The Pentagon spent $50,000 of our money to buy up the first edition of Operation Dark Heart by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and destroy every copy. The second printing has lots of words blacked out. WikiLeaks claims to have a first edition, but hasn’t shared it. However, reading the bleeped-through version reveals plenty. [The New York Times, [...]
The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “War on Terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.
The Obama administration has signaled that it wants the Justice Department to relocate the 9/11 terror trials, according to Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The Senator’s spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said Schumer spoke “with high-level members of the administration and urged them to find alternatives.” The move comes a little more than a day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on the Justice Department to change the venue of the trial.
n 2009, we had two additional intelligence agencies, a czar for national intelligence and an intelligence budget of more than $75 billion. In all three cases, there was sufficient intelligence available to prevent the attacks. In all three cases, however, our intelligence efforts were unimaginative, divided and diffuse. A blizzard of warnings went unheeded in all three cases. The United States had broken the Japanese military code, which provided many warnings of a decision to attack the United States. In the case of 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency received warnings from foreign liaison intelligence services, including the French, German, Israeli and Russian services.
Here’s the full transcript of President Obama’s remarks this afternoon: State Dining Room, 4:34 P.M. EST THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. The immediate reviews that I ordered after the failed Christmas terrorist attack are now complete. I was just briefed on the findings and recommendations for reform, and I believe it’s important that the American [...]
Compare Tony Blair’s latest confession to mass murder with Bush’s. The BBC has just aired an interview of Blair in which he was asked whether he would have attacked Iraq even if he had known there were no “weapons of mass destruction” there. Blair replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him.”
Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” which may be true, but as Greenwald noted, “the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.”
One of the best features of a visit to Los Angeles is the opportunity to hang out with the guy who put Charles Manson in prison, the most successful criminal prosecutor we’re ever likely to see, Vince Bugliosi (105 convictions in 106 felony jury trials, 21 convictions in 21 murder trials). I spoke with him on Tuesday about his forthcoming documentary film.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the corporate “mainstream” media make quite a pair. We’re hearing a very “balanced” debate over whether KSM should be tried in New York City, and whether the most insane objections to that proposal are really insane or not. But what are we not hearing?
