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Drivers nabbed in road blitz

February 27, 2010 - 9:46AM

Six drink drivers, two "disqualified" drivers and three "unlicensed" drivers have been caught in a road blitz in Melbourne's outer east.

Eighteen people with 108 outstanding warrants worth $35,000 were also nabbed in the operation between Victoria Police, the Sheriff's Office, VicRoads and the Victorian Taxi Directorate.

Police checked about 2200 drivers on the Maroondah Highway, Lilydale, between 7pm and 11pm (AEDT) on Friday.

They found five unregistered vehicles and 25 unsafe vehicles, and issued 41 penalty notices and 58 defect notices.

VicRoads issued nine defect and five penalty notices and detected four pollution offences.

Police used numberplate recognition cameras to check registrations against any outstanding matters in relation to vehicles.

AAP

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/drivers-nabbed-in-road-blitz-20100227-p9n2.html

'We are not satisfied'

February 27, 2010 - 1:16PM

Australia is not satisfied with Israeli explanations about the fraudulent use of Australian passports in the assassination of a Hamas operator, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says.

Mr Rudd said on Saturday the federal government had to "proceed very carefully" in the controversy because of its complex security nature.

Israeli's ambassador to Australia was summoned on Thursday for an urgent meeting with Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

"When it comes to Australian passport fraud or the use and abuse of Australian passports, this government has an absolutely hard line on defending the integrity of our passport system because millions of the travelling public depend on that each year," Mr Rudd told reporters in Adelaide on Saturday.

"That is why the foreign minister has called in the Israeli ambassador and asked for an explanation.

"Thus far we are not satisfied with that explanation."

Assassins with suspected links to the Israeli spy agency Mossad are believed to have stolen the identities of three Victorians.

The suspects were then involved in the murder of senior Hamas operator Mahmud al-Mabhuh in a Dubai luxury hotel on January 20.

Mr Rudd sidestepped criticism from one of the three Australians involved that they had not been contacted by Australian officials.

Nicole McCabe, 27, said she had no idea how her identity was stolen, as she still had her Australian passport in her Tel Aviv apartment, where she lives with husband.

Mr Rudd said: "My advice is that Australian officials have been in contact with a range of those associated with the most recent matters.

"Because these involve very complex and security intelligence matters, we have to proceed very carefully.

"I am just weighing my words very carefully.

"I wish to tread very carefully with the security and intelligence matters which arise in relation to each of the individuals and families concerned with this matter.

"Therefore I'm choosing my words very carefully so as not to compromise any person or so as not to compromise any continuing investigation."

AAP

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/we-are-not-satisfied-20100227-p9tm.html

In the red, mortgage burden soars to $1 trillion

Tim Colebatch
February 27, 2010 - 3:00AM

Australians now owe financial institutions more than $1 trillion in housing mortgages, almost 15 times as much as 20 years ago, new Reserve Bank figures show.

The Reserve revealed that people paying off their own homes now owe banks and other lenders $763 billion - almost 12 times more than the $65 billion owed in January 1990, when figures were first compiled.

Rental investors have increased their mortgage debt even more spectacularly. In January 1990, landlords owed banks $10.5 billion, but by January this year, the figure had swollen more than 30 times over, to $324 billion.

Household disposable income also rose in that period, but it only trebled. In January 1990, home mortgages ate up just 28 per cent of our disposable income. By January 2000, that had ballooned to 66 per cent, and by January this year, it doubled again to 134 per cent.

Even in the past year, despite the global financial crisis, the debt we owe on home mortgages climbed relentlessly, up $83.5 billion to $1087 billion.

Households' willingness to take on greater debt powered much of Australia's economic growth from 1990-2010 but with our households now as indebted as any in the Western world, economists say that will not be repeated.

The Reserve Bank was alarmed at the 13.6 per cent rise in house prices in 2009. Some observers believe it helped prompt the Reserve's decision to raise interest rates three times in a row in the December quarter.

A Reuters survey yesterday found most market economists believe the Reserve will raise rates a fourth time on Tuesday - and they expect a total of four or five rate rises in 2010.

The Reserve has been talking up the economy's prospects in recent days, with governor Glenn Stevens telling MPs last week that Australia's economy will be dominated over the medium term by a resurgence of the resources boom.

The Reuters survey found economists expect the first evidence of this to emerge next week, with GDP expected to jump 0.9 per cent in the December quarter - lifting annual growth to 2.4 per cent.

The Reserve yesterday reported that credit growth in January was the strongest for a year. Seasonally adjusted credit to the private sector rose by $6 billion, or 0.4 per cent, while governments borrowed another $2.6 billion.

Over the past year, private sector credit grew just $14 billion or 0.7 per cent, as business paid back more than it borrowed.

But government debt to financial institutions more than doubled, from $32 billion to $73 billion, as the federal government took on the job of keeping the Australian economy going through the crisis.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/business/in-the-red-mortgage-burden-soars-to-1-trillion-20100226-p9bs.html

No one contacted me on passport: Aussie

AAP February 27, 2010, 8:54 am

AAP ©

A terrified Australian woman whose identity was used in the assassination of a top Hamas official says the federal government has not yet offered her any help.

Pregnant Nicole McCabe, 27, said she had no idea how her identity was stolen, as she still had her Australian passport in her Tel Aviv apartment, where she lives with husband Tsahi Look.

Australian authorities have not yet contacted Ms McCabe over the revelations she is among three Australians whose stolen identities were used in the killing of senior Hamas operative Mahmud al-Mabhuh in a Dubai hotel room last month.

"I don't understand why nobody has called me to offer help from the government," Ms McCabe told News Limited.

"Nobody. Not one phone call.

"I'm surprised the embassy has not contacted me. I'm going to call them tomorrow to ask for help.

"I'm terrified. I haven't slept and I'm shaky.

"I'm worried for my health and I'm worried for my baby's health.

"I have no idea how they got hold of my passport, Obviously it's not my photo.

Ms McCabe, who is six months pregnant, has lived in Israel for two-and-a-half years and last left six months ago when she visited Australia and Thailand.

Joshua Bruce and Adam Korman also had their identities stolen and used in fake passports held by the alleged assassins.

Mossad, Israel's secret service, is believed to be behind the organised hit.

Earlier on Saturday, a former Australian ambassador to Israel revealed that he had warned the Israeli government not to fake Australian passports for intelligence operations.

Ian Wilcock, who was Australia's ambassador in Israel from 1997 to 1999, has told The Weekend Australian that he met Israeli Foreign Ministry officials in Jerusalem twice during his posting to convey to them strong concerns about the potential abuse of Australian passports by Israeli intelligence.

"The abuse of such a fundamental Australian document is completely unacceptable," Mr Wilcock said yesterday.

"We had concerns at the time about the abuse of the passports of a third country, so I met senior officials in the foreign ministry in Jerusalem and we put our concerns very strongly about the potential for this being done to Australian passports."

Mr Wilcock's comments support assertions made this week by former foreign minister Alexander Downer, who said the Howard government had raised the issue with the Israeli government.

The Rudd government has demanded answers from Israel about its suspected role in backing the theft of three Australian citizens' identities by its spy agency, Mossad, to carry out a political assassination.

Britain, France, Ireland and Germany have also called on Israel to explain why the identities of their citizens were stolen as part of the 26-person hit-squad that suffocated Hamas official Mahmud al-Mabhuh in his Dubai hotel room.

Jay-Z Denies Illuminati Rumors, Says Beanie Sigel Disses Were 'A Shocker'

Published 01/14/2010, by Allen Starbury

Blogs and conspiracy theorists went crazy when Jay-Z premiered his Swizz Beatz-assisted music video, "On To The Next One," earlier this month, due to images some felt were displaying his allegiance to the Illuminati -- a secret society that many presume to control world affairs behind the scenes through modern day government and international corporations. One of the images that got people talking was a crucifix placed between two bullets, as well as Jay's long-used diamond hand sign. Radio personality, Angie Martinez, recently questioned the rap superstar about the rumors, which he laughed them off. "I don't know where it came from, I don't know where it started ... NO, not me," Jay said when asked if he added images deliberately in his music videos to mess with people. "No, never done that before. Why would I do that? That's retarded. "I can't even get into a golf club in Palm Springs. I'm from Marcy Projects. Just think about that ..." he added. While Jay says the secret society rumors are funny, he admits that he believes, somewhat, in "cliques of friends" running world affairs. "I think there's cliques of friends who control things," he explained. "I don't know if its a devil worshipping sec ... I think that's a little Tom Hanks. But, I believe there's cliques of people who control the world. Like Jeezy's my man, I got Atlanta. If I go down to Atlanta, I got that thing. When he come to Brooklyn, he got that thing. That's just natural process. I'm sure Obama has his people who he's good with. As far as how far people are taking it ... I guess I'm an entertainer. People are entertained. That's not my thing ... People make up their own things, and just run with it." And just to clear the air about allegations that he worships the devil, Jay explained that he believes in one God, but not organized religion, and everything else you're reading on gossip blogs are silly. "To be honest with you. I really think it's really silly," he said. "For the record, I, of course, believe in God. I believe in one God. If people must know my religious belief, I believe in one God. I don't believe in religion. I don't believe in Christians or Muslims. I think all that separates people. I think it's one God, I think it's all the same God. I don't believe in hell ... Am I a part of some cult? That sounds stupid to me. That's ignorant to even say. That'll be the last time I address that." In addition to addressing the Illuminati rumors, Jay was also asked about his falling out with former protege Beanie Sigel. While he says he was somewhat surprised to see him align himself with 50 Cent to throw disses at him, he explained that artists will do anything to market themselves these days. "I can honestly say that one was a shocker. When you're cut from a certain cloth, there are things that are off limits," Jay said. "If you cross that line, it puts you in a different box. It comes from the same thing. I think people are running out of ideas and it's all marketing at this point. In the beginning it was competition. It was just like, 'Lets see who's better. Let's go to the square and see who's better.' It's all just marketing now. That's their whole marketing plan -- Jiggaman." Shortly after Beans' campaign with 50, he later admitted that the G-Unit general used him to drum up interest for his Before I Self Destruct album.

MORE ORWELLIAN ACTIVITY ATTACKING OUR FREEDOMS

Melbourne Age article, They like to watch...

Earlier this month, Australia Post's managers were accused of spying on staff. By using computerised letterboxes, they were able to catch workers falsifying their time sheets. Instead of denying the claims, senior management said they were entitled to secretly monitor their employees because the organisation isn't answerable to state laws.

Perhaps this lack of trust is explained by a global report released at the end of last year, the Global Retail Theft Barometer. It found that Australia was the only country in the Asia Pacific region to list employee theft as the main reason for missing profits and stock shortages. The majority of countries blamed shoplifting for their retail shrinkage rates.

Spying is nothing new for call centre workers, of course. Many of them have their phone conversations recorded "for quality and training purposes", but in reality, they're also used for espionage - or just for a giggle. I used to work in one where managers would listen to employees' personal calls and share with their colleagues what they'd heard.

Boeing allegedly employs a team of investigators who have the authority to read employees' private emails. They even follow workers and secretly take photos and videos of them. In certain cases, they covertly monitor employees' monitors, seeing in real time what their team members are doing on their computers, including their keystrokes.

Hewlett-Packard has faced the most public scrutiny over this issue. In 2006, they were ordered by a court to pay $14.5 million as a result of over-the-top espionage. They read their workers' emails and instant messages, used deception to obtain their phone records, and even initiated physical surveillance of one of their board members.

Internet monitoring is the default way to nab people. I saw a report in one company listing the websites employees had visited, the time spent on each site, and the links that were clicked. This was then used to sack staff because it's easier to dismiss people for inappropriate internet usage than it is to get rid of them for poor performance. Eight blokes had their employment terminated when a check of their emails by the IT department discovered they were forwarding pornographic images to each other.

Potential employees are being spied upon, too. Last year, a poll by Development Dimensions International revealed that 40 per cent of interviewers were worried they didn't have enough information about a candidate to make a decision, so 25 percent of them checked social networking sites, such as MySpace, to find out what a candidate was really like. 60 per cent of those who logged on found the information they needed and were subsequently able to make a hiring choice they felt was right.

Bosses are taking a peek at social networking sites as well. Fearful of what their employees are saying about the company on sites like Twitter, they check their workers' accounts and reprimand them for negative comments. For example, in the UK last February, a teenager was sacked for saying her work was boring on Facebook. In April, a worker in Switzerland was fired for using Facebook while she was sick at home. And in NSW last September, prison officers took their employer to the Industrial Relations Commission seeking the right to criticise their company online.

In some cases, it's understandable to spy on workers, especially when the risk of stolen intellectual property, fraudulent compensation claims, and potential harassment is high. But managers need to be careful that their attempts to minimise risk don't intrude on their employees' privacy. The difference between necessary precautions and micromanagement is small, but the adverse impact on morale is significant. At the very least, give employees advance notice in writing of any surveillance activities.

Once upon a time, managers would just spy with their little eye, but now something beginning with T is making this task simpler. And that word is 'technology'. The rate of employee-monitoring software is increasing in both usage and effectiveness, and it's turning big brother into a big bother.

Mossad 'factory' churned out fake Australian passports

By Middle East correspondent Anne Barker

Forged: The Australian passport in the name of Adam Korman allegedly used in the Dubai hit (AFP)

A former Mossad officer has alleged the Israeli spy agency has its own "passport factory" to create or doctor passports for use in intelligence operations.

Relations between Australia and Israel are under strain after three Australian passports were apparently used by suspects in the killing of top Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Dubai police say they are 99 per cent sure Mossad was behind the operation to smother Mabhouh with a pillow in his hotel room.

Victor Ostrovsky, a case officer at Mossad for several years in the 1980s, says he has no doubt Australian passports have been forged or fraudulently used for similar operations in the past.

"They need passports because you can't go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world," he said.

"They'll shy away right away. So most of these [Mossad] operations are carried out on what's called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you're trying to recruit from.

"If they can obtain blank passports, which they have in the past from Canada, from England, they do. If not, they just manufacture them."

He says a company within Mossad headquarters is dedicated to forging passports.

"They create various types of papers, every kind of ink. It's a very, very expensive research department," he said.

He says the manufactured passports are almost identical to the originals.

"If they create a passport at a top level for use of that nature ... I don't think anybody will be able to find the difference," he said.

Mr Ostrovsky says fraudulent Australian passports have been used regularly.

"Consider the fact that Australians speak English and it's an easy cover to take, very few people know very much about Australia," he said.

"You can tell whatever stories you want. It doesn't take much of an accent to be an Australian or New Zealander, or an Englishman for that matter. And I know people had been under Australian cover not once [but] quite a few times. So why not use it?"

He says Mossad chooses which passports to forge based on the cover agents need and the operation they are involved in.

"At the time there were people that were asked ... 'If when you're here in Israel we may need for security purposes to use your passport, would you allow us to do that?'" he said.

"And people would say 'yes'. There were shelves upon shelves of real passports just waiting to be used."

Mr Ostrovsky says there is no chance any of the 26 suspects could really be Mossad agents.

"No, absolutely not," he said.

"Except for James Bond, who actually pronounces or announces his arrival at the scene by saying, 'I'm Bond, James Bond'.

"Most people who work in the intelligence field don't present themselves by their real name."

Israel has long rejected Mr Ostrovsky's claims and tried to stop his book from being published.

This morning Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmour told ABC NewsRadio there was no proof of any link between Israel and Mabhouh's death.

"No evidence was presented by the Dubai police that links Israel to the incident in Dubai," he said.

"Since there is no evidence of that nature and since the Dubai police have so far not presented any ultimate evidence, we don't think that we should respond to anything."

GLAXO SMITH KLINE HIDES HARMFUL EVIDENCE

NaturalNews.com printable article
Originally published February 23 2010
GlaxoSmithKline deliberately hid evidence of Avandia harm, says Senate report
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) GlaxoSmithKline, maker of the diabetes drug Avandia, knew the drug was linked to tens of thousands of heart attacks but went out of its way to hide this information from the public, says a 334-page report just released by the Senate Finance Committee. (http://finance.senate.gov/press/Gpr...)

This report also accuses the FDA of betraying the public trust, explaining that FDA bureaucrats intentionally dismissed safety concerns found by the agency's own scientists.

The report says that Big Pharma's drugs "put public safety at risk because the FDA has been too cozy with drug makers and has been regularly outmaneuvered by companies that have a financial interest in downplaying or under-exploring potential safety risks." Sales of Avandia were $3.2 billion (yes, billion) in 2006.

According to a statistical analysis in the report, if all the diabetics currently taking Avandia were put on a "safer" drug, it would avert 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure every month in the United States alone. Presently, hundreds of thousands of Americans are still taking this drug, and hundreds will continue to die each month as a result, according to the report estimates.

This report, championed by U.S. Senators Grassley and Baucus, is the result of investigators pouring through more than 250,000 pages of documentation gathered from GlaxoSmithKline and the FDA. The document reveals some rather startling facts about the dangers of Avandia, including evidence from the FDA's own scientists who concluded that Avandia was associated with 83,000 heart attacks.

GlaxoSmithKline intimidates scientists
This investigative report also reveals that GSK engaged in the intimidation of physicians, saying: "GSK executives attempted to intimidate independent physicians, focused on strategies to minimize or misrepresent findings that Avandia may increase cardiovascular risk and sought ways to downplay findings that a competing drug might reduce cardiovascular risk."

"Patients trust drug companies with their health and their lives, and GlaxoSmithKline abused that trust." said Sen. Baucus. (Gee, really? Is anyone really surprised that GSK put its own financial interests ahead of a few thousand human lives?)

A separate letter sent to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg by Senators Baucus and Grassley added, "the totality of evidence suggests that GSK was aware of the possible cardiac risks associated with Avandia years before such evidence became public."

The FDA's own research also showed Avandia to be associated with a significant increase in heart attack risk, yet the FDA did nothing to protect the public. The agency's own scientists wrote in 2008, "There is strong evidence that rosiglitazone [Avandia] confers an increased risk of [heart attacks] and heart failure compared to pioglitazone [a rival drug on market]." This evidence went completely ignored at the FDA.

The FDA's famous Dr David Graham -- the key whistleblower on the Vioxx scandal -- concluded from his own research, "Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market."

Even the American Medical Association -- a long-time defender of Big Pharma's drugs -- admitted Avandia was dangerous. Its journal, JAMA, wrote in 2007: "Among patients with impaired glucose tolerance or type 2 diabetes, rosiglitazone use for at least 12 months is associated with a significantly increased risk of myocardial infarction and heart failure, without a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular mortality."

The New England Journal of Medicine also warned about the safety of the drug in an article published in 2007.

Despite these multiple warnings, an FDA panel voted 22 - 1 in favor of keeping Avandia on the market. This is no surprise, of course, to those who know how the FDA really operates (and where its priorities really lie).

Analysis: What does it all mean?
Are you kidding me? A drug company hid data that its high-profit drug was linked to increased risk of heart attacks? A drug company intimidated physicians and got away with hoodwinking the public while raking in billions of dollars in sales for a drug that the FDA's own scientists said should be pulled from the market?

Sounds like business as usual at the FDA, the "sweep it under the rug" division of the pharmaceutical industry. Once again, Dr David Graham turns out to be the sharpest guy in the room while having the courage to tell the truth even when surrounded by an agency full of morons and criminals.

The drug industry must hate this guy. But they can't get rid of him because he's one of the very few scientists in the FDA who is actually committed to protecting the public. Gee, what a concept, huh? The FDA as a whole abandoned that idea so long ago that virtually nobody there even remembers what it means. Protect the public? What do you mean? As in, lose profits by banning dangerous drugs that just happen to be making big money?

That's unthinkable at the FDA as we know it today. The agency exists to promote pharmaceuticals, not to limit their sales just because a hundred thousand people happen to drop dead each year from taking FDA-approved drugs.

When it comes to safety vs. profits, the FDA chooses profits for Big Pharma time and time again.

Do the math on this: If Avandia is linked to 83,000 heart attacks, and if roughly 50% of those are fatal (that's just an estimate), then Avandia could conceivably be the cause of 40,000 deaths. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 killed roughly 3,000 Americans, and yet just one drug that has been mysteriously kept on the market by the FDA appears to have killed more than ten times as many Americans as the terrorists.

So what does that make the FDA? More dangerous than the terrorists, of course!

So why is the FDA still allowed to operate in America if it's such a dangerous organization that's killing so many American citizens? Because it's profitable, of course!

There's one thing that's true about both WAR and MEDICINE: As long as the right corporations are making money, it really doesn't matter how many people die in the process.

And for all those diabetic Americans struggling to find improved health right now, there's something you desperately need to know: There's a price to putting your faith in the FDA, the drug companies and your pill-pushing doctor. That price may very well be your own life.

Diabetes has a cure, you know. You can reverse it in as little as four days by changing your diet. Read the books on diabetes by Dr Gabriel Cousens or Dr Julian Whitaker. Or read more about diabetes right here on NaturalNews: http://naturalnews.com/diabetes.html

Here's the full report from the U.S. Senate (PDF):
http://finance.senate.gov/press/Gpr...

Sources for this story include:
CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/...

NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/h...

PharmaTimes
http://www.pharmatimes.com/WorldNew...

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MUST WATCH VIDEO IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN, Mark McMurtrie SPEAKS!

Report by Tetractys Merkaba.

HELP MAKE THIS VIDEO GO VIRAL. IT NEEDS TO BE CONSUMED BY AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!!!
Important Australian, Mark McMurtrie offers his wisdom in a new video release on youtube. To save you the trouble of looking for it, we have it right here for the advancement of your education.

Australian Military Buildup And The Rise Of Asian NATO

By Rick Rozoff

Global Research, May 6, 2009

Stop NATO

On March 2, 2009 the Australian Department of Defence released a 140-page white paper called Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific century: force 2030 (1), which announced $72 billion in new military spending for an island nation of barely 20 million inhabitants with no adversaries except those it chooses to make for itself. The document details the Australian government's plans to acquire and expand a full spectrum - air, sea and land - arsenal of advanced weaponry in the nation's largest arms buildup since World War II. Canberra will replace six submarines with double that amount possessing greater range and longer mission capabilities, "hunter-killer submarines" [2], representing "a big new investment in anti-submarine warfare" [3] ; three new destroyers "specialising in air warfare" [4], which presumably be be Aegis class ones with missile killing capacity, and eight new frigates. All of the above are to be equipped with land-attack cruise missiles with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers, almost certainly of the Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile variety, which will make Australia "the first regional defence force to have the potent weapons system." [5] The nation is also to acquire 46 Tiger [German-French Eurocopter multi-role combat] helicopters, Hercules and other new generation military transport planes, 100 armored vehicles and, most alarmingly, 100 F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighters. The last is a Lockheed Martin-manufactured fifth-generation, multi-role stealth-capable military strike fighter capable of short- and medium-range bombing. Australia has been working with Norway on the Joint Strike Missile, "a newly developed anti surface warfare and land attack missile that will be adapted to meet an uncovered operational need on the F-35 Lightning II - Joint Strike Fighter" [6], which will be available for the 100 of the latter Australia plans to obtain. In addition, plans include "the veteran AP-3 Orion [anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare] fleet being replaced with a mix of at least eight P-8 Poseidon [US Navy anti-submarine warfare and electronic intelligence] long-range surveillance aircraft, together with up to seven unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles, possibly the US-made Global Hawk...." [7] Insular, comparatively isolated, unthreatened Australia has no legitimate reason to amass such an array of offensive, advanced weapons for use on land and sea and in the air. An article in a major Australian daily entitled "Kevin Rudd's push for missile supremacy," referring to the prime minister's unprecedented peacetime military expansion, states inter alia that the "navy will acquire a formidable arsenal of long-range cruise missiles for its new submarines, destroyers and frigates, able to strike at targets thousands of kilometres from Australia's shores." [8] To project deadly force thousands of kilometers from its shores, in various interpretations of the new military policy, is based on designs that "Our military strategy will be a proactive one in which we seek to control the dynamic of a conflict, principally by way of sea control and air superiority" and "The government intends to place greater emphasis on our capacity to detect and respond to submarines" [9] and "Force 2030...will be a more potent force in certain areas, particularly in undersea warfare and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) surface maritime warfare, air superiority, strategic strike, special forces, ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and cyber warfare" for use in a potential "wider conflict in the Asia-Pacific region." What the nature of that conflict might be and which nations are viewed as prospective co-belligerents in it was alluded to in a feature in the Financial Times: "Joel Fitzgibbon, defence minister, said the country's first defence white paper in almost a decade acknowledged the continued regional dominance of the US. But he warned of 'strategic tensions' arising from new powers, particularly China but also India, and the re-emergence of Russia." (10) India is a red herring as it too is enmeshed in US-led plans for the creation of an Asian-Pacific military bloc unless, of course, a change in the political leadership and foreign policy orientation of the country would ally it with Russia and China, thereby in fact creating "strategic tensions" from the West's point of view. The white paper, as seen above, grants the United States "regional dominance" in an area thousands of miles away from the superpower yet simultaneously attempts to strike a pose of Australian assertiveness and even self-reliance and independence. This is quite in keeping with the foreign policy of the Nixon-Kissinger years in which certain key allies were assigned the role of regional military policemen and enforcers or, as many described it at the time, regional subimperialist strongholds. There is no truth is this 'patriotic' posturing, though. Australia is being built up as the major military strike force in its neighborhood and far beyond even as it is being integrated ever more tightly with the Pentagon. And NATO. In February of 2007 in an article called "Secret new US spy base to get green light," it was announced that "Australia's close military alliance with the United States is to be further entrenched with the building of a high-tech communications base in Western Australia" which "will provide a crucial link for a new network of military satellites that will help the US's ability to fight wars in the Middle East and Asia" and "will be the first big US military installation to be built in Australia in decades, and follows controversies over other big bases such as Pine Gap and North West Cape."[11] Last September Australian Prime Minister Rudd visited Hawaii and met with the head of the Pentagon's Pacific Command, Admiral Timothy Keating, to brief him "on the Australian Defence Force deployments in East Timor and Solomon Islands. "The pair are understood to be discussing broader strategic trends in the western Pacific, including the steady build-up in regional maritime capabilities. "Admiral Keating told a seminar at the East-West Center in Honolulu in July that Asia wanted the US to maintain a strong and visible presence throughout the region. 'It is certainly in the minds of all our friends, partners and colleagues that the US should maintain military superiority in the theatre.'" [12] Australia has more troops serving with its US counterparts and under NATO command in Afghanistan, over 1,000, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announcing a few days ago that 400 more (including some to serve with the Special Operations Task Group elite combat group) on the way, than any other non-NATO member. Australian troops, along with those from New Zealand, are among the foreign forces scheduled to be evicted from the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan where US and NATO personnel have been stationed for several years in pursuit of the war in Afghanistan. Last June the nation's Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, was already calling for an expansion of the Afghan War theater to include neighboring Pakistan, saying: "I think we've got to start looking at the border between Afghanistan not just as a bilateral issue between those two nations, but a regional issue in which the international community has to play a role." [13] In the same month the head of Australia's Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said of the US and NATO war in South Asia: "I would say it's an endeavour that will last at least 10 years." [14] If so Australia has no plans to leave. As it will not leave Iraq. Australia's troops were among the first to enter Iraq after the March 2003 invasion and are among the few national contingents that are remaining there. At the end of 2008 the Iraqi parliament, not without dissension, passed a resolution authorizing individual agreements on the only non-US troops there: Those from Australia, Britain, Estonia, Romania and NATO. In January of this year when the head of the US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, announced plans for aggressive naval moves in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia, Australia was one of the first nations to offer support. A month earlier Australian Prime Minister Rudd traveled to the United Arab Emirates "where Australia is in the process of consolidating its air crews and Middle East command headquarters in a single secret base." [15] This April Australia completed its first command of the Combined Task Force 152, a permanent naval surveillance and interdiction operation in the Persian Gulf run by the US Naval Forces Central Command. "The Royal Australian Navy's command rotation also saw the integration of representatives from Australia, the U.S., Bahrain and other Gulf Cooperation Council nations into the CTF 152 staff." [16] Australia also participates in Combined Task Force 150, a sister operation in the Gulf of Oman and the Horn of Africa. Last summer the commander of the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, Admiral James Winnefeld, referred to Iran as an "unpredictable adversary" that "demands our immediate attention in the event of a need for Australia or NATO response." [17] Like the secret consolidated Australian base in the United Arab Emirates, Winnefeld was evidently speaking of matters not known to the general public or ordinarily divulged by Western military officials. In February Canberra announced that it was quadrupling the amount of Pakistani military officers to be trained in Australia for the expanding war in South Asia, the same month that Australian troops killed five Afghan children while engaged in a combat mission. Foreshadowing what would become this month's defense white paper, in September of last year Prime Minister Rudd stated that his nation needed "an enhanced naval capability that can protect our sea lanes of communication and support our land forces. We need an air force that can fill support and combat roles.'' [18] The press wire service from which the above is quoted reminded its readers that "Australia still has 1,000 personnel in and around Iraq, about 1,000 soldiers under NATO command in southern Afghanistan and about 750 peacekeepers in East Timor and 140 in the Solomon Islands." In the case of the last two nations, Australia's role is indeed that of a subimperialist regional policeman, with its nearly nine-year deployment in East Timor (Timor Este) as much a matter of protecting preferential oil and natural gas concessions in the Timor Gap and defying its major regional rival Indonesia as it is one of peacekeeping. Though in the same news conference reported above, Rudd also affirmed that "Australia will strengthen security cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore." There are two significant aspects to the last statement. The first is the nation not mentioned, China, and the second is that it reflects a basis for what for several years now has been referred to as Asian NATO. The expression has been used since the beginning of this century but first gained wider currency after then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz paid a five-day trip to Japan, South Korea and Singapore in May of 2003. The first two countries already had troops stationed in Iraq, and South Korea and Singapore would later deploy military forces to Afghanistan with the Japanese navy playing a supporting role in the Indian Ocean. Asian NATO has been referred to with increased frequency over the past several years and the concept, and project, was poignantly demonstrated in the 2007 Malabar naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal where warships from India, United States, Japan, Australia, and Singapore engaged in the largest multinational exercise of its sort - 25 ships - in Indian history. The exercises ranged from "Vizag on the eastern seaboard to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that guard the approaches to the Strait of Malacca, considered the world's busiest waterway." [19] The Malabar exercises before 2007 were bilateral US-India affairs but two years ago were employed to showcase an emerging American-led Asian military bloc. In most discussions of Asian NATO the term is used metaphorically, as in an Asian-Pacific military alliance that parallels the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Euro-Atlantic zone, if in no other manner than it is becoming a military bloc in a world that has only one other, NATO. This loose connotation of the term doesn't do justice to the truth. Even with the addendum that Asian NATO is an attempt by Washington to reproduce NATO in the Asia Pacific, also under its domination, it is not the full truth. In fact what has developed is an ever-broadening structure for integrating Asian nations directly with NATO as well as with its individual members, the US primarily of course, and an extension of NATO into the East. Previous articles in this series have examined direct NATO penetration of Asia and the South Pacific [20], the stationing of the bloc's military forces and the securing of permanent bases from the Balkans to the eastern rim of the Caspian Sea [21] and efforts by the US and its NATO allies to establish a global naval fleet to dominate most of the world and the Asia Pacific region in particular. [22]. The main components of this absorption of the Asia Pacific zone include individual partnerships; establishment of bases and positioning of military, including combat, forces; actual invasions, wars and occupations; conducting regular Western-led multinational military, including live-fire, exercises; recruiting and deploying troops from Asian nations to war zones like those in Afghanistan and Iraq; and in general integrating the military of Asia Pacific states under the direction of individual NATO nations and the alliance collectively. Applying the above criteria, as will be shown below or has been examined in reference to the South Caucasus and Central Asia in the Stop NATO articles referred to earlier, there are few nations in the entire Asia Pacific area, including the South Caucasus and West Asia (the Middle East), that are not to some degree involved in the process of creating a Western-dominated Asian military bloc. Excluding several smaller island nations in the South Pacific, those exceptions are Russia, China, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea, Bhutan, Iran and Syria. In addition to collective NATO partnerships partially or entirely outside of Europe and North America - Partnership for Peace includes all three South Caucasus and all five Central Asian former Soviet republics; the Mediterranean Dialogue takes in all North Africa nations on the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea from Mauritania to Egypt except for Libya as well as Israel and Jordan; the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative includes the Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with Oman and Saudi Arabia soon to follow, NATO has a category of individual partnerships it refers to as Contact Countries. This is how NATO itself describes it: "In addition to its formal partnerships, NATO cooperates with a range of countries that are not part of these structures. Often referred to as 'other partners across the globe' or 'Contact Countries', they share similar strategic concerns and key Alliance values. Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea and New Zealand are all examples in case." [23] The Alliance has de facto individual partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan and heads up a Tripartite Commission with both nations for the prosecution of the war in South Asia. Asia Pacific partners are also integrated in other fashions. Last autumn the US Congress "passed a bill...aimed at helping South Korea purchase American weapons systems cheaper and faster in order to strengthen the Korea-U.S. alliance, as well as increased interoperability between the two countries' militaries. Under the bill, South Korea will be granted the same status as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and three FMS [foreign military sales]-favored nations - Australia, Japan and New Zealand." [24] When the Senate passed an equivalent resolution days later, a South Korean official stated, ``Now we can call the highest U.S. FMS group `NATO+4.' That is a symbolic move to prove the Korea-U.S. alliance has been upgraded further.'' [25] Australia and Japan both participate in a NATO/Partnership for Peace Trust Fund in Azerbaijan, the Alliance's main military outpost on the Caspian Sea and the most pivotal partner for trans-Eurasian energy strategies. This January NATO held a conference in Turkey called Changing Security Environment and a Renewed Transatlantic Vision for the 21st century which "highlighted the importance of setting up cooperation ties with countries such as Japan and Australia." [26] This year the Standing NATO Response Force Maritime Group 1 was scheduled to visit Pakistan, Australia and Singapore and travel through the strategic Strait of Malacca - the first time the bloc would penetrate this part of the world - but was diverted to the coast of Somalia. However, the warships joined with the Pakistani navy for a two-day exercise in late April. In September of last year NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, General John Craddock, visited Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Japan to "provide their leadership with an assessment of the current operations in Afghanistan and express his appreciation for their efforts in the NATO-led mission." [27] Australia is the only non-NATO country involved in the global SeaSparrow (ship-borne short-range anti-aircraft and anti-missile missile) system, along with members Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Turkey and the US. This March it was announced that "Australia is set to conclude a deal with NATO on exchanging secret military information" in order to insure "a deeper strategic dialogue between Australia and NATO and increased cooperation on long-term common interests." [28] In June of last year NATO deployed AWACS to Australia for the first time for Exercise Pitch Black "a Royal Australian Air Force led exercise with international participation that includes 3,000 participants and more than 60 aircraft from Australia, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, France and the E-3A Component." [29] The E-3A is "NATO's Flagship Fleet. The E-3A Component is the world's only integrated, multi-national flying unit, providing rapid deployability, airborne surveillance, command, control and communication for NATO operations." [30] "This historic deployment to Australia is another example of our transformation into a world-wide deployable force," said Brig. Gen. Stephen Schmidt, Component Commander. "We are a lead element of the NATO Response Force and our daily mission requires that we be prepared to deploy on short notice to any location in the world as required by the Alliance...." [31] Last winter NATO conducted joint training in Germany with Afghan troops and their counterparts from the United States, Germany, France, Hungary, Canada, Slovenia, Slovakia, Italy...and Australia. In the same month perhaps the most influential - and infamous - Australian, media baron Rupert Murdoch, citing the "Russian invasion of Georgia," delivered himself of this demand: "Australia needs to be part of a reform of the institutions most responsible for maintaining peace and stability. I'm thinking especially of NATO....The only path to reform NATO is to expand it to include nations like Australia. That way NATO will become a community based less on geography and more on common values. That is the only way NATO will be effective. And Australian leadership is critical to these efforts." [32] Murdoch echoed demands of a Republican presidential candidate in last year's primary campaign: Rudolph Giuliani, who in 2007 called for NATO to admit Australia, India, Israel, Japan and Singapore to its ranks as full members. This January NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer while visiting Israel spoke on this and related topics: "NATO has transformed to address the challenges of today and tomorrow. We have built partnerships around the globe from Japan to Australia to Pakistan and, of course, with the important countries of the Mediterranean and the Gulf. We have established political relations with the UN and the African Union that never existed until now. We've taken in new [countries], soon 28 in total, with more in line. "[The] Alliance is projecting stability in Afghanistan, in Kosovo, in the Mediterranean (with Israeli support), and elsewhere - including fighting pirates off the Somali coast...." [33] The incoming US ambassador to NATO, the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, is reportedly an advocate of "Washington want[ing] NATO to be expanded by inviting counties like Australia, Japan, Brazil and South Africa and becom[ing] a global organization...." [34] The mainstays for the evolving Asian NATO, or as Daalder's, Scheffer's and Giuliani's positions make clear an Asian NATO plus, are Australia and Japan with India eyed as the third leg of the stool. Australia and Japan both have, in addition to hosting US military bases and deploying forces for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, entered on yet more dangerous ground by joining the American worldwide interceptor missile system. In May of 2007 "Australia said...it had joined the U.S. and Japanese missile defense plans and would consider the deployment of a missile shield on its soil" at the same time that NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced that his "organization will create its own missile defense system, which would be linked to the American system." [35] With US interceptor missile installations in place at Fort Greely on the Alaskan mainland and the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea facing Russia, the incorporation of Japan and Australia into the missile shield system complements plans for similar facilities and deployments in Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway and elsewhere in Europe, neutralizing Russia's deterrent and retaliation capabilities on both ends of its territory. Ahead of a visit to Japan in October of 2007 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said "Moscow regarded the joint missile defense effort as an 'object of concern,' expressing wariness over what he called the possibility that the system could be directed against Russia and China. "We oppose the construction of missile defense systems whose purpose is to ensure military superiority." [36] Lavrov would reiterate Russian concerns late last year when he "mentioned the problem of antimissile defences, which actually stands to reason, since the United States seeks to build such system on a global basis and deploy, among others, some of the system elements in Asia and the Pacific." The report from which the preceding came concluded with the observation that "Moscow has major strategic interests in Asia and the Pacific, interests that invariably clash with no less significant US interests." [37] A week later the US and Japan, in a significant return of the latter's military to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, conducted a sea-based interceptor missile test. "The Japanese missile destroyer Chokai will take part in a training firing session as part of the American-Japanese programme for testing a sea-based missile defence system, Christopher Taylor, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defence Agency says, adding that the destroyer which is equipped with the AEGIS BMD Weapon System and with the Standard -3 interceptor missiles, has already arrived at the U.S.-operated Pearl Harbor Base in Honolulu. "Missile defence complexes the Japanese destroyers are equipped with are linked to the U.S missile defence system. "They can receive information about targets and provide it to the American warships, equipped with both missile defence systems and bases for interceptor missiles in Alaska and California." [38] The US has also shifted substantial military forces and focus from Okinawa to Hokkaido on the Sea of Japan immediately across from Russia. It is not only Russia that is alarmed by these developments and not only Australia and Japan that are being integrated into the global American interceptor missile, so-called son of Star Wars, network. Last December the defense ministers of China and Russia met in Beijing and "Anatoly Serdyukov and Liang Guanglie [discussed] a project by the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan to establish a regional missile defense system. China is against the project...." [39] Earlier in the year Andrew Chang, a Hong Kong-based military expert, remarked on the US missile shield component in Asia that "it is aimed at targeting not only North Korea but China as well" and that "that China has every reason to voice unease over the matter, adding that US plans stipulate the deployment of elements of the missile defense shield also in Japan and Australia. "Aside from missile interceptors, an array of high-power radars will be deployed in the areas – a move that will make it possible for the US to track down China’s launchings of its missiles from the main launch pad in the Shangsi province." [40] The purpose of Asian NATO, then, is to establish US and broader Western military superiority, even invincibility, throughout Asia across the full spectrum of ground, air, naval and space forces and weapons. Lastly, the following survey of reports over the past few months is not an exhaustive one, but provides an overview on how the web of Western military penetration of the Asia Pacific region is simultaneously widening and tightening. As an illustrative example, the US has just completed the two-week (April 16-30) Balikatan 2009 joint military exercise in the Philippines, the latest in a series of annual war games. This year 5-6,000 US troops participated and at one point US Marines conducted a drill that can only be training for use against unarmed civilians - "'When you've got a big crowd agitated and moving at you,'" the nonlethal grenade would be a good choice." [41] The exercise was held on the grounds of the former Clark Air Base which the US Air Force had vacated in 1991, one of only a few bases the US has departed voluntarily. Not only were US Marines back on the site of the base, but F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft were employed for Balikatan 2009, the first American warplanes operating in the Philippines in sixteen years. The Pentagon also deployed the PHIBRON-11, the Navy's only forward-deployed amphibious squadron, consisting of four warships, from Japan for the occasion. The war games, note, were conducted in a nation that is waging several years-long counterinsurgency operations against not only the Abu Sayyaf Group but also the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the secular New People's Army. That war is backed by and includes the direct participation of US military forces (and those of Australia) who have established camps in Mindanao. Given that the war games were designed for combat operations in an armed conflict zone, it's revealing that military observers were present from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos and South Korea. [42] May 2008: The defense ministers of Japan and South Korea met to "boost three-way military ties with the U.S." and to "revive a suspended three-way military dialogue with the United States as soon as possible...." South Korean Defense Minister Lee Sang-hee "also met his Australian counterpart Joel Fitzgibbon and stressed the need for a military information protection accord between the two countries." [43] June: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Japanese and Australian foreign ministers Masahiko Komura and Stephen Smith, respectively, met at the third ministerial meeting of the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue and vowed to "to work in close strategic partnership to boost stability and security in the Asia-Pacific region as well as the world at large." [44) July: US Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Carrol Chandler, mentioning that the US Air Force has partnerships with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, said "We're not at war in the Pacific, but we're really not at peace, either," and stated that a "good example of...bilateral cooperation is missile defense." [45] It was announced that a large US military contingent would participate in Exercise Maru in New Zealand along with Australian warships and aircraft and with Japan contributing a P3 Orion surveillance aircraft. "In what will be seen as another step in breaking down the 20-year freeze by the Americans on joint participation in routine military exercises, its military will be strongly represented...." [46] The US hosted the annual Rim of the Pacific naval exercise in Hawaii which involved naval forces from Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Peru, the United Kingdom, Singapore and the US. "A total of 35 ships, six submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 personnel from the maritime forces of the 10 nations were involved in the exercise. "[T]he 22-day sea phase exercise which covered combined anti-submarine and air defence exercises including the live-firing of the missile off the Hawaiian coast...." [47] In a related development, the 2008 Pacific Rim Airpower Symposium was held in the capital of Malaysia, hosted by Royal Malaysian Air Force and US Pacific Air Forces' 13th Air Force officials and including the participation of delegations from Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam. "'Through this symposium, we have a great opportunity to share and understand what each nation brings to the battlefield,' said Lt. Gen. Loyd S. "Chip" Utterback, the 13th Air Force commander." [48] August: The Japanese defense ministry announced that in his upcoming visit to the United States the country's defense minister would discuss a series of proposals for expanding bilateral military cooperation including "rendering ...logistical support by Japan to a group of US battleships in the Indian Ocean that are involved in a military operation in Afghanistan. "[T]he last few years saw Japan and the US successfully cement bilateral military cooperation, including the joint deployment of missile defense systems....Aside from missile interceptors, an array of high-power radars will be deployed...." [49] September: Australian and New Zealand troops were among 2,000 from the Anglo-Saxon quint, along with forces from Britain, Canada and the United States, that trained in Germany for warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. "[A] group of New Zealand soldiers are practicing breaking into buildings and then making instant decisions on whether the occupants are friendly or hostile. "The Kiwis are taking part in joint exercises with four other English-speaking nations — the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia — designed to help them operate together and work out any kinks before they hit the battlefield...." [50] October: India and Japan signed a defense pact during a visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Tokyo, "a security cooperation agreement under which India and Japan...will hold military exercises, police the Indian Ocean and conduct military-to-military exchanges....Japan has such a security pact with only two other countries - the United States and Australia." [51] In a trip to the Czech capital of Prague, US Missile Defense Agency chief Henry Obering and Czech first Deputy Defence Minister Martin Bartak signed a framework treaty on strategic cooperation in missile defence, about which the local press revealed, "The United States has signed a similar agreement only with Australia, Britain, Denmark, Italy and Japan." [52] A New Zealand government website inadvertently divulged that military ties with the US were being strengthened. "After decades of cold-shoulder treatment, United States military brass are now saying a US-New Zealand military partnership is vital to meet security challenges in the Pacific region. "Joint military exercises are on offer again, according to US Air Force commander Lieutenant General Loyd S. Utterback, who was in Wellington last month for a conference hosted by air force chief Air Vice-Marshal Graham Lintott." [53] November: Spanish Defense Minister Carme Chacon and her Australian counterpart Joel Fitzgibbon signed an agreement for defense industry cooperation. "Earlier this year, the two members of NATO [verbatim] struck a deal to enhance cooperation between their naval forces." [54] December: Australia and Japan signed an agreement in Tokyo to increase security cooperation and to conduct more joint military operations. "Japan only has a similar security pact with the United States, while Australia has agreements with the US and Great Britain." [55] Japan's parliament voted to extend the nation's naval operations in the Indian Ocean to support the US-NATO war in Afghanistan by another year. January 2009: The outgoing US ambassador to Japan, Thomas Schieffer, called for Tokyo to play a larger role in global military missions "including reinterpreting its pacifist constitution to allow it to defend an ally if attacked." The Japanese constitution forbids what it calls collective defense. Evoking a hypothetical case, "if a Japanese destroyer failed to eliminate a missile launched from Asia on the basis that it was headed for the US," Schieffer warned "I think the American people would find that very difficult to understand the value of the alliance with Japan." He added that, in regards to US-Japanese post-World War II military relations, a "redefinition would be appropriate." [56] The Financial Times reported that "The US is in preliminary talks with India over the sale of missile shield systems" in reference to Pakistan and "other volatile countries in the region." [57] An Indian press service reported that "After signing its biggest-ever military deal with the US for eight long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft for the Indian Navy for $2.1bn, New Delhi is now eyeing to fast track three key military pacts with Washington." [58] February: In a visit to Japan US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Washington and Tokyo had "agreed to intensify consultations and coordination with the Republic of Korea, Australia, and India, which share universal values." [59] March: The head of Singapore's military, Lt-General Desmond Kuek, visited India to meet with his counterpart, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, to discuss increasing military ties and to sign pacts for joint military training. "Singapore has signed similar agreements for training facilities with countries like the US, France, Australia, Thailand and Taiwan...." [60] The US deployed F-15s to Thailand for Exercise Cope Tiger 2009 to engage in air combat training with the Thai and Singaporean air forces. An American military official speaking of the exercise said: "This exercise is a great opportunity to hone our air combat skills while practicing against different adversaries than we normally train against here. "This will facilitate any responses to regional events or contingencies in the future." [61] Gen. Songgitti Jaggabatara, chief of the defense forces of the Royal Thai Armed Forces, invited the Philippines to join in a US-led multinational military exercise in his country. "We have a multi-national exercise between Thailand, the United States, Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan and the Philippine Armed Force still is an observer. After this, maybe the Philippine Armed Force will join the exercise."[62] Cambodia announced it will host a US and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) military exercise. Pol Saroeurn, Commander-in-Chief of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, said: "It is an honor for Cambodia to be chosen by ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the superpower U.S. as the location for such a large-scale international military exercise" and recalled that in 2008 his forces had participated in a three-week exercise in Bangladesh in 2008 which "involved some 400 soldiers from 12 countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nepal, Brunei, Mongolia, Tonga, Cambodia and the U.S." [63] South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd met in Seoul and signed a bilateral security treaty, one which "calls for increasing joint military training exercises and peacekeeping operations, as well as military-to-military exchanges and cooperation in defense industry, including the exploration of airborne early warning and control aircraft." [64] April: American arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin officials met with ranking Indian naval officers to discuss Aegis ship-launched anti-missile missile acquisitions. "Apart from the US Navy, the Aegis system is operational on Japanese, South Korean, Norwegian, Spanish and Australian naval vessels." [65] In coordination with US-supplied Aegis class destroyer and joint US-Japanese ground-based missile shield elements, Japan announced what the government called its first strategic space policy. By which is meant not only space surveillance but preparing for warfare in outer space. Joining the United States in the militarization of the heavens. Plans for Asian NATO are not limited to Asia. Or to the Earth. Notes 1) Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific century: force 2030 (PDF) http://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/defence_white_paper_2009.pdf 2) Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2009 3) The Australian, April 25, 2009 4) Financial Times, May 4, 2009 5) The Australian, May 2, 2009 6) F-16.net, May 1, 2009 7) The Australian, April 25, 2009 8) The Australian, May 2, 2009 9) Ibid 10) Financial Times, May 4, 2009 11) Sydney Morning Herald, February 15, 2007 12) The Australian, September 23, 2008 13) Agence France-Presse, June 15, 2008 14) Agence France-Presse, June 4, 2008 15) Sydney Morning Herald, December 22, 2008 16) U.S. Naval Forces Central Command Public Affairs, April 27, 2009 17) Zee News (India), July 4, 2008 18) Bloomberg News, September 10, 2008 19) India Defence, September 3, 2007 20) Stop NATO, January 24, 2009 Global Military Bloc: NATO's Drive Into Asia http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/36946 21) Stop NATO, March 4, 2009 Mr. Simmons' Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/37672 22) Stop NATO, January 29, 2009 Proliferation Security Initiative And US 1,000-Ship Navy: Control Of World's Oceans, Prelude To War http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/37058 23) NATO International, March 9, 2009 24) Korea Times, September 24, 2008 25) Korea Times, October 2, 2008 26) Xinhua News Agency, January 30, 2009 27) NATO International, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, September 1, 2008 28) Canberra Times, March 13, 2009 29) NATO International, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, June 13, 2008 30) NATO Airborne Early Warning & Control Force, April 23, 2009 31) NATO International, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, June 13, 2008 32) ABS CBN News (Philippines), November 5 33) Ha'aretz, January 10, 2009 34) Russia Today, March 13, 2009 35) Russian Information Agency Novosti, May 22, 2007 36) Associated Press, October 13, 2007 37) Voice of Russia, November 8, 2008 38) Voice of Russia, November 17, 2008] 39) Russian Information Agency Novosti, December 10, 2008 40) Voice of Russia, August 29, 2008 41) Stars and Stripes, April 26, 2009 42) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 29, 2009 43) Yonhap News Agency (South Korea), May 31, 2008 44) Xinhua News Agency, June 27, 2008 45) Pacific Air Forces, July 11, 2008 46) The Dominion Post, July 22, 2008 47) Bernama.com (Malaysia), July 29, 2008 48) Air Force Link, July 23, 2008 49) Voice of Russia, August 29, 2008 50) Associated Press, September 25, 2008 51) Reuters, October 25, 2008 52) Czech News Agency, October 30, 2008 53) The Dominion Post, October 11, 2008 54) Agence France-Presse, November 25, 2008 55) Radio Netherlands, December 18, 2008 56) Agence France-Presse, January 14, 2009 57) Financial Times, January 7, 2009 58) Indo-Asian News Service, January 6, 2009 59) The Hindu, February 18, 2009 60) Times of India, March 3, 2009 61) Air Force Link, American Forces News Service, March 6, 2009 62) Xinhua News Agency, March 3, 2009 63) Xinhua News Agency, March 3, 2009 64) Defense News, March 5, 2009 65) Indo-Asian News Service, April 23, 2009

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Dick Cheney Admits to Torture

Dick Cheney Admits to Torture Conspiracy

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on February 15, 2010, Printed on February 16, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145671/

On Sunday, Cheney pronounced himself "a big supporter of waterboarding," a near-drowning technique that has been regarded as torture back to the Spanish Inquisition and that has long been treated by U.S. authorities as a serious war crime, such as when Japanese commanders were prosecuted for using it on American prisoners during World War II.

Cheney was unrepentant about his support for the technique. He answered with an emphatic "yes" when asked if he had opposed the Bush administration’s decision to suspend the use of waterboarding – after it was employed against three "high-value detainees" sometimes in repetitive sequences. He added that waterboarding should still be "on the table" today.

Cheney then went further. Speaking with a sense of impunity, he casually negated a key line of defense that senior Bush officials had hidden behind for years – that the brutal interrogations were approved by independent Justice Department legal experts who thus gave the administration a legitimate reason to believe the actions were within the law.

However, on Sunday, Cheney acknowledged that the White House had told the Justice Department lawyers what legal opinions to render. In other words, the opinions amounted to ordered-up lawyering to permit the administration to do whatever it wanted.

In responding to a question about why he had so aggressively attacked President Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism policies, Cheney explained that he had been concerned about the new administration prosecuting some CIA operatives who had handled the interrogations and "disbarring lawyers with the Justice Department who had helped us put those policies together. …

"I thought it was important for some senior person in the administration to stand up and defend those people who’d done what we asked them to do."

Cheney’s comment about the Justice lawyers who had "done what we asked them to do" was an apparent reference to John Yoo and his boss, Jay Bybee, at the Office of Legal Council (OLC), a powerful agency that advises the President on the limits of his power.

In 2002, Yoo – while working closely with White House officials – drafted legal memos that permitted waterboarding and other brutal techniques by narrowly defining torture. He also authored legal opinions that asserted virtual dictatorial powers for a President during war, even one as vaguely defined as the "war on terror." Yoo’s key memos were then signed by Bybee.

In 2003, after Yoo left to be a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Bybee was elevated to a federal appeals court judgeship in San Francisco, their successors withdrew the memos because of the sloppy scholarship. However, in 2005, President George W. Bush appointed a new acting chief of the OLC, Steven Bradbury, who restored many of the Yoo-Bybee opinions.

Legal Fig Leaf

In the years that followed, Bush administration officials repeatedly cited the Yoo-Bybee-Bradbury legal guidance when insisting that the "enhanced interrogation" of "war on terror" detainees – as well as prisoners from the Iraq and Afghan wars – did not cross the line into torture.

In essence, the Bush-Cheney defense was that the OLC lawyers offered honest opinions and that everyone from the President and Vice President, who approved use of the interrogation techniques, down to the CIA interrogators, who conducted the torture, operated in good faith.

If, however, that narrative proved to be false – if the lawyers had colluded with the policymakers to create legal excuses for criminal acts – then the Bush-Cheney defense would collapse. Rather than diligent lawyers providing professional advice, the picture would be of Mob consiglieres counseling crime bosses how to evade the law.

Though Bush administration defenders have long denied that the legal opinions were cooked, the evidence has long supported the conspiratorial interpretation. For instance, in his 2006 book War by Other Means, Yoo himself described his involvement in frequent White House meetings regarding what "other means" should receive a legal stamp of approval. Yoo wrote:

"As the White House held its procession of Christmas parties and receptions in December 2001, senior lawyers from the Attorney General’s office, the White House counsel’s office, the Departments of State and Defense and the NSC [National Security Council] met a few floors away to discuss the work on our opinion. …

"This group of lawyers would meet repeatedly over the next months to develop policy on the war on terrorism. "

Yoo said meetings were usually chaired by Alberto Gonzales, who was then White House counsel and later became Bush’s second Attorney General. Yoo identified other key players as Timothy Flanigan, Gonzales’s deputy; William Howard Taft IV from State; John Bellinger from the NSC; William "Jim" Haynes from the Pentagon; and David Addington, counsel to Cheney.

Yoo’s Account

In his book, Yoo described a give-and-take among participants at the meeting with the State Department’s Taft challenging Yoo’s OLC view that Bush could waive the Geneva Conventions regarding the invasion of Afghanistan (by labeling it a "failed state"). Taft noted that the Taliban was the recognized government of the country.

"We thought Taft’s memo represented the typically conservative thinking of foreign ministries, which places a priority on stabilizing relations with other states – even if it means creating or maintaining fictions – rather than adapting to new circumstances," Yoo wrote.

Regarding objections from the Pentagon’s judge advocate generals – who feared that waiving the Geneva Conventions would endanger American soldiers – Yoo again stressed policy concerns, not legal logic.

"It was far from obvious that following the Geneva Conventions in the war against al-Qaeda would be wise," Yoo wrote. "Our policy makers had to ask whether [compliance] would yield any benefit or act as a hindrance."

What Yoo’s book and other evidence make clear is that the lawyers from the Justice Department’s OLC weren’t just legal scholars handing down opinions from an ivory tower; they were participants in how to make Bush’s desired actions "legal."

They were the lawyerly equivalents of those U.S. intelligence analysts, who – in the words of the British "Downing Street Memo" – "fixed" the facts around Bush’s desire to justify invading Iraq.

The importance of this question – whether the OLC lawyers were honest brokers or criminal conspirators – was not missed by some of the congressional leaders who pressed for a serious investigation of Bush’s use of torture and other war crimes.

Two years ago, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, wrote a letter to the Justice Department’s watchdog agencies requesting an investigation into the role that "Justice Department officials [played] in authorizing and/or overseeing the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency... and whether those who authorized it violated the law."

In the Feb. 12, 2008, letter, the senators questioned whether the OLC lawyers were "insulated from outside pressure to reach a particular conclusion" and whether Bush’s White House and the CIA played any role in influencing "deliberations about the lawfulness of waterboarding," a technique that creates the sensation of drowning.

Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor, said those questions were designed to get to the point that having in-house lawyers dream up a legal argument doesn’t make an action legal, especially if the lawyers were somehow induced to produce the opinion.

Defining Torture

In the case of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation tactics, Yoo and Bybee generated a memo, dated Aug. 1, 2002, that came up with a novel and narrow definition of torture, essentially lifting the language from an unrelated law regarding health benefits.

The Yoo-Bybee legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee led to injuries that might result in "death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" then the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture.

Since waterboarding is not intended to cause death or organ failure – only the panicked gag reflex associated with drowning – it was deemed not to be torture.

The "torture memo" and related legal opinions were considered so unprofessional that Bybee’s replacement to head the OLC, Jack Goldsmith, himself a conservative Republican, took the extraordinary step of withdrawing them after he was appointed in October 2003.

However, Goldsmith was pushed out of his job after a confrontation with Cheney’s counsel Addington, and the later appointment of Bradbury enabled the Bush White House to reinstate many of the Yoo-Bybee opinions.

Last month, Newsweek reported that Yoo and Bybee had avoided any disciplinary recommendations because a draft report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility had been rewritten to remove harsh criticism that the two lawyers had violated professional standards, softening the language to simple criticism of their judgment.

The weaker language meant that the Justice Department would not refer the cases to state bar associations for possible disbarment proceedings.

Cheney’s frank comments on "This Week" – corroborating that Yoo and Bybee "had done what we asked them to do" – suggest that former Bush administration officials are confident that they will face no accountability from the Obama administration for war crimes.

Though the ABC News interviewer Jonathan Karl deserves some credit for posing the waterboarding question to Cheney, it was notable that Karl didn’t react with any shock or even a follow-up when Cheney pronounced himself a fan of the torture practice. Cheney’s waterboarding endorsement was only a footnote in ABC’s online account of the interview.

Surely, if a leader of another country had called himself "a big supporter of waterboarding," there would have been a clamor for his immediate arrest and trial at The Hague.

That Cheney feels he can operate with such impunity is a damning commentary on the rule of law in the United States, at least when it comes to the nation’s elites.

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

© 2010 Consortium News All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145671/

The Media Response to the Growing Influence of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Part II: A Survey of Attitude Change in 2009-2010

By Elizabeth Woodworth

Global Research, February 15, 2010

Abstract In the past year, in response to emerging independent science on the 9/11 attacks, nine corporate, seven public, and two independent media outlets aired analytic programs investigating the official account. Increasingly, the issue is treated as a scientific controversy worthy of debate, rather than as a "conspiracy theory" ignoring science and common sense. This essay presents these media analyses in the form of 18 case studies. Eight countries – Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Russia – have allowed their publicly-owned broadcasting stations to air the full spectrum of evidence challenging the truth of the official account of 9/11. This more open approach taken in the international media – I could also have included the Japanese media – might be a sign that worldwide public and corporate media organizations are positioning themselves, and preparing their audiences, for a possible revelation of the truth of the claim that forces within the US government were complicit in the attacks – a revelation that would call into question the publicly given rationale for the military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The evidence now being explored in the international media may pave the way for the US media to take an in-depth look at the implications of what is now known about 9/11, and to re-examine the country's foreign and domestic policies in the light of this knowledge. I. Introduction Until 2009, doubts about the official 9/11 story were briefly entertained by the mainstream media on each anniversary of the event, allowing the independent research community only a fleeting moment once a year to publicly voice its findings. But after crucial scientific evidence emerged in April 2009 to challenge the official story of how the towers fell, a spate of European media reports followed. The news coverage of this evidence seems to have opened the door to more serious reflection on all aspects of the 9/11 issue in the major media. The first paper in my series, "The Media Response to 9/11," dealt with the New Statesman's grudging recognition of Dr. David Ray Griffin, the world's "top truther" (as it dubbed him), placing him number 41 among "The 50 People Who Matter Today."1 Since this admission in September 2009, the issue has gathered increasing momentum. The collective content issuing from this new momentum is presented here in the hope that it will embolden other major media to take up the pivotal controversy concerning 9/11, and pursuing the truth wherever it may lead. Observations on the Analysis While carrying out my analysis, I observed five new features in the media treatment of the 9/11 issue that developed as 2009 progressed. They are listed here, so that readers might look for them in the case studies that follow below: 1. The 9/11 issue is increasingly framed not as conspiracy theories versus hard science, but as a legitimate controversy resting on unanswered questions and a search for truth. 2. News reports and television programs examining these controversies have become longer and more balanced. 3. Major media outlets have begun to present the claims of the truth movement first, followed by counter-arguments from defenders of the official story. 4. Major media outlets have begun to include, and even to introduce, extensive evidence to support the claims of the 9/11 truth community. 5. The media treatments increasingly suggest the possibility of a re-investigation into the events of September 11, 2001. The first part of this essay deals with the crucial scientific evidence that emerged in early 2009, the significance of this evidence in relation to the official story of 9/11, and the immediate news coverage it received. II. Scientific Paper Finds Nano-thermite Explosives in World Trade Center Dust, April 3, 2009 A peer-reviewed paper published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal on April 3, 2009,2 reported that a little known high-tech explosive called nano-thermite was found throughout the World Trade Center dust. These physicists and chemists involved in this study discovered "distinctive red/gray chips in significant numbers"3 in four samples of dust collected from the area. The presence of aluminum and iron oxide in the red material provided one of the signs that it might be nano-thermite, which is a high explosive (whereas ordinary thermite is an incendiary.) Another clue was provided when putting a flame to the chips produced an explosive reaction. On the basis of these and other observations, the team concluded that "the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material."4 The article's first-named author, Dr. Niels Harrit – a University of Copenhagen chemistry professor who specializes in nano-chemistry5 –explained on Danish TV2 News: "Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron. "So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel. "You cannot fudge this kind of science. We have found it: unreacted thermite."6 What was the significance of this sophisticated material? Reported Evidence that Nano-thermite is a Military Substance In a German interview in May 2009, Dr. Harrit said: "There are no experts on nano-thermite without connections to the military…. This stuff has only been prepared under military contracts in the USA and probably in bigger allied countries. This is secret military research…It was not prepared in a cave in Afghanistan."7 Chemist Kevin Ryan, another co-author, had reported in an earlier article that explosive nano-thermite, which may be painted onto surfaces, was developed by US government scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.8 A United States Department of Defense special publication confirms that work on these "energetic materials" has long been "performed in laboratories within all military services."9 According to a June 2009 statement by Britain's prestigious Institute of Nanotechnology,10 the Harrit study "provides indisputable evidence that a highly engineered explosive called nano-thermite was found in the dust of all three buildings that came down on 9/11 2001 in New York city. [sic] This advanced explosive incorporating nanotechnology is only available to sophisticated military labs."11 It thus became known by mid-2009 that explosives of military origin, probably in the United States, had been involved in the World Trade Center collapses. Early Coverage of the Nano-thermite Finding in the European Mainstream Press Although the new scientific evidence against the official story of 9/11 was not reported in the mainstream British or North American media, it did receive attention in continental Europe. The day the article was published, a thorough essay in the Danish journal Videnskab (Science) examined both sides of the controversy about controlled demolition.12 The same issue of Videnskab also carried an interview with Professor Harrit, who answered pointed questions about the peer-review history of the article, and the military nature of nano-thermite.13 The following day, Denmark's politiken.dk reported the scientific nano-thermite paper in an article called (in Danish) "Conspiracy theories about 9/11 get new life."14 Then, the day after Professor Harrit's April 6 interview Danish TV2 News, he was featured on the popular talk show, "Good Morning Denmark", on which he said: "The material we found is super hi-tech frontline military research. It's not a mixture of random chemicals. It's an advanced material which is difficult to get information on. But some conference papers and internal reports have been published…There has to be a normal forensic investigation of this attempt. Our research is high-level forensic work. We have provided technical evidence that can be used in the future investigation."15 On April 13, an online Croatian political newspaper posted the Danish TV2 video interview with Harrit along with an article titled "VIDEO: 9/11 No Longer Taboo Topic in Denmark".16 Russia also took notice. On July 9, Laura Emmett, the London correspondent for RT, interviewed Dr. Niels Harrit for over 10 minutes. (RT, previously known as Russia Today, is a globally broadcast English-language channel sponsored by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. It reaches 1.5 million people monthly, including half a million Americans.) Stating that "the evidence for controlled demolition is overwhelming", Harrit reported that the nano-thermite reaction produced pools of molten iron beneath the rubble and inextinguishable fires that lasted for months.17 I turn now to ways that the mainstream news coverage of the case against the official story has changed since the appearance of the nano-thermite paper. III. The Changing Mainstream Media Treatment of 9/11 Evidence from early 2009 to early 2010: 18 Case Studies Two February 2009 news items illustrate the wary mainstream attitude towards conspiracy theorists early in the year. A New York Times article said about actor Daniel Sunjata: The second episode of "Rescue Me's" fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company…Mr. Sunjata's character delivers a two-minute monologue…describing a "neoconservative government effort" to control the world's oil, drastically increase military spending and "change the definition of pre-emptive attack." Mr. Sunjata surprised some of the TV reporters when he said that he "absolutely, 100 percent" supports the assertion that "9/11 was an inside job."18 Fox News was somewhat less constrained, saying: An upcoming episode of the drama "Rescue Me" is about 9/11 being an inside job. The actor who spews the theories on camera, Daniel Sunjata, actually believes in it too. Look, the fact is, actors who barf this crap are doing it for their own egos. It makes them feel smart, because for once they're spouting something provocative instead of puerile. Never mind that it's an insidious insult to the victims of 9/11 – as it is to the rest of us, who may or may not be guilty, according to Sunjata's theory.19 However, things started to change after the appearance of the nano-thermite paper on April 3, as may be seen from the following case studies of media reports, each of which is identified as having corporate, public, or independent ownership. The case studies reveal the evidence which has been introduced into public consciousness during the past year. Case Study 1: The Dutch TV Mock Trial of Osama bin Laden, April 25, 2009 On April 8, 2009, a popular TV program called "Devil's Advocate" held a mock trial of Osama bin Laden with lawyers arguing before a politically balanced civil jury of five people. The case against bin Laden was argued by two real-world opponents: former American correspondent Charles Groenhuijsen, and Dutch-American Glenn Schoen of a US security firm. Real-world lawyer Gerald Spong acted as bin Laden's defense attorney.20 Spong presented new evidence from a videotape of Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies Gernot Rotter, saying that the American translators who transcribed the bin Laden tapes of the November 9, 2001 "confession video" have "clearly added things in many places – things that are not there even when listening multiple times."21 Spong won. Although the jury found bin Laden to be a terrorist, it said there was no proof that he had ordered the 9/11 attacks. Through this method, this program on AVRO – the Dutch public broadcasting organization – presented evidence, not previously seen in the major media, against the likelihood that bin Laden ordered the attacks. On April 15, Fox News reported the Dutch jury findings in a long and unusually balanced article, in which former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was quoted six times, saying that bin Laden's exoneration sent a "disturbing message" to the world and fueled conspiracy theories. Giuliani variously called this message "bizarre," "dangerous," "aberrational," "irrational," and "unfortunate."22 However, referring to Spong as a "well-known yet controversial attorney," Fox mentioned him 10 times, and more substantively, reporting his evidence that the bin Laden videos seemed inauthentic, as well as his point that the FBI has not indicted bin Laden for the attacks. Concluding Comment: (AVRO is publicly owned, but Fox News is corporate.) Neither of these two mainstream treatments of doubts about the official story was broadcast on the customary anniversary date, and both reached millions of people. Case Study 2: Architect Richard Gage in Canada's "Financial Post", April 25, 2009 One of Canada's top four English-language newspapers, the conservative National Post, publishes its business section as the Financial Post. Three weeks after the nano-thermite story broke, Jonathan Kay, a National Post columnist and editor with degrees in both engineering and law, wrote an article about Richard Gage, the "lucid" San Francisco architect who heads up the 1,000-strong "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth."23 Kay, who himself endorses the official story of 9/11, described Gage as a "respectable-looking middle-aged" architect, "complete with suit and tie, and receding hairline," and reported that Gage's organization "scored a booth at the upcoming American Institute of Architects conference from April 30 to May 2." In the midst of references to thermite reactions and iron-oxide-based explosives, Kay wrote of controlled demolitions: "As radical as Gage's theory may sound to readers, it's surprisingly popular. The '9/11 Truth Movement'…has millions of adherents across the world. Many believe that the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11 through controlled demolition set in motion by officials within America's own government and military." Gage's presentation was also described as "effective": "In one particularly effective segment, he puts up shots of the localized fires that broke out in the lower floors of WTC Building 7 hours before it collapsed. Seconds later, he shows footage of Beijing's Mandarin Oriental hotel – which suffered an epic top-to-bottom conflagration in 2009...and remained standing." Concluding Comment: (Corporate). Besides reporting Gage's evidence without any attempted refutation, this corporate-press writer remarked that "no major media outlet has done a truly comprehensive profile or investigation of the Truther movement." He thereby seemed to be suggesting that it is now time to take the 9/11 truth movement seriously. Case Study 3: Norwegian State Radio's Public Debate on 9/11 Truth, May 21, 2009 Professor Harrit, who was lecturing in Norway in late May 2009, was interviewed by public radio program "Here and Now",24 on NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation). Harrit presented the findings of the nano-thermite paper, which were then discussed by three Norwegian scientists who did not support his conclusions. Following the radio program, an extended email debate continued between Dr. Ola Nilsen, who teaches chemistry at the University of Oslo, and Dr. Steven Jones, a co-author of the nano-thermite paper who formerly taught physics at Brigham Young University. This debate, during which Nilsen somewhat modified his original view, was posted to a Norwegian blogsite in English.25 Concluding Comment: (Public). Although NRK in this April program challenged the findings of the Harrit paper, this was to change by late summer, as we shall see below. Case Study 4: Architect Richard Gage on Fox News, May 28, 2009 The hosts of Fox News on KMPH in Fresno, California, began their 7-minute interview by saying, "He's an architect experienced in steel structures. Now Richard Gage is…here to show us why he's calling for a more thorough investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings."26 These two anchors actively encouraged Gage's discussion of the ten key features of controlled demolition. He was allowed to explain the free-fall acceleration of WTC 7 (shown on his two video frames as dropping at the same rate as a second building felled by controlled demolition) and the "uncanny" failure of 40,000 tons of structural steel columns that were designed to resist its collapse. Although normal office fires were said to have caused the collapses, he explained, various firefighters had reported large pools of molten iron at ground level. "What produced all that molten iron?" he asked. The answer, he said, was found in the inches of dust covering lower Manhattan. "The by-product of thermite is molten iron and it's dispersed throughout all this dust…and there are small chips of unignited thermite as well. This is very high-tech thermite – nano-thermite. It's not found in a cave in Afghanistan; it's produced in very sophisticated defense department contracting laboratories…[its] particles are one-thousand times smaller than a human hair." Asked whether bin Laden might have had access to the buildings, Gage said probably not – that someone else who had access to nano-thermite, and to the buildings' security systems, would need to be investigated. Someone who had access to the elevator modernization, which was going on nine months earlier and was "immediately adjacent to the core columns and beams in the building." Concluding Comment: (Corporate). This Fox News show began by asking Gage about his credentials, saying "We ask that for clarification so that as we get into this, we want people to make sure that you're not just someone with a wacky idea…you come with some science to you." The program ended with a sincere thank-you to Gage for "opening up a lot to think about," and an announcement that there is "a great deal of information" on the KMPH.com website. In short, Gage was treated with the respect due to any serious participant in an important and controversial issue. The next major mainstream event was the Russia Today program of July 9, 2009, which was covered above, so we will move directly to the anniversary period of September 2009, when further evidence of the impact of the nano-thermite discovery became apparent. Case Study 5: The National Geographic Documentary, "9/11: Science and Conspiracy", August 31, 2009 In late August, 2009, the National Geographic Channel (NGC) aired a two-hour documentary, "9/11: Science and Conspiracy," which sought to answer several questions, "What caused the collapse of the Twin Towers? Was it from the fires, or were explosives placed inside the buildings, causing them to implode? Did a missile, rather than a commercial airline jet, strike the Pentagon?"27 This "NatGeo" program purported to explore evidence about controlled demolition presented by the 9/11 truth movment. It interviewed Dylan Avery (the maker of the "Loose Change" films), Richard Gage, David Ray Griffin, and Steven Jones. But in reality this NatGeo program was entirely devoted to debunking their claims by using pseudo-scientific demonstrations to refute claims that none of these men have made. For example, in order to refute the claim that nano-thermite could have brought down the buildings, NatGeo used ordinary thermite (with the narrator explaining that they had no access to nano-thermite). Moreover, instead of using the thermite to make shaped charges, which can cut through steel, the NatGeo experimenter simply placed a bag of thermite next to a steel column and lit it. When the burning thermite (entirely predictably) did not melt the column, the narrator concluded, triumphantly, that science had disproved the claim of the conspiracy theorists. A review in Media Life Magazine, while not fully exposing the phoniness of the program's claim to represent "science," did point out some shortcomings, saying: Some of the issues raised by the truthers, however, aren't addressed, or are addressed in brief asides. This leaves this documentary open to charges of picking and choosing which points to cover. "9/11: Science and Conspiracy" spends too much time discussing the psychology behind conspiracy theories – which isn't really a hard science.28 A review in the New York Post quoted Sander Hicks, a journalist who is openly a member of the 9/11 truth community, as saying that its representatives on the program "come off as careful and professional, unemotional, but compassionate about the truth," and that the program, in spite of its faults, shows "that the topic is still relevant and that the case isn't closed."29 Concluding Comment: (Corporate). This program by National Geographic provides a good reminder of how the 9/11 truth issue has generally been handled by the corporately-controlled media. But it also demonstrates the fact that the controversy is very much alive in the major media. Case Study 6: Germany's Weekly TV Guide, "TV Hören und Sehen," August 31, 2009 "TV Hören und Sehen", with a paid circulation of nearly a million copies, is owned by the Bauer Media Group, which publishes 308 magazines in 14 countries. The TV magazine features interviews and articles by prominent German authors.30 It is therefore significant that on August 31, 2009, this magazine published "Die Geheimakten von 9/11" ("The Secret Files of 9/11") as a full double-page spread, continuing with photos on two subsequent pages. It opened by saying: "9/11 is officially the largest criminal case in history – but classified documents and witness accounts are surfacing, that speak against the official versions of the CIA and Pentagon."31 It then asks what force could pulverize 200,000 tons of steel in 11.4 seconds, quoting US engineer Neel Ginson: "In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially exploded outwards." Ginson added that, looking closely, one can see small explosions in the Twin Towers always occurring before the floors are reached by the collapse line. The fact that the towers were the first steel-frame buildings in the world to collapse because of fire, he added, was even admitted by NIST (the National Institute of Science and Technology, the government agency that produced the official reports). Among many other questions, the article raises the issue of adjacent World Trade Center 7, the 47-storey steel-frame building with a base the size of a football field that collapsed at 5:20 PM the same day: "But the official 9/11 investigation never mentions the building once." With reference to the Pentagon, this article asks: How were the victims identified by their fingerprints, when even the airplane steel had melted? Concluding Comment: (Corporate). Although this article does not specifically mention nano-thermite, it clearly suggests that artificial explosions brought down the buildings. By not defending the official story at all, this large-chain corporate media outlet was among the first to give an open hearing to the independent 9/11 research community. Case Study 7: Two California Newspapers Review the Role of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, September 2009 In September 2009, Metroactive (Silicon Valley's number-one weekly magazine) and the Santa Barbara Independent, each published slightly different versions of a long article on the controversy surrounding the WTC building collapses.32 The Independent article – entitled "Twin Towers, Twin Myths?" – begins: "One of the crucial technical disputes in American history, perhaps second only to global warming, is underway. It pits hundreds of government technicians who say the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by airplane impact against hundreds of professional architects and building engineers who insist that the Twin Towers could never have collapsed solely due to the planes and are calling for a new independent investigation. It is a fight that is not going away and is likely to get louder as more building trade professionals sign on to one side or the other."33 The version in MetroActive – called "Explosive Theory" – says "[E]ight years after 9/11, a growing organization of building trades professionals suspect that there was more to the event than the government will admit." It then gives a short history of Gage's now 1,000-strong organization, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE).34 Deputy Director Michael J. Heimbach of the FBI's counter-terrorism division, this article adds, had recently acknowledged in a letter to the organization that Gage's presentation is "backed by thorough research and analysis." One local AE member was quoted as saying "it takes too much energy" – energy that was not there – to collapse the buildings at free-fall speed, given the resistance that steel offers. This was borne out, this member continued, by a team of scientists "working at technical laboratories in the United States and Denmark [who] reported in April that analysis of dust …gathered at the World Trade Center found evidence of the potent incendiary/explosive 'super thermite,' used by the military." Almost half of this article deals with the controversy over whether nano-thermite was used, with most of the space allotted to evidence supplied by the 9/11 Truth Movement. Near the end, however, spokesman Michael Newman is brought in to defend NIST's research, saying there was "no need" to test the dust for thermite. But the last word was given to engineer Ed Munyak of AE, who said: "The fact is that the collapses don't resemble any fire-induced behavior of structures, but it exactly mimics a controlled demolition, so why not investigate that? It's all very suspicious and that's why an independent investigation is needed so we can all learn from this." "Explosive Theory" also focuses pointedly on the growing number of professional organizations and retired officials calling for a new investigation, including: …two dozen retired U.S. military brass and eight former U.S. State Department officials, along with a number of Republicans who have served in high federal positions since President Reagan, including former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts and former Reagan administration Assistant Defense Secretary (and retired Marine Corps colonel) Ronald D. Ray. The version in the Santa Barbara Independent concludes with an unusually candid observation: And how would America deal with such an investigation against the backdrop of suppositions that some officials in government were complicit? This idea is virtually unthinkable to most of the public, much less something the American political system can handle…The forces of denial, in the system and in most of our minds, are innately powerful and probably sufficient to mitigate against a reopened investigation. Despite this, [Richard] Gage [of AE] sees his role as provoking a better investigation. Concluding Comment: (Independent). The authors of this article, rather than referring to "conspiracy theorists," present the 9/11 issue as a "technical dispute" of historic importance. Both versions of the article represent a 180-degree turnaround in American newspaper reporting, providing a useful introduction to the long-ignored research by independent professionals. The Santa Barbara Independent, curious about public opinion rather than seeking to hide it, published a local poll asking if conspiracy was behind the collapses: 75% of respondents answered "yes".35 Case Study 8: Dr. Niels Harrit on NRK1's "Schrödinger's Cat," September 10, 2009 NRK1 is the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's main TV channel. It's program "Schrödinger's Cat", which is about scientific research and technology, comes on every Thursday following the evening news. It has won several awards, and averages 487,000 viewers. For the September 10 program, Dr. Harrit was interviewed for about ten minutes in his office and laboratory at the University of Copenhagen Nano-Science Center, where he demonstrated the magnetic quality of a WTC dust sample. He also showed videotape of molten iron flowing from the upper South Tower, which was iron, not aluminum (which melts at a much lower temperature than steel or iron). Emphasizing that an office fire, even if fed by jet fuel, could not possibly get hot enough to melt steel, thereby producing iron, he concluded that the flowing iron had to have been caused by something such as nano-thermite, which produces "an enormous amount of heat", and molten iron is created in the process, with a temperature of 4530 F.36 Although Harrit did not know who placed the explosives, he said, he had no doubt that a crime had occurred. In the final third of the program, three other people were asked for comments. Two of the people tried to cast doubt on Harrit's conclusions, but their comments were weak, even absurd. An architect argued that the energy from the airliners brought the Twin Towers down and then Building 7 came down because the collapse of the towers acted like an earthquake to weaken the ground. American buildings are weak, he explained, because they don't use reinforced concrete. Finally, Dr. David Ray Griffin has stated that "for scientists and people who study the facts, the official story about the Twin Towers is completely ludicrous, but for the general public it has seemed plausible. Jet fuel fires – they seem so hot. Jet fuel's just kerosene." Concluding Comment: (Public). This prime-time coverage by Norway's largest TV channel was quite a turnaround from the earlier NRK radio coverage in May. Most of the time was given to Drs. Harrit and Griffin; the content was groundbreaking; and the opposing views were obviously insubstantial. Considering Norway's NATO membership and military participation in the US-led operations in Afghanistan, the program could prove to be significant. Case Study 9 : London's "Daily Mail" asks whether Osama bin Laden is Dead, September 11, 2009 This long and detailed article opens with the menacing bin Laden audiotape of June 3, 2009, timed to coincide with Barack Obama's arrival on his Middle East tour, and then moves to the new Anglo-American offensive to "hunt and kill" the al Qaeda leader. But, the Daily Mail asks, what if bin Laden isn't alive? What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake – and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror? Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.37 Professors Angelo Codevilla of Boston University and Bruce Lawrence of Duke University point out that the early, verifiable videotapes of bin Laden do not match the tapes that have emerged since 2002 – and even one in late 2001. Telltale distinguishing features include a changed facial structure and increasing secularism in the content of the messages. The article then presents the findings of Dr. Griffin's book on the topic – Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? – as "provoking shock waves". This book presents evidence that bin Laden died, probably due to kidney failure, in mid-December 2001, which would mean that his taped messages since then have been faked to "stoke up waning support for the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan." Perhaps the most controversial of all the tapes was released by the Pentagon on December 13, 2001, claiming that it had been found in a home in Jalalabad. Prior to this tape, bin Laden had, while praising the 9/11 attacks, consistently denied responsibility for them. But the bin Laden of this tape boasts about having planned them. President Bush, the Blair Government, and the mainstream media all hailed this message as offering conclusive proof of bin Laden's guilt. The Daily Mail, however, points to various reasons provided in Griffin's book to believe that the man in this video was an imposter. It refers to the existence of a "highly sophisticated, special effects film technology to morph together images and vocal recordings." And it quotes Griffin as saying: "The confession tape came exactly when Bush and Blair had failed to prove Bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11 and both men were trying to win international public support, particularly in the Islamic world, for the anti-terrorist campaign." Far from seeking to ridicule Griffin's book, the Daily Mail concluded thus: "[T]he Bin Laden tapes have emerged with clockwork regularity as billions have been spent and much blood spilt on the hunt for him. Bin Laden has been the central plank of the West's 'war on terror'. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?" Concluding Comment: (Corporate). This 2400-word article is the first serious mainstream coverage the evidence that Osama bin Laden is dead – and has been for many years. Case Study 10. The New Statesman announces Dr. David Ray Griffin as No. 41 in "The Fifty People who Matter Today," September 24, 2009 Two weeks after the Daily Mail article, a second corporate British publication put Griffin in 41st place in a list of people who "matter today.”38 Because this article was discussed in my earlier paper, Part I of this series, it is mentioned here only as a significant milepost, one that gave (grudging) recognition to the fact that the movement challenging the official account of 9/11 can no longer be ignored. Its impact on the media is shown by the fact that the New Statesman placed Dr. Griffin (who scores 200,000 results when googled) above Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, (who scores over 11 million results) on its list of influential people. Concluding Comment: (Corporate). Although the New Statesman called the movement represented by Dr. Griffin "pernicious", its evaluation of his importance represents a point of no return in the media coverage of 9/11 – as we shall see. Case Study 11: Jean-Marie Bigard on France 2 Public Television, October 28, 2009 Back in September 2008, Jean-Marie Bigard, France's most popular stand-up comedian, was led to apologize for claiming 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government.39 But by July 2009, Bigard had started to post humorous videos on his website ridiculing the official account of the September 11 attacks. In October 2009, Bigard and award-winning French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz appeared for an hour in a debate on France 2, the publicly owned French national television channel.40 The hosts, who had refused to include the scientist who was originally supposed to be on the show (Dr. Niels Harrit) attempted to center the debate on "straw man" theories that neither Bigard nor Kassovitz held. This led to arguments, which then allowed Le Figaro, France's second largest newspaper, to dismiss the debate as "noisy sophistry".41 Concluding Comment: (Public). Although this program was aimed at debunking the 9/11 movement, as shown by its refusal to include a scientist, the fact that it was aired on this state-owned network was a breakthrough, ending the era in which 9/11 questioning was ignored in France. Case Study 12: "The Unofficial Story", by CBC's The Fifth Estate, November 27, 2009 On November 26, 2009, Canada's largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail, noting in an objective review42 that the 9/11 truth movement is "gathering steam," reported that a documentary airing that evening "follows up on some fairly startling public-opinion polls of late." It was referring to "The Unofficial Story",43 a program in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's weekly award-winning investigative series, The Fifth Estate.44 Host Bob McKeown, himself a recipient of multiple awards45, opened by saying that eight years after the "most scrutinized day in history", there may be "more questions than ever", and that an increasing number of people now believe the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks. "Incredibly", he adds, "public opinion polls now show that a majority of Americans believe the Bush Administration had advance knowledge of those attacks, and one way or another allowed them to happen, and polls show that one Canadian in three believes that, too." "The Unofficial Story" then allows leading members of the 9/11 truth community to present a spectrum of evidence on various issues: Architect Richard Gage on how the towers were brought down by controlled demolition Canadian scientist A.K. Dewdney on the impossibility of cell phone calls at high altitude David Ray Griffin on the FBI's 2006 admission that, although US Solicitor General Ted Olson had reported receiving two calls from his wife, CNN commentator Barbara Olson on Flight 77, the evidence indicates that she attempted only one call and that it was "unconnected" and hence lasted "zero seconds" Dr. Griffin and Canadian media commentator Barrie Zwicker on the military's explanation of why it did not intercept the airliners 9/11 documentary filmmaker Craig Ranke on the fact that footage of the Pentagon attack is virtually unavailable to the public in spite of many cameras trained on the building Dewdney on evidence that Flight 93 was shot down by the US military Richard Gage on the presence of nano-thermite in the World Trade Center dust In response, defenders of the official account, such as Johnathan Kay (of Canada's National Post) and 9/11 Commission counsel John Farmer, focus more on why the American public is susceptible to conspiracy theories, than on the disputed evidence itself 46 – although Kay does credit Richard Gage for being involved in a serious quest for truth. Jim Meigs, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics, also directs comments against the skeptics themselves rather than their evidence. Conspiracy theorists, he says, are deluded by "the myth of hyper-competence" in relation to the failure of the US Air Force to intercept the planes. However, Brent Blanchard, presented as a demolition expert, argues against the controlled demolition theory by producing seismographs showing the absence of spikes that, he says, would have been produced by explosions. He also expressed concern that people around the world, by reporting US government complicity in 9/11 "as fact", are affecting how people view America. But actor Daniel Sunjata (of "Rescue Me") ponders the price of not asking the hard questions: "Sometimes boils need to be lanced. Sometimes poison needs to be brought to the surface in order for real healing to take place." McKeown concludes: "We did it not to promote one side or the other, but to shine some light on some of those unresolved issues and unanswered questions." And indeed, the program website published links to both sides of the issue.47 Concluding Comment: (Public). This hour-long documentary was the first truly fair opportunity in North America for advocates of the "unofficial story" of 9/11 to present some of their case on mainstream television. Representatives of the "official story" were also given time to speak, but their case was patently weaker. This imbalance was allowed by the producers, and indeed by the Canadian government, to stand. Aired several times across Canada, this program drew unusually high viewer commentary. Case Study 13: New Zealand TV's "Close Up" hosts Architect Richard Gage, November 27, 2009 The same day "The Unofficial Story" was broadcast by the CBC, Richard Gage appeared on New Zealand TV's popular public affairs program, Close-Up, for a six-minute interview.48 "WTC 7 was never hit by a plane but it still came down," the host begins, "and that's what troubles internationally respected architect Richard Gage." Gage is then allowed to explain that the building fell straight down in 6.5 seconds, and that NIST, the agency tasked with explaining the collapse, admitted that it had come down in absolute free-fall for the first hundred feet or so. "That means the structure had to have been removed," says Gage. "There is evidence of very high-tech explosives in all the dust throughout lower Manhattan – nanothermite." Normal office fires, Gage added, would start "a large, gradual deformation – the building would tip over – it wouldn't go straight down through the path of greatest resistance." This is why 1,000 engineers and architects around the world are demanding a real investigation that includes all of the evidence at the crime scene, not just the planes and the fires, says Gage. "In the nine months prior to 9/11, we had the largest elevator modernization in history going on inside the towers…We're looking for an investigation that includes elevator companies, security companies, etcetera." Concluding Comment: (Public). New Zealand's national television station allowed open and unopposed discussion, by the founder of the world's largest professional organization calling for a new 9/11 investigation, of the claim that nano-thermite was used in a controlled demolition of the World Trade Center. The coincidence that this program and the CBC's "The Unofficial Story" both aired on the same day may prove to be a turning point in media coverage of the 9/11 issue. Case Study 14 : "9/11 Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura," TruTV, Premiere December 9, 2009 TruTV is an American cable television network owned by Time Warner through its subsidiary, Turner Broadcasting. Historically, its has given live homicide trial coverage and other criminal justice programming, though it has recently expanded into more caught-on-video reality, which it calls "actuality" television. "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" premiered December 2, 2009, to an audience of 1.6 million television viewers. The former Governor of Minnesota has good cause to look into conspiracies, as seen in his December 29 episode, which shows personal experience that the "secret state" holds more power than the senior elected representatives of the people: "About a month after I was elected governor, I was requested into the basement of the capitol to be interviewed by 23 members of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA…And I said to them, "look before I answer any of your questions, I want to know what you're doing here." Because in the CIA mission statement it says that they're not to be operational inside the United States of America. Well, they wouldn't really give me an answer on that. And then I said, "I want to go around the room, and I want each one of you to tell me your name and what you do." Half of them wouldn't. Now isn't that bizarre? I'm the governor, and these guys won't even answer questions from me."49 Ventura made the 9/11 documentary after being approached by Donna March O'Connor, whose daughter died in the World Trade Center and wanted "every American exposed to the questions" about 9/11.50 Ventura's documentary contained interviews with the following people: Janitor William Rodriguez, the last man out of the North Tower and who was decorated for heroism by President Bush, who reported enormous explosions in the basements just before the plane hit up above, and whose testimony to the 9/11 Commission was ignored Physicist Steven Jones, formerly of Brigham Young University, who isolated super-thermite from the enormous dust clouds of the Twin Towers and Building 7, after which he was contacted by a consultant engineer from the Department of Homeland Security, who warned Jones that, if he published his findings "the pain would be great." Explosives expert Van Romero, of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, demonstrating how super-thermite can be painted onto a steel beam, causing it to burn through Ground Zero rescue worker Mike Mallone, who reported seeing one of the four black boxes removed from the site, and was told of two others – and who was told by the FBI that if he talked about it, "there would be a problem." Investigative journalist Dave Lindorff, who was told "off the record" by a contact in the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated the boxes, that all four had been recovered by the FBI and taken away, though officially, the contact said, this would be denied Air crash investigator Dale Leppard, who said that the bright orange heat-resistant boxes are never lost Yet the 9/11 Commission Report claimed that the boxes from American 11 and United 175 were never found. Ventura concluded by asking: "If everything they told us was true, then why would they need to stonewall us?" Concluding Comment: (Corporate). By calling his series "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura", he openly declares that conspiracies do exist, and that they are a legitimate subject to investigate. According to TruTV, the first episode drew 1.6 million viewers, a record for a new series on this network. Case Study 15: German Federal Judge Dieter Deiseroth Questions the Official 9/11 Investigation, December 15, 2009 Heinz Heise is a German publishing house, which publishes Europe's most popular computer and technology journals. It also owns Heise Online (heise.de), which is a top-50 site in Germany, and a top-1000 website in the world as a whole. On December 15 2008, Heise Online carried an interview with German Federal Judge Dieter Deiseroth on the legality of the Afghanistan war and the question of whether the attacks were adequately investigated in the US.51 In his response, Deiseroth made the following points: The 9/11 Commission consisted of Bush Administration officials who were very close to the military industrial complex. Now, over eight years after 9/11, no independent court has applied legal procedures to review the available evidence on who was responsible for the attacks. It is not acceptable for a constitutional state to dispense with the necessary steps in identifying suspects and instead to declare war, bomb a foreign country where suspects reside, and place it under military occupation. Having made the claim that bin Laden was responsible for the terrorism of 9/11, the United States was under burden of proof, and yet America's own FBI admits that it has no evidence presented in court of Osama bin Laden's responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Concluding Comment: (Corporate). This “top-50” online journal exposed many German people to the illegal and unconstitutional responses to the 9/11 attacks – which were the underpinning for the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and even to questions about the truth of the official account of 9/11 itself. Case Study 16: Germany's “Focus Money” says: “We Do Not Believe You!” January 8, 2010 With 450,000 to 720,000 readers, Focus Money is the second most popular German weekly business magazine. In January 2010, it published a 5-page, highly detailed, and comprehensively researched glossy feature, "We do not believe you!"52 The article first looks at the many professional 9/11 groups, as well as a 2,000-strong list of prominent and qualified people who question the 9/11 Commission Report at the Patriots Question 9/11 website. It quotes Richard Gage saying: "The towers accelerated without interruption in free fall…as if the lower 90 floors of the building did not exist. The only way to bring them down like that is controlled demolition." The article weighs Gage's list of ten features of a controlled demolition, which were exemplified in the World Trade Center collapses, against the three features of a fire-caused destruction, which were absent. Focus Money also explores the case of Barry Jennings, a former Deputy Director of Emergency Services in New York's Housing Authority, who reported being trapped in WTC 7 after massive explosions in this building occurred in the morning – before the Twin Towers fell. Focus Money also reported that Jennings, aged 53, died mysteriously just days before NIST's report on WTC-7 was to be released in August 2008. The article recommends films that challenge the official report, including "Loose Change", which has been seen 125 million times on Google video alone, "9/11 Mysteries," and "Zero" – all available online. Regarding the Pentagon, experienced commercial pilots are cited as maintaining that no one, let alone a Cessna pilot, could fly the route that Flight 77 allegedly took to hit the building. The article pointed out the lack of debris to support the official story: "There was no tail, there were no wings, no confirmation of the crash of a Boeing 757." And there were no titanium engines, which would have survived the crash. Also cited was Sergeant Lauro Chavez of the US Central Command in Florida, who was involved in exercises the morning of 9/11 to hijack planes and fly them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House. He asks why, when it became clear that the attacks were real, were the rogue planes not intercepted? Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony to the 9/11 Commission, in which he reported a conversation between Dick Cheney and a young officer prior to the strike on the Pentagon, supports Chavez' conviction that there had been a stand-down order. Concluding Comment: (Corporate). This 5,400-word article presented strong evidence against the official 9/11 account to Germany's economic and political decision-makers. Case Study 17: Televised documentary, "The BBC's Conspiracy Files: Osama bin Laden – Dead or Alive?" January 10, 2010 In January 2010, a BBC News article53 summarized evidence supporting both sides of the question stated in the title of its upcoming documentary, "Osama bin Laden – Dead or Alive?" – a title taken from the David Ray Griffin book that was previously discussed in a Daily Mail article.54 The documentary, which was part of the BBC Conspiracy Files series, opened by presenting evidence that bin Laden has long been dead, including the following points: Bruce Riedel, chair of President Obama's policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, says the bin Laden trail is cold, "frozen over," meaning that there has been no intelligence on bin Laden since Tora Bora, either by sightings or intercepted communications. Various lines of evidence suggest that bin Laden was suffering from advanced kidney disease: CBS News reported, for example, that he was being treated in the kidney ward of a hospital in Pakistan the night before the 9/11 attacks, and the last of the undoubtedly authentic videotapes showed him frail and gaunt, with a whitish beard. There were reports of his funeral in mid-December 2001 in Pakistani and Egyptian newspapers. Former CIA agent Robert Baer, who believes bin Laden to be dead, reported that none of his friends in the CIA could state for certain that bin Laden was still alive. Colonel Iman, Pakistan's former troop trainer, also believes him to be dead. The only proof of bin Laden's continuing existence is the audio and videotapes, and Dr. Griffin has presented evidence (about the structure of bin Laden's face and hands, and the secular content of his messages)that some of them are clearly faked, leading to the suspicion that they all are. Pakistan's former Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who knew bin Laden, supports this conclusion with regard to the alleged confession video. Professor Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, a student of the bin Laden tapes, also declared it a fake, especially because bin Laden always loved the spotlight. He asks why bin Laden has been seen so infrequently on video and why his contemporary, Ayman al-Zawahiri is seen so often.55 The BBC narrator says that only six of bin Laden's 40 messages were videotapes, and only two have appeared since Tora Bora in 2001. Dr Griffin says the first video appeared conveniently just before the 2004 US election, which helped Bush to win; and the second appeared in 2007, showing a very black beard, which had formerly been almost white.56 CIA agent Robert Baer confirmed that the alleged bin Laden audio and video tapes could have been faked through digital manipulation. The BBC program also presented evidence that is believed by some to show that the US may not have been intent on capturing or killing bin Laden: Dalton Fury, commander of the secret Delta Force, says it was "odd" that Washington denied him nearby troops and artillery when he had bin Laden trapped at Tora Bora in December 2001. Mike Scheuer, formerly of the CIA bin Laden Unit, said the US had ten chances to easily kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time the CIA briefed the White House of the opportunity, the decision was made not to shoot. In the final third of the program, the BBC provided rather weak evidence against "the theory that Osama bin Laden died 8 years ago and the US government is keeping him alive, faking videos, and sending troops to battle and allowing them to die in pursuit of an imaginary foe." However, a reviewer for the TV and Radio section of the The Independent, one of London's leading newspapers, complained that this rebuttal was too little, too late, saying: "The Conspiracy Files film about Osama Bin Laden was a dubious affair, which gave regrettable amounts of air time to an obsessive 9/11 "truther" called David Ray Griffin. . . . Griffin only got the airtime, as it turned out, so that Conspiracy Files could systematically work their way through his claims and dismiss them. But I think they grievously overestimated the capacity of common sense to mop up the pollution of paranoid fantasy that they actively helped to spread around in the first 45 minutes of the film."57 This seemed to be the commentator's way of saying that the BBC's show probably increased the number of people who believe that bin Laden is probably dead. Concluding Comment: (Public). This program attempts to neutralize the evidence that bin Laden has been dead for 8 years, which if true would mean that fabricated tapes are helping to justify a continuing Western offensive in the Middle East. That the program was made at all shows how seriously the BBC is taking the growing challenge to the official story of 9/11. Case Study 18 : An American Union Paper Calls for a New Probe, February 1, 2010 The New Hampshire Union Leader is a daily union newspaper seen by 143,000 people per month in the United States. Beth Lamontagne Hall of the Union Leader wrote in February 2010 that "Keene resident Gerhard Bedding doesn't buy the government's version of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, so he's working on a statewide campaign calling for another investigation into the terrorist attacks.58 Bedding and others, she reported, are petitioning New Hampshire's congressional delegates to push for an independent investigation into "all the evidence and unanswered questions" pertaining to the 9/11 attacks. Quoting Bedding's statement that a new investigation is needed "in light of new evidence that has appeared in the last two years," she pointed out that he mentioned, in particular, the report that scientists had found traces of explosives at the World Trade Center. Concluding Comment: (Independent). This article in a daily union newspaper is a significant indicator, more than eight years after the attacks, of the broadening concern over the truth about 9/11, and is another example of the widespread influence of the nano-thermite paper published by Dr. Harrit and his co-authors. IV. Summary and Concluding Observations 1. In the past year, in response to emerging independent science on the 9/11 attacks, nine corporate, seven public, and two independent media outlets aired examinations of the issue, which were all – with the exception of the National Geographic special – reasonably objective, examining the issue as a legitimate scientific controversy worthy of debate (not as "conspiracy theorists" vs. science and common sense). 2. Eight countries – Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia – have allowed their publicly-owned broadcasting stations to air the full spectrum of evidence challenging the truth of the official account of 9/11. 3. These developments may reflect a relaxation in the international media following the change in the US and British leaderships. 4. These developments definitely reflect, in any case, the fact that scientists in the 9/11 Truth Movement have recently succeeded in getting papers, such as the nano-thermite paper, published in peer-reviewed journals. 5. These developments surely also reflect the general professionalism of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as exemplified by the emergence of not only Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth but also Firefighters, Intelligence Officers, Lawyers, Medical Professionals, Pilots, Political Leaders, Religious Leaders, Scholars, and Veterans for 9/11 Truth. 6. These developments seem to reflect, moreover, an increased recognition of the importance of the 9/11 Truth Movement, which is demonstrated by two honors given to its most influential member, Dr. David Ray Griffin, that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: the choice by Publishers Weekly of one of his books as a "Pick of the Week," and his inclusion in the New Statesman's list of the most important people in the world today. This more open approach taken in the international media – I could also have included the Japanese media – might be a sign that worldwide public and corporate media organizations are positioning themselves, and preparing their audiences, for a possible revelation of the truth of the claim that forces within the US government were complicit in the attacks – a revelation that would call into question the publicly given rationale for the military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The evidence now being explored in the international media may pave the way for the US media to take an in-depth look at the implications of what is now known about 9/11, and to re-examine the country's foreign and domestic policies in the light of this knowledge. Elizabeth Woodworth is a retired professional health sciences librarian, and a freelance writer. She is the author of two published books and many articles on political and social justice issues. Notes 1 "The 50 People Who Matter Today," New Statesman, September 24, 2009 (http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2009/09/world-fashion-gay-india-church ). Note that Part I of this series, entitled "The Media Response to the Growing Influence of the 9 /11 Truth Movement: Reflections on a Recent Evaluation of Dr. David Ray Griffin," was published by Global Research, December 12, 2009 (http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16505) 2 Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe," Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol. 2 (April 3, 2009): 7-31 (http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm) 3 Ibid., p. 29. 4 Ibid., p. 29. 5 Dr. Harrit is Associate Professor of the Department of Chemistry, and has been a faculty member at the Nano-Science Center at the University of Copenhagen since this Center started in 2001. (http://nano.ku.dk/english/ ) 6 "Danish Scientist Niels Harrit on Nano-thermite in the WTC Dust (English subtitles)," TV2 News, Denmark, April 6, 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_tf25lx_3o). 7 By Lars Sobiraj, May 24, 2009,"Germany's gulli.com (link obsolete now) Interviews Dr. Niels Harrit on Nanothermite at the WTC," Sunday May 24th, 2009 1:28 PM, http://911truth.org/article_for_printing.php?story=20090525150347423 8 Kevin R. Ryan, "The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nano-Thermite," July 2, 2008, (http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf ) 9 Dr. Andrzej W. Miziolek, "Nanoenergetics: An Emerging Technology Area of National Importance," In: US Department of Defense. "Special Issue: DOD Researchers Provide a Look Inside Nanotechnology," Amptiac Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 44 (http://www.p2pays.org/ref/34/33115.pdf ) The article reports that, "Very simply, nanoenergetics can store higher amounts of energy than conventional energetic materials and one can use them in unprecedented ways to tailor the release of this energy so as to maximize the lethality of the weapons." p. 43. 10 See the IoN Advisory Group at http://www.nano.org.uk/aboutus/ukboard.htm 11 My italics. [News]: "Active Thermitic Material Confirmed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe," June 15, 2009 (http://www.nano.org.uk/news/jun2009/latest1881.htm) 12 Thomas Hoffmann, "Danish scientist: an explosive nano material found in dust from the World Trade Center", Videnskab.dk, April 3, 2009 (http://www.videnskab.dk/composite-1945.htm ) 13 Thomas Hoffmann, "Niels Harrit: Scientific evidence of long-time knowledge of 9/11," Videnskab.dk, April 3, 2009 (http://www.videnskab.dk/composite-2019.htm ) 14 Milla Mølgaard, April 4, 2009, (http://politiken.dk/indland/article684567.ece ) 15 "Niels Harrit presents evidence for nano-thermite in WTC, on GoodMorning Denmark," (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAUUKPfdeQA ) 16 Posted at: http://www.javno.com/en-world/video--911-no-longer-taboo-topic-in-denmark_250703 17 "Did nano-thermite take down the WTC?" (http://rt.com/Best_Videos/2009-07-09/Did_nano-thermite_take_down_the_WTC.html , and http://rt.com/Politics/2009-07-09/Did_nano-thermite_take_down_the_WTC.html?fullstory ) . Also available on youtube as "Dr. Niels Harrit on Russia Today – We need a real 9/11 investigation," (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVbF1ndquZI&feature=PlayList&p=4B3A9D67894B7184&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=20 ) 18 Brian Stelter, "The Political Suspicions of 9/11," New York Times, February 1, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/media/02fx.html?_r=2&ref=business ) 19 Fox News, "'Rescue Me' From 9/11 Conspiracy Theories," February 4, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,487906,00.html ) 20 The mock trial is available on youtube in 4 parts: "911 Devil's Advocate – English subs – Part 1 of 4", starts at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOdlA_eu-Lw 21 This is said at the beginning of "911 Devil's Advocate – English subs – Part 2 of 4", at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJX-rIaAbA4&feature=related. See also, Craig Morris, "Mistranslated Osama bin Laden Video – the German Press Investigates," December 23, 2001 (http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/16801 ) 22 Joshua Rhett Miller, "Dutch TV Show Feeds Conspiracy Theories on Bin Laden's Role in 9/11," Fox News, April 25, 2009 (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,516195,00.html ) 23 Johanthan Kay, "Richard Gage: 9/11 truther extraordinaire," Financial Post, Saturday, April 25, 2009 (http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=f54cf9ee-4637-44de-8819-19d918b3241b&k=21893 ) 24 The radio program may be heard at this link, in Norwegian, without subtitles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHZHGUd82wc ) 25 Norwegian State Radio initiates public debate on 9/11 Truth (update), (http://zelikow.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/norwegian-state-radio-initiates-public-debate-on-911-truth/ ) 26 Richard Gage interviewed by Kim Stephens and Kopi Sotiropulos on KMPH Fox 26 in Fresno, CA, May 28, 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO2yT0uBQbM&feature=related ) 27 "9/11: Science and Conspiracy", (http://www.shallownation.com/2009/08/31/national-geographic-9-11-science-and-conspiracy-video-photos/). National Geographic Channel is a joint venture of National Geographic Television & Film and Fox Cable Networks. 28 Tom Conroy. "'9/11: Science and Conspiracy' not quite," Media Life Magazine, August 31, 2009 (http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/TV_Reviews_21/9_11_Science_and_Conspiracy_not_quite.asp ) 29 Maxine Shen, "The Story Behind 9/11: Hit or Myth? Taking on the Truthers," New York Post, September 2, 2009 (http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/item_tPXUgMFRZVQywHJg28ON7J;jsessionid=5113BAC6DC385827B1486E60DAA759A8#ixzz0eY7F97Dx) 30 The website for this publication is http://www.tvhus.de/home/home.html 31 Hannes Wellmann, "Die Geheimakten von 9/11," TV Hören und Sehen, August 31, 2009. The article and its English translation have been downloaded to http://www.911video.de/news/020909/ 32 Whereas the article focuses primarily on Bay-Area resident Richard Gage, Santa Barbara is the home of David Ray Griffin, so the Independent version gave more space to him, even including his photo. 33 Jay Levin and Tom McKenzie, "Twin Towers, Twin Myths?" Santa Barbara Independent, September 17, 2009 (http://www.independent.com/news/2009/sep/17/twin-towers-twin-myths/ ) 34 Jay Levin and Tom McKenzie, "Explosive Theory," MetroActive, September 9, 2009, (http://www.metroactive.com/metro/09.09.09/cover-0936.html) 35 "Is conspiracy behind the World Trade Center's collapse?" (http://www.independent.com/polls/2009/sep/wtc09/results/ ) 36 "Norwegian TV examines 911 part 1," September 10, 2009, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlHuYt_u-kI ) The TV program was followed by a written account of it: Lars Ole Skjønberg, "World Trade Center ble sprengt" ("World Trade Center was Blown Up,") September 10, 2009, http://www.nrk.no/programmer/tv/schrodingers_katt/1.6769275 ). Further information and partial transcripts are available at "Norwegian State Television presents 9/11 Truth (en subs), (update) (http://zelikow.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/norwegian-state-television-presents-911-truth/ ) 37 Sue Reid, "Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years – and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?" Daily Mail, September 11, 2009 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seven-years--U-S-Britain-covering-continue-war-terror.html ) 38 New Statesman, "The 50 People who Matter Today." 39 "French comedian apolgises for claiming 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government," Belfast Telegraph, September 10, 2008 (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/french-comedian-apologises-for-claiming-911-was-orchestrated-by-the-us-government-13968453.html ) 40 "L'objet du scandale, 11 septembre, Bigard, Kassovitz," http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uc4Mb9rF0c The program is also available with English subtitles, at http://world911truth.org/911-debate-with-kassovitz-and-bigard/ . The debate was originally intended to include journalist Éric Laurent and Prof. Niels Harrit, but apparently France 2 could not find anyone to debate them. See "France 2 backs away from real debate, censors Niels Harrit and Éric Laurent," October 24, 2009, http://world911truth.org/france-2-backs-away-from-real-debate-censors-niels-harrit-and-eric-laurent/ . 41 Hervé de Saint Hilaire, «L'objet du scandale» : sophismes bruyants, Le Figaro, 30 octobre 2009 (http://www.lefigaro.fr/programmes-tele/2009/10/30/03012-20091030ARTFIG00348-l-objet-du-scandale-sophismes-bruyants-.php ) 42 Andrew Ryan, "Was 9/11 a conspiracy? 'Truthers' make their case: CBC's fifth estate airs The Unofficial Story," The Globe and Mail, November 26, 2009 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/was-911-a-conspiracy-truthers-make-their-case/article1378976/ ) 43 CBC. The Fifth Estate. "The Unofficial Story", November 27, 2009 (http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2009-2010/the_unofficial_story/ ) 44 The Fifth Estate has won 243 awards, including an Oscar for best documentary, three international Emmy Awards, and 31 Geminis. 45 McKeown's awards include two Emmys, two Geminis, two Edward R. Murrow awards, two Gracies, two National Headliner awards and a National Press Club award. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_McKeown ) 46 It is worth noting that attempts to derail critics of the official story have often framed the issue as "conspiracy theorists" vs. "the science" or vs. "the facts." But as the current essay illustrates, the debate is now increasingly being framed in the media as science on one side of the issue vs. science on the other side. 47 The Fifth Estate, at http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2009-2010/the_unofficial_story/links.html 48 "Richard Gage AIA on New Zealand National Television," November 27, 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2INIOXe_WI ) 49 "Conspiracy Theory Episode 4 Big Brother with Jesse Ventura," December 29, 2009 (http://conspiracytheoryjesseventura.com/forums/index.php?board=2.0 ) 50 "9/11 Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura," TruTV, Premiere Wed, December 9 at 10PM (http://www.conspiracytheoryjesseventura.com/2009/12/watch-episode-2-911-conspiracy-theory-jesse-ventura/ ) Also at "Conspiracy theory with Jesse Ventura – 9/11 part 1," http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uw5Bz-oL3w ) 51 Marcus Klöckner, "Das schreit geradezu nach Aufklärung," December 15, 2009 (http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/31/31729/1.html ). The English Google translation is at http://translate.google.ca/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Ftp%2Fr4%2Fartikel%2F31%2F31729%2F1.html&sl=de&tl=en ) 52 Oliver Janich, Focus Money, No. 2/2010, January 8, 2010 (http://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/terroranschlaege-vom-11-september-2001-wir-glauben-euch-nicht_aid_467894.html ). For English Google translation, see http://translate.google.ca/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.focus.de%2Ffinanzen%2Fnews%2Fterroranschlaege-vom-11-september-2001-wir-glauben-euch-nicht_aid_467894.html&sl=de&tl=en . For English introduction and commentary, see http://www.911video.de/news/080110/en.html . 53 Mike Rudin, "The Conspiracy Files," BBC News, January 9, 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8444069.stm ) 54 David Ray Griffin, "Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?" Interlink Books, 2009. The documentary, "The BBC's Conspiracy Files: Osama bin Laden – Dead or Alive?" January 10, 2010, is now periodically available on BBC stations throughout the world, and presently available on youtube: "BBC: Osama Bin Laden; Dead or Alive (1/6)," (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqg9SF2x50&feature=related ). 55 A Wikipedia article lists 34 videos of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri that have been released since May 2003. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videos_of_Ayman_al-Zawahiri) 56 Frames from the 2004 and 2007 videos may be seen side by side in the online article: David Ray Griffin, "Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?" Global Research, October 9, 2009 (http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15601 ) 57 Tom Sutcliffe, "Last Night's Television: By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, Sat, BBC2; Conspiracy Files: Osama Bin Laden – Dead or Alive?, Sun, BBC2," The Independent, January 11, 2010 (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-television-by-the-people-the-election-of-barack-obama-sat-bbc2brconspiracy-files-osama-bin-laden-ndash-dead-or-alive-sun-bbc2-1863741.html ) 58 Beth Lamontagne Hall, "NH group cites need for new 9/11 probe," New Hampshire Union Leader, February 1, 2010 (http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?articleId=c2822a9b-f0c3-4f03-b8c3-09c3e0765b2f&headline=NH+group+cites+need+for+new+9%2f11+probe )

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