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Is This What’s in Those 28 Pages? And Does it Matter?

Wednesday April 27, 2016

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Did the CIA meet with some of the 9/11 hijackers ahead of the attacks on New York? Did the Saudi government help finance those hijackers? Someone knows the answers, and soon, you might know as well.

This Summer?

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told the New York Times the so-called “28 pages,” a still-classified section from the official report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, may be released to the public as early as this summer. The full 838-page report, minus those pages, was published in December 2002.

The pages detail Saudi Arabia involvement in funding the 9/11 hijackers, and were classified by then-President George W. Bush.

So what do they say?

The 28 Pages

Richard Clarke is the former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism for the United States. He is best-known for trying to warn the George W. Bush administration that a terror attack was imminent in the days preceding 9/11. As late as a July 5, 2001, White House meeting with the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret Service and the INS, Clarke stated that “something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.”
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The Pentagon Gong Show

Wednesday April 27, 2016

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It should be clear that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) launched by George W. Bush and perpetuated by Barack Obama is a bust. It is now the longest war in US history; it is now the second most expensive war in US history; and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. 

Yet despite the GWOT’s astronomical cost, forces deployed and combat tempos are minuscule when compared the those of the far lower cost Viet Nam War. Nevertheless, the top uniformed and civilian officials in the Pentagon are whining to Congress that these tepid tempos have created a looming readiness crisis. They assert the relatively small cutbacks in the future growth implied by the budget caps of Budget Control Act of 2011 to what is by far the largest defense budget in the world is now the “gravest strategic danger” facing the United States!

A logical person, living in a sane world, would think that the GWOT, its high cost, its clearly broken nature, and the huge size of the defense budget would be major issues in the 2016 Presidential election. But the presidential candidates and the mainstream media, like the Pentagon, are silent on this surreal travesty. Indeed, the pathologies of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) are as much off limits in contemporary political discourse as is foul language is at holy communion. 
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The Classified '28 Pages': A Diversion From Real US-Saudi Issues

Tuesday April 26, 2016

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The controversy surrounding the infamous “28 pages” on the possible Saudi connection with the terrorists that were excised from the joint Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks is at fever pitch. But that controversy is a distraction from the real problems that Saudi Arabia’s policies pose to the United States and the entire Middle East region.

The political pressure to release the 28 pages has been growing for the past couple of years, with resolutions in both houses of Congress urging the president to declassify the information. But now legislation with bipartisan sponsorship has advanced in Congress that would deprive any foreign government of sovereign immunity in regard to responsibility for a terrorist attack on US soil and thus make it possible to sue the Saudi government in court for damages from the 9/11 attacks. 

That development prompted Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir to threaten last month to pull out as much as $750 billion in Saudi assets held in the United States. The Obama administration opposes the legislation, warning of “unintended consequences” – specifically that the US government could face lawsuits because of its actions abroad. Analysts of Saudi economic policy, however, do not take al-Jubeir’s threat very seriously since it would simply punish the Saudi economy.
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Wartime Washington Lives In Luxury...Guess Who Pays The Bills?

Tuesday April 26, 2016

Washington war contracts have enriched northern Virginia at a level equal to the total budgets of countries like Belgium and Sweden. That post-9/11 security- and military-industrial complex financial bonanza is why north Virginia counties are the wealthiest in the nation. Who is behind the explosions of  McMansions being built in the former sleepy outer counties of northern Virginia? The deep state operatives, who populate K Street, the think tanks, the security contractors, the permanent campaign operatives, etc. It is the one percent trafficking in fear to pad their nests at the expense of the rest of the country. How much longer can this scam go on? The Liberty Report is joined today by American Conservative Magazine's Kelley Vlahos to discuss the deep -- and deeply rich -- state that really runs things...
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The Hell on Earth Paved by Samantha Power’s Good Intentions

Tuesday April 26, 2016

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In Batman Vs. Superman, the intrepid reporter Lois Lane (played by Amy Adams), tries to expose a dastardly villain and gets herself into a deadly predicament from which Superman must save her. This has been the Lois Lane formula since 1938. But in this case, the rescue has blowback. The villain in question was an African warlord/terrorist. And the intervention of Superman (and the CIA) somehow precipitates a massacre of local civilians. Lois’s efforts end up leading to the very kind of atrocity she was crusading against.

This also aptly describes the Africa policy of Samantha Power, the most strident “humanitarian interventionist” in the Obama administration. Power’s career was encapsulated in a single awful moment last week. A New York Times story relates that:
“As the convoy barreled through a village in northern Cameroon on Monday, a 7-year-old boy darted to the road, excited to see the chain of white S.U.V.s carrying Samantha Power, the first cabinet-level American official to visit the country since 1991.

Distracted by a thundering noise, the boy glanced up at the helicopter providing security from above. Suddenly, he was struck dead — killed by the same convoy that had brought officials to showcase American efforts to help protect West Africa’s women and children.”
Running over one of those children with a car may seem a botched “showcase.” However it quite accurately, if tragically, exemplified the sort of “protection” that the US government, and Ms. Power in particular, has provided the people of the African continent.
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Censored, Surveilled, Watch Listed and Jailed: The Absurdity of Being a Citizen in the American Police State

Monday April 25, 2016

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In the American police state, the price to be paid for speaking truth to power (also increasingly viewed as an act of treason) is surveillance, censorship, jail and ultimately death.

However, where many Americans go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all you really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
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Escalation Without Representation: Syria, Iraq, and Black Sea

Monday April 25, 2016

According to the Washington Post, President Obama had promised the US public no fewer than eight times that he would not put US troops on the ground in Syria and would not mount ground opreations in Syria. Then the pretext of a rescue operation of the Yazidi minority was cooked up in 2014 and the president began military operations in Syria. He expanded them under the also false narrative that a "Khorasan Group" had emerged that was a direct threat to the United States. Then he used ISIS as a pretext to further expand US military operations in Syria. Today President Obama announced that he was quintupling the number of US troops on the ground in Syria to help create a Sunni-Kurd alliance against ISIS (and presumably against Assad). Meanwhile, US has decided to ramp up its naval presence in the Black Sea by using proxies Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria to get around Montreux Convention restrictions. Also, more US troops to Iraq and to eastern Europe. Through all these escalations everywhere, Congress remains completely silent. What is the endgame? The Liberty Report provides some perspective...
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Yes, Prince Faisal, We Need to ‘Recalibrate’ Our Relationship

Sunday April 24, 2016

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For decades the US and Saudi Arabia have shared a peculiar relationship: the Saudis sell relatively cheap oil to the United States for which they accept our fiat currency. They then recycle those paper dollars into the US military-industrial complex through the purchase of billions of dollars worth of military equipment, and the US guarantees the security of the Saudi monarchy.

By accepting only dollars for the sale of its oil, the Saudis help the dollar remain the world’s reserve currency. This has meant that we can export inflation, finance the warfare/welfare state, and delay our day of financial reckoning.
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Defending Democracy to the Last Drop of Oil

Saturday April 23, 2016

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Poor President Barack Obama flew to Saudi Arabia this past week but its ruler, King Salman, was too busy to greet him at Riyadh’s airport.

This snub was seen across the Arab world as a huge insult and violation of traditional desert hospitality. Obama should have refused to deplane and flown home.

Alas, he did not. Obama went to kow-tow to the new Saudi monarch and his hot-headed son, Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef. They are furious that Obama has refused to attack Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria’s Assad regime.

They are also angry as hornets that the US may allow relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi royal family, which is widely suspected of being involved in the attack.

Interestingly, survivors of the 34 American sailors killed aboard the USS Liberty when it was attacked by Israeli warplanes in 1967, have been denied any legal recourse.
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Ron Paul Rewind: 'You're Painting an Overly Optimistic Picture of Afghanistan Success' (2004)

Friday April 22, 2016

It was yet another in a periodic series of House International Relations Committee hearings where the "experts" were trotted out to tell us how incredibly well the US intervention in Afghanistan was going and that if only Congress would keep the money train at full throttle, one hundred flowers would bloom where US bombs planted the seeds. This date was 2004, a hearing titled "US Security Police in Afghanistan on the Eve of National Elections," featuring Lieutenant General Walter L. Sharp, Director, Strategic Plans and Policy, The Joint Staff.
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