| Author | Message | | Cowboy | |  | | Nobody | | | | Cowboy | | | | DanielDives | | Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 2:53 am Post subject: |
| Asbestos - one of the WTC complex`s problems solved, but...
Most Ground Zero Rescue Workers May Suffer for Life
By ELIZABETH SOLOMONT - September 6, 2006
http://www.nysun.com/article/39120
Nearly 70% of rescue workers exposed to toxic dust at ground zero became ill as a result, a study released yesterday said, citing a correlation between respiratory illness and recovery work after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. | | | | DanielDives | | | | DanielDives | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 5:55 am Post subject: |
| Reply to Popular Mechanics re 9/11 by Peter Myers
http://www.serendipity.li/wot/pop_mech/reply_to_popular_mechanics.htm#1
Many links to other anonamlies are included in his essay.
A second article by Popular Mechanics and a book? Sounds like the old "final version" bullshit like Posner on JFK (debunked) and Cristol on the USS Librty (debunked).
Perhaps we're getting warmer as more Americans have reservations about 9-11 so much that the 9-11 Commission Chairman Kearns and Hamilton have put out a subsequent apologia in an attempt to salvage their reputation or place in history and not be the newest "Warren Commission". Look at what isn't discussed.
CONSPIRACY CRANKS
By JAMES B. MEIGS
September 12, 2006 -- ON Feb. 7, 2005, I became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for world domination. That day, Popular Mechanics, the magazine I edit, hit newsstands with a story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs - which calls itself the "9/11 Truth Movement" - was aflame with wild fantasies about me, my staff and the article we had published. Conspiracy Web sites labeled Popular Mechanics a "CIA front organization" and compared us to Nazis and war criminals.
For a 104-year-old magazine about science, technology, home improvement and car maintenance, this was pretty extreme stuff. What had we done to provoke such outrage?
Research.
Conspiracy theories alleging that 9/11 was a U.S. government operation are rapidly infiltrating the mainstream. These notions are advanced by hundreds of books, over a million Web pages and even in some college classrooms. The movie "Loose Change," a slick roundup of popular conspiracy claims, has become an Internet sensation.
Worse, these fantasies are gaining influence on the international stage. French author Thierry Meyssan's "The Big Lie," which argues that the U.S. military orchestrated the attacks, was a bestseller in France, and his claims have been widely repeated in European and Middle Eastern media. And recent surveys reveal that, even in moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey and Jordan, majorities of the public believe that no Arab terrorists were involved in the attacks.
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion," Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying. "He is not entitled to his own facts." Yet conspiracy theorists want to pick and choose which facts to believe.
Rather than grapple with the huge preponderance of evidence in support of the mainstream view of 9/11, they tend to focus on a handful of small anomalies that they believe cast doubt on the conventional account. These anomalies include the claim that the hole in the Pentagon was too small to have been made by a commercial jet (but just right for a cruise missile); that the Twin Towers were too robustly built to have been destroyed by the jet impacts and fires (so they must have been felled by explosives), and more. If true, these and similar assertions would cast serious doubt on the mainstream account of 9/11.
But they're not true. Popular Mechanics has been fact-checking such claims since late 2004, and recently published a book on the topic. We've pored over transcripts, flight logs and blueprints, and interviewed more than 300 sources - including engineers, aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses and members of investigative teams.
In every single case, we found that the very facts used by conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies are mistaken, misunderstood or deliberately falsified.
Here's one example: Meyssan and hundreds of Web sites cite an eyewitness who said the craft that hit the Pentagon looked "like a cruise missile with wings." Here's what that witness, a Washington, D.C., broadcaster named Mike Walter, actually told CNN: "I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up. It's really low.' And I saw it. I mean, it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon."
We talked to Walter and, like so many of the experts and witnesses widely quoted by conspiracy theorists, he told us he is heartsick to see the way his words have been twisted: "I struggle with the fact that my comments will forever be taken out of context."
Here's another: An article in the American Free Press claims that a seismograph at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory picked up signals indicating that large bombs were detonated in the towers. The article quotes Columbia geologist Won-Young Kim and certainly looks authoritative. Yet the truth on this issue is not hard to find. A published Lamont-Doherty report on the seismic record of 9/11 says no such thing. Kim told Popular Mechanics that the publication's interpretation of his research was "categorically incorrect." Yet the claim is repeated verbatim on more than 50 Web sites as well as in the film "Loose Change."
Every 9/11 conspiracy theory we investigated was based on similarly shoddy evidence. Most of these falsehoods are easy to refute simply by checking the original source material or talking to experts in the relevant fields. And yet even the flimsiest claims are repeated constantly in conspiracy circles, passed from Web site to book to Web site in an endless daisy chain. And any witness, expert - or publication - that tries to set the record straight is immediately vilified as being part of the conspiracy.
The American public has every right to ask hard questions about 9/11. And informed skepticism about government and media can be healthy. But skepticism needs to be based on facts, not fallacies. Unfortunately, for all too many, conspiratorial fantasies offer a seductive alternative to grappling with the hard realities of a post-9/11 world.
James B. Meigs is editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics. The magazine's new book, "Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand up to the Facts," is just out. | | | | meo48 | | Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 2:07 pm Post subject: FBI Says It Has No Evidence |
| The only evidence the FBI could have used to indict Bin Laden is his confessional tape that was release by the Pentagon on Dec. 13, 2001.
Ed Haas of the Muckraker Report through the Freedom of Information Act sent a series of questions to the CIA, DoD, and FBI regarding the provenence, chain of custody, and authentication of the tape.
Both the DoD and CIA told him that he has to wait; too many other requests ahead of him. The FBI answered by saying those documents are under seal for various reasons that might include an ongoing investigation or cannot release for national security reasons.
The tape itself was authenticated by me and found out that it was bogus. The analysis of the tape confirmed what Jason Burke of The London Observer said on Dec. 16, 2001. The tape is genuine but the result of a sting operation run by the CIA with the help of either Pakistani or Saudi intelligence.
The analysis I did went further. It eliminated the Pakistanis as being part of it. It exposed the sting as a too part sting. First part was taping, second part was capturing.
The second part failed because one of the special forces helicopter crashed due to bad weather, freezing rain. on Nov. 2, 2001.
What was left in the hands of president Bush was the product of the first part, the tape.
By Dec. 13, 2001, the calls for proof of Bin Laden's guilt had mounted to the point Bush could no longer ignore it. This call was the result of the images of innocent civilians Al-jazeera was piping into the living rooms of almost every Muslim family during the month of Ramadan.
The only item available to Bush as evidence that would counter balance those images was the tape.
By releasing the tape, Bush told Bin Laden how close intelligence were to (capturing) him and is the main reason Bin Laden has not been caught yet; no one was going to get that close to him again.
The FBI's answer to Ed Haas Freedom of Information Request could have three reasons, as I told Ed.
1. Either a genuine investigation is taking place since I shared all my raw material with FBI special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
2. Mr. Fitzgerald sent the info to head quarters where it was put under seal and there is no investigation.
3. FBI conducted investigation to indict Bin Laden in 2001 but found out that the tape was bogus and sealed it for national security reasons.
The full article can be read at
http://www.counterpunch.org/osseiran08212006.html
A follow up article that is out in print today can be found online at
http://www.lonestaricon.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=493&z=60
On a final note, this article is not another conspiracy theory kind of article. All components are available to the media and law enforcement to test and probe.
I do find it shameful though that The Observer in 2001 dropped the ball and did not follow up on such an important story. All attempt to get any comments from Jason Burke and his editor went without answer. | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 4:16 pm Post subject: Atta in Prague; What CIA doesn’t want you to hear |
| Lie after lie after lie for a basis for war.
Atta in Prague
The story that the ‘intelligence community’ doesn’t want you to hear.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:48 p.m. CT Sept 13, 2006
Sept. 13, 2006 - The claim that terrorist leader Mohamed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi spy a few months before 9/11 was never substantiated, but that didn’t stop the White House from trying to insert the allegation in presidential speeches, according to classified documents.
Cryptic references to the White House efforts are contained in a new Senate Intelligence Committee report released last Friday that debunked purported links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, attempts by committee Democrats to make public a more explicit account of White House interest in the anecdote were thwarted when the “intelligence community” refused to declassify a CIA cable that lays out the controversy, according to congressional sources. Democrats charged in a written statement that intelligence officials had failed to demonstrate “that disclosing the [cable] ... would reveal sources and methods or otherwise harm national security.” The Democrats also complained that officials' refusal to declassify the cable “represents an improper use of classification authority by the intelligence community to shield the White House.”
According to two sources familiar with the blacked-out portions of the Senate report that discuss the CIA cable's contents, the document indicates that White House officials had proposed mentioning the supposed Atta-Prague meeting in a Bush speech scheduled for March 14, 2003. Originated by Czech intelligence shortly after 9/11, the tendentious claim was that in April 2001, Atta, the 9/11 hijack leader, had met in Prague with the local station chief for Iraqi intelligence. The sources said that upon learning of the proposed White House speech, the CIA station in Prague sent back a cable explaining in detail why the agency believed the anecdote was ill-founded.
According to one of the sources familiar with the Senate report's censored portions, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, the tone of the CIA cable was “strident” and expressed dismay that the White House was trying to shoehorn the Atta anecdote into the Bush speech to be delivered only days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The source said the cable also suggested that policymakers had tried to insert the same anecdote into other speeches by top administration officials.
A second source familiar with the Senate report, however, maintained that it could be read as routine give-and-take between policymakers asking legitimate questions about intelligence reporting and field operatives giving respectful responses. Both sources familiar with the report acknowledge that there is no proof the White House saw the cable, and thus it is unclear whether the CIA document had any bearing on the fact that Bush never mentioned the Atta anecdote in a speech. One of the sources said that some GOP senators on the Intelligence Committee felt the CIA cable issue should be omitted entirely from the Senate report because there was no proof the cable had influenced the White House.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano says the agency “cooperated closely with the committee as it prepared its report. Mindful of the vital oversight role that Congress plays—and the important issues it was reviewing in this case—the agency provided the committee with classified material that typically does not leave our headquarters. And we agreed to the vast majority of the committee's declassification requests. When CIA did not agree to a specific public release, its case was based on current intelligence equities and a desire to preserve the candor essential to good internal discussion of complex issues. It's simply wrong to suggest the goal was to protect the White House.” A White House spokesman had no comment.
Uncensored portions of the Senate report say that by January 2003, the CIA had issued two assessments questioning whether the Prague meeting occurred. In these assessments, the agency said that neither it nor the FBI were able to confirm the meeting happened.
A former senior intelligence official who was in active service at the time confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the White House on multiple occasions had proposed inserting the Atta-in-Prague anecdote in speeches by both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney. The official said that the CIA usually objected to the White House proposals. Although Bush never mentioned the Atta anecdote, Cheney referred to it on several occasions—most recently in a TV appearance last weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press” during which he conceded that the claim that Atta had a pre-9/11 meeting with an Iraqi spook had never been confirmed.
After the Czech intelligence report first surfaced, it became a holy grail for Bush administration hard-liners seeking evidence to justify a possible U.S. war in Iraq. Cheney and his aides in particular badgered intelligence officials for evidence confirming the Prague meeting and for other proof connecting Saddam to 9/11 and Al Qaeda, according to several former intelligence officials. As my NEWSWEEK colleague Michael Isikoff and his coauthor David Corn report in their new book “Hubris,” some top Pentagon and White House conservatives, including former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, were admirers of Laurie Mylroie, an eccentric author and academic who theorized that Saddam’s intelligence apparatus, rather than Osama bin Laden, was directing Al Qaeda attacks. While the administration, and particularly Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, put a lot of effort into trying to confirm Mylroie’s claims, they were never substantiated.
In uncensored comments attached to Friday’s Senate Intelligence Committee report, Democrats explicitly charge that the administration bullied and harangued intelligence agencies to come up with evidence linking Saddam to Al Qaeda. “This pressure took the form of policymakers repetitively tasking analysts to review, reconsider and revise their analytical judgments,” the Democrats allege. In support of this claim, the Democrats cite a July 2003 paper on Iraq in which the CIA itself said that “Requests for reporting and analysis of [Iraq’s link to Al Qaeda] were steady and heavy in the period leading up to the war, creating significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection.”
Democrats also publicly report that an internal CIA watchdog known as the “politicization ombudsman” had looked into complaints that the administration was pressuring intelligence analysts to come up with intelligence connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda. According to the Democrats, the ombudsman told committee investigators that he felt the “hammering” that intelligence analysts got from administration policymakers on Iraq intelligence was, in the Democrats’ language, “harder than he had previously witnessed in his 32-year career” at the CIA. The Democrats also report that former CIA chief George Tenet told the committee that analysts had felt pressured by policymakers and that “The issue where there was intense focus and questioning where the analysts felt pressure was Iraq and Al Qaeda.” A White House official noted that investigations by the 9/11 Commission and the commission headed by Judge Lawrence Silberman, which investigated WMD threats, did not substantiate suggestions that the CIA or other intelligence analysts had been pressured over Iraq.
According to a chronology included by Democrats in their appendix to the Senate report, Cheney alluded to the purported Atta-in-Prague meeting at least three times between 9/11 and a year later, and Condoleezza Rice, then the national-security adviser, alluded to it cryptically right before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In December 2001, Cheney had claimed: “It’s been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”
On TV last Sunday, however, Cheney said: “We’ve never been able to [b]confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.”
Host Tim Russert then asked him: “And the meeting with Atta did not occur?”
Cheney replied: “We don’t know. I mean, we’ve never been able to, to, to link it, and the FBI and CIA have worked it aggressively. I would say, at this point, nobody has been able to confirm …”[/b]
According to former senior intelligence officials, when the White House sent to the CIA its first proposed version of the now-famous United Nations speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell outlining the U.S. case against Saddam, the 48-page draft—which the officials say they believe was largely written by Scooter Libby—included prominent references to the Atta-in-Prague anecdote. Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, told a hearing organized by congressional Democrats earlier this year that one of the most dramatic moments in the preparation for the speech occurred in Tenet’s conference room at CIA headquarters. Powell was reading through the speech as part of a final rehearsal before leaving for New York. According to Wilkerson’s account, as Powell proceeded, Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national-security adviser (who is now the national-security adviser) asked what happened to the Atta-in-Prague story, which Powell had omitted. According to Wilkerson, Powell replied, “We took it out, and it’s staying out.”
According to portions of the new Senate report that were not censored, the anecdote about Atta meeting Ahmed al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence station chief, in Prague originated with a “single source” for Czech intelligence. Investigations by the CIA and FBI determined that in the years before 9/11, Atta had indeed visited Prague on at least two occasions. But according to a July 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency paper quoted in the Senate report, investigators trying to substantiate the single-source claim about Atta’s 2001 Prague meeting found “no photographic, immigration or other documentary evidence” to back it up. Investigations by the FBI and CIA also turned up evidence that Atta was in the United States on days shortly before and shortly after the alleged Prague meeting. The CIA also turned up information indicating that for most of the day the alleged meeting occurred, Atta’s alleged Iraqi interlocutor, al-Ani, was not even in Prague but rather was visiting a city about 60-90 minutes away. Al-Ani also denied to U.S. interrogators after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that he had ever met with Atta in Prague, or anywhere else.
Even after most career intelligence operatives and analysts had begun to doubt the credibility of the Atta-in-Prague story, some administration hard-liners still were touting it as a possible Saddam-9/11 smoking gun and scrounging around for scraps of corroboration. In a secret briefing prepared for delivery to White House officials including Hadley and Libby in September 2002, officials working for Douglas Feith, then the hard-line head of the Pentagon’s policy development branch, included a special slide about the purported meeting that included an allegation that “several workers at Prague Airport identified Atta following 9/11 and remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta.” When earlier versions of the same briefing were presented to CIA officials and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, however, the Prague slide was not included. Several former intelligence officials who worked directly on investigations of Saddam’s alleged Al Qaeda ties said that they had never heard of the allegation about Atta’s brother, even though defense officials claimed this had been reported through normal intelligence channels. In a footnote to their new book, Isikoff and Corn report that Atta had two sisters, but no brother.
While some senators did dispute whether references to the censored CIA cable about Atta in Prague should be included in their new report, all but one Republican member of the Intelligence Committee voted to endorse the more sweeping conclusions comparing pre-war and postwar intelligence findings about Saddam and Al Qaeda. Among the findings: Saddam’s dealings with Al Qaeda were tentative and wary rather than collaborative, and Saddam’s intelligence service once warned him that the United States might try to make up or exploit any Iraqi links to Al Qaeda for propaganda purposes.
In a section of the Senate report that is not questioned by administration supporters on the committee, investigators also produce strong new evidence undermining a key section of Powell’s U.N. speech, in which the secretary of State claimed that the presence in Baghdad, during the spring and summer of 2002, of alleged Al Qaeda associate Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi demonstrated evidence of a possible relationship between Saddam’s government and Al Qaeda. The new Senate report says that after the U.S. invasion, American personnel in Baghdad discovered evidence that Saddam’s government considered Zarqawi an outlaw and made unsuccessful efforts to track him down and capture him. Postwar investigations turned up no evidence Saddam’s government ever had friendly dealings with Zarqawi, who later gained worldwide notoriety as the beheader of U.S. hostages and self-proclaimed leader of jihadi forces in post-Saddam Iraq.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14824384/site/newsweek/
© 2006 MSNBC.com | | | | Jefferson Davis | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
