S.1867

Latest Title: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012
Sponsor: Sen Levin, Carl [MI] (introduced 11/15/2011) Cosponsors (None)
Related Bills: H.R.1540
Latest Major Action: 12/1/2011 Passed/agreed to in Senate. Status: Passed Senate with amendments by Yea-Nay. 93 – 7. Record Vote Number: 218.
Latest Action: 12/1/2011 See also H.R. 1540.

FOLLOW THIS BILL > http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:s.1867:

Fact Sheet: New Law Allowing for Indefinite Military Detention for Americans Without Charge or Trial

• S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act passed by a 93 -7 vote in the U.S. Senate on November 30 and now headed
  toward becoming law unless vetoed by the president, allows for American citizens to be taken into military custody without
  charge or trial, for life, for the first time in American history. The new law is intended to designate the entire world, including
  the U.S., as the “battlefield” in the war on terror. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in a speech on the Senate floor: “1031, the
  statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the
  homeland.”
• The Christian Science Monitor reports: “”Legislation passed by the Senate this week and headed for the House – and a
  possible presidential veto – could allow the US military to detain American citizens indefinitely.” (“Guantánamo for US
  citizens? Senate bill raises questions,” Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 3, 2011)
• The law would permanently and unconstitutionally deprive Americans of their Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial,
  guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
• Once in military detention there is no recourse for proving innocence. None of the protections, due process, or 230 years of
  criminal law and legal processes apply. The military operates under a chain of command answerable only to the Secretary of
  Defense and the president. After Obama, all presidents will inherit these powers.
• The Washington Post has confirmed a secret list of Americans to be assassinated, reporting on Jan. 26, 2010: “The military’s
  Joint Special Operations Command maintains a target list that includes several Americans…U.S. officials have said that the
  government is prepared to kill U.S. citizens who are believed to be involved in terrorist activities that threaten Americans.”
  There is no way to determine who is on the list, as it is “classified.” (“U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding
  Yemen on strikes,” Washington Post, by Dana Priest, Jan. 27, 2010)
• The law’s primary sponsors are Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). (Chris Anders, Senior Legislative
  Counsel for ACLU, Washington office, “Senators Demand the Military Lock Up of American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They
  Define as Being Right Outside Your Window,” Nov. 23, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/85xfjyg )
• The only U.S. senators who voted against the law, “7 Patriots” are: Jeff Merkley [D], Tom Harkin [D], Ron Wyden [D],
  Thomas Coburn, [R], Mike Lee [R], Rand Paul [R], and Bernie Sanders [I].
• The Oath of Office of the U.S. senator, required by the Constitution before assuming duties, as well as any American military
  officer, is: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all
  enemies, foreign and domestic…” The Oath makes no mention of defending territory, the president, or anything other than the
  Constitution. The Founders intended that defense of the Constitution come before all else. Thomas Jefferson said: “I consider
  trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its
  constitution.” By violating their Oath to protect and defend the United States Constitution, these senators have made
  themselves “domestic enemies” of the Constitution.
• Case law has until now been ambiguous on the government’s ability to designate American citizens as “enemy combatants”
  for life. The authority of the executive branch to invoke wartime powers in order to hold American citizen Jose Padilla as an
  enemy combatant in 2001 was upheld by Judge J. Michael Luttig in the Fourth Circuit, but Padilla was released to a civilian
  trial before the decision could be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The McCain-Levin law for the first time clearly
  attempts to permanently override every citizen’s right to a jury trial; under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
  (Wikipedia, “Jose Padilla”)
• 18 states have public official recall laws. A few, like Rhode Island, specifically exclude federal officials, although this can be
  changed by the state legislature, and recall laws can be passed by any state. Although not written into the Constitution, the
  power to recall federal officials is grounded in the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the
  Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
• Opposition to what amounts to a blatant betrayal of the Oath of Office has united Americans from different parts of the
  political spectrum as never before.

For more information see: “We Are All Really Bradley Manning Now: Senate Passes Military Detention for American
Citizens,” WarIsACrime.org, http://tinyurl.com/85bwqq4

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Source: 9/11 Truth News

Without explanation, a group of insurers today dropped its lawsuit against Saudi Arabia and several Saudi organizations claiming they should cover the $215 million the group has paid out in claims related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Stephen Cozen, a Philadelphia lawyer representing Lloyd`s Syndicate 3500, filed a notice today that the group is voluntarily dismissing its lawsuit. Cozen, by email, refused to discuss the reasons for dropping the case. Cozen previously said his group filed the lawsuit to hold terrorism sponsors accountable. Lloyd`s Syndicate 3500, part of the company more commonly known as Lloyd`s of London, filed the lawsuit on Sept. 8. The group contends that Saudi Arabia and the other defendants knowingly provided material support and resources to al-Qaida in the years preceding the terrorist attacks.

source: Politico

by James Bamford

Illustration by Matt Mahurin.

Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.

Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.

Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.

There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.

Because the information is collected in real time, attempting to delete history caches from a computer is useless.

At the NSA, thousands of analysts who once eavesdropped on troop movements of enemy soldiers in distant countries were now listening in on the bedroom conversations of innocent Americans in nearby states.

“We were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted, to include those of Americans,” Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA “voice interceptor,” told me. She was recalled to active duty after Sept. 11.

“Some of those conversations are personal,” she said. “Some even intimate. … I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and that I was listening to it. … When I was on active duty in ’94 to ’98, we would never collect on an American.”

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source: In These Times
via 911truth.org

by Michelle Chen

This weekend, the public will mourn a site of loss, recasting the painful memories and haunting fears that still hover over the aftermath at Ground Zero. But the people who worked and breathed that tragedy in the days and months following September 11 won’t be at the primary commemoration ceremony for the families of victims. The Mayor’s decision to limit the attendees by excluding the 9/11 first responders is an unnerving metaphor for an unhealed scar of 9/11. Many of the rescue and recovery workers who labored at Ground Zero have been plagued by a metastasizing medical crisis, aggravated by chronic political failure.

This week, 9/11 firefighters and police chiefs rallied to demand changes to the rules governing compensation for health problems tied to poisonous air and debris at Ground Zero. They want federal funds to support treatment for cancer, which is currently omitted from the primary legislation covering Ground Zero-related medical needs. For years, researchers have been uncovering fresh evidence of widespread and devastating illnesses afflicting a large portion of people exposed to the aftermath; ongoing health issues range from crippling lung and breathing problems to post-traumatic stress disorder. But adequate funding for 9/11 workers has often been ensnared in political gridlock, not to mention the general incompetence of the healthcare system.

The UK Guardian reports that new research could trump politicians’ concerns over potential cancer liabilities:

Cancer treatment has been specifically excluded from federal health funding, with officials arguing there has been insufficient evidence to prove any direct link between the toxins present at the site and the disease.

But last week the results of the first large-scale study, published in the Lancet, found that firefighters who were involved on the day of the attacks and in the weeks that followed had a 19 percent higher risk of contracting cancer.

The study looked at 9,800 male firefighters, comparing those present during and after the attacks with those who were not involved.

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source: 9/11 Truth News

by Cosmos

Rick Veitch has been pushing the boundaries of comic book storytelling as a writer and artist for over three decades. Best known for his mind-bending work on DC’s Swamp Thing, Veitch has worked on everything from mainstream superhero comics such as Justice League of America to the graphic navigation of the outer reaches of his own dreams in the independently published Rare Bit Fiends.

Veitch’s most recent ongoing series was Army@Love, a black-humored, absurdist mash-up of romance and war genre comics, inspired in no small part by the hype and horror of the War on Terror. In 2006, Veitch released the epic book-length poem Can’t Get No, exploring one man’s soul-searching odyssey in the wake of 9/11. Publishers Weekly called it one of the “Best Books of 2006?.

Now Rick Veitch returns to 9/11 – this time exploring some of the many inconsistencies and contradictions of the official account – in a new book from Image Comics called The Big Lie. 9/11 Truth News spoke to Rick Veitch to find out more about the inspiration behind his new work.

9/11 Truth News: Even 10 years down the road, it takes a lot of courage to speak up about 9/11, that much more so to release a major work calling it into question. You’re putting out a book called The Big Lie on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, so I imagine you must have very strong feelings about it. Why is 9/11 important to you?

Rick Veitch: It’s important to all of us. We all lost something on that morning when that attack happened. It took me a couple years to begin to really wonder about what actually happened in contrast to what we were told happened. Tom Yeates, who is the editor of this book and the guy who did the cover – he and I are old buddies, we went to the Kubert school together and shared a hippie art crash pad together decades ago. He and I would get on the phone and we’d start talking about this stuff and agreed the whole thing just stunk to high heaven. Tom turned me on to some good 9/11 research. And I was a big fan of Adam Curtis’ BBC documentaries, especially THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES. I can’t say that I’m what some folks refer to as a “truther”, but I try to stay informed about events and I’m naturally skeptical of “official” stories. This one never quite convinced me. There are just too many holes in it.

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source: Huffington Post

by Michael McAlilff

WASHINGTON — A provision in the new 9/11 health bill may be adding insult to injury for people who fell sick after their service in the aftermath of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, The Huffington Post has learned.

The tens of thousands of cops, firefighters, construction workers and others who survived the worst terrorist assault in U.S. history and risked their lives in its wake will soon be informed that their names must be run through the FBI’s terrorism watch list, according to a letter obtained by HuffPost.

Any of the responders who are not compared to the database of suspected terrorists would be barred from getting treatment for the numerous, worsening ailments that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health And Compensation Law was passed to address.

It’s a requirement that was tacked onto the law during the bitter debates over it last year.

The letter from Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, informs medical providers and administrators that they should begin letting patients know before the new program kicks in this July.

“This is absurd,” said Glen Kline, a former NYPD emergency services officer. “It’s silly. It’s stupid. It’s asinine.”

“It’s comical at best, and I think it’s an insult to everyone who worked on The Pile and is sick and suffering from 9/11,” said John Feal, a former construction worker who lost half a foot at Ground Zero and runs the advocacy group Fealgood Foundation.

The provision was added in an amendment by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) during the heated debate over the bill in the House Energy and Commerce Committee last May.

Sept. 11 responders in the committee room at the time mostly shook their heads at the move, which Democrats accepted on a voice vote after battling to bar other amendments on abortion and immigration that might have killed the bill.

But suddenly the point is no longer just a strategic concession to get a law passed.

As doctors and administrators begin acting on the federal instructions, participants in the 9/11 treatment and monitoring programs will soon be told that their names, places of birth, addresses, government ID numbers and other personal data will be provided to the FBI to ensure they are not terrorists.

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source: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
via: Raw Story

Art by Gary Varvel (www.garyvarvel.com)

WASHINGTON – US prosecutors compiled lots of evidence against the five men accused of having organized the September 11 attacks on the United States, but not until this week have details been fully revealed.

The indictment charging self-professed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others was unsealed when US Attorney General Eric Holder referred the case to the Defense Department for military trials instead of trials at a US federal court in New York.

Holder said Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustapha Ahmed al-Hawsawi could have been prosecuted in federal court and blamed Congress for imposing measures blocking civilian trials of Guantanamo Bay inmates.

They will be tried in military courts in the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.

The now-public details show that the United States, nearly 10 years after hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, reconstructed step by step the logistics of the five accused men.

They compiled bank transactions, flight records, visa applications, and dozens of telephone conversations to create the most comprehensive account of the chain of events before the attacks.

Implementation of the plan began in 1999, when Sheikh Mohammed (referred to as “KSM” by US officials) proposed to Osama bin Laden to use commercial airliners as missiles against US targets.

Until the last minute, according to the indictment, Sheikh Mohammed controlled the entire operation.

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source: Wall Street Journal

by Evan Perez

Courtroom sketch of bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. European Pressphoto Agency

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.

The move is one of the Obama administration’s most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.

The Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat.” Such action would need prior approval from FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers, according to the memo, which was issued in December but not made public.

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source: Crunch Gear

by Nicholas Deleon

The United States government is now in the business of professional trolling. The Guardian has discovered a program referred to as “Online Persona Management,” the goal of which appears to be to manipulate online conversations so that they’re seen as being more “pro-American.” The Pentagon says the program doesn’t have an English language component, and that it merely exists to combat misrepresentations found on Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu language Web sites.

The program’s contract, which set back the U.S. taxpayer a cool $2.76m, is part of the larger, $200m Operation Earnest Voice program. (Operation Earnest Voice was described [PDF] by the inspector general as “an operation to influence regional and international audiences to achieve U.S. Central Command strategic objectives.”)The contract was awarded to a California company by the name of Ntrepid Corporation.

Ntrepid’s Web site has a solitary e-mail contact. There’s no whois information either, as the site is registered to Domains By Proxy, Inc., whose slogan is: “Remember, your identity is nobody’s business but ours.”

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source: This Can’t Be Happening
via: 9/11 Truth News

by Dave Lindorff

The ongoing case of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor facing murder charges in Lahore for the execution-style slaying of two apparent agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is apparently leading to a roll-back of America’s espionage and Special Operations activities in Pakistan.

A few days ago, Pakistan’s Interior Department, which is reportedly conducting a careful review of the hundreds of private US contractors who flooded into Pakistan over the last two years, many with “diplomatic passports,” and many others, like Davis, linked to shady “security” firms, arrested an American security contractor named Aaron DeHaven, a Virginia native who claims to work for a company called Catalyst Services LLC.

The Catalyst Services LLC website describes the company, with offices in Afghanistan, Dubai, the US and Pakistan, as having experience in “logistics, operations, security and finance,” and as having a staff led by “individuals who have been involved in some of the most significant events of the last 20 years,” including “the break-up of the Soviet Union, the US effort in Somalia, and the Global War on Terror.”

DeHaven is being held on a 14-day remand, charged with overstaying his visa and with living in an unauthorized area.

Meanwhile, the English-language Express Tribune in Pakistan reports that according to ISI sources, 30 “suspected US operatives” in Pakistan have “suspended” their operations in the country, while 12 have fled the country.

The paper quotes the Pakistan Foreign Office as saying that 851 Americans claiming diplomatic immunity are currently in Pakistan, 297 of whom are “not working in any diplomatic capacity.” The paper says that the country’s Interior Department claims that 414 of the total are “non-diplomats.” The majority of these American operatives, the paper says, are located in Islamabad (where the US is building a huge fortress-like embassy reminiscent of the one in Baghdad), with the others in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar. Most are suspected of being involved in covert missions that report to the US Joint Special Operations Command, with many suspected of being active-duty Special Forces personnel from the Army’s Delta Force. (The website of the JSOC says its responsibility is “synchronizing Department of Defense plans against global terrorist networks and, as directed, conducting global operations.”)

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