New York, U.S.A. - New evidence shows that the September 11th activities of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were falsely reported by official sources.

The 20-member 9/11 Consensus Panel analyzed evidence from press reports, FOIA requests, and archived 9/11 Commission files documents to produce eight new studies.

The international Panel also discovered that four massive aerial practice exercises traditionally held in October were in full operation on 9/11. The largest, Global Guardian, held annually by NORAD and the U.S. Strategic and Space Commands, had originally been scheduled for October 22-31 but was moved, along with Vigilant Guardian, to early September.

Although senior officials claimed  no one could have predicted using hijacked planes as weapons, the military had been practicing similar exercises on 9/11 itself — and for years before it.

The Panel, discovering widespread reports of confusion and delays in the defense response, looked into who was overseeing the air defenses after the second Tower was hit at 9:03 A.M.

Official sources claimed neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff Acting Chairman General Richard Myers (filling in for General Hugh Shelton), nor  war-room chief General Montague Winfield were available to take command until well after the Pentagon was struck about 9:37.

Yet emerging documents and memoirs show that top leaders were engaged earlier — and later discussed a shoot down of the “let’s roll” Flight 93 before debris was scattered widely around its alleged Shanksville, Pennsylvania crash site.

Most intriguing is the mystery of who was running the Pentagon’s war-room during the critical early hours.

These findings follow hard on the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal’s May 15th verdict that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were guilty of torture and war crimes.

The Consensus Panel has completed 25 educational studies (using a medical consensus model) offering the “best evidence” regarding specific official claims about 9/11.

Its goal is to “provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.”

Image Courtesy of   PaulSteinJC

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Washington, U.S.A. - As the first anniversary of bin Laden’s death approaches, Robert Weiner, a former Clinton White House spokesman and former communications director for the House Government Operations Committee, and Senior Analyst at Robert Weiner Associates Richard Mann, prove wrong the statements by Mitt Romney, Carl Rove, and other critics that “any president” would have given the order that launched the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year.

They contrast Bush’s 2001 outsourcing a raid on Bin Laden’s 2001 Tora Bora location to the Afghanis who failed — on purpose or through ineptness — to Obama’s U.S. solo action in Abbottabad, Pakistan that succeeded when Obama did not reveal or leak the strategy.

Weiner and Mann document their claim with information from a 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report, “Tora Bora Revisited: How we Failed to Get Bin Laden.”

Weiner and Mann say, “When placed in a similar situation with parallel choices, George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor, failed to succeed because he made the opposite decision. In December 2001, Bush had the chance to capture Bin Laden in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, was faced with the choice of doing it ourselves or involving a foreign government, and asked the Afghanis to do it. Whether by ineptness or intent, the Afghani troops allowed bin Laden to escape.”

Weiner and Mann show how Obama’s approach was totally different: “When Obama was questioned as why he did not inform the Pakistanis in advance about Abbottabad, he said, ‘I didn’t tell most people here in the White House. I didn’t tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security.’

When asked during the 2006 presidential campaign debates what he would do with ‘actionable intelligence’, he said he would have the United States ‘act unilaterally’ rather than in consort with foreign intelligence if necessary to capture bin Laden. That’s precisely what he did, as the President restated at a White House news conference.”

Weiner and Mann cite the 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report: “The Committee says its review ‘removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.” The Committee Chair expressed the “hope that we can learn from the mistakes of the past.” “Obama did,” say Weiner and Mann.

“Obama recognized that bin Laden’s compound could not exist without local and likely some kind of government cooperation.

“During the years after the Tora Bora debacle, the Bush administration went even further in the opposite direction from Obama’s later actions. Bush closed the CIA’s unit on bin Laden. In contrast, Obama reprioritized the search for bin Laden. Bush said, ‘I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq. I really don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.’ Likewise, Governor Romney said he ‘would not move heaven and earth’ to get bin Laden.

“The notion recently raised by Carl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney that Bush deserves a share of the credit for Obama’s bin Laden operation is ridiculous and should be recognized as sour grapes.

“Obama’s team had as key players Vice President Joe Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a former Senate Armed Services Committee member, and their emphasis on using intelligence and special operations over a large military footprint ultimately proved successful. Despite 100,000 troops and another 100,000 contractors, the Taliban actually grew stronger.

It was the surgical raid by a small team that defeated the man behind the 9/11 attacks. “It is time to ask the Republicans and other critics if they have any real alternative that would have succeeded as Obama did in taking down Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi or for that matter, on domestic policy, where Obama reversed the Bush bleeding of 750,000 jobs per month, rescued the auto industry and the nation’s financial institutions, and put the country back to 26 straight months of increased jobs and GDP.”

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Though still not even in official release, the writer and director of “The Last War Crime” says that YouTube is already trying to suppress the movie, which is a new full-length feature film about indicting Dick Cheney for torture. The movie’s writer and director, who goes by the name of The Pen, asks, “And isn’t that something billions of people want to see?”

But, says The Pen, YouTube does not want their visitors to see the preview clip of the waterboarding scene from the movie, for the purported reason that it contains nudity or is otherwise sexually provocative. A protest is mobilizing against this accusation.

“That’s ridiculous,” exclaims Pen. “There is no actual nudity in it … none. The actor playing the detainee wore a swimmer’s style bathing suit the entire time, and we positioned the female interrogator character so view of his midriff was blocked entirely in any case. And if they’re complaining this scene is sexually suggestive, they need to ban half the rest of the movies on their site.”

The purpose of the scene in the movie is to condemn waterboarding, long recognized to be a form of torture unequivocally. According to The Pen, the scene also serves to remind everyone that the sexual taunting of helpless and mostly innocent captives, in places like Abu Ghraib, was a deliberate part of a de facto program to degrade people in violation of the Geneva Conventions. However, YouTube makes no provision on their site to challenge their own unilateral dictates.

Pen states, “Shame on YouTube for censoring this clip, which we believe, and we think you will agree, is part of an important cultural and artistic statement of social commentary.

We have already submitted the movie to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the Cinequest Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, SXSW, the Cleveland International Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, seven of the top breakout venues for serious works of new film art.”

Pen continues, “And shame on YouTube further for deleting our waterboarding scene in such a summary and authoritarian manner. We had to build our own video server to do it, but people can now again see the clip for themselves on our new website.”

On the same web page is an action form configured to automatically send protests to YouTube. Pen is asking everyone to submit this form to send their own personal messages of complaint and is demanding that YouTube immediately restore the wrongfully deleted waterboarding scene from “The Last War Crime” movie, and put in place an accessible review process so nothing like this can ever happen again. Hoping thousands of people will join with him, Pen suggests, “Maybe that will start to get YouTube’s attention.”

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Looking back, many Americans now believe that Hilary Clinton would have been a better president over Barack Obama. Clinton was a 2008 presidential nominee against President Barack Obama, but lost in the race and instead made Secretary of State for the Barack administration.

Although a  popular figure among most Americans, a recent Bloomberg poll conducted this month demonstrated that 64 per cent of Americans currently have a more favorable view of Clinton. The poll also included a study asking if the United States would be better off today with Clinton in the White House than it is under President Obama and 34 per cent agreed.

Only 13 per cent thought that the country would be worse off if Hilary Clinton was in office, along with 35 per cent of people who thought the country would be worse off with McCain as president. A share of 46 per cent think that the country would be about the same with either Clinton or President Obama in office.

After surveying 997 people, participants ranked Hilary Clinton at 27 per cent ‘very favorable’ which surpassed the current president with his 21 percent ‘very favorable’ rating. Dick Cheney even chimed in stating on Fox News while promoting his new book, that “perhaps she might have been easier for some of us who are critics of the President to work with.”

He also said, “I have the sense that she’s one of the more competent members of the current administration, and it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president.” Clinton’s recent speech at the U.N event on Monday encouraged women to get involved in democracies throughout the world.

She stressed the importance of a “true democracy” that includes women and was there to promote the future of women in politics. She stated, “If we want a safe, secure, prosperous, peaceful future [...] women must be equal partners and free to realize their own God-given potential.”

Last week Clinton also made an appearance at the UN General Assembly, urging a peaceful solution through negotiations for Israel and Palestine. This speech was intended to smooth over plans by Palestine to ask the United Nations to declare the Israeli-occupied land independent and recognize the Palestinian territory as sovereign.

Unfortunate for many hopefuls, Hilary Clinton thus far has not shown any steps towards entering the 2012 presidential race. She said that she wouldn’t run for president again and was looking forward to retirement in an interview with Anne Curry in 2009.

Her approval rating and popularity might make it hard for her to turn down the opportunity though, and the polls show that many people wish they could get another opportunity to vote differently and elect Clinton into office.

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As Dick Cheney’s memoir hits the bookstore shelves, one target of the former vice president is clear- Sen. John McCain from Arizona. Cheney’s disgust for the former Republican candidate for president is clear in the book.

McCain’s name is first mentioned in the book, “In My Time” when Cheney discusses how McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham from South Carolina tried in 2005 to rein some of the abuses by President Bush’s interrogation programs.

Cheney, who designed the programs, wrote in his book that McCain “lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting” he had set up with CIA Director Porter Goss to brief him on the intelligence gleaned from those interrogations.

“[H]is view of the program was certainly not unanimous among his fellow former POWs,” Cheney wrote. Another passage about McCain comes later in the book. Cheney talks about the 2008 presidential campaign run by McCain.

On September 24, 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain announced he was suspending his presidential campaign to come back to Washington to deal with the financial crisis. It was a move that frankly surprised many of us in the White House. After all, there really wasn’t much John could actually do, and it seemed pretty risky to announce the campaign suspension and head back to Washington without being clear about what you could actually deliver.

But we wanted McCain to win, so when he asked the president to convene the congressional leadership in the Cabinet Room of the White House to discuss the financial crisis, the president did it. He called Senator Obama, McCain’s opponent, and asked him to be there as well. What unfolded that day in the West Wing was likely unique in the annals of American presidential contests.

When the president turned to Senator McCain to speak, he passed. Since he had called for the meeting in the first place, that was a surprise. After a few other people expressed their opinions, most of them negative, the president came back to McCain. This time he spoke, but only for himself.

It was a marked contrast with Obama, whose words carried the authority of all the Democrats in the room. Senator McCain added nothing of substance. It was entirely unclear why he’d returned to Washington and why he’d wanted the congressional leadership called together. I left the Cabinet Room when the meeting was over thinking the Republican presidential ticket was in trouble.

Despite Cheney’s obvious attempt to point fingers and generate book sales, McCain is not taking the bait. In a statement to the National Review Online, McCain took the high road. “I respect and appreciate Vice President Cheney’s leadership and dedicated service to our country,” McCain said.

“From time to time, we have had differences, as is typical for anyone in public life. I wish the Vice President well and that he remains in good health.”

Image Courtesy of  http://www.facebook.com/johnmccain

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s book was released this week with promises of “heads exploding” in Washington.  I am not sure that any heads will explode, but I will bet that his book sells pretty well.

One of the heads that Cheney might have thought would explode belongs to former top diplomat inside the Bush administration, Colin Powell. Powell appeared CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday and accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots.”

Cheney writes in his book, “In My Time” that Powell tried to undermine Bush by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government. Powell denies these accusations stating that he routinely gave his opinion and his best advice on issues to the president.

Although Powell stated he has always planned to resign after Bush’s first term, Cheney suggested in his book that Powell somehow was forced to resign. Powell also suggested Cheney is almost condescending in his remarks about Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice.

Powell also discussed Cheney’s prediction of head’s exploding. “That’s quite a visual,” Powell said of the former vice president’s choice of words. “[It's] the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist or the kind of headline you might see one of the super market tabloids write.

It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from one of the vice presidents of the United States of America.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.”

Other revelations from Cheney’s book include his secret resignation letter and his lack of regret over waterboarding. Cheney reported that he kept a signed resignation letter in a lock box. “I did it because I was concerned that — for a couple of reasons,” Cheney explains in an interview with NBC’s Jamie Gangel. “One was my own health situation.

The possibility that I might have a heart attack or a stroke that would be incapacitating. And, there is no mechanism for getting rid of a vice-president who can’t function.”

Cheney says he has “no regrets” about his support for waterboarding terror suspects, and that he would “strongly support using it again if we had a high value detainee and that was the only way we could get him to talk.” Cheney feels he is not betraying former President George W. Bush’s trust by revealing their private conversations.

Image Courtesy of  Gage Skidmore

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