Coverup? Entire blockbuster films were made about this which explicitly linked the two (The Kingdom). Don't mistake people either not caring or not understanding with a coverup.
Watch the opening title sequence for one of the best summaries of the linked events building to 9/11 and the Saudi response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW71JuzHr5o
The existence of unofficially recognized evidence and conclusions does not preclude a coverup. The government is not releasing documents or recognizing facts, and people who are open to a more sinister truth are marginalized.
I'm kinda amazed that after 12 years, info is not only leaking out, but is still painting a picture of what damn near everyone thought in the first place...
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened had Flight 93 reached it's presumed target, the Capitol Building [1]. I was young at the time, around 12 or 13, but I do remember quite vividly the atmosphere of fear that engulfed my country in the wake of the attacks. I cringe to think of how much worse it could have been had Congress been directly and successfully attacked. Our democracy was already in an extremely fragile condition. A plane hitting the Capitol Building on that day likely would have guaranteed it's immediate demise [2].
We have created this myth that Flight 93 was heading for the Capitol Building based on media reports of what some bloke in Guantanamo Bay said after being tortured. It is single source evidence, 'speculative fictional history'.
The media have also speculated that Flight 93 was also heading for Three Mile Island (a nuclear power station designed to survive a plane crash) and Camp David (the President's holiday home where some Middle East peace deal had been agreed on with the participants having gone home decades ago).
It is tempting to believe that Flight 93 was heading for the Capitol given that there is some confession and it would have made more sense than Three Mile Island or Camp David. However this is flawed reasoning.
Had Flight 93 not been delayed at the airport and made it to its target on time then that target just might have been The Pentagon. Here it would have made a far greater impact. We know one 757 had hit The Pentagon to cause significant damage. Had another plane - Flight 93 - crashed into another 'wedge' opposite to the fire that did happen then there would have been a high likelihood that the entire Pentagon would have burned to the ground. The first fire would have served as an attack on the fire prevention systems allowing the fire from the second attack to burn unimpeded.
If we look at what happened at the World Trade Center two planes were used against one target. The Twin Towers might have appeared as two buildings, however, there was only one set of pumps for the sprinklers. The towers had been designed to survive impact by a plane but not the scenario of 9/11 when both towers were attacked. Also note that the second tower to be hit was the first to fall - in paart due to the lack of water pressure for the sprinklers.
Given that two planes were used for the one target in New York it is not unreasonable to consider that two planes were also intended for the Pentagon, with one fire able to knock out the sprinklers and another fire to burn the building down. This would have removed The Pentagon from the map rather than create damage that could be (and was) repaired.
Although there is a certain amount of logic to support The Pentagon being the target for Flight 93, this idea does not support the agenda of 'The War Against Terror'. Let's stick with the nursery stories and believe what the media say the interrogators water-boarded out of the guy in Guantanamo - Flight 93 was heading for The Capitol.
Well, for one thing, if congress itself or it's members are attacked, they are very likely to declare war with an unspecified enemy. Such a declaration would immediately transfer full authority of the armed forces to the president (to be used freely outside of and inside U.S. territory), and this until a peace treaty is signed. Furthermore, if an attack is in progress, this declaration does not require a majority vote, the president merely needs to find (what he reasonably believes to be) the highest ranking member.
So one (probable) difference would have been that president Bush would not have asked Congress what to do if Congress was directly attacked. He would have simply decided what to do and done it, after having received the declaration from Nancy Pelosi.
This would have lead to the combination of having a single deciding vote of what to do with the armed forces at the command of a single politician, making for easy and quick decisions and the entire country clamoring for revenge.
I'm not saying it would necessarily have lead to immediate counterattack, but it certainly wouldn't have lowered the odds of that happening.
After 9/11 - on 12 September 2001 - NATO invoked 'Article 5', the mutual self defence clause. This was on a provisional basis subject to evidence being provided that the bloke in a cave on a dialysis machine (or whatever) was guilty. However, the use of 'Article 5' meant that every member of the NATO alliance had the go-ahead for war without a single member of congress or member of the UK parliament having to vote on matters.
Congress and the British parliament were asked to vote for the war, this was not because their support was needed for the war to go ahead, had they all voted 'no' then that would not have trumped the 'let's kill' NATO card.
The Secretary General of NATO had a role in starting The War Against Terror, at the time the person in this role was one of Tony Blair's mates (his former Defence Secretary) and he was not American or voted into office by 'the peoples of NATO'.
The Reichstag fire made way for sweeping authoritarian changes in Germany and to me this is pretty much what has happened in the US, starting with the Patriot Act. Furthermore the Recichstag fire was surrounded in conspiracy theories with many believing the Nazis framed Van der Lubbe to further political ideals. Regardless of the Capitol Building being hit I'd say 9/11 was the US Reichstag.
In "Debt of Honor" and "Executive Orders", America survives this kind of catastrophe essentially okay, although it helps that they have Jack Ryan in charge.
This is utter nonsense. The chain of succession would be in place to establish a new President, and we could do without Congress until a new election were held.
In the absolute worst case of a more serious attack, the US armed services would assume control, and it would be unthinkable that they wouldn't restore democracy. 99% of our soldiery are patriots.
(Our eduction system hasn't done that much damage to our soldiers... yet. Some day, unless the intellectual trends in our nation change, our soldies will no longer believe that "democracy" is "practical," and will believe that people have to be forced to be good, and then we are not only going to be living under socaialism (as currently), we are going to be living under authoritarianism.)
If you say that the US is "living under socialism"... you don't know what that word means.
Wikipedia says: "Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy. "Social ownership" may refer to cooperative enterprises, common ownership, state ownership, citizen ownership of equity, or any combination of these."
The US lives under a regulated capitalist economy.
I think of "socialism" as "unlimited redistribution of wealth." But the definition you gave checks out as far as I can tell from common sources online.
So I may be using the term in an unconventional and confusing way.
That said, how would you describe a system with high taxation and redistribution of income, but without state ownership of the means of production? (That is how I characterize the US mainly, plus massive reuglation.) There needs to be a word for it.
"Socialism" seems to fit pretty well. The definition you are promulgating seems too narrow and technical. It doesn't really matter if the state owns the means of production, or simply seizes the profits created thereby. In the end, it's the same.
No, that is not what socialism means, just because you want to think of the term meaning something else doesn't mean it is so. That's not how a shared language works.
My comment asknowledges potential error, raises issues, asks questions, and does not provide answers that I can't provide yet.
Rather than dealing with any of that, you just make an assertion.
If you want "socalism" to mean only a subset of collective political coersion, you have to defend that intellectually with reason. That is how a shared language works.
Personally, I think of state ownership of the means of production as "communism," and redistribution of wealth, separate from ownership of the means of production, as "socialism."
There is a shared understanding of what socialism means, the parent you responded to pointed out one of the many accepted definitions and cited Wikipedia. Just because you would like it to mean something else does not mean that is does, I really struggle to understand the issue you have with that.
Fair enough you want to label the current system of economic distribution in the USA, but you can't co-opt an existing term. For one it attempts to subvert a well understood concept, and tries to make it mean something else. There is no way that you can call the current system in the US socialist, unless you do not understand what socialism is, and how it works. And state controlled business is wildly different from taxed private business in a whole range of ways.
Thanks for the response. I think I was being too harsh before. And I think you are putting forth a reasonable and commonly held view. I think it's a crime against comprehension to take well-known words and try to make them mean something else.
That said, I'm not actually sure I'm doing that when I equate massive taxation and redistribution with socialism.
High taxes and redistribution is an attempt to get away with socialism, without calling it "socialism." I don't think that is even controversial. It is the same goal with only slightly different means.
So in calling that "socialism," I'm just calling it for what it really is, in terms of motivation and goal, and partially in terms of method (which is still coercive, just at a different point).
In further support of my point---different socialists disagree on the precise techinical means of implemnting socialism anyway, so that would suggest that it may be a flexible enough term to encompass what I am talking about.
And yet further support of my point is that there is no existing word to describe what I am describing other than "socialism;" if there were, I would be obliged to use that other term.
The closest thing would be a "mixed economy." But 51% of Americans now take more from the tax system than they put in, and taxes are what I would call "very high." If you are taxed at a 50% rate, and you live to be 100, you have spent 50 years serving others. Plus we are in the process of implementing universal healthcare. Sounds like what socialist advocates would call a victory. (Of course socialism works so badly that you don't see good things coming out of it in practice, so nobody is claiming victory; but in terms of methodology, they are getting what they have advocated.)
Long and fruitless war, maybe? The Iraqi war is over and the Afghani war is all but over. Keeping some troops there doesn't constitute a "war", we have them all over the place.
The only legitimate claim is the idea that money is a big part of politics, which it obviously is and it's gotten worse. But to equate that to "single party rule" is absurd. On top of that I don't see how any of that is a result of 9/11.
I think the previous commenter meant the "War on Terror", which is essentially eternal because there is no opponent that could be defeated, and therefore it cannot be ended, only abandoned.
Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.
1st amendment is also pretty much in tatters, with protesters now labeled as "low level terrorists", and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation (admittedly that was in the UK, but what do you think would happen to Greenwald if he were dumb enough to travel to the US??)
Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone. Of course, only if you do something the government doesn't like, but that's pretty much the point of civil rights...
> Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.
Your comment is utterly ungrounded in reality. The "war on terror" has had pretty much no specific effect on any of the civil rights you mentioned.
1) Habeas corpus: the most recent change to the law of habeas corpus was AEDPA in 1996. Despite having "antiterrorism" in its name, it's largely addressed at preventing convicted criminals from abusing the habeas process through repeated frivolous habeas petitions and treating habeas essentially as a federal appeal from valid state court judgments. The "terrorism" provisions are distinct and don't concern habeas corpus, but rather financing and immigration issues related to terrorism. The post-9/11 Supreme Court cases on habeas have strengthened habeas corpus, not weakened it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush, and the predecessor cases Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
2) Removal of the 4th amendment: the 4th amendment is probably not at the apex of its vitality, but it's on the upswing since 9/11. To the extent that it's been diminished over the years, that largely happened in the 1970's and the 1980's as a byproduct of that era's "tough on crime" movement. Even in the context of NSA spying, the legal basis for those programs are not rooted in anything post-9/11, but in the quite old third-party doctrine and this case from 1979 that created the data versus metadata distinction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland.
3) Gutting of the 1st amendment: the first amendment has simply never been stronger, and the U.S. continue to have among the strongest protections for free speech of any country in the world. Your comment about "protestors now labeled as 'low level terrorists,' and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation" is factually incorrect. What protestors in the U.S. have been charged with a crime based purely on their political speech? Some FBI documents stating that Occupy protestors might be a vector for domestic terrorism isn't a first amendment violation by any imaginable stretch of the imagination; to violate the first amendment, the "label" must have some legal significance, not simply be an expression of the opinion of someone in the government. Also, your question "what do you think would happen to Greenwald" if he traveled to the U.S. totally ignores the fact that the U.K. has historically had much weaker protections for free speech and journalism than the U.S.
> Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone
You seem to be mostly regurgitating the utterly uninformed conventional wisdom that permeates places like HN and Reddit.
You are confusing "reality" with "law". Changing the law is not the biggest problem since 9/11 (though there has been enough of that, see Patriot Act, etc.), it is going around the law and simply ignoring it.
For example, it has always been legal to kill enemies during war (with restrictions). We've just now expanded the definition of what a war is and what an enemy is, or changed the meaning of "torture" etc.
Of course many of these things started before 9/11, but if you can't detect the difference since then, you need to get out of the (law) library more often.
At least 'the rich guys' give themselves super high tax rates.
Edit:
For those who won't read the whole comment thread, the US has one of the highest top income tax rates in the OECD, one of the highest (or the highest?) corp tax rates in OECD, and arguably the lowest tax burden on poor/middle class in OECD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
First chart cuts off in '09, before Obamas tax hikes. Also probably doesn't include state/local income tax burden (!!). US has one of harshest tax regimes for top earners, and amongst most progressive regimes in OECD (arguably THE most progressive).
Second chart is straight nonsense: counts unrepatriated money - capital stuck abroad whilst awaiting change in broken US corp tax policy - as taxed at zero percent!
Please, before you start calling things 'cute gimmicks', provide a citation, especially for this claim: "US has one of the harshest tax regimes for top earners".
"France has the highest tax rate with a 75% rate on millionaires. In the U.S., the fight is over whether to extend the top rate to little more than half that amount."
"In Washington, of course, the fight is over whether to raise the top rate to a level just over half the amount they are arguing about in France -- to 39.6% from 35%.
By contrast, numerous countries have top rates in the low to mid-50s, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Japan and Sweden. The world's highest rate is levied in sunny Aruba, where people making more than $171,000 face a top rate of 58.95%, according to figures compiled by KPMG."
2012 top rate of income taxes: 35% (rising to 39.6% in 2013)
Effective tax rate on $100,000: 26% (7.3% Social Security, 18.7% income tax)
World rank on effective tax rate of $100,000: 55
Effective tax rate on $300,000: 30.5% (3.7% Social Security, 26.8% income tax)
World rank on effective tax rate of $300,000: 53"
Like I said, one of the highest in OECD. And arguably most progressive in all of OECD: US lacks severe excise taxes and VATs which target the poor and middle class, coupled with generously progressive income tax brackets.
And of course those infamously high US corporate tax rates: often double the rates of other OECD nations (same link).
lead to a link at the Tax Foundation that lists /only/ "Selected Federal Rates":
"136. "State Corporate Income Tax Rates, 2000-2013". Tax Foundation. Retrieved 2013-05-17.
137. "State Corporate Income Tax Rates, 2000-2013". Tax Foundation. Retrieved 2013-05-17."
Despite the titles thereof. I find it odd, too, that all the US references are to the Tax Foundation, which has had numerous criticisms leveled at it as a conservative think tank, not least of which:
"US economist Paul Krugman has characterised the Tax Foundation as "not a reliable source" while criticizing a report by the Tax Foundation comparing corporate tax rates in the United States to those in other countries.[46] Krugman has also accused the Tax Foundation of "deliberate fraud" in connection with a report it issued concerning the American Jobs Act.[47]"
There's all this not insubstantial disclaimer to your table:
"Some other taxes (for instance property tax, substantial in many countries, such as the USA) are not shown here. The table is not intended to represent the true tax burden to either the corporation or the individual in the listed country."
Not that there's not pause for thought. But it's intriguing that multiple independent sources list our highest task rates around the 30th to 55th in the world, but yet the Tax Foundation lists at nearly the top.
This is something I often wonder about on HN: Is this guy being downvoted simply because we disagree with him/he's making absurd claims? His comments are correctly punctuated, grammatical, at least tolerably respectful, etc. Though his map does not seem to correspond to the territory, in my eyes that alone doesn't merit downvotes.
The rich gave themselves low capital gains taxes and shifted their income to be capital gains, so the income tax rate is less and less relevant.
Just as an example, Mit Romney's publicized tax rate was around 14.1% in 2011 on income that very comfortably puts him in the top income tax bracket. He just doesn't pay income tax on it.
Another misconception. Well two in one post, actually.
1) Capital gains income is often first passed through a corporation, thus getting taxed at the insanely high US corp tax rate before getting taxed a second time at the moderately normal US cap gains rate. So US citizens are still paying more on average, even if it all doesn't show up as such on a tax return.
2) And Mitt's specifically! Let's count the misconceptions (note that I don't blame you - the media never described them and let the infamous "14.1%" figure stand because it's a good story):
a) Doesn't include state tax rate. That right there could easily tack on another 9%. Though it could also be zero if in Texas. Mitt of course lived in Mass, so it's just 4% or so.
b) No one deducted charitable contributions. As a Mormon, that was 10% of his income. So add another 1.4% to his tax rate there.
c) People counted his off-shore income, which is counted as income but not taxed until repatriated, as taxed at 0%. In fact it would be taxed at normal capital gains, which today is ~20% Federal + 4% Mass. Depending on the blend of foreign to domestic income, this could amount to a lot or just a little. Let's say his offshore income constituted 10% of overall income, for a ~1-2% higher average tax rate overall?
d) Most impactfully, no one's counting the Corp Tax rate which was paid before he took the Cap Gains. That's 39% Federal and another 8% Mass (~46% total), assuming that it's coming from Mass based corps. I'd say a solid chunk of his income is coming from this sort of income, probably in the ballpark of 70%, but let's just say it's 30% (of his income subject to this sort of double tax) to be super conservative.
Starting with base 14.1% + 4%(a) + 1.4%(b) + 1-2%(c) + (.3)(46%) = 21.5% just with very simple adjustments, and as high as 31.4% with a corp tax rate blended in a bit.
Once again, you are confusing nominal rates with effective rates, and simply assuming that corp. tax was paid at that nominal rate, which has a statistical likelihood so low as to be indistinguishable from zero.
Effectively, a quarter of corporations pay zero corporation tax. Considering that the whole purpose of these constructs is to reduce the tax burden, I'd wager a guess that the rates paid tend towards the low end of the scale.
Of course tax should be paid on income that was shifted off-shore for tax reasons, but of course the monied interests are lobbying for a "tax holiday", which they have "successfully" done in the past. "Success" in quotes because the policy failed to achieve the things that were used to peddle the ludicrous idea: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020363310... It was highly successful in avoiding taxes, which is why they are lobbying for it again.
What do voluntary charitable contributions have to do with taxes (apart from him not deducting some of them in order to not have his tax rate look even more ridiculously low than it already is)?
They have not been able to declare war on the entire world, including their own citizens, before now. Assassination has not been an accepted tool of foreign policy for decades since Ford.
Even in wartime (if this is indeed war), rules apply, so if you want to apply the rules of war assassinations of enemies who are unarmed and not on any battlefield are not permitted. Awlaki, and later his teenage son, and the innocents killed with them, were not killed on any battlefield or as part of any war, unless you redefine war to mean any killing outside the judicial process, as Bush and then Obama have done.
But I think it's more useful to consider the methods used rather than arguing about semantics - the US president now claims the right to kill citizens, and anyone else, without trial or justification. That is a huge shift in policy and also has implications at home. If they can kill at will abroad, why not at home?
The whole concept of rules to warfare is on a certain level a bit silly. As if the hawks can add rules to warfare, they can make it more palatable to general public and then wage war more frequently. On other side of the coin, if war is just so horrible (many innocents and civilians needlessly killed), then warfare as a business practice for the state will become less frequent. To a certain extent, the threat of global thermonuclear war has somewhat borne out this line of reasoning.
The constitution requires a declaration of war. That requirement has been withered away in recent years, don't you think? It was there to prevent exactly this sort of nonsense.
Article I, Section 8 says that Congress has the power to declare war. It does not specify that this declaration need take any particular form. I've never seen a convincing explanation for why Congressional authorization such as the AUMF doesn't qualify as an exercise of Congress's powers under Article I, Section 8. Especially considering that the practice of Congress authorizing military actions without a formal declaration of war dates back almost to the founding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unite....
To be fair, a large part of why America doesn't declare war is because no-one declares war. After WWII we no longer consider war-making a sovereign right of nations, so a declaration of war is useless.
First, no, it doesn't. It gives Congress the power to declare war. It neither explicitly requires nor has ever been understood to implicitly require a war be declared to be prosecuted in all circumstance, particularly not in the event of a war initiated by an enemy attack.
Second, as with every other Congressional power, exercising the power to declare war doesn't require any kind of magic words. All of the controversial drone attacks on al-Qaeda targets have been as part of action specifically authorized by Congress in Public Law 107-40 [1].
Whatever problems there are with the War on Terrorism, the absence of Congressional declaration of war certainly isn't one of them.
First, due process only applies to those on American soil and to U.S. citizens abroad. The U.S. could nuke Yemen tomorrow and it absolutely would not be a Constitutional violation. It would be bad foreign policy, it would be an act of genocide, but there would be nothing "illegal" about it. Courts are intrinsically domestic institutions, they do not exist to supervise the conduct of nations in foreign affairs.
Second, "due process" does not mean "trial." The word "due" is used synonymously with the word "warranted" or "appropriate." What is the appropriate amount of procedural protection for someone who evaded attempts to capture him for a decade by hiding in the deserts of Yemen and inciting acts of war against the U.S. during that time? It's debatable, but it's not clear that Al Awlaki didn't get all of the process he was due.
Importantly, both Awlaki and his teenage son who was later targeted in another drone strike, were both American citizens. You can argue as much as you like in favor of the joys of murder and assassination as a way of organizing the world, but there is no conceivable argument that this is constitutional.
Pointing out the fact of his killing in no way defends Awlaki.
The principle remains the same regardless of who Awlaki was, or what the administration has told you he was - the state should not be allowed to assassinate unarmed citizens or anyone else without trial, due process, etc. if he was guilty they should have tried him in absentia.
What do you think about the killing of his son a few weeks afterward?
> the state should not be allowed to assassinate unarmed citizens or anyone else without trial, due process, etc. if he was guilty they should have tried him in absentia.
A trial in absentia would be wildly more unconstitutional and also a much more dangerous precedent. The right of sovereign nations to kill foreigners on foreign soil is well-established, and a bright-line distinction: either someone is a foreigner and on foreign soil, in which case due process rights do not apply, or they are not either of these things, in which case due process rights do apply. Awalki's case is complicated by the fact that he was technically a U.S. citizen, but you can justify the assassination on the basis that his decade of evading attempts to apprehend him in Yemen amount to an implied renunciation of his citizenship.
Trials in abstentia are much more dangerous precedent. There, you're basically acknowledging that Awlaki was not only entitled to due process rights, but that the "process due" was a full trial. The Constitutional rights applicable to criminal trials are deeply established, and they do not allow trials in abstentia. If you proceed with one anyway, you're creating this whole new class of exception to Constitutional rights in cases of terrorism.
> What do you think about the killing of his son a few weeks afterward?
The right of sovereign nations to kill foreigners on foreign soil is well-established
Only in times of war and with carefully described conditions (Geneva conventions). Declaring an eternal war on civilians everywhere will not end well, and claiming the right to assassinate worldwide will rapidly erode US power and allies worldwide.
I disagree that a trial in absentia is worse or more dangerous than killing on suspicion, without trial or appeal.
A trial in abstentia may be better for the person being targeted, but preserving a bright line distinction between military actions abroad and judicial process at home preserves the integrity of the courts. Jurisdictional boundaries exist not just to respect the constitutional separation between the executive and the judiciary, they exist to protect to autonomy of the judiciary. It undermines American courts to water down the constitutional protections applicable to trials in order to be able to give a trial to foreign nationals hiding out in foreign countries engaging and planning acts of war.
And the assassination of an American citizen without the involvement of any judicial process at all doesn't undermine American courts?
I don't really know what the right answer is here, if, as claimed, it was indeed impossible to capture al-Awlaki safely. But here you are asserting that he was a foreign national. It seems to me that at the very least, that claim deserved judicial review.
1. wasn't his son traveling with another targeted individual?
2. i'm iffy on the assassination thing because its not like the US wasn't looking for that guy dead or alive. You act like slapping hand-cuffs on him was plausible.
3. Yemen tried him.
A system of courts and due process is inconvenient and sometimes means the guilty are not punished, but it is preferable to the alternatives.
I've seen no evidence that he was travelling with a targeted individual, or even that the targeting was justified, the statement was I believe 'he was not specifically targeted'. That's because there was no trial, and no evidence presented. Have you seen any evidence, or merely the assurances of gov. officials? Does proximity to a criminal while eating now warrant instant death?
As to the Yemen trial, that applies to Awlaki, not his son, and you have a remarkable faith in the Yemeni justice system. If the US is to assassinate people, I do think they owe them at least a trial in their own courts.
Personally I think this policy is wrongheaded and damaging to US interests in the long term, given all the innocents inevitably killed by drone or missiles in civilian areas. However it's also a sign of declining respect for the law in the US. According to Obama, and yourself if you accept these assassinations, his will is law.
Even if that would be OK, I haven't heard of "capital punishment by drone" as execution method yet. (And add to that "also include anyone he happens to be with at the moment of execution because terrorism")
"Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. "
Pretty significant sentence, in this case. Much hangs from it, in the sense that if the official government narrative and this classified information differ greatly - then the Federal govt has been involved in what is essentially a huge propaganda operation.
America appears to have an analogue of Parliamentary privilege¹ written into the US Constitution (“for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place”), so why can't they discuss it there?
It reads to me as though speaking in Congress can't be made a felony (or treason, or breach of the peace) because that would involve the Member being questioned for their speech in another place (i.e., a court) — but then, this is the sort of thing that makes American politics such fun to watch, from a bit of a distance.
There's two separate provisions of the Speech and Debate clause:
1) Members can't be arrested while attending a session of their House of Congress, or while travelling to or from such a session, except in relation to charges of "Treason, Felony, and Breach of Peace."
and:
2) Members can't be held accountable for any speech or debate in their House except by the same House itself.
The "Treason, Felony, or Breach of Peace" exception has nothing to do with the second provision.
Thats kinda how things work though. Its pretty amazing that we're a country so fervently attached to the rule of law in some instances. It's kinda amazing actually.
Other nations wouldn't have it so lucky.
I'm sure stuff like this is why Cynthia McKinney just said to hell with it all...
"She had accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleged serious security breaches and cover-ups and that intelligence had been deliberately suppressed, endangering national security."
From Wikipedia: "Edmonds testified before the 9/11 Commission, but her testimony was excluded from the official 567 page 9/11 Commission Report."
Publicly questioning the official 9/11 story is a great way to be ridiculed. The media and other propaganda outlets have so effectively labelled anything contrary to the party line as "conspiracy theory", discrediting anyone who points out the hundreds and hundreds of holes in the official story. The only credible theory (taking a cold look at the facts that have come to light over the past 12 years) is that AT THE VERY LEAST the US Government knew about 9/11 in advance.
Maybe, with time, it will become more socially acceptable to openly wonder what really happened. And probably by that time, most people won't give a shit.
Er, maybe that's because conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 often go off into complete nonsense? We already know the US intelligence community failed to put together the pieces before 9/11. There are dozens of conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, all of them with holes of their own.
Could you provide a summary or breakdown (with sources?) of the facts about the U.S. government knowing about 9/11 in advance (and allowing it to happen when they could have stopped it or evacuated the buildings, as you're implying)?
If you do have some knowledge I don't, putting it in an accessible form like that would be very helpful - a lot of 9/11 "truth" material is steeped in scifi conspiracy nonsense or global elite lizard people type stuff. Or if you ask for clarification, you're told to watch a 2 hour youtube video filled with "many experts agree that this is wrong" weasel words.
One particularly good example: John Farmer, Jr., senior counsel to the Commission stated that the Commission "discovered that...what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when — was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue." Farmer continues: "At some level of the government, at some point in time … there was a decision not to tell the truth about what happened...The (NORAD) tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public."[1] Thomas Kean, the head of the 9/11 Commission, concurred: "We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth."
The 'official' conclusion was that the program did not correctly identify the 9/11 hijackers and plot in advance, but not everyone involved in the operation believes that.
There is a problem with reflexively dismissing "conspiracy theories": it increases the attack surface for deceiving the public.
Imagine telling a computer user "Don't be so paranoid, it's safe to open that binary. Do you really think there's some conspiracy to hijack your computing power as part of some botnet? Har har!"
Case-by-case, you'd be right nearly all of the time (at least for software the user sought out themselves, and didn't get linked to by spam). But by dismissing that concern out of hand, it becomes far more likely the user won't do 5 minutes of Google research, and will open an untrusted binary that really is unsafe.
Skepticism should apply across the board, and certainty should be an unachievable asymptote for "official" and "crackpot" explanations alike. There is a sufficient track record of powerful entities successfully deceiving the public that even the craziest of theories should be examined and considered, if only to spread the antibodies of skepticism.
Is that tongue-in-cheek or unintentionally ironic? This comic itself represents "cutting away context from facts and arguments and assembling them into reassuring litanies".
"Why is person A saying X?"
"Oh, you can just ignore that, exactly like when Person B says Y... it's just a conspiracy theory. What we do is, we use the mentally unstable, the confused and the mislead as an excuse to not look anyone else in the eye either, whenever it gets uncomfortable. This makes us morally and intellectually superior."
Yep. Ayn Rand called this "package dealing," though she wasn't thinkimng about conspiracy theories in particular.
For instance, "selfish." Is that pursuing rational long-term values, or is that victimizing others in a futile attempt at short-term gain? Catholic priests lumped them together intentionally since the middle ages, and so it continues throughout our culture today to help justify various kinds of collectivism.
Today people are doing it with "conspiracy theories" to try to prevent challenges to their worldview. But the fact is, sometimes, conspiracies actually do happen!
It's the source that's the problem. The NY Post for me is in the neighborhood of the National Enquirer. If they told me the sun rose in the east I'd check it with reliable sources before I believed them.
The burden of proof falls upon the claimant, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
If there is a conspiracy to wage war against the US, there better damn well be a more creditable news source than a sensationalist tabloid, owned by Rupert Murdoch, than the NY Post.
Other than a foreign power, one of this country's largest trading partners, aided and abetted criminals who staged the largest act of aggression ever inflicted on any country in the last 50 years.
You have an interesting definition of the word "extraordinary". Also, let me tell you about a little tea pot which is right now in orbit around the sun.
Exactly. the fact that this is suddenly being trotted out now leads me to wonder, "Who wants me to think about this now? Why? What are they trying to convince me to go along with?"
I am certainly not going to take this at face value. The NYP has a record of making up stuff. E.g.:
After the Marathon Bombing, "The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid claimed that 12 people were killed by explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and that a suspect -- a Saudi Arabian male -- was being questioned at a Boston hospital." [1]
After the marathon bombing, they were "slapped with a defamtion lawsuit" for claiming it was the two "Bag Men."
[2]
What was the motivation for Saudi Arabia to carry out these attacks? Was it an independent decision by Saudi elite? Did any events take place that would encourage vengeance of some kind? And why did it take place just once?
The OP is pointing a finger at the Saudis. However, there are many unexplained discrepancies in the official account of 9/11 that suggests a deeper conspiracy.
For people who don't want to read the essay, I'll just say:
Peikoff argues that modern terrorism is almost entirely coming about through sponsorship by a couple of very, very bad states, and simply ending those states in a proper, just war would solve the problem and make "Fortress America" unnecessary. (Any mistakes here are likely my own, not his.)
maxharris, wasn't this actually a full-page ad in the NYT? Could be wrong but for some reason I thought it was.
So what? Most terrorist attacks on US were orchestrated by FBI or secred services, who spoon-fed attackers, give them bomb and 'catched' them. Nobody cares.
Well, the FBI has a history of encouraging people to commit bad acts, giving them fake bombs and then "catching" them. I don't believe the FBI generally gives people real bombs, and it would be big news if you could prove that they did.
They did in the 1993 WTC bombing. The FBI informant initiated the plot as first using pipe bombs for synagogues. Then later it evolved and he built a real bomb under the supervision and direction of the FBI and the District Attorney. The informant wanted more money and eventually the FBI lost confidence in him and cut him loose. Approximately 6-months later the bomb exploded. Afterwards, he was rehired, paid a million dollars and used a fake bomb to catch other would-be terrorists.
The evidence of this is the hours of audiotapes he recorded which was covered in several NYTimes articles.
The odd thing is the plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the country. And the two Iraqi brothers, where Yousef first went, and the lady associated with them, were never caught.
I don't think it was a malicious conspiracy but it was gross negligence and there is indication that the FBI wanted to catch the terrorists in the act to teach them a lesson. Even worse is that KSM is Yousef's uncle and there were several neo-con writers who cast doubt on Yousef's true identity whilst trying to link him to Iraq.
sadly this is exactly right - the American people don't care - they pretend they do but in reality they will just do what they're told to by the media and the politicians from whichever side of the one party with two faces they pretend they're aligned with
Generalizations like this make everyone in the country seem like lemmings. That must be the same reason why the world sends its best and brightest to America to be educated.
The second fly in your ointment is that you assume the source to be credible. If it is credible, then at some point other news companies will be forced to recognize that credibility.
But, sadly, the NY Post has a history of exaggerating the truth and bending it in ways that will inflame and influence people like yourself, making you the one who's being told by the media what to think.
The world increasingly DOESN'T send its best and brightest to America to be educated. Wealthy elites often send family members to establish themselves here for the economic benefits of a system controlling most of the worlds resources supported by the world's largest military.
There's nothing particularly controversial in this. Most of these facts have been long reported - just in isolated dribs and drabs over the course of the last decade and mostly people are disinterested in hearing it.
i agree anyone bright enough to tie ones own shoes wouldnt head to murica for an "education", japan, china, russia, germany, sweeden, australia, new zealand, all have far better higher education systems.
"The US would be attacking one its closest allies in the region."
But if the Saudis were, indeed, responsible for the 9/11 attacks, they would, by definition, no longer be our ally. They would have had committed an act of war against the U.S.
If the U.K. or France had blown up the WTC and the Pentagon, they would no longer be our allies either.
> What's Bush's interest in protecting the Saudis?
Perhaps not so much protecting the Saudis, as protecting the established pretext for the administration's response?
For instance, it has been reported that within mere hours of the first plane hitting, high-level officials were specifically seeking ways to blame it on Iraq, without regard to whether that was a relevant course of action [1].
Additionally, senior officials have stated that they believe Bush intended on invading Iraq at the time he took office, or at least well ahead of 9/11 [2][3].
And it's clear that protecting the public story was important: The Bush administration outrageously persecuted those who attempted to move the public discourse in directions that contradicted the official line, for instance [4] which was nothing but retribution for pointing out that the administration lied (i.e.: already knew their claims about uranium and Niger had been specifically investigated and debunked).
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9...Rumsfeld was "telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks" five hours after an American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon. ... [N]otes that had been taken at the time by a Rumsfeld aide ... quote the defense chief asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH (Saddam Hussein) at the same time, not only UBL" (Usama bin Laden). The administration should
"go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not".
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_IraqFormer chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council Richard A. Clarke believes Bush took office with a predetermined plan to invade Iraq.
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-sought-way-to-invade-iraq/And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
Watch the opening title sequence for one of the best summaries of the linked events building to 9/11 and the Saudi response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW71JuzHr5o