Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has admitted for the first time that she led high-level discussions beginning in 2002 with other senior Bush administration officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists detained at military prisons to the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, according to documents released late Wednesday by Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.
Responding in writing to questions by Levin, who will convene a hearing today on the administration’s interrogation program, John B. Bellinger, Rice’s legal adviser at the State Department, said they recalled participating in meetings with Ashcroft and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in July 2002 about an Army and Air Force survival training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime.
On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain’s supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil.
I read the story as reported by the Dayton Daily News, but this was after I had received an email written by a friend of some of the victims of these American terrorists. The matter of fact news report in the Dayton paper didn’t come close to conveying the horrific impact of this unthinkable act like the email I had just read, so I asked the email’s author for permission to share what they had written. The author was with one of the families from the mosque — a mother and two of the small children who were in the room that was gassed — the day after the attack occurred.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Contact: Jessica Robinson, 573-751-0290
JEFFERSON CITY – Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.
“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.
“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.
During this, the season of the seventh anniversary of 911, we must continue to increase the effectiveness of our transnational peace lobby aimed at extending the Nuremberg process towards an international investigation into the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the name of the War on Terror. Such an investigation must begin by asking some foundational questions about the underlying crime that gave rise to the War on Terror. Were the events of 911 orchestrated by a very different cast of characters and for very different motives than those identified in the trial by media that began with unseemly haste on the very day of the Great Shock?1 Is the War on Terror a War on Truth? Did the official conspiracy theory originate in a web of lies, distortions and cover-ups expressed to this day in the dense shroud of public mythology surrounding the events of 911? We must empower a credible international tribunal of esteemed jurists with sufficient independence to asses on its own merits the growing body of evidence to indicate that the destruction of the Twin Towers and World Trade Centre 7, together with the hit on the Pentagon, were caused by something considerably more elaborate than the actions of nineteen young Saudis equipped with nothing but box cutters, flight training and jihadist zeal.
Britons should be subjected to random carbon spotchecks and intensive surveillance of their diets, transport and waste disposal habits, says the Government’s architecture and design quango in a new report today.
The word “monitoring” occurs 19 times in the 32-page publication by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). If the proposals in the report What Makes An Eco Town?are implemented few aspects of life will go unrecorded.
CABE says the strict monitoring is needed to ensure the carbon footprint of the eco-town dwellers remains at one-third of the British average, which is the requirement for what’s called “one-planet living”, the quango says.
Examples of monitoring include “the ecological footprint of the diet of 100 randomly selected residents”, and the number of shops selling local produce. Waste disposal and transportion habits will also be scrutinized.
Britain’s first identity card in more than half a century was unveiled yesterday – and turned out to be covered in EU symbols to satisfy Brussels.
The plastic card, which will be issued to foreign citizens in Britain starting in November, marks the first stage in the Government’s ambitious scheme to issue biometric ID cards to all UK residents at a cost of billions of pounds.
But serious questions remain over whether the system will work or bring any practical benefits, and doubts were underlined yesterday as the Conservatives pledged to scrap the entire venture if they win the next General Election.
The Scarlet A: Links between the Anthrax Attacks and 9/11
The author is a Senior Military Affairs Journalist, and former White House Policy Analyst and Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President in the first Reagan Administration. Ms. Honegger is the author of the 9/11 expose “The Pentagon Attack Papers” http://physics911.net/pdf/honegger.pdf and October Surprise (Tudor, 1989), the first book to reveal the true origins of the Iran side of the Iran/Contra scandal.
By insisting that Bruce Ivins, a biowarfare scientist then with the Army’s Ft. Detrick laboratory, was behind the anthrax attacks, the Bush Administration has officially acknowledged that those attacks were perpetrated by a U.S. Government insider — and not by bin Laden or by Iraq.
Likewise, compelling evidence (1) has demonstrated that the mass murders of 9/11 themselves were perpetrated or enabled by U.S. Government insiders. And while it is well known that President Bush has admitted Iraq was not behind Sept. 11, it is less widely known that bin Laden has never been wanted by the FBI for 9/11 on the agency’s ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ web page. FBI Director Mueller and his chief investigative spokesman, Rex Tomb, have publicly stated that the reason bin Laden isn’t officially wanted for 9/11 is because there is “no hard evidence” linking him to the Sept. 11 plot. (2)
Spy novelist John Le Carré has criticised the Government for ’stripping’ away British civil liberties due to the threat of terrorism.
The 76-year-old author and former MI6 agent, who rarely speaks publicly, slammed ministers for voting to extend the 42-day limit that terror suspects can be held without charge.
Le Carré, who admitted he had been labelled an ‘angry old man’, said: ‘Partly I’m so angry that there is so little anger around me at what is being done to our society, supposedly to protect it.
‘We have been taken to war under false pretences, and stripped of our civil liberties in an atmosphere of panic.
‘Our lawyers don’t take to the streets as they have in Pakistan. Our MPs allow themselves to be deluded by their own spin doctors, and end up believing their own propaganda’
AP REPORTER: Do you think that our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan — our continued military presence there, is inflaming Islamic extremists?
SARAH PALIN: I think our presence in Iraq and in Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation. Again, because the mission is to take the fight over there, do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here. And that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But, since September 11th, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.
