U.S. upped Iran psywar by exposing Israel?

The Pentagon's deliberate leak of Tel Aviv's military maneuver is seen in Israel as an attempt to pressure Iran over its nuclear program.

In a Saturday report published in the Yediot Aharonot, military affairs correspondent Alex Fishman suggested that the US had leaked information about a recent Israeli military exercise in a bid to take the psywar against Iran to a new level.

"As the Iranian regime discusses the European Union representative's most recent offer to halt its nuclear program in exchange for extensive benefits, the Americans opted to add a bit more pressure in the shape of Israel's air force," Fishman said.

"When the diplomacy of economic and political pressure fails to produce results, a shift is made to gunboat diplomacy," he added.

In a recent New York Times report, unnamed Pentagon officials revealed that Israel had carried out a major military maneuver in early June to prepare for a future attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. The maneuver involved over 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters.

Israeli Maariv daily commentator Amir Rappaport described Pentagon's leak as an attempt 'to deter Iran and increase pressure on it to cooperate' with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

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Enfeebled Superpower: How America Lost Its Grip

The mighty US has held the best ever hand in global political history but played it spectacularly badly. Now its influence is waning on all fronts

When historians try to understand the world of the early 21st century, they should take note of the Parsley crisis. In 2002, the government of Morocco sent 12 soldiers to a tiny island called Leila in the Straits of Gibraltar and planted its flag there.

The island is uninhabited and all that thrives on it is wild parsley, hence its Spanish name, Perejil. But its sovereignty had long been contested and the Spanish government reacted forcefully: 75 Spanish soldiers were airlifted onto the island; they pulled down the Moroccan flag, hoisted two Spanish flags and sent the Moroccans home. The Moroccan government denounced the “act of war” and Spain put its warships off the coast of Morocco.

From afar the whole affair looked like a comic opera. But someone was going to have to talk the two countries down. That role fell not to the United Nations, or to the European Union, or to France, which has good relations with both sides. It fell to the United States. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘What do I have to do with any of this?’ ” recalled Colin Powell, who was secretary of state.

Once it became clear that nothing else was working, he began a hectic round of telephone diplomacy from home on a Friday night: “I decided that I had to push for a compromise fast because otherwise pride takes over, positions harden and people get stubborn. And my grandkids were going to come over soon for a swim.”

By Saturday morning he had drafted an agreement on his home computer. He got both sides to accept it, signed for each side himself and faxed it to Spain and Morocco. They issued statements thanking the United States for helping to resolve the crisis. Powell got to go swimming with his grandkids.

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Animal outbreak could be costly if lab taken off Plum Island

WASHINGTON — An outbreak of one of the most contagious animal diseases from any of five locations the White House is considering for a new high-security research laboratory would be more devastating to the U.S. economy than from the isolated island laboratory where such research is now conducted, says a report published Friday.

The 1,005-page Homeland Security Department study said chances of such an outbreak — with estimated losses of more than $4.2 billion — would be "extremely low" if the research lab were designed, constructed and operated according to government safety standards.

Still, it calculated that economic losses in an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease could surpass $4 billion if the lab were built near livestock herds in Kansas or Texas, two options the Bush administration is considering. That would be nearly $1 billion higher than the government's estimate of losses blamed on a hypothetical outbreak from its existing laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y.

The foot-and-mouth virus does not infect humans but could devastate herds of cattle, swine, lambs and sheep.

Lab most likely will move

The five locations the U.S. are considering are Athens, Ga.; Manhattan, Kan.; Butner, N.C.; San Antonio; and Flora, Miss. A sixth alternative would be construction of a new research lab on Plum Island. That option is considered less likely because the administration spent considerable time and money scouting new locations and because of financial concerns about operating from a location accessible only by ferry or helicopter.

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9/11 - Architect Richard Gage Says Explosives Destroyed the WTC Towers

9/11 Blueprint for Truth: The Architecture of Destruction

Commercial architect Richard Gage (founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth) presents a watertight case for controlled demolition of the three steel-framed building collapses at the World Trade Center, New York on 9/11/01.

It includes physicist Steven Jones' updated evidence of thermite. Gage's website, www.ae911truth.org, is rapidly drawing building and engineering professionals to the 9/11 Truth Movement!

Does an investigation of the Pentagon’s channel to an Iran Contra arms dealer continue?

When Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence presented the final installments of the committee’s long-awaited pre-war intelligence investigations to the press earlier this month in the Senate gallery, they demurred when reporters asked them if they intended to pursue possible charges against Bush administration officials whom the senators said had exaggerated the case for war based on the intelligence available to them. "Nothing else would get done, on Clean Air, FISA, anything," committee chairman John "Jay" Rockefeller (D-WV) explained why the committee would be reluctant to call for possible charges against US officials. "If we pressed for that, it would be like impeachment."

But there are signs that further federal investigation of at least one aspect of the committee’s inquiry may continue.

Mother Jones has learned that one subject of one of the recent Senate Intelligence committee reports has told associates that he has hired a defense attorney in connection to a federal investigation. Pentagon civilian official Harold Rhode, a civilian employee of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments who participated in controversial meetings with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in Rome and Paris, did not respond to messages sent to his home and Pentagon emails inquiring about the Senate’s report on the Ghorbanifar channel, and questions over a possible federal investigation involving him and the hiring of an attorney. Calls to his home went to a fax machine and he did not answer his Pentagon office phone over the past several days.

The Senate report found that former Reagan administration consultant and Iran contra figure Michael Ledeen had brought two Farsi-speaking Pentagon officials—Rhode and Larry Franklin—to a December 2001 meeting in Rome with two unidentified Iranians as well as Ledeen's old Iran contra interlocutor Ghorbanifar, the subject of a CIA burn notice.

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Emergency Rules Issued for Surveillance Cameras in U.S. Capital

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) announced emergency rules last night to govern a controversial new system that centralizes the monitoring of more than 5,000 security cameras belonging to D.C. government agencies.

Fenty said in a news release that the rules would "ensure the security of our data and our residents." But privacy advocates expressed concern that the rules were too vague for a system intended to bring together images from cameras in schools, public housing complexes, government offices and the D.C. jail.

The rules, which took effect June 12, contain provisions for prosecuting monitoring-center workers who misuse the cameras. Workers are forbidden to zero in on fliers carried by people whose images are recorded or to listen to their conversations.

Images captured by the cameras will be kept for 10 business days unless they are likely to be used in a court case or a criminal investigation, the rules say. Authorities will be required to give public updates twice a year on the system.

Mayoral spokeswoman Carrie Brooks said the emergency regulations will last for 120 days, during which time the administration will submit a plan for D.C. Council approval, as required by recent legislation.

The administration has said that the $10 million monitoring system, to be built largely with federal homeland security grants, will bring greater efficiency to a hodgepodge of city-owned surveillance cameras and provide emergency managers with direct access to images. It was launched in May.

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Class Action Filed Over D.C. Checkpoints

By Del Quentin Wilber

A civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit yesterday to halt the D.C. police department's new checkpoint initiative, arguing that it is unconstitutional to screen motorists and prevent some from entering certain neighborhoods.

The Partnership for Civil Justice filed the suit on behalf of four District residents who alleged that the checkpoints, set up after a stretch of deadly violence in Northeast Washington, led to "widespread civil rights violations." The suit seeks to bar police from using the program anywhere in the city.

"It is very clear that the District of Columbia is engaged in an unprecedented and unconstitutional system of suspicionless stops and seizures," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney with the civil rights group, said in an interview.

Responding to a spate of shootings, including a triple homicide, D.C. police set up a checkpoint in the Trinidad area of Northeast Washington to prevent potential gunmen from entering the neighborhood in cars. At random times during a six-day period that ended June 12, officers questioned drivers to make sure they had a "legitimate" purpose for heading into the neighborhood. Some were denied entry. D.C. police hailed the program as a success, noting that no one was killed in the area while the program was running.

Nevertheless, the suit says the tactics were "neither constitutional, nor effective."

"The District's military-style roadblock system was deployed, in part, to give the appearance that the government is addressing" residents' hopes for safe neighborhoods, the suit states.

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Ron Paul Claims Pelosi Spiked Iran Bill

By: Rick Pedraza

Representative Ron Paul says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed a section from a bill passed by Congress which would have barred the U.S. from going to war with Iran without a congressional vote, claiming she did so at the behest of the leadership of Israel and AIPAC.

Paul, a former Republican presidential contender who formally removed himself from the party’s nomination race last week, makes the allegation on C-SPAN during a recently held foreign policy conference in Virginia.

Paul says Pelosi’s first act as House Speaker in 2006 was to “deliberately” remove a portion of a legislative spending bill which said the United States “can't go to war with Iran without getting approval from Congress.”

According to Paul, Pelosi and her allies in the chamber's Democratic leadership initially accepted the bill designed to outline an Iraq exit strategy, but during a revision of the legislation excluded the statement regarding the need for congressional approval of any military assault on the neighboring country of Iran.

“She [Pelosi] removed it deliberately,” Paul says. “And then, the astounding thing is, when asked why, she said the leadership in Israel asked her to. That was in the newspaper, that was in 'The Washington Post,' that she was asked by AIPAC and others not to do that."

Paul implies Pelosi, desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation, bargained away the proposal that would have been the House leadership's primary vehicle for challenging the administration's policies in the region.

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USS Liberty: Govt. Betrayal & Cover-up Finally Exposed

By Paul Craig Roberts / Hustler Magazine July 2008

June 8, 1967 — the fourth day of the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan — was a beautiful day in the Mediterranean. The USS Liberty was in international waters off the coast of Egypt. Israeli aircraft had flown over the USS Liberty in the morning and had reported that the ship was American. The crew, in close proximity to the war zone, was reassured by the presence of Israeli aircraft. But at 2:00 p.m. sailors sunbathing on the deck saw fighter jets coming at them in attack formation. Red flashes from the wings of the fighters were followed by explosions, blood and death. A beautiful afternoon suddenly became a nightmare. Who was attacking the USS Liberty and why? The attack on the Liberty was an attack on America.

The Liberty was an intelligence ship. Its purpose was to monitor Soviet and Arab communications in order to warn both Israel and Washington should the Soviets enter the war on behalf of its Arab allies. The Liberty was armed only with four machineguns to repel boarders. Its request for a destroyer escort had been denied.

The assault on the Liberty is well documented. With no warning, the Liberty was attacked by successive waves of unmarked jets using cannon, rockets and napalm. The attacking jets jammed all of the US communications frequencies, an indication they knew the Liberty was an American ship.

The air attack failed to sink the Liberty. About 30 minutes into the attack three torpedo boats appeared flying the Star of David. The Israeli boats were not on a rescue mission. They attacked the Liberty with cannon, machineguns and torpedoes. One torpedo struck the Liberty mid-ship, instantly killing 25 Americans while flooding the lower decks.

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The Stench Emanating From Washington D.C. is Unbearable

By Alicia Hope / Gangster Government

Yesterday, we witnessed Scott McClellan give testimony on Capitol Hill that the President of the United States ran an insular and secretive White House that lied about the leaking of a CIA officer's name and "overstated" intelligence in the rush to war in Iraq.

"The continuing cloud of suspicion over the White House is not something I can remove, because I know only one part of the story," McClellan said during several hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. "Only those who know the underlying truth can bring this to an end. Sadly, they remain silent."

When pressed by Sheila Jackson (D-TEX)  about impeachment McClellan says,"Congressman, I do not support impeachment based on what I know!"

What? Is McClellan crazy?

The entire book is a case for impeachment! Remember, they initiated impeachment against Clinton for lying about sex! We're talking about taking a country to war based on lies and false propaganda! There are more than 4,000 dead and 30,000+ disabled because Bush wants to have his demonic "New Order of the Ages"(NWO)! We are not going to accept their beast mark no matter how many wars or false flag attacks they initiate!

Hans Blix, the United Nation’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, in his March 7, 2003, address to the UN Security Council, said that as of that date, less than 3 weeks before Bush invaded Iraq, that Iraq had capitulated to all demands for professional, no-notice weapons inspections all over Iraq and agreed to increased aerial surveillance by the U.S. over the “no-fly” zones.

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White House Refuses To Release Documents On Air-Quality Policy

By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson / Washington Post

The Bush administration yesterday invoked executive privilege and refused to turn over key documents sought by a House investigative committee, escalating a fight over the White House role in U.S. policy on greenhouse-gas emissions and ozone air quality standards.

Rep. Henry L. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called off a threatened contempt of Congress vote against Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson and a White House budget official while congressional Democrats decide how to respond.

Lawmakers say the two Bush administration officials refused to respond to subpoenas for documents about communications between the White House and EPA. The papers concern White House intervention in Johnson's December decision to overrule EPA officials who were in favor of granting California and 17 other states permission to mandate a reduction of vehicle emissions by 30 percent by 2016.

In March, the EPA also issued tougher health standards for smog, but they were not as strict as levels recommended by an EPA science advisory board after President Bush sided with the White House Office of Management and Budget in opposition.

"Administrator Johnson has repeatedly insisted he reached his decisions on California's petition and the new ozone standard on his own, relying on his best judgment," Waxman said. "Today's assertion of executive privilege raises serious questions about administrator Johnson's credibility and the involvement of the president."

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White House Dismissed Legal Advice On Detainees

By Michael Abramowitz / Washington Post

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such advice, issued periodically over the past six years, was ignored or discounted, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the debates.

In August 2006, for example, the top lawyer at the State Department told senior officials at the White House that unless they won a congressional mandate that broadly supported their system of detaining terrorism suspects, their goal of keeping the detainees locked up was in jeopardy. "I can virtually guarantee you, without a legislative basis, federal courts are not going to be willing to uphold the indefinite detention of unlawful combatants," John B. Bellinger III warned in an e-mail.

The e-mail, disclosed by former White House officials familiar with the intense internal debates over detainee policy, was one of several red flags for the White House in its fierce battle to keep the detention facility in Cuba free of judicial oversight.

The result, they said, has been a series of losses at the Supreme Court, including last week's 5 to 4 ruling that detainees at Guantanamo have a constitutional right to a review of their detention in federal courts -- a ruling that holds out the prospect of heavy litigation and close judicial scrutiny of decision-making that the administration has long argued is best left to the president.

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Secret Pentagon Funding Near All-Time High

The latest Pentagon budget request contains a near record high level of money for classified, or "black" programs, reports the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.  Fiscal year 2009 includes a whopping $34 billion to fund classified weapons purchases and development, though it is not the highest level ever.

"The FY 2007 level is higher than the FY 2009 request primarily because it includes war-related funding, while the FY 2009 figure does not," notes the report, which is updated annually by Steven Kosiak. "It is likely that once war-related funding is included, the FY 2009 total will surpass the FY 2007 level—making it the highest total for classified acquisition programs since FY 1987 in real terms."

The updated report does not speculate on what specific programs are being funded--though past reports have noted that classified space programs account for a good portion of the total. Longtime aerospace reporter Bill Sweetman has speculated that some chunk of this large amount of change is going toward a classified bomber prototype. And of course there's also been longtime speculation--but little concrete proof--of an "Aurora" hypersonic aircraft (though if Aurora exists/existed, then someone needs to explain why the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is proposing Blackswift, a new hypersonic aicraft?).

Classified programs, though they have have produced some notable successes, like the B-2, have their downsides, as Kosiak points out.  "Restrictions placed on access to classified funding have meant that DoD and Congress typically exercise less oversight over classified programs than unclassified ones," Kosiak writes. "This lower level of scrutiny, coupled with the compartmentalization of information generally associated with classified efforts has contributed to performance problems and cost growth in a number of programs, such as the Navy’s ill-fated A-12 attack aircraft program."

Congress 'Punks Out' Over Telecom Immunity Issue!!!

WASHINGTON — After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s program of eavesdropping without warrants after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The deal, expanding the government’s powers to spy on terrorism suspects in some major respects, would strengthen the ability of intelligence officials to eavesdrop on foreign targets. It would also allow them to conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined that important national security information would otherwise be lost. If approved, as appears likely, the agreement would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.

The agreement would settle one of the thorniest issues in dispute by providing immunity to the phone companies in the Sept. 11 program as long as a federal district court determined that they received legitimate requests from the government directing their participation in the program of wiretapping without warrants.

With AT&T and other telecommunications companies facing some 40 lawsuits over their reported participation in the wiretapping program, Republican leaders described this narrow court review on the immunity question as a mere “formality.”

“The lawsuits will be dismissed,” Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 2 Republican in the House, predicted with confidence.

The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute.

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McClellan: Bush should tell all on CIA leak

A former White House spokesman told Congress on Friday that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney wanted him to say that Cheney's chief of staff wasn't involved in the leak of a CIA operative's identity, an assertion that turned out to be false.

Scott McClellan, Bush's spokesman from 2003-2006, said he had reservations about publicly clearing the name of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff at the time. Later, Libby was convicted of obstructing the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity.

McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee that he doesn't know if a crime was committed in efforts to cover up the leak.

But he had harsh words for the White House, suggesting that the administration is continuing a cover-up in the Plame case.

"This White House promised or assured the American people that at some point when this was behind us they would talk publicly about it," he said. "And they have refused to.

"And that's why I think more than any other reason we are here today and the suspicion still remains," McClellan told the panel.

McClellan said he does not believe Bush knew about or caused the leak. When asked about Cheney, he replied: "I do not know. There's a lot of suspicion there."

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Abramoff Used White House To Help Get Rid of Roadblock

By R. Jeffrey Smith / Washington Post

If lobbyists find the path to their clients' riches obstructed by an implacably hostile federal official, they might achieve success by an end run or an appeal to more senior authorities. But a more extreme solution -- if the foe has high-level support -- is to pull strings at the White House and orchestrate the official's removal.

That option was chosen by Jack Abramoff and his colleagues at the Washington office of Greenberg Traurig in the Bush administration's early days, to oust Alan Stayman from a State Department negotiating job. Stayman had earned their ire by advocating labor reforms in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. protectorate where Abramoff's clients wanted to keep paying immigrants less than the federal minimum wage to work in textile factories.

Stayman was supported by James A. Kelly, who was a White House aide to President Ronald Reagan and served as the State Department's assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific from 2001 to 2005. Kelly, citing ongoing negotiations with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, told his department's personnel office on May 1, 2001, that he wanted Stayman to remain for two more years.

But Abramoff's path to success in what an aide called "the Stayman project" is spelled out in a set of internal White House, State Department and Greenberg Traurig e-mails provided to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and made public last week.

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Gov't Says FBI Agents Can't Testify About 9/11

The Associated Press

Government lawyers say the ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks could be compromised if the airline industry is allowed to seek more information from the FBI to defend itself against lawsuits brought by terrorism victims.

In papers filed late Tuesday, the government urged a judge to block aviation companies from interviewing five FBI employees who the companies say will help them prove the government withheld key information before the 2001 attacks.

The lawyers said it would be impossible to interview the employees without disclosing classified or privileged material that could "cause serious damage to national security and interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings."

"The harm described is not hypothetical and cannot be lightly dismissed," according to the court papers submitted by the office of U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia. "Investigators continue to seek out those parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks who remain at large."

The largest investigation in FBI history has resulted in 167,000 interviews and more than 155,000 pieces of evidence and involved the pursuit of 500,000 investigative leads, the lawyers wrote.

They said the aviation lawyers were unrealistic to think the investigation would not be compromised if they speak to the FBI employees.

"In fact, it is not possible to disentangle the classified from the unclassified information in the context of a deposition, where open-ended inquiries may elicit responses in which classified or privileged material is intertwined," they wrote.

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9/11 The Criminal Enterprise and Its Pattern

The "official explanation", the one touted by the government and all the major media is a total fantasy. This is determined by looking at the cold hard evidence.

For details see http://www.journalof911studies.com and http://www.pilotsfor911truth.com

Here's a quick summary: 9/11 was another in a series of politically, economically sanctioned "false flag" operations, something that's gone on for centuries.

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FBI & Homeland Security behind martial law exercises in Indianapolis

By: D. H. Williams / Dailynewscaster.com

For over two weeks 2,300 Marines have been using the city of Indianapolis and its civilian population as a “simulated urban combat zone” under the direction of FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The exercises began on June 4th when Mayor Greg Ballard surrendered 26 sites around the city.

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General Accuses Bush Admin of War Crimes

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

"The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted --both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

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