Month: September 2011

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9/11 Commission Charade | Lew Rockwell

911CommissionRpt-288Editor’s Note: I looked through my archives and brought forward this article in remembrance of the tragedy of 9/11 and the feeble investigation that followed. There’s are still  too many unanswered questions and government officials who were not held accountable for their actions, or failure to act, in the face of a national emergency. Shame on America for allowing this happen and destroying our country in the process.

By Ron Paul

August 24, 2004 – The 9-11 Commission report, released late last month (i.e., July 2004), has disrupted the normally quiet Washington August. Various congressional committees are holding hearings on the report this week, even though Congress is not in session, in an attempt to show the government is “doing something” about terrorism in an election year. The Commission recommendations themselves have been accepted reverently and without question, as if handed down from on high.

But what exactly is going on here? These hearings amount to nothing more than current government officials meeting with former government officials, many of whom now lobby government officials, and agreeing that we need more government! The current and past architects of the very bureaucracy that failed Americans so badly on September 11th three years ago are now meeting to recommend more bureaucracy. Why on earth do we assume that former government officials, some of whom are self-interested government lobbyists, suddenly become wise, benevolent, and politically neutral when they retire? Why do we look to former bureaucrats to address a bureaucratic failure?

The 9-11 Commission report is several hundred pages worth of recommendations to make government larger and more intrusive. Does this surprise anyone? It was written by people who cannot imagine any solution not coming from government. One thing you definitely will not see in the Commission report is a single critique of our interventionist foreign policy, which is the real source of most anti-American feelings around the globe.

The Commissioners recommend the government spend billions of dollars spreading pro-US propaganda overseas, as if that will convince the world to love us. What we have forgotten in the years since the end of the Cold War is that actions speak louder than words. The US didn’t need propaganda in the captive nations of Eastern Europe during the Cold War because people knew us by our deeds. They could see the difference between the United States and their Soviet overlords. That is why, given the first chance, they chose freedom. Yet everything we have done in response to the 9-11 attacks, from the Patriot Act to the war in Iraq, has reduced freedom in America. Spending more money abroad or restricting liberties at home will do nothing to deter terrorists, yet this is exactly what the 9-11 Commission recommends.

Our nation will be safer only when government does less, not more. Rather than asking ourselves what Congress or the president should be doing about terrorism, we ought to ask what government should stop doing. It should stop spending trillions of dollars on unconstitutional programs that detract from basic government functions like national defense and border security. It should stop meddling in the internal affairs of foreign nations, but instead demonstrate by example the superiority of freedom, capitalism, and an open society. It should stop engaging in nation-building, and stop trying to create democratic societies through military force. It should stop militarizing future enemies, as we did by supplying money and weapons to characters like Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It should stop entangling the American people in unholy alliances like the UN and NATO, and pledge that our armed forces will never serve under foreign command. It should stop committing American troops to useless, expensive, and troublesome assignments overseas, and instead commit the Department of Defense to actually defending America. It should stop interfering with the 2nd amendment rights of private citizens and businesses seeking to defend themselves.

More than anything, our federal government should stop deluding us that more government is the answer. We have far more to fear from an unaccountable government at home than from any foreign terrorist.

Source: Lew Rockwell

Resources:
911 Commission Report (pdf) & Response (pdf)
911 Historical Timeline
911 Video Archives (Camera Planet)
America and the World Beyond 911 by Johnny Liberty (pdf)
A Hard Rain (pdf)
Awaken to Consciousness by Dalai Lama (pdf)
Chief Arvol Looking Horse’s Perspective (pdf)
FAA Destroys Terror Tape (pdf)
Inside Job Music (mp3) by Don Henley
Let’s Roll 9/11
Lies a Sixth Grader Would Not Accept by Michael Ruppert
Painful Questions Ad (pdf)
Self-Evident Poem and Music (mp3) by Ani DiFranco
Reflections After 911 by Johnny Liberty (pdf)
USA Patriot Act (pdf)

NewWTC-288“There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious…

But even people who aren’t partisan Republicans shy away from confronting the administration’s dishonest case for war, because they don’t want to face the implications…

After all, suppose a politician – or a journalist –
admits to himself that Mr. Bush bamboozled the nation into war.
Well, launching a war on false pretenses is, to say the least a breach of trust.

So if you admit to yourself that such a thing happened,
you have a moral obligation to demand accountability –
and to do so in the face not only of a powerful,
ruthless political machine but in the face of a country
not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited
9/11 for political gain. It’s a scary prospect.

Yet, if we can’t find people willing to take the risk –
to face the truth and act on it – what will happen to our democracy?”
–Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 24, 2003

Intelligent News for the Rest of Us

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9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie | PrisonPlanet.com

9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11 140409top

By Paul Joseph Watson

The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission – John Farmer – says that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11, echoing the assertions of fellow 9/11 Commission members who concluded that the Pentagon were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack.

Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), and is also a former New Jersey Attorney General.

Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission is entitled The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, and is set to be released tomorrow.

The book unveils how “the public had been seriously misled about what occurred during the morning of the attacks,” and Farmer himself states that “at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”

Only the very naive would dispute that an agreement not to tell the truth is an agreement to lie. Farmer’s contention is that the government agreed to create a phony official version of events to cover-up the real story behind 9/11.

The publisher of the book, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, states that, “Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security.”

farmer

In August 2006, the Washington Post reported, “Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.”

The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

Farmer himself is quoted in the Post article, stating, “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

As we also reported in August 2006, released portions of NORAD tapes from 9/11, which were featured in a Vanity Fair article, do little to answer skeptic’s questions about the impotence of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 and if anything only increase focus on the incompatibility of the official version of events with what is actually known to have taken place on that day.

Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job, however, Farmer’s testimony, along with that of his fellow 9/11 Commission members, conclusively demonstrates that, whatever really happened on 9/11, the official story as told to the public on the day and that which remains the authorities’ version of events today, is a lie – according to the very people who were tasked by the government to investigate it. This is a fact that no debunker or government apologist can ever legitimately deny.

Research related links:

  1. Mukasey Denies Request for Special Counsel to Investigate CIA Interrogators
  2. In Their Own Words: Admissions from the people who wrote the 9/11 Commission Report that it was compromised
  3. Lehman: Commission Purposely Set Up So that 9/11 Staff Had Conflict of Interest
  4. Walter Mondale and Mark Dayton Support New 9/11 Investigation
  5. Obama: Trilateral Commission Endgame
  6. Pentagon Faxes Charges for September 11 Military Commission
  7. British Commission Hypes Bioterrorism Threat
  8. Commission Recommends U.S. Use ‘Direct Force’–If Needed–to Stop Iran, N. Korea Nuke Programs
  9. McCain’s Economic Snake Oil Commission
  10. What Do NORAD’s 9/11 Computer Chat Logs Reveal?
  11. UN Human Rights Official Wants Investigation Into US Government Role In 9/11

Source: PrisonPlanet.com

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Endgame: When Debt is Fraud, Debt Forgiveness is the Last and Only Remedy | Endgame

By Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D.

Introduction

Finally serious economists are considering a position I have been maintaining and writing about since the 2008 financial meltdown. Whatever its name— erasure, repudiation, abolishment, cancellation, jubilee—debt forgiveness, will have to eventually emerge forefront in global efforts to solve an ongoing systemic financial crisis.

“On a grand scale the only way to erase counterfeit money and (counterfeit) assets of hundreds of trillions of dollars is to erase the debts associated with those fake assets. (Let me underscore again, these are not “toxic” assets, they are fake assets.)… Forgiveness in general, and forgiveness of debt in particular, stand as virtues if they free us up to acknowledge, address, and learn from our culpability, start anew, and create forward.” ( The Big Squeeze, Part 3: The Quiet Rebellion: Civil Disobedience, Local Markets, and Debt Erasure (January 29, 2011)

Debt forgiveness, therefore, accomplishes two important things. It eliminates the increasing and outsized portion of productive enterprise to pay off unproductive obligations, and it clears the ground for new opportunities, new thinking, invention, and entrepreneurialism. This is why the ability to declare bankruptcy is so essential in the pursuit of both happiness and innovation.

Currently we are mired in a “new normal” and calls for “austerity” which are nothing more than the delusional efforts of a status quo to avoid the consequences of its own error and fraud and to profit evermore. So bedazzled by the false wealth created by debt multiplication and its concomitant fantasy of ever-higher returns, this status quo continues to be stupidly amazed that people are not spending and that the economy is not picking up. But how could it be otherwise?

Productive wealth has been trapped in a web of parasitic theft, counterfeiting, liability evasion, non-regulation, and prosecutorial non-accountability. All the fundamental attributes of a functioning exchange economy have been warped to reward creative criminals. I spoke extensively about this in my posts from 2008. ( Imaginary Worth, Empire of Debt: How Modern Finance Created Its Own Downfall (October 15, 2008)

The unsustainable nature of debt

Two observations: 1) Fabricated/parasitic so-called “wealth” destroys value by diluting the value of productive wealth. 2) Debt/credit that cannot be paid back is never an asset and is always a hot-potato liability (needing to be foisted to a greater fool to garner “profit” and transaction fees):

“The models [modern debt are] based upon had no contact with reality. They assumed unlimited growth and ability to pay. When matched against the reality of people paying ten times their salary for mortgages that actually added more money owed to their principal (i.e. with negative amortization), required no money down, and set up “balloon payments,” large step-ups in payments after a few years) there is no possible way they could NOT default in a predictable span of time.” ( Part II: How the Credit Default Swap Scam Works (October 13, 2008)

Systemically, all debt that charges a percentage (“usury”) originates in delusion. Debt grows exponentially indefinitely, growth (income and otherwise) cannot. This leads to a widening condition where the fruits of productive “growth” devoted to interest payments increase until those fruits are entirely consumed. (The Elephant In The Room: Debt Grows Exponentially, While Economies Only Grow In An S-Curve (Washington’s Blog)

Once this happens, stores of wealth (hard assets) begin to be cannibalized to make up for the difference. You see this in Greece with its sale of public assets to private companies, and in middle-class America where people are liquidating retirement accounts to pay for their cost of living.

This problem is compounded by a private Federal Reserve that lends money into circulation at interest, and then allows the multiplication of this consumer debt-money liability through fractional reserve banking. The money in circulation today could pay only a small fraction of the total private and public debt. That fact alone is evidence of a kind of systemic fraud. “If you just work hard enough, save, and make sensible decisions, you can get out of debt” could only physically work for a bare fraction of the population, given the money-to-debt ratio. The rest would have to simply default to clear the boards.

This is why debt forgiveness makes not only moral but rational, mathematical sense. Finances require balancing to be coherent. There must be some way to redress systemic imbalance. One has to be able to “zero the scales” to get an accurate weight of value and to re-establish healthy value creation. Read more…