the recent NIE report shows.
According to the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, the infamous footage of Bin Laden marching around with armed soldiers was a ruse on the part of Osama himself, graciously propagated by the lapdog press, in which actors were hired off the streets, given uniforms and guns and told to look aggressive.
Note the video states Bin Laden only took on the Al-Qaeda mantle post-9/11 after the U.S. government began parroting the term. The only error is the now debunked myth that 9/11 was carried out by "Al-Qaeda."
So if the group doesn't exist, where did the name come from?
You have heard before that "Al-Qaeda" roughly translates into "the base," but were you aware that "Ana raicha Al Qaeda" is arabic colloquial for "I'm going to the toilet"?
Would hardened terrorists hell bent on the destruction of the west name their organization after a euphemism for taking a shit?
The truth about where the name "Al-Qaeda" originated explains why no would-be fundamentalist suicide martyr could have been involved in its creation.
Former Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook, who admirably resigned in protest of the 2003 Iraq invasion, penned a piece in the London Guardian shortly before his death that shed light on the true genesis of the name.
"Al-Qaida," states Cook, "literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
Former French Military Intelligence official Pierre Henry Bunel expands, noting that "Al-Qaeda," was an early form of intranet, which was used by Islamic nations and influential families to communicate with each other. It was also used by the "American agent," Osama bin Laden to send coded or covert messages back to his CIA handlers from Afghanistan.
It's worthy to conclude with Bunel's assertion that "Al-Qaeda" as an organization is about as genuine as George W. Bush's Texas brush clearing cowboy image.
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."
Alex is joined in-studio by researcher, author and the progressive Pastor of the local Austin Unitarian Universalist Church who has started a 9/11 Truth film screening program for his church and has written extensively on the use of so-called religious conservativism to transform America into a fascist state.
Loehr is one of a dying breed of pastors and spiritual leaders who do not shy away from facing the evil in our government and tackling political issues such as the 9/11 inside job, which Loehr has also gone public on.
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A strange Associated Press article about presidential scribblings makes a bizarre reference to a John F. Kennedy doodle in which he seemingly predicted a "9-11 conspiracy" 40 years before it happened.
"President Kennedy, known for separating his life into compartments, would enclose words and numbers inside circles and boxes. Events long after his death give one doodle an unintended chill: A small circle with the numbers "9-11" contained within. Just to the lower left on the page, the word "conspiracy" is underlined."
The doodle is part of a new book, Presidential Doodles, which analyses the jottings of eight commanders in chief.
What kind of astronomical coincidence could see JFK - himself the target of a conspiracy - accurately forecast a major world event decades beforehand?
Is this some kind of inside joke or is it a hat tip to the 9/11 truth movement?
One thing's for sure - it's weird.
George W. Bush's most infamous note making to date came during a UN Security Council meeting on September 14 2005, where he asked Condoleeza Rice if he could be given permission to take a toilet break. Reuters carried a photo of the message (above) and later had to clarify its reason for running the shot on its photo wire. Many Neo-Con blowhard baselessly accused Reuters of photoshopping the image, focusing on why the photo was carried and taking attention away from the importance of what it said.
The message perfectly illustrated the fact that Bush is a figurehead and a puppet who controls absolutely nothing and has to ask special his handlers simply to leave the room.
Bush Desperate To Legislate Mengele Style Torture Phony intelligence from false confessions needed to maintain Al-Qaeda myth, sexual mutilation of children advocated by White House legal architect
The Bush administration's desperation to legitimize and legislate torture in the face of revolt from Congress, the Senate and even Colin Powell, is an attempt to rescue the need to have a constant supply of phony intelligence obtained from torture to justify the war on terror - while the real horror of how the administration advocates sexually mutilating children under the same legal definition remains hidden from the U.S. public.
A large portion of Americans still support the use of 'rendition' and 'pressure' because they are told that the information obtained from such methods protects them from terrorists. Not only is that information crude, unreliable and often misleading - but the suffering inflicted on the victims is a horror show in comparison to the milquetoast edited version presented via the media.
The philosophy of the Bush administration's approach to torture is encapsulated by John “torture” Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.
During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.
Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
By the very framework that has been established within this context, Bush's Rose Garden speech this past Friday was a tacit attempt to sell the justification of crushing a child's genitals in the name of the war on terror. No you haven't entered the twilight zone, you are witnessing the absolute sacking and moral decay of everything that used to be America.
They are actually arguing for the legalization of sadistic, serial killer style torture and sexual molestation of children - the same administration that labels its critics "fascists" is pursuing a doctrine that makes Dr. Josef Mengele look like Ronald McDonald in comparison.
The official US Army report listed all the abuses committed at the Abu Ghraib prison. These methods are standard use in the 'Copper Green' worldwide torture program.
a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
b. (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
e. (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;
f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
h. (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
.................
a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; [Rape]
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees (after detainees were beaten to death).
Spun as the actions of "a few bad apples," the Abu Ghraib torture program was sanctioned from the very top.
Janis Karpinski was scapegoated as being party to the torture when she was in reality trying to put a stop to it. Since the Abu Ghraib scandal she has been blowing the whistle on who directed the torture program and how it continues to this day. During an interview on the Alex Jones Show, Karpinski stated,
"There is overwhelming proof that torture is going on, that it has been directed and is likely continuing, even to this day. I don't want to believe it is but the statements from the people just returning from the theater give every indication that in fact it is, they still don't know where to draw the line." The General said.
Karpinski identified the masterminds of the torture policy as occupying the highest rungs of the Bush administration.
"The orders came right from the top, filtered down from the secretary of defense, with the endorsement of the President, the Vice President, whatever advisors are surrounding them, filtered down through the Commanders in the field, these practices were not only endorsed, but were in use at Guantanamo bay and in locations in Afghanistan. And when General Miller visited Iraq he brought those techniques with him. And then he sent contract interrogators who had 'performed well' at Guantanamo Bay to Iraq as well."
Why is the Bush administration so feverish to gut the Geneva conventions and legislate torture?
It is common knowledge that evidence obtained from torture is completely unreliable and if anything only muddies the waters of intelligence. The Neo-Con architects of the war on terror could not care less whether the information obtained from torture is accurate or not, the agenda is to artificially manufacture the myth that there are numerous Al-Qaeda cells dotted around the world wanting to attack America.
This process is clearly evident in Uzbekistan, where racist dictator Islam Karimov, the man who enjoys boiling people alive, plays ball in helping Bush and Blair maintain the Al-Qaeda myth by providing a steady supply of tortured Muslims who would admit to being Osama Bin Laden's rent boy just to have the cattle prod removed.
Karimov, Bush and Blair have set-up a nice little back scratching society and it works like this - Karimov has his brownshirts snatch innocent Muslims off the streets, tortures them until they "confess" to being Al-Qaeda members, and then in return for financial kickbacks, hands the phony confessions to the CIA and British intelligence, who use them as propaganda to argue the threat of the Al-Qaeda menace. In addition, the manufacturing of an artificial 'Al-Qaeda threat' enables Karimov to propagandize his own population into supporting his savagery through fear.
The fact that the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray told the Blair government directly that false confessions were being obtained through violent torture, didn't concern MI6 or the CIA, who ordered the program to continue.
The hallmark of the worldwide detainee and torture camps is defined by repeated examples whereby proven top Al-Qaeda members are protected or released while completely innocent individuals are imprisoned for no reason and tortured.
For more than a decade, Osama bin Laden had few soldiers more devoted than Abdallah Tabarak. A former Moroccan transit worker, Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show.
During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others fled in the other direction.
Tabarak was captured and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was classified as such a high-value prisoner that the Pentagon repeatedly denied requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him. Then, after spending almost three years at the base, he was suddenly released.
The article describes how Tabarak was a proven loyal and unceasing Al-Qaeda member with an unparalleled affinity for Osama bin Laden.
This website has repeatedly highlighted examples of where known terrorists, even in some cases individuals who were in the throes of carrying out terrorist attacks, are ordered to be released by the US government.
And yet Pakistani gangsters admitted to rounding up innocent people in street sweeps and selling them to the US government as terrorists for anything up to $25,000. These people are now at Guantanamo Bay.
Khaled Masri was abducted off the streets of Germany by the CIA for being a suspected terrorist, the case against him later collapsed and the U.S. government graciously apologized for ruining his life.
In a similar recent case, Ottawa software engineer Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested for terrorist ties and deported to Syria, where he was tortured. An official inquiry concluded that Arar was completely innocent.
Only nine alleged terrorists have been brought to trial by the US government and none have been convicted, save the mental retard Zacarias Moussaoui who was tortured into whistling whatever tune his handlers demanded.
In many cases, alleged terrorists like Iyman Faris, the so-called Brooklyn Bridge bomber, turn out to be confidants of the US government. Faris was an FBI informant.
The so-called mastermind of the 7/7 London bombing, Haroon Rashid Aswat, was an MI6 informant whom British intelligence had repeatedly protected in the years before the attack in the face of attempts by intelligence agencies of other nations to arrest him.
The policy of the highest echelons of the American and British establishment is to torture the innocent and release the guilty.
The elite needs to maintain the facade that terrorist cells are everywhere and that only their smothering 'protection' will keep us safe. And yet time and time again the real terrorists are protected and given safe passage by the military-industrial complex handlers.
Though the torture program is being sold to the American people as a necessity in the "war of civilizations," it is in actual fact a trial balloon for the incarceration of political dissidents during a time of manufactured national emergency such as a biological terror attack or race riots.
It was announced earlier this year that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.
The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used "as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency."
Discussions of federal concentration camps is no longer the rhetoric of paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists, it is mainstream news.
Under the enemy combatant designation anyone at the behest of the US government, even if they are a US citizen, can be kidnapped and placed in an internment facility forever without trial. Jose Padilla, an American citizen, spent over three years in a Navy brig before he was afforded any kind of hearing. The evidence against him was proven to be non-existent and he was transferred to a civilian jail.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says that the Bush Administration may have "planned and carried out" the 9/11 attacks, reports CNN international.
In a recent speech Chavez said:
The hypothesis that is gaining strength, which was said on television last night, and which could soon blow up, was that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack, or act, against its own people and against citizens all over the world. A transcript follows the video.
TRANSCRIPT
CLANCY: All right, turning now to Latin America. Well it's nothing new to say that the president of Venezuela is no friend of the United States, particularly the Bush administration. Hugo Chavez leading a crusade against U.S. dominance of Latin America for the past several years. Just after the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, well, he's added a bit of fuel to the fire.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HUGO CHAVEZ, VENEZUELAN PRES. (through translator): The hypothesis that is gaining strength, which was said on television last night, and which could soon blow up, was that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack, or act, against its own people and against citizens all over the world. Why? To justify the aggression that was immediately unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq and the threats against all of us, against Venezuela, too.
Documentary film maker and radio host Alex Jones, coordinating today's 9/11 truth movement events in downtown New York City, says that the atmosphere around ground zero has dramatically changed, with the majority of firefighters and police officers now sympathetic to the claim that 9/11 was an inside job.
Alex is featured at the end of the Associated Press video above imploring viewers to understand that 9/11 was "a self-inflicted wound designed to create a police state in the U.S. and capture us as an engine for world government and world domination."
Alex was assigned to lead a protest march today which he described as over 1000 strong as it snaked across ground zero and through lower Manhattan.
Saying that the "entire atmosphere had changed," Alex explained how police support for protesters at ground zero had gone from 20% support two years ago to around 60% support now - with many willing to affirm that sentiment on camera and many knowledgeable about Alex Jones' work and the 9/11 truth movement.
"Police just saying 'keep your investigation going, we appreciate you' on video," said Jones.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "TerrorStorm sets a new standard in documentary filmmaking. Alex Jones knocks it out of the park yet again." -Dylan Avery, Director, "Loose Change" - Click here to get the DVD or click here to watch online now! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The firemen we've been talking to - a hundred per cent are on our side and have seen the documentary films....it is just incredible what's happened at the grass roots."
Jones said that the few debunkers who were spewing Bush administration style propaganda were met with distain from the police.
"I think that thing that triggered it was the fact that the government lied about the dust, the asbestos all of it," said Jones in citing why first responders and police have become increasingly skeptical about anything the government says about 9/11.
Alex later commenced a vocal bullhorning of ground zero and led a chant of "9/11 was an inside job," more on that to come tomorrow.
Click here to listen to Alex Jones' groud zero report.
A benchmark of the wildfire success of the 9/11 truth movement can be measured with a new CNN poll released today that shows the amount of American citizens who "blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks," has risen from a third to over a half over the past four years.
The 9/11 truth movement is characterized by an increasingly credible veneer - largely thanks to the 9/11 scholars. As media attention builds to a deafening crescendo in anticipation of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, it is necessary to step back and distance ourselves from the more outlandish 9/11 theories and offset their damaging effects.
Over the course of the next week we will continue to take a critical and discerning look at the 9/11 truth movement, celebrating both its obvious measured progress while also highlighting areas of concern that need to be resolved before the next rung on the ladder to bringing criminal charges against the guilty parties can be climbed.
Our sole purpose in this piece is to weed out and discredit an element of 9/11 embraced by 'conspiracy theorists' as oppose to 'skeptics' of the official story. We will treat conspiracy theories that are as implausible or more so than the government version, which in itself a conspiracy theory, with the same contempt - because they are harmful to the 9/11 truth movement as a whole.
It is not the intention of this article to create in-fighting or bickering nor is it advantageous to attack anyone's character and that is why we refrain from citing any individuals by name. Many speculative tenets of what happened on 9/11 have been courted - including by this author - and then dropped after the evidence evaporates and common sense kicks in. We should be loathe to jettison reason and logic even in times of unparalleled absurdity.
Advocates of the 'blue screen' or 'hologram' theory hold that the planes that hit the World Trade Center, or at least Flight 175, were ghost aircraft and that sophisticated image projection technology was used to fake the illusion of them entering the towers.
The evidence they present to validate this notion is the contention that Flight 175 should have "bounced off" the tower yet sliced through it like a knife through butter.
The vast majority of the evidence is supported not by scientific analysis of what one would expect to happen when a large commercial airliner impacts a skyscraper at over 500 miles per hour, but with grainy Internet videos and hastily interpreted statements made by news reporters at ground zero.
If we are to believe, and the evidence suggests it to be so, that western intelligence agencies are carrying out acts of terror, to go to such lengths mandates the necessity of multi-layered fallback options if the criminals are caught red-handed. This is why a large scale terror attack is always shadowed by an almost identical government drill, as was the case with 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings. If significant and damning evidence were to be presented in a court of law powerful enough to have any impact that implicated high officials in acts of gross treason - the fallback option that it was "just part of the drill," remains as a last chance saloon.
If we are to consider that some form of high-tech hologram technology was utilized as part of a David Copperfield style sound and lights magic show that only made it appear as if Flight 175 had hit the south tower - then we are seriously entertaining the notion that the criminals who ran the attack did not bother to construct any fallback explanation if this massive public stunt had gone wrong.
What if the bombs inside the tower had failed due to faulty wiring or had only detonated a second after the hologram had been sent into the tower? How could that one be explained away? Who in their right mind would make such a huge gamble with no fallback option?
There is one video that soundly debunks the blue screen theories and should be used to put this deception to bed for good. Japanese news footage of Flight 175 striking the south tower shows the fuselage of the aircraft briefly exiting the opposite face of the building before the entire plane is engulfed in flames from the exploding jet fuel (located well behind the nosecone). Watch the clip below.
To maintain that this was a hologram necessitates that the "ghost plane" was also somehow superimposed inside the tower so it could be seen exiting at the exact right moment. This is a ridiculous concept.
Here is a close-up frame of the nose exiting the tower.
Here is debris from the fuselage of Flight 175 at ground zero.
I could spend hours attempting to dismiss the multitude of claims made by blue screen advocates but I don't doubt that for every point I make they could uncover another grainy video or edited piece of eyewitness testimony to counter my argument. This is why I can only try and appeal to reason and rational thinking.
If the criminals who organized and carried out 9/11 could execute the operation -
a) in a manner that would have more or less the same psychological impact they were trying to achieve even if the planes had missed their targets (which one of them did)
and
b) by using the most straightforward means available and minimizing the potential that the plot would fail (using giant holograms and attempting to hoodwink millions watching both on television and in person is not the most straightforward means)
Then they would choose those options.
A great deal of the hit pieces we have already encountered and several more that will undoubtedly emerge on or around the fifth anniversary on Monday excel in setting up straw man arguments, attributing minority fringe theories to the entire 9/11 truth movement and then using them to debunk the entire field. Popular Mechanics seized upon the no planes at the WTC theory and dishonestly exhaulted it as a core argument of the 9/11 truth movement.
Therefore it is our remit to distance ourselves from completely unsubstantiated theories which have the effect of eclipsing proven holes in the official story. The hologram theory is severely damaging to the credibility that the 9/11 truth movement has fought so hard to obtain and should therefore be sidelined and shunned at all costs.
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