Mineta Confirms Cheney Ordered Stand Down
June 27, 2007
06-26-2007
Jones Report
Aaron Dykes
Former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta answered questions from members
of 9/11 Truth Seattle.org about his testimony before the 9/11 Commission report.
Mineta says Vice President Cheney was “absolutely” already there when he
arrived at approximately 9:25 a.m. in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency
Operations Center) bunker on the morning of 9/11. Mineta seemed shocked
to learn that the 9/11 Commission Report claimed Cheney had not arrived
there until 9:58– after the Pentagon had been hit, a report that
Mineta definitively contradicted.
Norman Mineta revealed that Lynn Cheney was also in the PEOC bunker already at
the time of his arrival, along with a number of other staff.
Mineta is on video testifying before the 9/11 Commission, though it was omitted in their final report. He told Lee Hamilton:
“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a
young man who would come in and say to the Vice President…the plane is
50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the
plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president
“do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped
his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you
heard anything to the contrary!?
Mineta confirmed his statements with reporters, saying “When I overheard
something about ‘the orders still stand’ and so, what I thought of was
that they had already made the decision to shoot something down.”
Mineta was still in the PEOG bunker when the plane was reported down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
“I remember later on when I heard about the Shanksville plane going down,
the Vice President was right across from me, and I said, ‘Do you think
that we shot it down ourselves?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said,
‘Let’s find out.’ So he had someone check with the Pentagon. That was
about maybe, let’s say 10:30 or so, and we never heard back from the
DoD until probably about 12:30. And they said, ‘No, we didn’t do it.’”
Norman Mineta’s Testimony Before the 9/11 Commission– which was NOT
included in the final report and which DISPUTES the Commission’s
timetable for Vice President Dick Cheney on 9/11
The two hour time delay is suspicious given the Vice President’s own
account of the dedicated video communications available that morning, as he told it to Tim Russert of Meet the Press on September 16, 2001.
“We had access, secured communications with Air Force One, with the
secretary of Defense over in the Pentagon. We had also the secure
videoconference that ties together the White House, CIA, State,
Justice, Defense–a very useful and valuable facility. We have the
counterterrorism task force up on that net. And so I was in a position
to be able to see all the stuff coming in, receive reports and then
make decisions in terms of acting with it.”
At a bare minimum, this confirmation by Norman Mineta is in gross
contradiction to the 9/11 Commission Report and poses serious questions
about the Vice President’s role in ordering NORAD to stand down on 9/11.
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Talk Radio Study Demonstrates Misuse Of Public Airwaves
June 26, 2007
From Huffington Post, June 22, 2007
By Dave JohnsonFree
Press and The Center for American Progress have teamed up to produce a
report on talk radio that is very interesting. The Structural Imbalance
of Political Talk Radio. Some excerpts from the summary:
Among radio formats, the combined news/talk format (which includes
news/talk/information and talk/personality) leads all others in terms
of the total number of stations per format and trails only country
music in terms of national audience share. Through more than 1,700
stations across the nation, the combined news/talk format is estimated
to reach more than 50 million listeners each week.
And what options are presented to the public by these stations?
* Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations
owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent
of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9
percent is progressive.
* Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes
of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254
hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as
progressive talk.
* A separate analysis of all of the news/talk
stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the
programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is
progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as
New York and Chicago.
Yikes! This study demonstrates that
consumers are not allowed choices of different opinions and analysis.
These stations are licensed to use public airwaves. By limiting choices
in this way, are they serving the public interest?
Is it a licensing issue? Again, from the study,
Ownership diversity is perhaps the single most important variable
contributing to the structural imbalance based on the data.
Quantitative analysis conducted by Free Press of all 10,506 licensed
commercial radio stations reveals that stin, from the study,ations
owned by women, minorities, or local owners are statistically less
likely to air conservative hosts or shows.
In contrast, stations controlled by group owners—those with stations in multiple
markets or more than three stations in a single market—were
statistically more likely to air conservative talk.
This article is from Huffington Post.
If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to
visit their Web site and register an account, if necessary, to view all
their articles on the Web. Support quality journalism.
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I spent the weekend reading A Woman in Charge,
Carl Bernstein’s biography of Hillary Clinton (okay, I know I’m late)
while being simultaneously bombarded with fresh evidence of the
Bush/Cheney administration’s pathological obsession with secrecy.
Historians will be debating for decades what the worst element of
the Bush White House was — but at the root of the entire cancerous
structure is George Bush and Dick Cheney’s shared fixation on secrecy.
Their mutual contempt for the public’s right to know knows no bounds –
witness the VP’s absurd attempt to escape oversight by claiming he’s not part of the executive branch, or the endless legal maneuvering to keep the administration’s abuse of detainees hidden from scrutiny.
As a result, it’s pretty safe to say the central question facing
Democratic voters in the presidential primaries is: which candidate
will be most effective at rolling back the Bush years? On issue after
issue, the Democratic contenders are doing everything they can to
highlight their differences with Bush.
But when it comes to the issue of secrecy and an administration
operating in the shadows, there’s an argument to be made that the
candidate least likely to turn on the lights is Hillary Clinton. Her
lifelong commitment to secrecy is one of the main themes of Bernstein’s
book.
“Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with
the truth,” writes Bernstein. “She has often chosen to obfuscate, omit,
and avoid. It is an understatement by now that she has been known to
apprehend truths about herself and the events of her life that others
do not exactly share.”
Or, as Bernstein summed it up on the Today Show, “This is a woman who led a camouflaged life and continues to.”
It’s not just that she’s a private person. There are plenty of
public servants who are zealous about guarding their personal lives and
equally zealous about keeping their public lives — and public policies
– transparent. But, like Bush and Cheney, Clinton seems devoted to
secrecy for its own sake.
As Bernstein shows, what was most shocking about her handling of the
health care fiasco during her husband’s administration wasn’t that she
kept the plan secret from its critics, but that she kept it secret even
from those who would have been champions of the plan had they known
anything about it.
This passion for concealment is a pattern that, as Bernstein
demonstrates, has been repeated throughout Clinton’s life. It was there
in the head-scratching decision to hide her college thesis
from public view because it was about radical organizer Saul Alinsky.
It was there in her refusal for 30 years to admit that she had failed
the bar exam the first time she took it. It was there in the way she
glossed over in her memoir her summer internship at the law firm of
Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein — one of the most renowned left-wing
law firms in the nation. It was there in the way she handled the
Whitewater and Travelgate investigations, which, as Bernstein told me,
“ended up unnecessarily prolonging them.”
Bernstein quotes Clinton lawyer Mark Fabiani as saying of Hillary
and Whitewater: “She would do anything to get out of the situation. And
if that involved not being forthcoming [in releasing documents and
other materials] she herself would say, ‘I have a reason for not being
forthcoming.’” And he reports that then-White House advisor George
Stephanopoulos described Hillary’s responses to the various scandals of
the Clinton presidency as “Jesuitical lying.”
And it has been there in the way Hillary’s camp has attacked Bernstein’s book, saying, among other things, “Is it possible to be quoted yawning?” and deriding it as old news: “Nothing more than cash for rehash.” This assessment stands in stark contrast to the majority of reviews, including the one in the Los Angeles Times by Ron Brownstein, who called it “a model of contemporary political biography… an excellent book: thorough, balanced, judicious and deeply reported.”
“Hillary Clinton and her advisors apparently don’t want people to
know her real story,” Carl Bernstein told me. “That is particularly sad
because the authentic picture of her life is so much more compelling
than the tired, airbrushed, and sanitized version they keep serving up
and refining. The campaign’s official response to A Woman in Charge
– even before they had seen the book — is the kind of thing I would
have expected from the Nixon White House or the Bush White House, not a
Clinton presidential campaign committed to a new openness and
transparency.”
I actually found Bernstein’s book to be a very humanizing portrait
of Clinton, which is why her camp’s reaction struck me as excessive and
misguided. It’s as if Hillary and those around her have such an
idealized view of her they feel the need to vanquish anything that
contradicts the faultless fantasy. No imperfection is allowed.
On the campaign trail, Clinton talks a lot about her experience in
the White House — clearly we’re meant to factor those eight years in
when evaluating her fitness to return. But reading the Bernstein book
made me feel like she has taken away all the wrong lessons about being
in power. Her tendency to hide and obfuscate appears to be a learned
behavior.
So the question facing Democrats — and, indeed, the country — is
whether we want another presidency cloaked in secrecy, deception, and
denial.
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Why Hillary Scares Me
June 26, 2007
During
one of the debates I mentioned that my fellow Democratic candidates
scare me. Hillary’s speech last week to the Take Back America
conference gives me yet another reason to be afraid.
In an indignant voice she decried the Bush administration’s
‘’stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok. . .
It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our
Constitution was designed to prevent.” Actually, our Constitution
grants Congress the power to prevent these ills but Hillary and her
colleagues weren’t up to the task.
Our founders’ legacy did not stop Hillary from voting for the
Patriot Act and then supporting its renewal in 2006 despite revelations
that the government was using it to infringe on the very liberties that
our founders held sacred. Where was her commitment to our founders when
she voted to gut our habeas corpus protections?
As for cronyism — Hillary has repeatedly authorized billions that
the Pentagon gave in no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Even though the
Democrats have been in control of Congress for months, they still
haven’t summoned Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the other usual suspects to
account for the missing millions in reconstruction funding.
When I think about how Congress enabled Bush’s corruption and cronyism, I’m reminded of the lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?
Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf,
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep:
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.
In the same frightening speech, Hillary went on the blame the Iraqis
for the mess in their country: “The American military has succeeded. It
is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions
that are important for their own people.”
Let me get this straight. The Iraq disaster is not the fault of the
delusional neo-cons, the greedy oil companies, or the gullible and
cowardly Congressional warhawks. (Most senators including Clinton
didn’t even bother to read the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate).
According to Hillary, the real culprit is the Iraqi government that we
created virtually overnight and left to govern a fractured,
impoverished society. Talk about blaming the victim!
Hillary, as an active supporter of the war, you are one of many
Americans who are guilty. And now all Americans are left responsible,
regardless of whether we supported or opposed he war. When we pull out,
our hands will drip with the blood of the tens of thousands of American
casualties and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead. The Iraqi
government didn’t start this, we did.
Of course we can continue to compartmentalize ourselves from the
truth, remove the troops and blame the rubble on the Iraqis. We can
feed the collective fantasy that our good intentions and heroic efforts
were thwarted by the cowardice and incompetence of others. But if
that’s what we take from our experience in Iraq, we will never learn
the true lessons and we will be condemned to repeat the same mistakes.
The inability to admit a mistake and assume responsibility is not
just a morally bankrupt way to walk through life; it is a dangerous and
deadly way to lead a nation. When I am president, I will open up all
secret files relating to the Iraq war and expose all officials who lied
to the public in promoting it. (That’s right, Dick, your files too.) My
Justice Department will prosecute everyone who lied under oath or
ripped off the American taxpayer by exploiting the Iraq reconstruction
effort. And I will pardon to no one.
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Pitbull vs. Porcupine
June 25, 2007
| Pit Bull vs. Porcupine |  |
 |
 |
| Sunday, 24 June 2007 | |
| Somewhere there is a naked Porcupine! This Pit Bull decided he would attack a Porcupine; but being brave, he learned the hard way that you can’t always win, no matter how tough you are. The vet sedated the dog and removed 1347 quills…the dog survived and hopefully learned a lesson. 1. Choose your fights wisely. 2. Don’t mess with Porcupines!
|
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Sen. Hillary Clinton an artful dodger
June 24, 2007
WASHINGTON — Slick Hillary? Former President
Clinton earned the nickname “Slick Willy” for his mastery in the
political arts of ducking and dodging. He had a knack for convincing
people on both sides of an issue that he agreed with them.
His wife may not be as smooth, but Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton is doing a passable impression of the ever-parsing
former president.
Would she pardon Scooter Libby?
No comment.
Would she nominate a union leader to be secretary of labor?
Maybe.
Would she repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement?
Can’t say.
The Democratic presidential candidate drew
several rounds of applause for her appearance before the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union Tuesday. She
flashed her sense of humor, displayed a deep knowledge of the issues
and held her own in a forum that pitted her against other presidential
rivals. But what stood out was her reluctance to address questions
head-on.
This habit of hers begs a question: Will the
Clintonian tactic help her in the crowded Democratic field — or hurt
her in the eyes of voters who have grown coarsened by the spin and
obfuscation that marred both the Clinton and Bush administrations?
“It’s obviously a skill that, in the long run,
served Bill Clinton well, and there’s something to say for a politician
who doesn’t alienate people by taking clear positions on issues,” said
Charles Franklin, political science professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. “For Bill, it was certainly a useful skill for
political success.”
But he said the question for Hillary Clinton “is
whether she can pull it off, because it’s certainly not an easy thing
to do successfully.”
She gave AFSCME her best shot.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked Clinton at the
labor forum whether former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
should be pardoned.
“Oh, I think there would be enough to be said about that without me adding to it,” she replied.
“That is such a political answer!” complained Matthews.
The largely Democratic audience buzzed,
apparently in protest of Matthews’ response. One audience member told
him to ask a “real question.” Clinton finished the person’s sentence: “
… a question that’s really about the people in this audience and not
what goes on inside of Washington,” she said.
“So we’ll leave that as a non-answer,” Matthews said.
Clinton 1, Moderator 0.
Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice
President Dick Cheney, was convicted in March of lying to investigators
and obstructing Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s inquiry into
the 2003 leak of a CIA operative’s identity. A federal judge said last
week he will not delay a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for Libby in the
case.
Most conservatives want President Bush to pardon Libby. Most Democratic activists don’t.
Indeed, Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination didn’t hesitate to simply reply “no” when asked about a Libby pardon.
It was the same dynamic on trade. Shortly after
Rep. Dennis Kucinich vowed to repeal the North American Free Trade
Agreement, Clinton was asked if she would move to scuttle it.
She dodged. “Like anything,” Clinton said, “NAFTA had some positives, but unfortunately had a lot of downsides.”
Clinton can be specific when she want to be. In
her non-answer on NAFTA, she identified a soon-to-be-closed car plant
by the small Michigan town where it’s located, and she talked in depth
about the link between outsourced jobs and health care costs.
Playing to the union crowd, Matthews asked
Clinton whether she would nominate a union leader as secretary of the
Labor Department. Yes or no? “It’s a great idea,” she said. “I think we
should really consider that.” It wasn’t what you would call a firm
commitment.
Some voters might find it refreshing that
Clinton passed up three chances to pander to liberal Democrats. Being
against Libby, opposed to NAFTA and in favor of giving unions a voice
at the Labor Department are no-brainers in Democratic primary fights.
It may be that she’s looking beyond the nomination.
“I kind of see those things as in keeping with
her effort to paint herself as a more moderate Democrat than her image
as first lady,” Franklin said.
Until recently, Clinton distanced herself from
the liberal, anti-war wing of the Democratic Party on Iraq — a
position that her advisers said was true to her convictions as well as
smart general-election strategy. But, under pressure from activists who
dominate primary and caucus voting, she has steadily edged to the left.
She told the crowd Tuesday that she had been
calling for a troop withdrawal “for some time,” not mentioning that her
rivals have held that position for a longer period. On the other hand,
she said some troops will need to remain in Iraq to contain al-Qaida,
protect Kurds, keep an eye on Iran, protect the U.S. Embassy and maybe
train Iraqi forces.
The answer offered a little something for everybody, for or against U.S. involvement in Iraq. Pretty slick.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — Ron Fournier has covered politics for The Associated Press for nearly 20 years.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All
rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten or redistributed.
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Extraordinary Hearing on Extraordinary Rendition
June 24, 2007
original post here
The
House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing last April on the policy
of “extraordinary rendition,” referring to the seizure of suspected
terrorists and their transfer to a foreign country for detention and
interrogation.
The record of the hearing, which has just been published
(pdf), features the volatile Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official
involved in the rendition program. It is exceptionally nasty and
occasionally funny.
Mr. Scheuer, veering from outrageous to absurd and back again,
attacked John McCain, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and quite a few
others in remarkably offensive terms.
See “Extraordinary Rendition in U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: The Impact on Transatlantic Relations,” House Foreign Affairs Committee, April 17, 2007.
“Oftentimes,” Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) delicately observed, “people
aspire to a higher percentage of their thoughts going unspoken than
this hearing has demonstrated.”
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Al Gore 2008 (eminem mix)
June 20, 2007
Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot
June 20, 2007
06.14.07 | 2:00 AM
This courtroom sketch shows Russell Defreitas at his arraignment in
federal court in the borough of Brooklyn, New York. Defreitas was
arrested for allegedly plotting to blow up a fuel line that runs to
John F. Kennedy International Airport.
AP Photo/Christine Cornell
The
recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy
International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the
past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of
the terrorists, our government and the press.
Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed
by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by
wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots — and worse, allowing our
essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse — is wrong.
The alleged plan, to blow up JFK’s fuel tanks and a small
segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport,
was ridiculous. The fuel tanks are thick-walled, making them hard to
damage. The airport tanks are separated from the pipelines by cutoff
valves, so even if a fire broke out at the tanks, it would not back up
into the pipelines. And the pipeline couldn’t blow up in any case,
since there’s no oxygen to aid combustion. Not that the terrorists ever
got to the stage — or demonstrated that they could get there — where
they actually obtained explosives. Or even a current map of the
airport’s infrastructure.
But read what Russell Defreitas, the lead terrorist, had to say:
“Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United
States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow…. They love JFK — he’s like the
man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It’s like
you can kill the man twice.”
If these are the terrorists we’re fighting, we’ve got a pretty incompetent enemy.
read entire commentary here
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Nut of the week award: Arkansas GOP head: We need more ‘attacks on American soil’ so people appreciate Bush
June 6, 2007
In his first interview as the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, Dennis Milligan told a reporter that America needs to be attacked by terrorists so that people will appreciate the work that President Bush has done to protect the country.
“At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001],” Milligan said to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country.”
Milligan, who was elected as the new chair of the Arkansas Republican Party just two weeks ago, also told the newspaper that he is “150 percent” behind Bush in the war in Iraq.
In his acceptance speech on May 19th, Milligan told his fellow Republicans that it was “time for a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”
The owner of a water treatment company, Milligan was a relative unknown in Arkansas politics until being elected the party chairman. He had previously served as the party’s treasurer and the Saline County Republican chair.
