Peace and Justice Post

Source: swissinfo, September 12, 2007 – 2:07 AM

HAVANA (Reuters) – Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said the U.S. government misinformed Americans and the world about 9/11, echoing conspiracy theories about the terror attacks against the United States six years ago. In an essay read by a Cuban television presenter on Tuesday night, Castro said the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.

“Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation,” wrote Castro, who has not appeared in public since July of 2006 when life-threatening surgery for a secret illness forced him to hand over power to his brother Raul Castro.

“Studying the impact of planes, similar to those that hit the Twin Towers, that had accidentally fallen on densely populated cities, one concludes that it was not a plane that crashed into the Pentagon,” Castro said.

“Only a projectile could have caused the geometrically round hole that allegedly was made by the plane,” he said.

“We were fooled like the rest of the planet’s inhabitants,” he wrote.

Castro said the truth behind the September 11 attacks with hijacked planes that killed nearly 3,000 people will probably never be known.

Castro’s 4,256-word essay made no mention of Osama bin Laden and his militant Islamist al Qaeda network behind the attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and Washington.

Castro, who was the target of CIA assassination plots after his 1959 revolution, said Cuba tipped off U.S. security services in 1984 about a plan to kill then President Ronald Reagan while he campaigned for re-election in North Carolina.

The information provided by Cuba led to the arrest of a group of would-be assassins and foiled the plot, he wrote.

Reuters (IDS)

Agence France-Presse

Last updated 11:31pm (Mla time) 09/11/2007

WASHINGTON — Israel carried out a rare air strike inside Syria last week targeting a shipment of arms, CNN reported Tuesday quoting US government and military sources.

Israeli officials have so far maintained a veil of silence over Syrian reports that Israeli warplanes violated its airspace on Thursday ratcheting up the tension between the neighboring foes still officially at war.

Reporter Christiane Amanpour said Tuesday on the Cable News Network (CNN) that “sources now are telling me that in fact Israel did conduct a military strike against Syrian territory. That it was an air strike, that it perhaps involved Israeli ground forces.”

She added it was believed the strike targeted “weapons that were either coming into Syria or that were being trans-shipped from Iran through Syria to Hezbollah.”

US government and US military officials had told CNN that Israel did conduct a rare air strike inside Syria and “it has left a big hole in the desert,” she added.

Syria said its air defenses had opened fire on Israeli warplanes flying over the northeast of the country in the early hours of Thursday and warned it was weighing its response to the Israeli “aggression.”

But Israeli officials have made no comment on the allegations, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “specifically instructed ministers not to talk about the incident related to Syria at all,” one senior Israeli government official said.

Information Clearing House

By Paul Craig Roberts

09/11/07 “ICH” — — On Sept. 7, National Public Radio reported that Muslims in the Middle East were beginning to believe that the 9-11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were false flag operations committed by some part of the U.S. and/ or Israeli government.

It was beyond the imagination of the NPR reporter and producer that there could be any substance to these beliefs, which were attributed to the influence of books by U.S. and European authors sold in bookstores in Egypt.

NPR’s concern was that books by Western authors questioning the origin of the 9-11 attack have the undesirable result of removing guilt from Muslims’ shoulders.

The NPR reporter, Ursula Lindsey, said that “here in the U.S., most people have little doubt about what happened during the 2001 attacks.”

NPR’s assumption that the official 9-11 story is the final word is uninformed. Polls show that 36 percent of Americans and more than 50 percent of New Yorkers lack confidence in the 9-11 commission report. Many 9-11 families who lost relatives in the attacks are unsatisfied with the official story.

Why are the U.S. media untroubled that there has been no independent investigation of 9-11?

Why are the media unconcerned that the rules governing preservation of forensic evidence were not followed by federal authorities?

Why do the media brand skeptics of the official line “conspiracy theorists” and “kooks”?

What is wrong with debate and listening to both sides of the defining issue of our time? If the official line is so correct and defensible, what does it have to fear from skeptics?

Keep reading . . .

Spiegel online International, September 10, 2007

In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, American military historian Gabriel Kolko argues that the situation in Iraq is worse than ever and that the artificial nation, created after World War I, is breaking up. The “surge,” he says, is also failing.

REUTERS

US soldiers in Iraq: “Some of the most acute criticisms made of the gross simplisms which have guided interventionist policies were produced within the American military.”

SPIEGEL: The long awaited results of the “surge” are now in. Has the surge succeeded? Is there reason for optimism in Iraq? KOLKO: Both United States General David H. Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will deliver “progress” reports to Congress on Monday, but the skeptics far outnumber those who believe Bush’s strategy in Iraq is succeeding. They will say that Shiite attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad have fallen but they will not add that Baghdad has been largely purged in many areas of Sunni inhabitants and their flight much earlier — and not the increase in Americans — is the reason “success” can be reported to Congress. Indeed, most of the administration’s statistics have been met with a wave a skepticism.

Continued …

by Dave Lindorff | Sep 10 2007
Nobody should fall for a story that those six (yeah, it was first reported as five, but now the original military whistleblowers have told Army Times it was six) nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that were flown in launch position on a B-52 from Minot, ND to Barksdale, LA, were put on there inadvertently.

I had some experience with the way nuclear weapons get handled, as compared to conventional weapons, and I can assure you that there is no way anyone would just “accidentally” pick up the wrong weapons.

article continues…

Information Clearing House

By Jim Kirwan

09/08/07 “ICH ” — – The United States has had a standing presence in the skies around the world since the Cold War began. The division of the Air Force that has that responsibility was Strategic Air Command – that was the case until the Berlin Wall went down. Since that time it is unclear who is in charge of this vast nuclear fleet of global bombers that always kept a full third of their forces in the air, around the world, at all times prior to the end of the Cold War. (1)

Those B-52’s were armed with nuclear weapons, because they were part of our forward defense shield to deter the communist regime of the USSR from a pre-emptive attack upon the USA or on any of our military bases scattered all over the planet. We also had Trident submarines that also encircled the seas – and they too carried nuclear weapons, theirs were in the form of ICBM’s. What remains unclear today is who now controls our nuclear bomber fleet – and what will happen to them on September 14, when the US Air Force grounds all its planes because of this “incident.’ (2)

Today there are 190 nations in the world and we have 130 military bases on this planet in other nations: If we do not have a WAR department, why do we need so many bases? We call the military—the Department of Defense—yet how can this be considered a Defensive department – when so many of our bases are still located in 130 other countries?

Continued . . .

War In Iraq

By: AKI on: 11.09.2007

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk says prestige of Western civilisation ruined by ‘horrors and injustice’ of war.

TURIN, Italy – The Iraqi war was a disaster for the US and its allies and had undermined support for democracy and secularism in the Islamic world, Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk told Adnkronos International (AKI).

On a visit to Italy, Pamuk said the prestige of Western civilisation had been ruined by the ‘horrors and injustice’ of the war and it had poisoned relations between the Arab world and the US and its European allies.

“I think it is one of the major disasters in the last three or four decades, this war in Iraq. It’s destroyed a peaceful approach in the Middle East towards democracy, towards human rights, western values and women’s liberation,” Pamuk told AKI.

He was visiting the northern city of Turin for a lecture organised by the Premio Grinzane Cavour, a prestigious Italian literary prize that he won in 2002.

Pamuk said Muslim countries were also suffering from simplistic perceptions in the West that associated Islam with terrorism, suicide killings and bombings.

Continued . . .

Published on Monday, September 10, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

By Norman Solomon

It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited “9/11,” a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight — giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.

Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you’re more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you’re more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.

“Sept. 11 changed everything” became a sudden cliche in news media. Words are supposed to mean something, and those words were — and are — preposterous. They speak of a USA enthralled with itself while reducing the rest of the world (its oceans and valleys and mountains and peoples) to little more than an extensive mirror to help us reflect on our centrality to the world. In an individual, we call that narcissism. In the nexus of media and politics, all too often, it’s called “patriotism.”

Continued . . .

Prisonplanet.com

Sunday September 9, 2007

Adam Pearlman, the Jewish Mossad agent who once wrote stinging essays condemning Muslims as “bloodthirsty terrorists”, has been singled out as the creator of the suspicious “new” Osama Bin Laden video.

From the London Telegraph:

A Californian heavy metal fan, who converted to Islam and became the first American to be charged with treason in half a century, has been fingered as the author of Osama bin Laden’s latest video lecture – which left the terror chief sounding like an anti-globalisation protester.

The al-Qaeda leader’s first video message for three years featured a bizarre rant against America, with references to global warming, “insane taxes”, the US mortgage market meltdown and rising interest rates.

American spy chiefs were quick to name Adam Gadahn, the head of al-Qaeda’s English language media operations, as the author of large sections of bin Laden’s broadcast.

Continued . . .

By Bill Van Auken

Global Research, September 9, 2007

wsws.org – 2007-09-07

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Wednesday’s revelation that a US Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the length of the United States armed with six cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads has attracted amazingly little media attention.

The story, first broken by the Military Times web site based on tips from military officers, was relegated to the bottom of page 16 in Thursday’s New York Times and to page 10 of the Washington Post.

Featured prominently in both newspapers and generally in media coverage were reassurances from a spokesman for the Air Force that it represented “an isolated mistake” and that “at no time was there a threat to public safety.”

This incident, however, has immense and ominous significance. Describing it as an “isolated mistake” begs the obvious questions of how a nuclear-armed B-52 was allowed to become airborne—ostensibly without the approval of senior officials—and who ordered this extraordinary flight, and why.

The B-52 took off from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on August 30 after six nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise Missiles were mounted on the pylons under its wings. Each of the warheads carried a yield of up to 150 kilotons, more than ten times as powerful as the US bomb that leveled Hiroshima at the close of the Second World War.

Continued . . .