IF THE OFFICIAL STORY IS TRUE THAT ON 9/11/2001 A HANDFUL OF MUSLIMS DEFEATED THE CIA, FBI, NSA, MOSSAD, NORAD, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, USAF, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, AND AIRPORT SECURITY FOUR TIMES IN ONE HOUR ON THE SAME MORNING, WHY HAVE THESE SUPER TERRORISTS NOT RETURNED EVEN ONCE IN THE PAST 11 YEARS TO SLAY THOSE AMERICANS WHO HAVE PUBLICALLY REVELED IN THEIR SUCCESSES IN TORTURING AND MURDERING MUSLIMS?

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The Case of the Missing Terrorists

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May 14, 2012 | Original here

If there were any real terrorists, Jose Rodriguez would be dead.

Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents. Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” for the bounty paid.

If Rodriguez’s identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He has been on CBS “60 Minutes” taking credit for torturing Muslims and using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA claim, Rodriguez’s name would be a struck through item on the terrorists’ hit list. He would be in his grave.

So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice (sic).

Notice that Rodriguez, “The Torturer of the Muslims,” doesn’t have to hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.

Another easy mark for assassination would be former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who staffed up the Pentagon with neoconservative warmongers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who in turn concocted the false information used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld himself declared members of al Qaeda to be the most vicious and dangerous killers on earth. Yet Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, together with neoconservative media propagandists, such as William Kristol and Max Boot, have been walking around safe for years unmolested by terrorists seeking revenge or bringing retribution to those responsible for as many as 1,000,000 Muslim deaths.

Condi Rice, Colin Powell, who delivered the Speech of Lies to the UN inaugurating the invasion of Iraq, and Dick Cheney, whose minimal Secret Service protection could not withstand a determined assassination attempt, also enjoy lives unmolested by terrorists.

Remember the deck of cards that the Bush regime had with Iraqi faces? If terrorists had a similar deck, all of those named above would be “high value targets.” Yet, there has not been a single attempt on any one of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that none of the above are faced with a terrorist threat. Yet, the tough, macho Navy Seals who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden must have their identity kept hidden so that they don’t become terrorist targets. These American supermen, highly trained killers themselves, don’t dare show their faces, but Rodriguez, Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice can walk around unmolested. Indeed, the Seals’ lives are so endangered that President Obama gave up the enormous public relations political benefit of a White House ceremony with the heroic Navy Seals. Very strange behavior for a politician. A couple of weeks after the alleged bin Laden killing, the Seals unit, or most of it, was wiped out in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

If you were a Muslim terrorist seeking retribution for Washington’s crimes, would you try to smuggle aboard an airliner a bomb in your underwear or shoe in order to blow up people whose only responsibility for Washington’s war against Muslims is that they fell for Washington’s propaganda? If you wanted to blow up the innocent, wouldn’t you instead place your bomb in the middle of the mass of humanity waiting to clear airport security and take out TSA personnel along with passengers? Terrorists could coordinate their attacks, hitting a number of large airports across the US at the same minute. This would be real terror. Moreover, it would present TSA with an insolvable problem: how can people be screened before they are screened?

Or coordinated attacks on shopping malls and sports events?

Why should terrorists, if they exist, bother to kill people when it is easy to cause mayhem by not killing them? There are a large number of unguarded electric power substations. Entire regions of the country could be shut down. The simplest disruptive act would be to release large quantities of roofing nails in the midst of rush hour traffic in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. You get the picture: thousands and thousands of cars disabled with flat tires blocking the main arteries for days.

Before some reader accuses me of giving terrorists ideas, ask yourself if you really think people so clever as to have allegedly planned and carried out 9/11 couldn’t think of such simple tactics, plots that could be carried out without having to defeat security or kill innocent people?  My point isn’t what terrorists, if they exist, should do. The point is that the absence of easy-to-do acts of terrorism suggests that the terrorist threat is more hype than reality. Yet, we have an expensive, intrusive security apparatus that seems to have no real function except to exercise power over American citizens.

In place of real terrorists carrying out easy plots, we have “terrorist” plots dreamed up by FBI and CIA agents, who then recruit some hapless or demented dupes, bribing them with money and heroic images of themselves, and supplying them with the plot and fake explosives. These are called “sting operations,” but they are not. They are orchestrations by our own security agencies that produce fake terrorist plots that are then “foiled” by the security agencies that hatched the plots. Washington’s announcement is always: “The public was never in danger.” Some terrorist plot! We have never been endangered by one, but the airports have been on orange alert for 11.5 years.

The federal judiciary and brainwashed juries actually treat these concocted plots as real threats to American security despite the government’s announcements that the public was never in danger.

The announcements of the “foiled” plots keep the brainwashed public docile and amenable to intrusive searches, warrantless spying, the growth of an unaccountable police state, and endless wars.

The “War on Terror” is a hoax, one that has been successfully used to destroy the US Constitution and to complete the transformation of law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. By destroying habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of innocence, the “War on Terror” has destroyed our security.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IS AROUSED WHEN A PERSON IS CONFRONTED WITH INFORMATION INCONSISTENT WITH A STRONGLY HELD BELIEF. IF HOLDING THIS BELIEF (THOUGH IT MAY BE A LIE) GIVES THE PERSON GREAT COMFORT, HE/SHE MAY IGNORE HIGHLY CONVINCING EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY (SERVING THE PURPOSES OF THE LIAR). "THE MEN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ADMIRE MOST EXTRAVIGANTLY ARE THE GREATEST LIARS; THE MEN THEY DETEST THE MOST VIOLENTLY ARE THOSE WHO TRY TO TELL THEM THE TRUTH." -- H.L. MENCKEN

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Trials Without Crimes Or Evidence

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April 25, 2012 | Original here

A fish rots from the head

Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing the facts of the US government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,” against whom no evidence exists. ( http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/ ) In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture.

For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured through torture has been impermissible evidence for centuries. So also has been secret evidence withheld from the accused and his attorney. Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as made-up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because it cannot stand the light of day.

The US government relies on secret evidence in its cases against alleged terrorists, claiming that national security would be threatened if the evidence were revealed. This is abject nonsense. It is an absurd claim that presenting evidence against a terrorist jeopardizes the national security of the United States.

To the contrary, not presenting evidence jeopardizes the security of each and every one of us. Once the government can convict defendants on the basis of secret evidence, even the concept of a fair trial will disappear. Fair trials are already history, but the concept lingers.

Secret evidence murders the concept of a fair trial. It murders justice and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be convicted of anything. As in Kafka’s The Trial,
people will cease to know the crimes for which they are being tried and convicted.

This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not resulted in impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional scholars, and bar associations.

Having bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just want someone to pay. They don’t care who as long as someone pays. To accommodate this desire, the government has produced some “high value detainees” with Arab or Muslim names.

But instead of bringing these alleged malefactors to trial and presenting evidence against them, the government has kept them in torture dungeons for years trying to create through the application of pain and psychological breakdown guilt by self-incrimination in order to create a case against them.

The government has been unsuccessful and has nothing that it can bring to a real court. So the Bush/Obama Regime created and recreated “military tribunals” to lend “national security” credence to the absolute need that non-existent evidence be kept secret.

Andy Worthington in his numerous reports does a good job in providing the history of the detainees and their treatment. He deserves our commendation and support. But what I want to do is to ask some questions, not of Worthington, but about the idea that the US is under terrorist threat.

By this September, 9/11 will be eleven years ago. Yet despite the War on Terror, the loss of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, an expenditure of trillions of dollars on numerous wars, violations of US and international laws against torture, and so forth, no one has been held accountable. Neither the perpetrators nor those whom the perpetrators outwitted, assuming that they are different people, have been held accountable. Going on 11 years and no trials of villains or chastisement of negligent public officials. This is remarkable.

The government’s account of 9/11 implies massive failure of all US security and intelligence agencies along with those of our NATO puppets and Israel’s Mossad.

The government’s official line also implies the failure of the National Security Council, NORAD and the US Air Force, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times in one hour on the same morning. It implies the failure of the President, the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense.

Many on the left and also libertarians find this apparent failure of the centralized and oppressive government so hopeful that they cling to the official “government failure” explanation of 9/11. However, such massive failure is simply unbelievable. How in the world could the US have survived the cold war with the Soviets if the US government were so totally incompetent?

If we attribute superhero powers to the 19 alleged hijackers, powers in excess of V’s in V for Vendetta or James Bond’s or Captain Marvel’s, and assume that these young terrorists, primarily Saudi Arabians, outwitted Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Tony Blair, along with the CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, etc., one would have expected for the President, Congress, and the media to call for heads to roll. No more humiliating affront has ever been suffered by a major power than the US suffered on 9/11. Yet, absolutely no one, not even some lowly traffic controller, was scapegoated and held accountable for what is considered to be the most extraordinarily successful terrorist attack in human history, an attack so successful that it implies total negligence across the totality of the US government and that of all its allies.

This just doesn’t smell right. Total failure and no accountability. The most expensively funded security apparatus the world has ever known defeated by a handful of Saudi Arabians. How can anyone in the CIA, FBI, NSA, NORAD, and National Security Council hold up their heads? What a disgraced bunch of jerks and incompetents.

What do we need them for?

Consider the alleged hijackers. Despite allegedly being caught off guard by the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was soon able to identify the 19 hijackers despite the fact that apparently none of the alleged hijackers’ names are on the passenger lists of the airliners that they allegedly hijacked.

How did 19 passengers get on airplanes in the US without being on the passenger lists?

I do not personally know if the alleged hijackers were on the four airliners. Moreover, defenders of the official 9/11 story claim that the passenger lists released to the public were “victims lists,” not passenger lists, because the names of the hijackers were withheld and only released some four years later after 9/11 researchers had had years in which to confuse victims lists with passenger lists. This seems an odd explanation. Why encourage public misinformation for years by withholding the passenger lists and issuing victims lists in their place? It cannot have been to keep the hijackers’ names a secret as the FBI released a list of the hijackers several days after 9/11. Even more puzzling, if the hijackers’ names were on the airline passenger lists, why did it take the FBI several days to confirm the names and numbers of hijackers?

Researchers have found contradictions in the FBI’s accounts of the passenger lists with the FBI adding and subtracting names from its various lists and some names being misspelled, indicating possibly that the FBI doesn’t really know who the person is. The authenticity of the passenger lists that were finally released in 2005 is contested, and the list apparently was not presented as evidence by the FBI in the Moussaoui trial in 2006. David Ray Griffin has extensively researched the 9/11 story. In one of his books, 9/11 Ten Years Later, Griffin writes: “Although the FBI claimed that it had received flight manifests from the airlines by the morning of 9/11, the ‘manifests’ that appeared in 2005 had names that were not known to the FBI until a day or more after 9/11. These 2005 ‘manifests,’ therefore, could not have been the original manifests for the four 9/11 flights.”

The airlines themselves have not been forthcoming. We are left with the mystery of why simple and straightforward evidence, such as a list of passengers, was withheld for years and mired in secrecy and controversy.

We have the additional problem that the BBC and subsequently other news organizations established that 6 or 7 of the alleged hijackers on the FBI’s list are alive and well and have never been part of any terrorist plot.

These points are not even a beginning of the voluminous reasons that the government’s 9/11 story looks very thin.

But the American public, being throughly plugged into the Matrix, are not suspicious of the government’s thin story. Instead, they are suspicious of the facts and of those experts who are suspicious of the government’s story. Architects, engineers, scientists, first responders, pilots, and former public officials who raise objections to the official story are written off as conspiracy theorists. Why does an ignorant American public think it knows more than experts? Why do Americans believe a government that told them the intentional lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction despite the fact that the weapons inspectors reported to President Bush that Hussein had no such weapons? And now we see the same thing all over again with the alleged, but non-existent, Iranian nukes.

As Frantz Fanon wrote, the power of cognitive dissonance is extreme. It keeps people comfortable and safe from threatening information. Most Americans find the government’s lies preferable to the truth. They don’t want to be unplugged from the Matrix. The truth is too uncomfortable for emotionally and mentally weak Americans.

Worthington focuses on the harm being done to detainees. They have been abused for much of their lives. Their innocence or guilt cannot be established because the evidence is compromised by torture, self-incrimination, and coerced testimony against others. They stand convicted by the government’s accusation alone. These are real wrongs, and Worthington is correct to emphasize them.

In contrast, my focus is on the harm to America, on the harm to truth and truth’s power, on the harm to the rule of law and accountability to the people of the government and its agencies, on the harm to the moral fabric of the US government and to liberty in the United States.

As the adage goes, a fish rots from the head. As the government rots, so does the United States of America. 

A PARAGRAPH FROM PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS' MAY 9th OpEdNews COLUMN

Original here.

If bin Laden beat all odds and managed to live another decade to await, unarmed and undefended, the arrival of the Navy SEALs last week, how it is possible that the "terror mastermind," who defeated not merely the CIA and FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies along with those of America's European allies and Israel, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, airport security four times on the same morning, etc. etc., never enjoyed another success, not even a little, very minor one? What was the "terror mastermind" doing for a decade after 9/11?  

Think about it.