Boston, U.S.A. — George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, spoke as the keynote speaker at the annual 2012 GBTA Convention at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

A standing room-only crowd welcomed the President, who spoke candidly about leadership, his time in office and the decision making process behind some of the most challenging moments during his presidency. The President then sat for a one-on-one interview with Michael W. McCormick, GBTA executive director and COO discussing global events, the economy and his memoir, “Decision Points.” President Bush’s appearance was sponsored by Orbitz for Business.

On leadership, George W. Bush said, “When you get into the Oval Office, you better be ready to make decisions. To run a company or an organization, you need to have a vision and principals. State them clearly and honor them.” In the sit down interview with Michael W. McCormick, he talked about his first foreign trip as President and Air Force One. Bush said humorously, “Our country does Presidential travel right.”

At the ‘Luminaries of Travel’ panel, Trip Davis, co-founder and chairman, TRX, president, Darden School Foundation, University of Virginia moderated the panel of leaders comprised of major travel suppliers including Barney Harford, CEO of Orbitz Worldwide, Luis Maroto, president and CEO of Amadeus, David Cush president and CEO of Virgin America and Arne Sorenson, president and CEO of Marriott International, Inc. Technology’s ability to change the dynamic between customer, supplier and company were big themes as well as the increasingly globalized nature of business.

“Technology is complementary to travel,” said David Cush of Virgin America, “But you still have to get on the airline, stay at the hotel and get out there to grow business.” The panel was sponsored by BMO Financial Group.

GBTA and Fast Company also announced the winners of the annual Business Traveler Innovation Awards 2012 congratulating the category winners, ExpertFlyer, Kayak.com, Carlson Wagonlit, Sabre Travel Network, Hertz and unveiled the 2012 People’s Choice Award and the GBTA Business Travel Judges’ Award Winners. ExertFlyer took home the 2012 People Choice Award and TripLingo won the GBTA Business Travel Judges’ Award Winners taking home the top prize.

Continuing a day of breaking news at Convention, GBTA announced the launch of its new GBTA Media Group. Through advocacy in radio, television, online and in print, the Association will build a dynamic media presence. The first phase of the media group is the launch of its new magazine, Global Business Travel, which was unveiled during the general session by GBTA Executive Director and COO, Michael W. McCormick. The first full issue of the print magazine will be published in January 2013.

Image Courtesy of   Jason and Bonnie Grower / Shutterstock.com

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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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RoadsideAmerica.com, the guide to offbeat tourist attractions, announced the launch of its Roadside Presidents mobile software app for iPhone. Roadside Presidents reveals over a thousand U.S. President tourist attractions  around the country – from traditional historic places, such as presidential birthplaces and memorials, to the offbeat and unexpected, such as the ice cream store where President Obama worked during high school.

“We’ve discovered so many bizarre presidential sights out there,” said Ken Smith, senior editor of RoadsideAmerica.com.  “By visiting conventional landmarks, but also the hidden treasures, you get the broader, nuttier picture of America’s history. You’ll never think of George Washington quite the same way after you’ve seen his whiskey-making still — or of Ronald Reagan after seeing a statue of him eating a potato pancake.”

Roadside Presidents is available on the Apple (U.S.) App Store for $2.99. The list of attractions is always growing, and the app retrieves real-time updates and attraction status reports from RoadsideAmerica.com.

Users can browse by president or by location, and read fun facts, attraction visit reports and stories, and see visitor-contributed tips and photos, maps, driving directions, hours, and phone numbers. They can snap photos from within the app to submit directly to RoadsideAmerica.com. The app’s “Been There!” feature lets users keep track of roadside attractions they have visited.

The editorial team at RoadsideAmerica.com has spent years seeking out dusty wax dioramas and creaky animatronics of the nation’s Chief Executives. They’ve written irreverent and illuminating entries for Roadside Presidents – on first ladies and VPs, quirky siblings, White House pets, and presidential also-rans.

Assassination, conspiracy, and scandal sights are other road trip possibilities found in the app. The attractions are everywhere and the app makes them easy to find — whether it’s a robot Lyndon Johnson cracking jokes in Texas, a Highway of Vice Presidents in Indiana, or a George Bush giant sequoia in California.

Roadside Presidents was designed by the software development team that created the popular Roadside America iPhone app, consistently listed among the top-selling App Store Travel apps since it was introduced in 2010. It was named an App Store Staff Favorite in 2011.

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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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