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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Unconfirmed Report: U.S. Official was caught giving nuclear and biowarfare materials to Al-Qaeda

source: Washington’s Blog

CNN notes:

News that the American accused of killing two Pakistani men is a CIA contractor has intensified an already highly charged situation in Pakistan.

“Raymond Davis is a CIA Guy,” read the headline in the Daily Times newspaper Tuesday.

***

Davis was jailed January 27 after fatally shooting two men who pulled up to him on a motorcycle in a bustling Lahore neighborhood.

***

The 36-year-old Davis is a former member of the U.S. Army special forces and had been employed by security firm XE Services, previously known as Blackwater.

Davis began working for the CIA nearly four years ago. He was assigned to Pakistan in late 2009. He was living with other security personnel at a safehouse in Lahore before the shooting incident.

On Monday, a U.S. government official also said that Davis was a CIA contractor providing security for CIA officers.

The U.S. at first falsely claimed that Davis was a diplomat with the State Department and should therefore be granted diplomatic immunity:

Despite the revelation of Davis’ true line of work, U.S. officials on Monday renewed their argument that he has diplomatic immunity and must be released.

***
Before Monday, U.S. officials had described Davis only as an employee who was attached to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and who was working at the U.S. Consulate in Lahore at the time of the shootings.

But the deeper story is that Davis allegedly actively aided and abetted terrorism. As CNN notes:

Some newspapers cited unnamed sources to link Davis with “terrorist activity” and the Pakistani Taliban.

“CIA agent Davis had ties with local militants,” read the headline in The Express Tribune.

The Tribune quoted an unnamed “senior police official” as saying Davis was suspected in masterminding terrorist activity.

“His close ties with the TTP (The Pakistani Taliban) were revealed during the investigations,” the paper quoted the police official as saying. “Davis was instrumental in recruiting young people from Punjab for the Taliban to fuel the insurgency.”

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source: guardian.co.uk

Man codenamed Curveball ‘invented’ tales of bioweapons

by Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi’s claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell’s landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi’s admission as “fascinating”, and said the emergence of the truth “makes me feel better”. “I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now,” said Drumheller.

In the only other at length interview Janabi has given he denied all knowledge of his supposed role in helping the US build a case for invading Saddam’s Iraq.

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source: Raw Story

President Obama Seeks Longer PATRIOT Act Extension Than Republicans

by Stephen C. Webster

Faced with a looming vote on a planned one-year extension of special powers authorized in the USA PATRIOT Act, the Obama White House did not object or propose reforms, as the president vowed to do as a candidate.

The Obama administration instead asked Congress to grant those powers for an additional three years.

As a US Senator and candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama never actually argued for a repeal of the Bush administration’s security initiatives. Instead, he’s consistently argued for enhanced judicial oversight and a pullback on the most extreme elements of the bill, such as the use of National Security Letters to search people’s personal records without a court-issued warrant.

While many in his own party opposed the PATRIOT Act outright, as president Obama has said repeatedly that the emergency measures remain a valuable tool for law enforcement engaged in national security prerogatives.

On Tuesday, ahead of a House vote to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act for another year, the White House did something unexpected: they asked for even more.

A prepared statement issued Tuesday afternoon said that President Obama “would strongly prefer enactment of reauthorizing legislation that would extend these authorities until December 2013.”

The move was likely aimed at avoiding the potential conflation of national security legislation and an election year’s hyper-partisan atmosphere.

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Two Interviews Featuring CPT’s Shari Bernson and 9-11 Whistleblower Kevin Ryan

Trevor Carey of  Denver Late Night on KLZ 560 am in Denver Colorado and George Flynn of  Words of Freedom on KRFC 88.9 FM in Fort Collins welcome 9-11 Whistleblower Kevin Ryan and Shari Bernson, Membership Director/Executive Producer at Colorado Public Television to talk about the December 4th airing of Loose Change; An American Coup.

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Colorado Public Television to Broadcast Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup

source: Colorado Public Television

Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup
Saturday, December 4 at 7:00 pm on Channel 12.1

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:
With the departure of the Bush Administration and the arrival of an “era of transparency,” opportunities are arising for the disclosure of new information that may shed more light on the events that took place before and after 9/11/2001. This film takes viewers on a turbulent journey through several pivotal moments in history before delving into the most significant catastrophe in recent memory, 9/11. Loaded with powerful, new footage and in-depth interviews with the likes of Steven Earl Jones, an American physicist who has discovered undetonated explosive material in multiple samples of dust from the World Trade Center collapses, this documentary presents a wide array of evidence. The American people continue to live in the aftermath of 9/11 and deal with its ongoing repercussions. Is this just another machination of power on the timeline of history? If so, the real question is what happens next? Or better yet, what can we do to prevent another 9/11? LOOSE CHANGE 9/11 serves as a fundamental call to action which is fueled by hope that those affected by 9/11 will soon receive the answers that they have sought after for nearly a decade.

WHY CPT12 IS AIRING THIS FILM:
Last year, in response to numerous viewer requests, Colorado Public Television (CPT12) aired two independent films, 911 PRESS FOR TRUTH and 911 BLUEPRINT FOR TRUTH. It was the United States’ broadcast television debut for each of these controversial films, both of which question the official reports of what happened surrounding the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Presented as part of CPT12’s fundraising efforts, the station interrupted each film’s broadcast to feature in-studio guests who discussed the films and the station’s mission of providing access to diverse and opposing viewpoints. The in-studio guests included Kyle Hence, Bob McIlvane, Ray Nowosielski and Richard Gage, AIA.

While both programs helped raise funds for Channel 12, their broadcasts were not without controversy. Our evening of 9/11 programming generated many comments from the press as well as a huge groundswell of feedback from CPT12 viewers and members.

Many viewers thanked the station for airing content that has been neglected by mainstream media – whether they agreed with the official story explaining the events of 9/11, the alternative theories presented in the films, or were undecided. In fact, we heard from people all over the country.

Some of the feedback included complaints about the program breaks and our in-studio guests – that the station was only presenting a one-sided view that supported the alternative theories of the “Truth Movement” or “Truthers.” While these two films did argue alternate theories, Colorado Public Television has also aired PBS programs focused on the official story of 9/11. These include NOVA’s “Why the Towers Fell” and “Building on Ground Zero” as well as AMERICAN EXPERIENCE’s “The Center of the World.”

Taking all feedback, criticisms and requests into account, Colorado Public Television is now airing LOOSE CHANGE 9/11: AN AMERICAN COUP.

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source: Centre for Research on Globalization

by Gareth Porter

Since 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – with the support of the United States, Israel and European allies UK, France and Germany – has been demanding that Iran explain a set of purported internal documents portraying a covert Iranian military program of research and development of nuclear weapons. The “laptop documents,” supposedly obtained from a stolen Iranian computer by an unknown source and given to US intelligence in 2004, include a series of drawings of a missile re-entry vehicle that appears to be an effort to accommodate a nuclear weapon, as well as reports on high explosives testing for what appeared to be a detonator for a nuclear weapon.

In one report after another, the IAEA has suggested that Iran has failed to cooperate with its inquiry into that alleged research, and that the agency, therefore, cannot verify that it has not diverted nuclear material to military purposes.

That issue remains central to US policy toward Iran. The Obama administration says there can be no diplomatic negotiations with Iran unless Iran satisfies the IAEA fully in regard to the allegations derived from the documents that it had covert nuclear weapons program.

That position is based on the premise that the intelligence documents that Iran has been asked to explain are genuine. The evidence now available, however, indicates that they are fabrications.

The drawings of the Iranian missile warhead that were said by the IAEA to show an intent to accommodate a nuclear weapon actually depict a missile design that Iran is now known to have already abandoned in favor of an improved model by the time the technical drawings were allegedly made. And one of the major components of the purported Iranian military research program allegedly included a project labeled with a number that turns out to have been assigned by Iran’s civilian nuclear authority years before the covert program is said to have been initiated.

The former head of the agency’s safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, who shaped its approach to the issue of the intelligence documents from 2005 and 2010, has offered no real explanation for these anomalies in recent interviews with Truthout.

These telltale indicators of fraud bring into question the central pillar of the case against Iran and raise more fundamental questions about the handling of the Iranian nuclear issue by the IAEA, the United States and its key European allies.

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source: Raw Story

by Stephen C. Webster

A new television ad campaign featuring the family members of 9/11 victims has succeeded in garnering what 9/11 activists have lacked for years: serious treatment in the mainstream media.

Granted, that media was Fox News host Geraldo Rivera, who in a former iteration ran a Jerry Springer-like daytime talk show. That and, the last time Rupert Murdoch’s conservative-tilted television channel seriously talked about issues pertaining to 9/11, they were calling for a public official’s resignation over a signature on one of the “9/11 truth” petitions.

Still, at the end of his serious-yet-brief treatment of questions surrounding the collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7, pictured), Rivera admitted that the activists had made him “much more open minded” about questions surrounding 9/11.

And all it took was the proper message.

That message, which was playing in 30-second bytes on screens all around New York City, does not focus on conspiracy theories. It does not feature hip-hop beats in the background or winded, red-faced protesters dressed in black shouting at reporters. It doesn’t even mention President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney or the systemic failures in America’s air defenses.

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source: New York Times

by ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.

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source: Raw Story
by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Videos suggest detainees were routinely subjected to emotional assaults

A former US soldier in Iraq has come forward with video of his fellow soldiers subjecting Iraqi detainees to what he describes as “mental, emotional, degrading” abuse.

US Army Specialist Ethan McCord was a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, the same unit that was involved in a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad shown in a leaked video released last April by WikiLeaks.

“I started to ‘acquire’ these videos and some pictures once I realized that what we are doing in Iraq is wrong,” McCord wrote on Wednesday in a blog entry at MichaelMoore.com. “These videos are of detainee abuse. Not the type of abuse that’s physical, but the mental, emotional, degrading type.”

In the three brief clips, soldiers are shown harassing a handcuffed and blindfolded detainee in a variety of ways. In one, a soldier repeatedly orders a detainee to hold his hands up and then put them down again — a sequence which McCord says went on for 45 minutes.

Another shows a soldier asking a terrified detainee, “Are you militia” and telling him he is “going to go to prison for that,” until being ordered to “stop talking to the detainees.” In the third, a soldier sings loudly and mockingly into the ear of a man who was detained for having an AK-47 in his home.

The use of deliberate humiliation as a means of softening up detainees prior to questioning became particularly notorious in connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal and was examined in detail in Errol Morris’s critically-acclaimed 2008 documentary Standard Operating Procedure.

“The MPs speak frankly, if not always lucidly, about conditions at the prison and the vague orders from higher-ups that allowed them to believe what they were doing was somehow OK,” Slate’s Dana Stevens wrote of the film. “They saw themselves as ‘softening up’ detainees for the real questioning that would take place later behind closed doors.”

“My two cents worth of opinion,” Morris told an interviewer, “is that this is not just a war of humiliation but a war of sexual humiliation at its core, and the entire foreign policy. I wouldn’t even think it’s fair to say that America has a foreign policy in the years since 9/11, but if it has had a foreign policy, the foreign policy is, show them whose [sic] boss, humiliate them like they have humiliated us.”

Although the harassment shown in McCord’s clips does not rise to the same level of sexual abuse as was present at Abu Ghraib, it appears to be similarly designed to “show them who’s boss” and break down the detainees’ will to resist.

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source: Raw Story

Escalation in drone, helicopter attacks ‘setting country on fire,’ says Pakistani high commissioner to UK, European officials doubt terror threat, Guardian reports

This past weekend’s terror alert from Washington — alleging possible Al Qaeda activity and warning travelers to be vigilant when in Europe –was “politically motivated and not based on credible new information,” senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence community insiders have told the Guardian.

The warning, which doesn’t specify countries or targets but speculates about “Mumbai-style” multiple simultaneous attacks, was an attempt to justify the recent escalation of attacks on militant targets inside Pakistan, said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the Pakistani high commissioner to the UK. Hasan said the bombing campaigns have “set the country on fire.”

Following the death of two Pakistani soldiers in a NATO helicopter raid, Pakistan blocked access to Afghanistan for a NATO convoy running through the Khyber Pass. Although Pakistani diplomats have said the pass would soon be opened again, the “blockade” continues.

Since the United States issued its terror alert on Sunday, Britain, Japan, Sweden and France have issued their own travel warnings.

The Guardian reports that unnamed officials in the British, French and German governments are “dismissing” the terror threat and also pointing the finger at Washington.

“To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical,” said one official, identified only as being “well-placed.”

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