Milkhouse Mouse

As the United States nears the fifth anniversary of its transformative 9/11 terrorist attacks--an event the White House used to justify its "war on terrorism" fostering more terrorism and its savaging of civil liberties to preserve democracy--I am remined of a friend's sage counsel about TV news coverage:

"You see better the reality of an crisis by paying closer attention to TV's initial unscripted coverage than its sanitized follow-up."

Applying that advise to live 9/11 coverage presents challenges to The Official Story (TOS), i.e., that 19 al-Qaeda terrorists crashed four planes in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, killing 3000 innocents because the Arab world resents American "freedoms."

Consider this visual 9/11 counter-evidence to TOS:

1. In reporting live from the Pentagon as smoke billowed in the background, CNN's Jamie McIntyre states he sees no evidence a plane crashed into America's military headquarters. (But in a recent sanitized follow-up, McIntyre says the assessment of the damage to the Pentagon in that clip was misconstrued.)

2. Injured WTC workers, police officiers and emergency workers told on-site TV crews they heard explosions after the planes crashed intoWTC#1 and WTC#2.

What could possibly account for these loud and clearly distinct explosions? One scientist has evidence that will surprise you.

3. Dr. Steven Jones, a physics professor at Utah's ultra-conservative Brigham Young University, published a professional paper claiming the WTC collapse is better explained by "pre-set" bombs laced with thermite/thermate. That explanation accounts for the signature "pancaking" collapse of WTC #1 and #2 associated with controlled demolitions, which, indicentially, occured with WTC#7 around 5:20PM on the afternoon of 11 September. Most Americans still believe only two WTC buildings collapsed that day.

In November 2005, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson interviewed Jones but refused the meek professor's repeated requests to show a video clip of WTC#7's collapse from a controlled demolition.

TOS proponents would have you believe them rather than your own eyes.

In late June, a group of American scholars provided audiences with additional compelling details on some of this marginalized 9/11 video coverage at a Los Angeles symposium. Last Saturday (July 29), C-SPAN televised 105 minutes of the scholars' remarks, a program the network will reprise August 1 at 6:10PM.

As the word keeps geting out, more Americans are grasping the profound revelations that continue to emerge from the 9/11 Truth Movement.

The chronic incompetence of state agencies bordering fraud—which is normative rather than exceptional among state governments—piss me off second only to the intentional fascist criminality of the Bush White House.

Needless to say, I remain in a perpetual state of post-9/11 chronic pissed-offed-ness.

As an independent researcher/writer, I regularly see online state-level data unable to stand up to Bullshit Sniff and DNA Progeny tests that, when jointly considered, suggest state governments’ incorrigible public relations spin just might reflect a congenital condition, i.e., the result of protracted sexual liaisons among very close relatives.

Consider the wording in this study sponsored by the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC). It’s taken from a passage of an online report by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation on inmate “failure rates” from 1989-1991, i.e., inmates released to the community who were “either recommitted or rearrested within two years” after their prison release date.

Consistent with prior findings by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, data continue to indicate that parolees fail at higher rates than probationers do, and probationers at higher rates than felons who [complete]their sentences. These differences can be explained in part by the return of parolees and probationers on technical violations of the conditions of their release.

Excuse me? Haven't you just told me that parolees and probationers (who, incidentally, have not been committed to prison) were violated and shipped off to prison by their respective parole and probationer officers for technical rather than criminal violations “of the conditions of their release”?

Beneath the sloppy prose lurks evidence of ego-driven community corrections officers who cost Tennessee taxpayers by violating former prisoners on flimsy grounds? It’s probably equally bad in other states, right?

Over the course of looking into more TDOC data, I found another, even more serious, anomaly; I need additional time to assess the details.

TDOC has one of the worst reputations among all of the nation’s state agencies. Perhaps you remember from the 1970s TDOC senior officials were implicated with the governor in selling pardons to state prisoners. When the scandal broke, at least one whistleblower died in a Nashville hotel room. Hollywood made a movie about one of the whistleblowers that lived played by Sissy Spasek.

"So it goes," wrote novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

No matter how cynical you are, it's never enough.--Lilly Tomlin

With the fifth anniversary of the September 11^th terrorist attacks looming on the calendar, all is not well south of the Canadian border. An apt metaphor for us Yanks’ dire state of public affairs comes from Greg Palast, America’s premiere muckraker tracking White House criminality, in his latest bestseller “Armed Madhouse.”

To paraphrase a friend from Toronto, America has nosedived over the precipice of sanity. But it was a coerced leap, occasioned by the convenient confluence of 9/11 and senior White House officials too well-versed in Niccolo Machiavelli’s views on exploiting opponents’ errors for political gain. While an estimated 700,000 Americans die annually from medical error, Bush administration officials envisioned more self-serving payoffs by enacting a Keystone Cop-esque pursuit of a terrorist group—created in the 1970s by some of those same officials—allegedly responsible for some riveting TV coverage of substantially fever deaths on 11 September 2001.

In exploiting 9/11's fear-wracked aftermath, the Bush administration launched its dubious “war on terrorism,” which White House attorneys then secretly used to justify expropriating unprecedented wartime powers to the executive branch. Abetted by a increasingly conservative federal judiciary, the newly empowered presidency cajoled Republican congressional leadership into virtually rubber-stamping a proto-corporate police state agenda. That American police state now diverts more than half of every federal tax dollar from public service coffers into no-bid contracts for political allies who gleefully profiteering from a preemptive war and dizzying litany of classified national security programs and projects.

The 9/11 agenda also ensures George Bush operates above the law, since constitutional checks and balances now are relegated to the political status of historical footnotes. Pertinent examples abound. Among the most egregious is the National Security Agency wiretapping* of Americans’ electronic communications reported by the New York Times in December 2005. Not only has the congress ignored its constitutional mandate to investigate even the appearance of executive wrongdoing, but that august body is looking past George Bush’s confirmed obstruction of a Justice Department inquiry into the legality of the NSA program—a subterfuge the Washington Post compared to Richard Nixon’s 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox just as he stumbled on evidence linking the White House to the breakin of Democratic headquaters at the Watergate Hotel.

That Bush’s longtime legal whore Attorney General Alberto Gonzales outed his boss’s felonious obstruction of justice in testimony before a congressional committee further confirms just how far above the law the White House perceives itself to be. Gonzales' revelation also is tantamount to rubbing the cumulataive faces of congressional Democrats and the American public in the White House's post-9/11 proverbial bullshit.

Niccolo Machiavelli could only be proud of his 21st-century students.

[More forthcoming to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 9/11]

*German Anony-mouse: To make the government scrutiny's of your web-surfing more challenging, check out http://anonymouse.org/. There you find a free online proto-proxy server for anonymous emailing, broswing and posting to newsgroups. If the little German ads that pops up on websites you access prove too much a distraction, $38 for a year gets you ad-free websurfing.

The friendly patriots over at MSNBC want to know how 9/11 has changed my life.

Their sensitive preamble for prompting me to send in my story of transformation is so precious I must include it here:

From subtle shifts to complete transformations, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the lives of millions of Americans. First, of course, there were those who faced the devastation of losing family and friends, as well as those who witnessed the attacks or were uprooted from their homes and workplaces in and around the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Then there were the thousands of reservists who were called up to serve in America’s armed forces or made the decision to join up and serve in the armed forces.

And then there are the less obvious effects of being in a country that no longer feels comparatively cushioned from the troubles of the rest of the world.

If your life was transformed in some way by 9/11, we would like to hear from you. As part of a special section marking the fifth anniversary of the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, we will be featuring the stories of how ordinary Americans were affected by an extraordinary act of hatred.

Don’t delay. Use the form below to send us your story today.

Obliging my fellow Americans at MSNBC, I immediately sent them my post-9/11 American story, included here:

As an American, the 9/11 terrorist attacks have victimized my life in two key ways. First, the attacks have occasioned my Orwellian government to declare protracted preemptive war based on dubious evidence. Then a "Patriot" Act enacted without congressional debate made any breach of law sufficient grounds for treating me as a terrorist suspect, including breaking the law by illegally snooping on my phone calls and emails.

"Americans need to be very careful about what they say, about what they do" warned former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher of the Bush administration's impending post-9/11 repression of speech and thought.

Then America's mainstream media's ostrich-like response to these developments means the laudable Fourth Estate is dead. Resident MSNBC pussy Tucker Carlson's on-air insults last November of BYU physics professor Steven Jones’ research demonstrating the WTC collapsed from pre-set bombs is merely one of myriad egregious examples of media complicity to restrict the range of ideas that inform public debate on 9/11. Rather than a public watchdog, I see TV and the press only abetting America's steady descent into a stylized American fascism that would do the Third Reich proud.

I expect the small power elite controlling U.S. elections to offer only presidential candidates with prepackaged fascist policies masked by patriotic posturing. But the media's role in legitimating their crimes and misdemeanors is my impetus to leave America for Canada by year's end.

As the bombs and missles continue to fly between Israel and Lebanon, White House officials are slipping some fascist-flavored kool-aid into the morning coffee as we watch the televised carnage in the Middle East.

Consider these news sleepers:

1. A ruling is pending by the National Labor Relations Board that may do away with the right of 8 million American workers to form a union. Given the anti-worker/corporate-friendly bias of the Bush White House, expecting the NLRB to preserve America's 120-year-old right to organize suggests you imbibed too much of the Ghanan kool-aid.

In a related labor note: In March, the Center for Responsibility and and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group with a hopeless mission, filed a FIOA request to obtain documents from the Department of Labor detailing the agency's suspected internal support of anti-labor lobbyists and groups, to include "conservative lobbyist and executive director of the anti-union group Center for Union Facts, Richard Berman."

After filing a lawsuit after the request was ignored, CREW obtained in June 108 pages of DOL documents confirming the group's suspicions. "These documents make it clear that the leadership of Secretary [Elaine] Chao, the Department of Labor has become anti-labor," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW. "It is disgraceful that the very department designed to focus on improving the lives of American laborers is disseminating anti-union propagand and developing relationships with anti-union organizations. American workers deserve better."

The DOL, however, did not release emails between Chao and Berman, claiming that correspondence was "privileged." CREW was still litigating to obtain those emails.

2. According to Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkim, AG Alberto Gonzales told congress that George Bush personally blocked a Department of Justice inquiry into the outed NSA electronic snooping program. Froomkim suggests the unsual suspects in mainstream media are overlooking a spiked investigation; he further says Bush's move is comparable to the "Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal."

Froomkin's piece also provides a link to Boston Globe staff writer Charles Savage's series on Bush's law-dodging "signature statement" strategy argued by White House legal counsel that allows the President to retroactively break U.S. laws he deems unconstitutional. To date, the commander-in-chief has used "signature statements" to circumvent 75o law. For example, while Bush signed the John McCain's senate bill into law probibiting the US's torture of "terrorists", a signing statement allowed him then to ignore it as unconstituional.

3. And let me close with a July 11 comment from Bozo Bill O'Reilly over at the fair and balanced Fox News network. Bill is pissed with Dr. Kevin Barrnet, a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group claiming the Official Public Story of those attacks is a "hoax."

"This guy would have been gone at Boston University, my alma mater, in a heartbeat. The Chancellor there, John Silber, would of--would have--this guy'd be in the Charles River floating down, you know, toward the harbor," said O'Reilly.

An instructor at the University of Wisonsin-Madison, Barrett had just weathered widely-reported pressure from Wisconsin Republican politicians for the university to fire him for "wrong" views, shared by the other 300 S9/11T members, claiming the US government was directly involved in 9/11. (And I thought the First Amendment and academic freedom were still residing in the US!)

James Fetzer, S9/11T founder and professor emeritus of phiolosophy from Minnesota issued a press release condeming O'Reilly's comments.

"'What's stunning is that [O'Reilly], who knows nothing about the events of 9/11 apart from what the government has told him, nevertheless assumes unto himself the role of judge, jury, and (it even appears) executioner!' Fetzer added. 'This is a travesty, an astonishing violation of academic freedom, freedom of speech, the right of the people to be free from assault.' Verbal threats, he observed, are assaults, especially when, as in this case, they endorse physical violence against a citizen."

With public attention now riveted by TV coverage of Israeli air strikes on Lebanon, let's see what fascist developments are unfolding in America's inchoate fascist empire. Remember, Karl Rove's dirties tricks hand bag opens the widest when the national attention span is diverted by crisis.

But do consider this report about the situation in Lebanon. According to the 19 July issue of the UK Guardian in London, "The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources." US and UK officials even "blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels." As Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton really is making an impression before the Security Council.

Now for news about the White House's war on the rest of world, including America.

War on Terrorism

Drug warlords continue to gain more control of Afghanistan. Amid the most violent fighting since the U.S. invaded the country late in 2001, Taliban troops on Sunday took control of two towns in the southern part of battle-ravaged country. On the other hand, massive corruption in Iraq's oil program threatens the ability of the new government to conduct normal business. Since Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton oversees Iraq's oil industry, doesn't this mean that the U.S. are implicated in this theft?

In testimony to our "Know Nothing" congress last week, U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office, reported " about 10 percent of Iraq's refined fuels and 30 percent of its imported fuels are being stolen, in part because the subsidized Iraqi price of gasoline, about 44 cents a gallon, is less than half the regional price of 90 cents a gallon. That provides a tremendous incentive to be able to steal these fuels and be able to sell them for whatever purposes, corruption or otherwise." One of the first no-bid contracts Halliburton obtained in Iraq was for infastructure management and transportation of Iraqi oil. Is shotgun Dick still holding the lion's share of Halliburton stock.

In another development in war-ravaged Iraq, the country had its first bank robbery since Saddam's defeat. Men dressed as Iraqi security forces robbed a bank of $1.4 billion Iraqi dinars, fleeing the scene in two green pickups and a BMW. A BMW? Isn't Secretary of Defense Donald Rumself still in Iraq?

The Washington Post reported Tuesday (July 18) that Iraqis, anticipating an impending civil war, are selling furniture and other house possession to purchase weapons and ammunition. In the lethal streets of Bagdhad Neighbors are killing neighbors and Sunnis and Shi'ites are squaring off.

"Jubouri, a 40-year-old Sunni, said that police are collaborating with the militias and that there is a $1,200 bounty on the head of any Sunni with his surname. When he passed a police checkpoint this week, he said, he overheard someone say: 'Wash away your sins and be forgiven with the blood of a Sunni'."

It appears Iraqis are simply overwhelmed with Bush-styled democracy.

War on America

More of the same in our disappearing First and Sixth amendments. In perfectly pitched Orwellian doubblespeak, the Senate Judiciary Committee reported it has reached a "compromise bill" to rectify the NSA's illegal spying program. But according to the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), the measaure "is a sham compromise that would cut off meaningful legal review -- sweeping current legal challenges out of the traditional court system and failing to require court review or congressional oversight of any future surveillance programs."

That's about all of the puke sickness I care to pass along today.

By 1994, former U.S. President "Bubba" Bill Clinton had conned America with the North American Free Trade Agreement, a border-blurring measure the Teflon-tongued Clinton had told supporters would bring bring them work and higher wages. But as the years passed, so did the jobs and financial capital, immigrating to poorer countries preferred by anti-labor corporate taskmasters.

But NAFTA merely was a dress rehearsal for the Bush White House’s North American Union, a secretive project that CNN's Lou Dobbs recently characterized as "NAFT on steroids." Without quesiton, the plan will end the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court and the borders with Canada and Mexico.

To do his part for Bush and Cheney's fledging NAU, Bubba Bill is seriously currying some intimate Canadian relations.

In reading between the lines of a recent UK report, Clinton the Non-Inhaler is getting between the sheets with Canadian pseudo-royalty and Tory turncoat Belinda Stronach. Listed by Time magazine as one of the planet’s 100 most powerful people, she is the 40-year-old daughter of the fabulously wealthy Frank Stronach, founder of the $10 billion Magna International auto parts empire. (Oh, to be born to powerful rather than have it self-made.)

Ms. Stronach's power, however, resides in finance rather than politics. After her election to a “Conservative riding (constituency)” in Toronto, Ms Stronach changed her political leanings leftward. The politicial betrayal nonetheless won her a minor civil post in former Prime Minister (and NAU instigator) Paul Martin’s cabinet—for all of six months. When Mr. Harper of Alberta relocated to Ottawa, he dispensed with Belinda’s Time-honored power.

So Bill the Betrayer obviously has much to share with Bombshell Belinda, who can become even more politically expedient under Clinton’s tutelage. She certainly has a surprise in store, however, if she is harboring illusions of enduring Clintonian political fidelity once the presidential penis gets that wandering eye or wishes to mimic an Oval Office Cuban cigar.

As far as marital fidelity goes these days, Bill cares naught that this latest skirt-chasing indiscretion is chapping the ass of wife and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York's nominal Democrat who already is testing the chopping waters for a run at the White House in 2008. New reports of her husband’s incorrigible philandering surely will not win votes or support in the middle-class American heartland controlled by the Republicans.

Then again, Hillary, who perhaps is her own worst political enemy, is signaling to voters she plans to betray “traditional Democratic values” (whatever that phrase might mean in America’s 21^st-century schizophrenic political landscape). She accepted an invitation by Australian ultra-conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of the liberally reviled Fox News cable network and the a post-9/11 poster child for unchecked corporate greed, to host a July fundraiser for the good woman senator of New York.

Politics certainly do make for strange in- and out-of- bedfellows. But can’t these neo-conic liberals north and south of our disappearing border take a clue from racist GOP leaders to change their sheets before savagng the innocents?