High Treason Case Dropped at the Department of Justice: Betraying America Sanctioned by Obama Administration

New_york_crimes_rally_010

And the hits just keep on coming from Obama's Department of Justice -- last week we discovered that the DoJ scuttled the prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood groups in the US (i.e. CAIR, etc.)

We protested this action of sedition back in 2008.

Breaking News Politico
-------------------------------------------------

The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush denounced as a breach of national security and that stoked a congressional debate about whether the government had overstepped its authority as it scrambled to respond to the 9/11 terror attacks.

The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005 revealing that after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush ordered the interception of certain phone calls and e-mail messages into and out of the U.S. without a warrant — a move many lawyers contend violated the 1978 law governing intelligence-related wiretaps.

Atlas Shrugs

Arab Riots Raise New False Hopes for US Dupes

The Revolution of Hope Is Changing the Way Americans Look at Islam
James Carroll, TomDispatch: "Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, 'God is great!' Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations. For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary."
Truthout

92% of Afghans Never Heard of 911

92% of Afghans never heard of 911; they believe the US is on their soil in order to "destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan." Of course, the country of origin of the 911 attacks knee jerks on the motive "to destroy Islam." This constant state of war mentality.

They gas their girls schools, while we build their schools. But we're the bad guys. Sheesh.

Of course, the recommnedation of the think tank is more aid, so we can gin up more hate.

You can't make this up.

92% of Afghans never heard of 9/11 Raw story hat tip Jack

Fewer than one in 10 Afghans are aware of the 9/11 attacks and their precipitation of the war in Afghanistan, says a study from an international think tank.

A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of those surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to "destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan."

To be sure, the survey can't claim to be definitive: It only canvassed men, and relied primarily on respondents from Helmand and Kandahar, the two most war-torn provinces in the country. But the results nonetheless show that Western forces fighting insurgents in Afghanistan have largely failed to connect with the local population.

“We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,” ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.

The survey also suggests that Afghans are skeptical of their own government's ability to protect them, and have little regard for the fledgling democratic institutions the country is building. Fully 43 percent could not name one positive aspect of democracy, and nearly two-thirds -- 61 percent -- said they didn't think Afghan forces would be able to keep up the fight against the Taliban if and when Western forces withdrew.

Atlas Shrugs

USA Accessory to Mumbai's 911

Perhaps a lawsuit is in order. The Indian government and the Chabad might think about filing a lawsuit against the US government. If either through stupidity, submission, cluelessness, or perfidy, they aided and abetted India's 911, then a lawsuit is in order. This is beyond egregious; this is treacherous. It is a horrible example of political correctness or self-imposed sharia.

Know the enemy, you silly dangerous clowns.

Chanting "USA" at Football Games is Offensive to Muslims

At least in the view of a dhimmi "University Academic Professional" at the University of Illinois. "Block-I chant portrays 'neither patriotism nor remembrance,'" by David Green, "University Academic Professional," in the Daily Illini, September 15 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):

The vast majority of 9/11 observances in this country cannot be seen as politically neutral events. Implicit in their nature are the notions that lives lost at the World Trade Center are more valuable than lives lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere; that the motives of the 9/11 attackers had nothing to do with genuine grievances in the Islamic world regarding American imperialism; and that the U.S. has been justified in the subsequent killing of hundreds of thousands in so-called retaliation.

The observance at Saturday's football game was no different. A moment of silence was followed by a military airplane flyover; in between, Block-I students chanted "USA, USA." This was neither patriotism nor remembrance in any justifiable sense, but politicization, militarism, propaganda and bellicosity. The University is a public institution that encompasses the political views of all, not just the most (falsely) "patriotic." Athletic planners should cease such exploitation for political purposes. They might at least consider how most Muslim students, American or otherwise, would respond to this nativist display; or better, Muslims and others that live their lives under the threat of our planes, drones and soldiers....

Never mind the non-Muslims in Muslim countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, and Egypt who are threatened and terrorized by Muslims. That wouldn't fit this "University Academic Professional"'s paradigm.

War Zone NYC - but do not insult Islam

If you close your eyes and listen to the jihadist convicted yesterday in his role in unleashing a bomb in the NYC subway system on the anniversary of the 911 Islamic attacks on America, you would swear it was Obama and his dhimmi administration talking: "I strongly urge the American people to stop supporting the war against Islam. And this will be in their own interest."

Ahmedzay's narrative reflects Obama's policy on Islamic jihad. He urges America to stop defending herself against the global jihad. Like Obama and his silly DoD Gates, he suggests that fighting jihad will only ...... create jihad. As for all of the jihadi attacks before Iraq and Afghanistan operations, well.... that's irrelevant, an inconvenient truth. The left never lets logic and evidence get in the way of their anti-American narrative.

The day this plot was foiled, Obama was in New York addressing the UN. His speech was about the greatest threat posed to man: global warming. I kid you not.

Obama's strategy to Islam is the very definition of Islam -- submission. His cover-up of the Fort Hood jihad massacre, the largest attack on a military base on American history, will go down in history as the most blatant act of subversion by a US president.

Like Obama points to Israel as the problem, this WMD would-be killer blames the zionists as well. No jihadist rant is complete without full-on Islamic Jew-hatred. Zarein Ahmedzay, the Muslim guilty of planning to bomb NYC on September 11th, said:

"Your Honor, I would like to quote from the Qur’an."

"Quote, Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their wealth for the price of Paradise, to fight in the way of Allah, to kill and get killed. It is a promise binding on the truth in the Torah, the Gospel and the Qur’an, end of quote.

[....]

"Yes. Um, Your Honor, I strongly urge the American people to stop supporting the war against Islam. And this will be in their own interest.

[...]

"And I believe that the real enemies of this country are the ones destroying this country from within. And I believe these are the special group, the Zionist Jews, I believe, who want a permanent shadow government within the government of the United States of America."

Sounds like Ahmedzay is describing the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood at the senior levels of all branches of the US government.

Who knew how iconic and metaphorical this image of the Pentagon would become 9 years after 911:

Atlas Shrugs

Republican Civil War

Republican Civil War Erupts

Jennifer Loven, HuffPost

WASHINGTON — In a shocking turnabout, the press secretary most known for defending President Bush on Iraq, Katrina and a host of other controversial issues produced a memoir damning of his old boss on nearly every level _ from too much secrecy to a less-than-honest selling of the war to a lack of personal candor and an unwillingness to admit mistakes.

In the first major insider account of the Bush White House, one-time spokesman Scott McClellan calls the operation "insular, secretive and combative" and says it veered irretrievably off course as a result.

The White House responded angrily Wednesday to McClellan's confessional memoir, calling it self-serving sour grapes.

"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to McClellan. "We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."

McClellan was the White House press secretary from May 2003 to April 2006, the second of four so far in Bush's presidency.

He reveals that he was pushed to leave earlier than he had planned, and he displays some bitterness about that as well as about being sometimes kept out of the loop on key decision-making sessions.

He excludes himself from major involvement in some of what he calls the administration's biggest blunders, for instance the decision to go to war and the initial campaign to sell that decision to the American people. But he doesn't spare himself entirely, saying, "I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.

He includes criticism for the reporters whose questions he fielded. The news media, he says, were "complicit enablers" for focusing more on "covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war."

And McClellan issues this disclaimer about Bush: "I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people."

But most everything else he writes comes awfully close to making just this assertion, all the more stunning coming from someone who had been one of the longest-serving of the band of loyalists to come to Washington with Bush from Texas.

The heart of the book concerns Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, a determination McClellan says the president had made by early 2002 _ at least a full year before the invasion _ if not even earlier.

"He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest," McClellan writes in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

The book, which had been scheduled for release on Monday, was being sold by bookstores on Wednesday after the publisher moved up its release amid intense media coverage of its contents.

McClellan says Bush's main reason for war always was "an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom." But Bush and his advisers made "a marketing choice" to downplay this rationale in favor of one focused on increasingly trumped-up portrayals of the threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction.

During the "political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people," Bush and his team tried to make the "WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were." Something else was downplayed as well, McClellan says: any discussion of "the possible unpleasant consequences of war _ casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions."

In Bush's second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was "insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin."

All of this was a "serious strategic blunder" that sent Bush's presidency "terribly off course."

"The Iraq war was not necessary," McClellan concludes.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton referred to the book and its author while campaigning Wednesday in Rapid City, S.D., saying, "In this book this young man essentially apologizes for having been part of misleading America for three years."

Reporters in Los Angeles with John McCain, the Republicans' candidate for president, asked if he believed that Bush used propaganda or deception regarding the war in Iraq. "I have no information on that fact. I am glad for one that Saddam Husein is no longer there," McCain said. He declined to comment on other assertions in the book, saying he had not read it.

McClellan draws a portrait of Bush as possessing "personal charm, wit and enormous political skill." He says Bush's administration early on possessed "seeds of greatness."

But McClellan ticks off a long list of Bush's weaknesses: someone with a penchant for self-deception if it "suits his needs at the moment," "an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader" who has a lack of interest in delving deeply into policy options, a man with a lack of self-confidence that makes him unable to acknowledge when he's been wrong.

McClellan also writes extensively about what he says is the Bush White House's excessive focus on "the permanent campaign."

"The Bush team imitated some of the worst qualities of the Clinton White House and even took them to new depths," he writes.

McClellan is most scathing on the topic of the administration's embrace of secrecy.

"The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine," he writes.

Three top Bush advisers come in for particularly harsh criticism.

McClellan calls Vice President Dick Cheney "the magic man" who "always seemed to get his way" and sometimes "simply could not contain his deep-seated certitude, even arrogance, to the detriment of the president."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser earlier in Bush's presidency, "was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort on helping him understand all the considerations and potential consequences" of war. Rice "was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview," McClellan says, but he predicts that "history will likely judge her harshly."

And former Bush political guru Karl Rove "always struck me as the kind of person who would be willing, in the heat of battle, to push the envelope to the limit of what is permissible ethically or legally."

The White House was severely damaged by blunders beyond the war, McClellan says.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, for instance, the administration went on autopilot "rather than seizing the initiative and getting in front of what was happening on the ground."

And Bush's drive to remake the Social Security program after his 2004 re-election failed in large part because the White House focused almost exclusively on "selling our sketchily designed plan" instead of doing behind-the-scenes work with lawmakers.

McClellan explains his dramatic shift from defender to critic as a difficult act of personal contrition, a way, to learn from his mistakes, be true to his Christian faith and become a better person. He says he started the book to explain his role in the CIA leak case, in which some of his own words turned out to be what he called "badly misguided," though sincere at the time.

McClellan says Bush loyalists will no doubt continue to think the administration's decisions have been correct and its unpopularity undeserved. "I've become genuinely convinced otherwise," he says.

Indeed, former Bush aides joined current White House aides in expressing disbelief and disappointment at McClellan's account.

"Not once did Scott approach me _ privately or publicly _ to discuss any misgivings he had about the war in Iraq or the manner in which the White House made the case for war," McClellan's predecessor as press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said.

Said Fran Townsend, former head of the White House-based counterterrorism office and now a CNN commentator: "This now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional."

Perino described Bush as "surprised" by the book but said the president wouldn't have anything to say about it. "He has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers," she said.

___

Associated Press writers Beth Fouhy in Rapid City, S.D., and Liz Sidoti in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

More in Politics...

A Promise to the Dead

A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman is an indictment of torture and a powerful study of individual and collective memory.

Chile Under Pinochet and the Post-9/11 "War on Terror"

By Sophia A. McClennen, AlterNet.

Torture, the suspension of democracy and civil rights, illegal surveillance, forced displacement, and a culture of fear led by a despot who gains power through an act of violence committed on September 11. Sound familiar? Canadian director Peter Raymont's new documentary, A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, covers familiar ground but in less familiar territory as he intertwines the life of Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman with the history of Chile and with the events of 9/11 in both Chile and the United States. Author of the award-winning play Death and the Maiden, Dorfman is a novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, journalist, and human rights activist. Born in Argentina in 1942, his family was forced to move to the United States in 1945 only to then become the victims of McCarthyism in 1954. They next fled to Chile, where Dorfman eventually gained citizenship. Exiled again from Chile in 1973, Dorfman has lived since the 1980s in Durham, North Carolina where he teaches at Duke University. Tracing the Dorfman family's multiple displacements, the documentary is an exploration of exile and loss, but it is equally the story of persistent hope, the survival of collective ties, and the triumph of memory.

Dorfman should have died on September 11, 1973 when a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet ousted the democratically-elected Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende. Dorfman served at the time as Allende's cultural advisor and his name was included on a list of government officials that would be called in the event of an attack. But he wasn't called. Rather than die alongside his friends and comrades, he lived -- and lived to tell the story. Or, as he tells readers of his memoir, Heading South, Looking North, which served as the basis for the film, "If it is not true that this was why I was saved, I have tried to make it true. In every story I tell. Haunted by the certainty that I have been keeping a promise to the dead."

The haunting presence of the dead and the even more haunting ways that the living hold radically contradictory memories of the dead form some of the central questions that guide Raymont's film. What does it mean to keep a promise to the dead? For Dorfman it means first and foremost telling the story of the thousands of Chileans who were tortured, disappeared, and exiled during the Pinochet years. It means using literature and the power of words to rescue stories that history would like us to forget. It also means being a voice for those that survived but suffered the trauma of losing loved ones. In one especially moving scene Dorfman accompanies Aleida, the daughter of Sergio Leiva, to a Chilean courthouse where he signs an affidavit confirming that he saw her father shot by a sniper while he was a refugee in the Argentine embassy. Until Dorfman's words provided a challenge to official history, she had suffered the trauma of not only losing her father but having his death completely erased from public memory.

Viewed in the current context of extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, and enemy combatants, where bodies disappear and die with no public record, Dorfman's story is both inspiring and chilling. During exile, Dorfman dedicated himself to advancing the cause of the Chilean resistance. His perfect bilingualism, due to having lived in the United States and in South America as a young man, and his skills as a writer uniquely positioned him to tell the story of the dictatorship. But, even though the exile years were spent tirelessly struggling for the return of democracy, those long years also served to distance him irremediably from Chile. This distance became painfully clear when his play, Death and the Maiden, about a torture survivor who confronts her torturer, opened in Chile to less than enthusiastic reviews. Yet it is arguably the most internationally significant play authored by a Latin American writer and has been staged across the globe -- to resounding success. After receiving an Olivier Award for its production in London, it opened on Broadway with Gene Hackman, Glenn Close, and Richard Dreyfus and was later made into a film directed by Roman Polanski and starring Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, and Stuart Wilson. But it has yet to fully reach Dorfman's intended audience. Dorfman's most internationally successful work brought the story of Chile closer to the world but left him even farther away. Rather than focus merely on Dorfman's successes as a writer, the documentary explores this gap when he has dinner with the actor, Paula Sharim, who diplomatically characterizes the play as "putting a finger in a wound."

Another scene in A Promise to the Dead presses the point of his outsider status when Dorfman appears on a television talk show with a Pinochet supporter shortly after the general's death. The debate is whether Pinochet deserves to have a military burial. Dorfman adamantly opposes the idea, arguing that a man who denies his enemies the ability to bury their dead has violated military codes of conduct. He then directly asks the program's host when he first knew about the torture conducted under Pinochet. The simple truth of Dorfman's words shocks the host and the viewer is left savoring one of those few moments when they have seen someone absolutely refuse to self-censor. It's a moment reminiscent of Stephen Colbert's speech in front of George W. Bush at the correspondent's dinner, except in this case Dorfman was dead serious.

The documentary does an excellent job of balancing between Dorfman's life and the events he has witnessed, but the real success of Raymont's film lies in the way that it captures essential features of Dorfman's aesthetic approach to writing his memoir. The memoir moves back and forth through time and across nations as it recalls the events of the coup in chapters that alternate with memories of Dorfman's life before the coup. Similarly, the film gracefully moves across time and space showing the ways that memory structures not only our sense of the past but also our dreams for the future. Memory is messy, it is flawed, it can confuse us and haunt us. A first-time visit to Dorfman's grandmother's grave reveals that she has been moved to a common unmarked burial ground. Dorfman, running from the loss of her death, had refused to remember her.

Yet memory also is what gives him strength, what inspires his writing, and what allows him to relive the extraordinary camaraderie of the Allende years. In a brilliant scene that reveals both the limits and the resilience of memory, Dorfman meets up with old friends and they reenact a pro-Allende victory march. Linked arm and arm the three men in their 60s erupt in song. When it comes time to turn, they move in opposite directions, having forgotten the actual route they used to take. As they break into laughter over the misstep, the message is clear: Some forgetting is inevitable. Some forgetting is willful. And some forgetting is criminal. When a nation has suffered radical trauma its greatest challenge is over which memories will survive, which will be suppressed, which will be fabricated, and which will be punished.

Pinochet's systematic denial of the dead, the tortured, and the exiled has drastically scarred Chile. It is impossible to watch this film and not feel deep connections between the story of Chile under Pinochet and the post 9/11/2001 world of the war on terror. At one point, Dorfman speaks about all the people who had to have known about the torture -- not just the government and the torturers, but also the people who cleaned the rooms, who cooked for the torturers, and who worked in the myriad jobs that were required to sustain them. Dorfman asks viewers to think about all of the people who knew something horrible was happening to their country and said nothing. He also visits Ground Zero in New York where the tragedy of the attacks and of the response to the attacks resonates eerily with his own memories of Chile.

Measured against these bleak experiences Raymont's film tells another story. It is a story of extraordinary hope. It is the story of the jubilance of the Allende years and the exhilaration of the vote to oust Pinochet. We watch democracy in action: first voting in a Socialist President and then removing a dictator from power. Ballots slip into a box and we think of other elections to come, other opportunities for change, other ways to keep a promise to the dead.

"A Promise to the Dead" will be shown on June 12th at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York. Go here for a full schedule.

Suppressing Evidence Often Proves Guilt

I can buy only the first part of the official 911 story. It is possible that four groups of suicidal terrorists hijacked 4 planes destined to crash on American sites.The rest of it is propaganda and cover up.Even as the first jet hit the WTC, there were 12 'witnesses' with accounts that paralleled one another too much to be authentic. Most of them were news media executives who produced coherent accounts repeated over and over throughout the day of the attack to a shocked and news hungry population.The two planes that struck the twin towers could not have caused the towers to implode and to fall as they did. It was a controlled demolition requiring an expertise held by seven US firms.When several hundred architects and engineers released forensic evidence to debunk the 911 commission report version, they met fanatic resistance from the government officials.Sibel Edmonds met similar obstacles when she broke her story on the sale of US nuclear secrets through the Turks to various Muslim States. Since 2001, there has been a massive media blackout on her reporting as well.The Agency efforts to suppress her findings as well as those of the 911 truth seekers are remarkable. The Agencies charged with the investigation of these atrocities were the ones that sealed the evidence from the public.