Jim Hightower; A Very Funny Man

MICHAEL WINSHIP FOR BUZZFLASH

I first became aware of Jim Hightower more than 20 years ago, during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The Democrats were nominating Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis to run for president against Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, and at the time Dukakis looked like he had a pretty good chance at the White House.

This was before a series of events did him in, including the notorious Willie Horton ad that attacked Dukakis for a Massachusetts weekend furlough prison program that allowed a convicted murderer back on the street, where he robbed and raped.

And it was before Dukakis bobbled a harsh debate question about what he would do if his own wife Kitty was raped and murdered. And it was before he was photographed atop an Abrams tank wearing a helmet that made him look like he was starring in Snoopy III: This Time It's Personal.

All of that misery lay ahead. The Democrats were still in giddy spirits during the convention and had a high old time poking fun at Bush, Sr.That was when the late Ann Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, famously lamented, "Poor George! He can't help it - he was born with asilver foot in his mouth!"

But it was the convention speech by Hightower that I especially remember. He was the Texas agriculture commissioner in those days - an important job in the Lone Star State - and described Bush as a "toothache of a man," a cruel but remarkable metaphor. And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was "born on third base and thought he hit a triple... He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber."

Maybe Hightower didn't originate those lines (as Milton Berle used to say, "When you steal from me, you steal twice"), but he delivered them with a gusto akin to genuine authorship and over the years has come up with enough original material of his own to absolve him - mostly -  from the sin of occasional joke-filching. Now others steal from him.

It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I've heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution. And I think it was Jim who first said of George W. Bush, "If ignorance ever reaches $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to his head." (On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, "Oh good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant.")

These days, Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries and edits "The Hightower Lowdown," an invaluable monthly newsletter. With the passing of both Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, he has became the funniest person in Texas politics - intentionally, that is. But it is his steadfast advocacy of progressive politics, his unyielding embrace of the old time gospel of populism, that made him an especially appropriate guest on the final edition of the PBS series, Bill Moyers Journal.

"Here's what populism is not," he told my colleague Bill Moyers. "It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort [was], and as most of it is still today - though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there.
But what populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government.

"...One big difference between real populism and... the tea party thing is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, 'Let's get rid of government.' You need to be saying, 'Let's take over government.'"

As Hightower's fond of saying, the water won't clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek. "I see the central issue in politics to be the rise of corporate power," he reiterated.
"Overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they're the top dogs, and we're a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?"

Of President Obama he said, "It's odd to me that we've got a president who ran from the outside and won, and now is trying to govern from the inside. You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force... Our heavyweight is the people themselves.  They've got the fat cats, but we've got the alley cats..."

This weekend, Jim is being honored at Texas State University-San Marcos with an exhibition celebrating his life's work as a populist journalist, historian and advocate. They're calling the event "Swim Against the Current" because, as Moyers says, "That's what he does." In fact, "Swim Against the Current" also is the title of Hightower's most recent book, subtitled, "Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow." He comes from a long history of flow resisters, a critical, American political tradition. "I go all the way back to Thomas Paine," he said.

"I mean, that was kind of the ultimate rebellion, when the media tool was a pamphlet." The men who wrote the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence "didn't create democracy. [They] made democracy possible.

"What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies.  Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and CaesarChavez.  And now it's down to us.

"These are agitators.  They extended democracy decade after decade.  You know, sometimes we get in the midst of these fights.  We think we're making no progress.  But... you look back, we've made a lot of progress... The agitator after all is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So, we need a lot more agitation.... "We can battle back against the powers.  But it's not just going to a rally and shouting. It's organizing and it's thinking. And reaching out to others. And building a real people's movement."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

With this week's edition, Bill Moyers Journal goes off the air. But
we'll be continuing the conversation via our Web site at PBS.org/moyers.
These weekly columns will be continuing for the foreseeable as well. It
has been a delight and honor collaborating with Bill - and the entire
production team - so intensely over the last two years. I am always
improved in their presence and thank them all, especially Bill and
executive editor Judith Davidson Moyers, executive producers Judy
Doctoroff and Sally Roy and Diane Domondon and Jesse Adams, the two of
whom every week have made sure these scratchings make it out alive, with
alacrity and accuracy.


       Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs
program Bill Moyers Journal, which concludes Friday night on PBS.
Watch online or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Let The Sun Shine In......

The Bush Legacy

Four of the merely six words in the title of Pew Research Center's latest poll results (pdf) are "distrust, discontent, anger" and "rancor."

That sort of says it all, doesn't it? A concentrated, supermajority of fuming, "a perfect storm of conditions," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut -- "a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials."
All of which, I suppose, was inevitable. During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the more common observations was that the unluckiest candidate would be the winner. For nearly a decade the Bush administration had labored mightily to pile-drive the nation's distrust and discontent, while throughout, its chief political strategist -- Karl Rove -- cultivated partisan anger and rancor as electoral insurance, whose costly premium has now come due.

Theirs was a conscious, unconscionable effort to split the country -- plus one -- to achieve what they confidently envisioned as a permanent majority. Hyperpatriotic global adventurism and partisan scapegoating would hold it all together, while any domestic discontent would be decisively confronted with the Reaganite shibboleth that government is the problem, not the solution.

Their objective was a kind of impotent überstate -- a sort of controlled anarchy in which the militaristic protection of Big Brother would subsume the internal vulnerabilities of plutocratic whim and socioeconomic decline.

And in this, the Bush administration accomplished its one splendidly executed job: it hugely reinforced the erstwhile moderate American belief that government, where not in uniform, is spelled s-n-a-f-u.

Best of all? If that permanent-majority thing failed to work out, some other poor schmuck would have to cope with the enduringly miserable consequences. The Bushies and their politico-economic class could take their misbegotten gains and head for the hills of material comfort; the opposition would be left the herculean task of reassembling a disintegrated nation.

Which, for President Obama (as well as his admittedly hapless but passably well-intentioned allies on the Hill), became a thankless chore. The year 2009 wasn't 1933, which now, bizarrely enough, seems a golden political age, a time before lunatic cable-news hosts and lunatic radio talk-show hosts and lunatic bloggers -- all absolutely ubiquitous, and the crazier the more successful.

Yet a good deal of today's thanklessness loops back, I think, to that splendid job performed by the Bushies: their jackhammer, propagandistic insistence that government is unfailingly inept, so what might you expect?

To the contrary what the body politic did  expect -- unschooled as it is in the grinding parliamentary process of reversing determined decline -- was nothing short of a miracle: virtually instant betterment. Obama would simply stroll into the Oval Office, I can only presume, and snap his fingers and issue executive commands and presto -- within, let's say, a year, our city on the hill would gleam again.

Eight years -- indeed, several decades -- of unprecedented, deliberate neglect and suffocating decay would be erased. Theoretically. And when the theory failed to hold? Why of course, thought the electorate: Government is unfailingly inept. Why -- against the Bushies' admonishments -- did we ever expect otherwise?

Much easier, then, to revert to the former administration's finely cultivated zeitgeist of distrust, discontent, anger and rancor: reactionaryism's best friends.

During a presidential campaign such an apocalyptic foursome is not only acceptable, it borders on the acceptably advisable. For nothing concentrates the democratic mind like motivated revenge.

Yet what appeared to be relatively short-term distrust, discontent, anger and rancor had in reality become a new way of American political life. Except for one's closest ideological allies, everyone's a vague kind of enemy; plus government's a joke, hope's a pipe dream and real and upwardly robust change is not only unattainable, it's a liberal mirage, QED.
That is the Bushian DNA of our political ghosts -- Bush's truest legacy; a sour, fuming, disoriented, thoroughly disenchanted electorate which -- the result of relentless, top-down repetition -- can always land on at least one identifiable enemy: inept government.

And irony of ironies, who's paying the political price? Why of course. The unlucky winner of 2008, who is only trying his damnedest to ept the inept.

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Let The Sun Shine In......

Glenn Beck is an idiot (just one example)

Was it not Dick Cheney who said that Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don't matter?

Quote of the Day

by BooMan
Thu Apr 8th, 2010 at 12:37:42 PM EST

I generally ignore Glenn Beck because I don't want to do even a small part to give him the kind of attention he needs to make $32 million a year, but I just want to look at this onequote:

I don't know if you have seen the debt clock, but the debt is unsustainable. We're about to go out of business.People who are only playing the political games will ask: Where were you when George Bush was spending? It doesn't matter. I'm here now. Where are you now?

And before Dubya Bush, we might have asked where the budget hawks were when Reagan was spending. When Poppy Bush, in an effort at post-Reagan fiscal sanity, broke his 'read-my-lips-no-new-taxes' pledge, the 'budget hawks' threw him out of office.

What the American people need to understand about Republicans is that when they are out of power they are against any federal spending on anything other than weapons and immigration enforcement (better if these two things can be combined). But, when Republicans are in power, they spend freely and run up staggering debts. When the bill comes due and they get replaced by Democrats, they dismiss critics of their profligate spending by saying "It doesn't matter. I'm here now," and go right back to advocating balanced budgets.

In other words, now that they are no longer in control of the federal treasury, they are going back to their roots as an opposition party. But, even if you agree with them about the need to have a balanced budget, there is no reason to believe them when they say they will create one if put back in charge. They won't. And there is a simple reason for that. They will never raise taxes even when the economic times call for tax hikes. In fact, they will reduce taxes to the maximum degree possible. But they won't make corresponding cuts in federal programs. So, the result, every time, is staggering debt.

It pays to look at the conservative ideology as something that developed over decades in the minority in Congress. From the end of World War Two until 1995, the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for a total of four years (1947-49 and 1953-55). So, modern conservative ideology is built on opposing the federal government's spending priorities (and, really, any spending at all). It's an ideology that takes no account of an actual governing ideology. 

Again, other than spending on weapons and a Great Wall of Mexico, they have no fiscal priorities besides tax cuts (primarily for the wealthiest). The Republicans spent so long not being able to control the purse strings that they lost any interest in arguing over how the money should be spent. They just want to take the money out of the purse. But, hand them the purse, and they'll spend money just as lavishly as the Democrats and then they'll max out the credit cards for good measure.

So, my answer to Glenn Beck is that he should go with his real calling: rodeo clown. It doesn't pay as well, but he'd sleep better at night.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Ghosts of preznits past.....

Spirit of Rove and Dubya Lingers in the Department of Justice

If you live in Alabama and care about justice issues, it's as if George W. Bush and Karl Rove never left the White House.

The latest evidence of that came Thursday when federal investigators met with members of the Alabama Legislature and said they are looking into corruption surrounding an electronic-bingo bill that passed the Senate earlier in the week.

Democrats, who tended to favor the bill, immediately pointed a finger at Republican Governor Bob Riley, who has been using a task force and pre-dawn raids to try to shut down bingo facilities in the state. Democrats say Riley's crusade has been driven by the desires of Mississippi Choctaw gaming interests, who reportedly spent $13 million to help get him elected in 2002.

An FBI agent based in Alabama said the bingo investigation is being driven by prosecutors in Washington. But a close examination of the circumstances surrounding the inquiry indicate that almost certainly isn't true. And it shows that President Barack Obama, now that health-care reform has passed, needs to exert control over a Justice Department that remains alarmingly dysfunctional.

Experts in criminal justice said the meeting on Thursday with legislative officials was "virtually unprecedented" and violated standard FBI procedures. "I can't think of a legitimate law-enforcement purpose to do something like this," one said.

That's because the meeting almost certainly was not held for a legitimate law-enforcement purpose--it was designed to intimidate.

Consider a couple of key factors surrounding the latest bizarre events in Alabama:

* The bingo bill passed on a 21-13 vote in the Alabama Senate on Tuesday;

* Federal investigators arrived at 8 a.m. the following day at the home of Jarrod Massey, a lobbyist for the Country Crossing development near Dothan, which includes an electronic-bingo pavilion. Massey, according to his attorney, was harassed and threatened with arrest and told he had until the end of the day to cooperate and "save" himself.

* The bill is set to go to the Alabama House of Representatives, and if OK'd there, would allow voters to go to the polls in November to decided whether to allow electronic bingo.

* According to press reports, representatives from the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama played a key role in Thursday's meeting. Bush appointee Leura Canary, who oversaw the prosecution of former Democratic governor and Bob Riley opponent Don Siegelman, remains in the charge of that office. Alabama's two Republican U.S. Senators, Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, have scuttled various Obama nominees for the position, and the White House, so far, has chosen not to fight for the two candidates (Michel Nicrosi and Joseph Van Heest) favored by Democrats.

Canary's lingering presence in office almost certainly is driving the bingo investigation. Angela Tobon, an FBI special agent in Mobile, Alabama, told The Birmingham News that the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of the Justice Department is leading the inquiry. Tobon refused to elaborate when contacted by a reporter from the Montgomery Advertiser.

PIN was a notorious cesspool during the Bush years, playing key roles in the political prosecutions of Don Siegelman in Alabama and Paul Minor in Mississippi. Six lawyers from PIN have been under investigation for failure to turn over evidence in the prosecution of former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK).

To make matters worse, PIN has been without a permanent leader since last October, when news broke of probable misconduct in the Stevens case. Jack Smith, a career federal prosecutor out of Brooklyn, New York, was named on March 11 to become permanent head of PIN.

News of Smith's appointment drew positive reaction in the justice community. But he has been serving with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, and is not likely to take over full-time at PIN for a while.

Does that mean Leura Canary was able to take advantage of a leaderless organization, contacting "loyal Bushies" still embedded in the Justice Department to help get PIN involved in a bogus Alabama operation?

It sure looks that way.

And that appears to be the thinking of lawyers for Jarrod Massey, the targeted lobbyist. They already have filed a complaint with the Office of Professional Responsibility and asked that Canary be prohibited from taking part in the probe. Reports mainjustice.com:

“We strongly agree that, if there is any evidence of wrongdoing in regards to SB380, then it must be investigated,” Jarrod Massey’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the DOJ, according to The Birmingham News. “However, the investigation should not be performed under the direction of the current U.S. attorney, with her close political ties to Gov. Bob Riley, but rather by Main Justice in order to remove any hint of political influence.”

Let The Sun Shine In......

Bush criticized by former 9/11 commission member

Can anyone really be this obtuse while responsible for national security? Furthermore, how could the president not know what he knew, when he knew about it and what he did about it? After a catastrophe, it is human nature to flash back to we we should have, could have done to stop it.

By PETE YOST –

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former member of the 9/11 Commission criticizes former President George W. Bush in a new book for not responding to pre-attack intelligence on Osama bin Laden's intentions.

In "The Emperor's New Clothes: Exposing the Truth from Watergate to 9/11," Richard Ben-Veniste writes that CIA analysts told Bush that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States, "yet the president had done absolutely nothing to follow up."

A Democrat and a longtime Washington attorney, Ben-Veniste provides an inside account of the commission's three-hour interview with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on April 29, 2004.

Bush told the panel that the Aug. 6, 2001 intelligence summary — known as a presidential daily brief — was the only one he ever received on the domestic threat, Ben-Veniste writes.

In the interview with Bush, Ben-Veniste asked the president why he hadn't met with the FBI director after getting the PDB.

Bush replied that there were concerns predating his administration about politicizing the FBI and interfering in pending cases.

But "this was no pending case subject to claims of political interference," Ben-Veniste writes in his book.
The president said he couldn't recall whether he asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to get in touch with the FBI regarding the PDB, according to the book.

There was no immediate response from a spokesman for the former president to requests for comment.

Finally declassified by the Bush administration amid public and political pressure in April 2004, the PDB from Aug. 6, 2001 said, "The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden related." The PDB also said that the CIA and the FBI at the time were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates three months earlier saying that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

In his interview with the commission, Bush said the mention of 70 pending FBI investigations was a good thing, helpful, according to Ben-Veniste's book. Rice testified publicly that the PDB contained "some frightening things." At the time the president received the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB, Rice was not with Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

In the runup to the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, Ben-Veniste wrote, the summer of 2001 marked the most elevated threat level the country had ever experienced, providing convincing evidence that a spectacular attack was about to occur.

"CIA analysts had written a report for the president's eyes to alert him to the possibility that bin Laden's words and actions, together with recent investigative clues, pointed to an attack by al-Qaida on the American homeland," Ben-Veniste writes.

In the commission interview, "President Bush volunteered that if there had been 'a serious concern' in August 2001, he would have known about it," Ben-Veniste writes. "Being on my best behavior, I didn't come out and ask him what he thought a briefing from the CIA titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' was, if not a serious concern."

"Instead, I asked whether the president had discussed the Aug. 6 PDB with either the attorney general or the secretary of the treasury, the two cabinet officers who oversaw the FBI and other federal agencies charged with domestic law enforcement," Ben-Veniste wrote. "Had he discussed the PDB with Attorney General Ashcroft to ensure the FBI was doing everything necessary? The president said that he could not recall, nor could he say whether Rice had any such discussion with Ashcroft."

Ben-Veniste's book recounts five episodes from his career in which he played a role. Aside from his membership on the 9/11 Commission, Ben-Veniste prosecuted former top Nixon administration officials in the Watergate coverup; prosecuted the top aide to Democratic Speaker John McCormack for bribery and perjury; defended a lawyer in the FBI's Abscam sting operation in which bribes were paid to members of Congress; and served as Democratic counsel to the Republican-controlled Senate Whitewater Committee that investigated the Clintons.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Related articles

• Bush criticized by former 9/11 commission member
  The Associated Press - May 22, 2009
• Richard Ben-Veniste Smacks Bush. Again.
  Daily Kos - 13 hours ago
• Bush criticized by former 9/11 commission member
  KSWT-TV - May 22, 2009
• More coverage (3) »

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Nancy Pelosi Did Not Order Torture!

Late Night: Elephants on Parade By: Gregg Levine Friday May 15, 2009 8:00 pm

You know, it was a big week. . . lots to talk about, lots of insanely insane Republicans to shamelessly shame. . . but what with all this “he said, she said,” with the “she” being Nancy Pelosi, isn’t it time we talked about, you know, the, um, elephant in the room?

That’s right, tonight, let’s talk about Dick.

There has been a great deal of excellent reporting on this site by the likes of Marcy, Jane, and Spencer, among others, showing that there is now pretty solid evidence that the CIA misled those in Congress tasked with oversight—that the Bush Administration waited until after it began torturing detainees to inform the likes of Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bob Graham about these “enhanced” programs. . . and, even then, it is possible they withheld important facts. Yet, pretty much every news segment I catch is starting and ending the argument with whether Speaker Pelosi is hiding something, and whether it is over the line to accuse the CIA of lying.

I got news for ya’, it isn’t even close to over the line—but that’s not where I want to go tonight. . . .
Because before you get to Pelosi, or to Graham, or Jane Harman, or a host of other congressional leaders who in good time should be held accountable for their action or inaction during the Bush years—before you get to any of that—one thing had to happen. . . .

Someone had to order the torture. Someone had to sign off on the program in its design phase, someone had to render a group of detainees, hold them outside the reach of US law, and someone had to give the order to have them tortured.

I could, at this point, throw out the name George W. Bush—he was president at the time, after all—but we now have pretty good evidence that the real authority for waterboarding (to name but the most talked about of many illegally brutal “techniques”), the real orders to “do that,” and “do that again,” came from the vice president. The order to torture came from Dick Cheney.

(And Cheney says Bush signed off on "the program".)

Let me say that again: Dick Cheney ordered torture.

Not Nancy Pelosi; Dick Cheney.

Before there were any briefings of any Democrats, there was the torture—a violation in-and-of itself—and that torture was ordered by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.

And to take it one step further, that torture wasn’t ordered up to save us from some imagined “ticking bomb” scenario (not that torture would even solve that particular problem, and not that, even if it did, it could be justified), it was ordered to make detainees produce a specific, desired piece of information (or disinformation). Dick Cheney wanted a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein, and so Cheney told interrogators contractors to torture detainees until they stated that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

They signed off on a reverse-engineered program designed to help US troops survive “brain washing,” and then used that program to elicit false confessions.

All at the behest of tonight’s big fucking elephant, Dick Cheney.

I know all of that has been said before, but I felt like I needed to say it again. What do you need to say about this week’s execrable elephants?

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Official story of 9/11 "almost entirely untrue"

Sat May 16, 2009 at 01:09:42 AM PDT

Now, before you get your panties in a bunch, this is about a new book, titled "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11".

And before you get all outraged (The FAQ! The FAQ!), here is the author of the book, John Farmer:

John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where his areas of responsibility included assessing the national response to the terrorist attacks and evaluating the current state of national preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he also served as attorney general of New Jersey (1999-2002), as chief counsel to Governor Whitman, and as a federal prosecutor. He recently served as a subject matter/rule of law expert on security to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He is currently a partner of a New Jersey law firm and an adjunct professor of national security law at Rutgers University Law School. His editorials and articles have appeared in "The New York Times" and elsewhere

I wrote a couple of nights ago, here -- '9/11 Commission Report -- Info Obtained Through Torture" -- as to how much of what was published in the 9/11 Commission report was obtained through torture, and is therefore completely without credibility.

Scandalous enough, right?

Well, it gets worse.

The above described James Farmer has just come out with his new book. It was released April 14. I have not read it (I just heard about it maybe ten minutes ago) and it is difficult to find any reviews of it by any mainstream book reviewers (gee, what a surprise!).

But according to the publisher, it's quite a bombshell:

Description:

As of the 9/11 Commission’s one of the primary authors report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues’ work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write.

Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general’s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He reveals — terrifyingly and illuminatingly — the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, revealing them as they have never before been seen.

Ultimately Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures tells a very different story — a story that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.

So let me just repeat that to let it sink in .... The official story is "almost entirely untrue." So what IS true? Hell if I know.

And check this out:

Farmer himself states that "at some level of the government, at some point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened."

So let's let that sink in .... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.

This link also develops the story further:

In August 2006, the Washington Post reported, "Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate."

The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

"We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.

Wow. Let's go to that Washington Post story now, shall we?

It's 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon, from August 1, 2006:

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.

Farmer was quoted in this story as well. And according to the one review I did find:

Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job ...

I'm sure I'll get flamed by a lot of people who don't even read that quote. But whatever.

Like I said, I haven't read the book myself, seeing as I just found out about it. But it sure looks interesting.

Sure would be nice to find out what really happened that day. And left wondering HOW such a monumentally huge fuck-up, at every level imaginable, both during the attacks, and after, and during the investigation that followed, could have possibly happened in this country. And why people were tortured to deliberately give false information that could be used in a report everybody knew was bogus anyway.

And why we are now involved in two wars, both unnecessary and without end ...

And why we're being lied to about it all, to this day.



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Let The Sun Shine In......

Fusion Center Freak Out:

This is the the first I've heard of them; these fusion centers. 

Any Pelican independents out there who have heard anything about this? Anyone else? 

If so, give out a shout to pelican693@gmail.Tell us what you've heard and what you think.

ACLU Uneasy With Big Brother's National Listening Party

Submitted by meg on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 2:47pm. Analysis

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Mike German is not surprised you haven't heard of fusion centers.

German was an FBI agent until 2004 and is currently a national security policy advisor for the American Civil Liberties Union, yet he "had never heard of a fusion center" until 2007. He said the reason that he started investigating these intelligence centers for the ACLU was because he saw hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars going to support law enforcement activities that he couldn't define.

German said part of the problem is that "no two fusion centers are alike," making it hard to even talk about them. Even determining "whether something is a fusion center or not is iffy."

So what are they?

A fusion center is part of a network linking at least 800,000 federal, state, municipal and private security and law enforcement professionals who gather information about Americans in order to combat terrorism. Maybe one such person will stop and ask you why you're taking a picture of those power lines, or show up incognito to your religious meeting or anti-war demonstration. They might look at your credit report or your phone records. There are at least 58 centers, though some estimate there are as many as 70. They could be in a back room at your local police department, housed within a National Guard office or in a nondescript building down the street.

Do I sound paranoid?

Well, though German told me these centers "developed really quietly" in the years following 9/11, they are not a secret. The Department of Homeland Security has a brief and vague description of the centers on their Web site, notably putting the emphasis on "state and local." The department also recently issued a report detailing privacy threats posed by the centers. And all the examples of the instances related above have been documented in the media or by the ACLU.

German worked on an ACLU report about fusion centers published in December 2007. In the months that followed, news reports about the abuses the ACLU report anticipated started popping up around the country, so German compiled an update to the report in July 2008. With this week's news of the report leaked from a Virginia fusion center that warned of traditionally black colleges and peaceful religious and social change groups being potential hotbeds of terrorist activity, German said they're thinking about compiling another report.

The original idea of a fusion center network came out of the turf war over intelligence sharing after 9/11. Local law enforcement officials weren't getting security information from the Feds, so states set up these centers to gather and share information. In turn, the Department of Homeland Security was more than happy to have extra hands on the counterterrorism case.

There's no mission statement or clear set of guidelines for these centers, but in many cases they were envisioned as a repository for suspicious activity reports. If you've ever heeded those signs in public places to "say something" "if you see something," the information you gave out probably went to a fusion center.

Then came the "mission creep." Each center existed in a local area, each with its own individual problems. Some centers began to focus on border patrol; others volunteered themselves for the drug war. And then there's the inherent flexibility in the term "suspicious activity."

If these were merely call centers for concerned citizens to report to, German said he would have no problem with that. In fact, it's not the fusion centers themselves that are the real issue, but rather the sometimes illegal and unconstitutional activities that occur in clear violation of federal privacy statutes within and around the centers.

Supporters of third party presidential candidates such as Bob Barr and Ron Paul have been targeted for surveillance by these centers for no other reason than their political ideology. Mainstream ecological groups such as the Sierra Club and the Humane Society are being watched as eco-terrorists. One North Central Texas center alleged a terrorist conspiracy between a disparate group of hip-hop musicians, Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbyists, anti-war demonstrators, the U.S. Treasury Department and former Congresswoman and presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney.

(The above would be laughable, if it weren't so scary. Seriously; my mom volunteers for the Humane Society. On second thought, if there are any fusion center employees reading this, leave my poor mother alone! I swear she's not a radical!)

Amen. It's more than scary, it is terrorizing, and I thought that's what we are trying to avoid. If one finds oneself terrorized, does it matter, really, whether the threat is coming from our own government or from without.

The ACLU is calling for lawmakers at all levels to institute guidelines and oversight for these centers. They are also calling on the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the abuses that have been documented.
While there have been a handful of congressional hearings on fusion centers as well as local efforts to ensure the centers comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, specific instances of abuse have been largely glossed over by the government and ignored by the media.

"Where there are instances of abuse, there has been very little investigation," German said, specifically noting a case in Los Angeles where a few fusion center officials were court-martialed for stealing classified information, but the local law enforcement officers who were involved in the theft were never charged. 

"We are working with the executive branch to draw guidelines, and there is some progress there," German said.  He emphasized a "multifaceted" approach with state and local legislation plugging the time gap before federal action is taken.

This comprehensive approach mirrors the networking of many levels of jurisdiction at fusion centers themselves. German said the fact that these centers are considered neither national nor local allows them to "water down all the protections to the least common denominator." In states with strong privacy laws, fusion centers abide by less restrictive federal laws; in states with lax protections, the centers use local regulations.
Public-private collusion also allows fusion centers to skirt privacy laws. Law enforcement doesn't have the legal right to collect and store certain personal information because of its ties to government. Instead, fusion centers pay private companies, which own extensive stores of information about Americans' consumer and intellectual habits, to create and maintain searchable databases for the center's benefit.

"They have created this symbiotic relationship," German said. "If you combine [federal information gathering with private efforts], it is very dangerous to the individual." German said the privatization problem at fusion centers is not acknowledged as an issue by officials.

"This is one area that is being ignored by the federal government," German said.

It would be one thing if these fusion centers worked, but from all the intelligence reports German has seen, he's concluded that they haven't done anything to contribute to the country's security. On the contrary, German says they're becoming an obstacle to safety due to the public uproar over privacy violations.

"Law enforcement authorities are having to respond to the criticism rather than focus on security," German said.

Besides the distraction and lack of results, the basic math behind fusion centers may be flawed. The primary weapon at these centers is a method of sifting through information received from all these different sources that is called "data mining." The practice is very common among direct mail marketers and other small-scale commercial operations, but the ACLU report cites several independent studies showing that data mining is not at all a useful technique for the counterterrorism community. Instead, the ACLU found that data mining would only drain resources and implicate innocent citizens in imaginary plots.

OK, let's recap: We have local centers in almost every state in the country that engage in illegal and unconstitutional activities, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and that do not actually work to combat terrorism. The impetus for these centers may have been understandable at the time, but why are they still around?

German said the federal intelligence agencies are more than happy to have these local nodes to gather security information for them, saying it's like having 800,000 extra agents working for them. But Congress may have its own reasons for resisting a call to shut these places down.

"Fear is still driving a lot of our security policies," German said. He noted political pressure against reducing funds or projects combating terrorism is strong. Many expected the Democratic Congress to limit programs such as warrantless wiretapping, but instead "they've been expanded."

"To narrow any program [related to national security] is extremely difficult," German said.

Meanwhile the right wing of the blogosphere, already itchy from myths about "Obama's enemies list" and the expansion of Americorps into liberal "re-education camps," has broken out in a rash of paranoia over these fusion centers.

Where was all their concern when Bush and Cheney were calling the shots?  I remember right-wingers calling the guy, who blew the old whistle on the illegal domestic spying, as well as the NYT, traitors. Some even suggested the death penalty. Now, they are concerned. Did they learn nothing from what happened in Germany? When you fail to come to the aid of others, no one will be around to come to your aid when it comes to civil/human rights.

German said the ACLU is working with the executive branch to rein these centers in. But after years of operating in secrecy under the Bush Administration, I hardly think a set of guidelines is going to make the renegades at some of the more troubling centers behave. The best move President Obama could make -- from a security, civil rights, budgetary and public relations standpoint -- is to close these homegrown spy centers immediately. 

So, let me get this straight? This system of fusion centers are mostly spying for every reason on earth rather than terrorism, without which there would be no fusion centers....at least I hope not? Do I understand correctly that these centers are being manned by volunteers, many of whom may or may not know shit from shinola about what might be important or not, let alone how to connect dots? I mean, my god, look who they find worthy of being a target; maybe they are eco-terrorist....or Al Qaeda sympathizers. How does anyone come to the conclusion that peace activists are pro-Al Qaeda.? Not real ones. We are not any more in favor of one kind of terrorism than another. War is terror. too 

Anyone having any role in the events of 9/11 or the anthrax attacks should burn in the deepest recesses of hell, as far as I am concerned. 

Does anyone, think that shock and awe was any less terrifying for the people of Iraq than 9/11 was to the people of NYC and America? Even more so the anthrax attacks; anthrax was killing and attacking randomly, with the exception of the highly weaponized anthrax attacks on the Congress. Both targets were Democrats.

It wasn't neccesary. It was a war of aggression which is against just about every international treaty unto which we have signed. 

Bob Barr? I'm not crazy about the guy, but is he a threat to national security? I can't buy that one no matter how high the paranoia level gets. Ron Paul? Oh, puleeze. 

I'm not paying for this totally bizzare network of goofball "security" paranoids?  So, there's another reason for tax resistance to a terror run state, which, in few ways, resembles the America in which I was taught to believe, before they stopped teaching civics in school. 

Me thinks this came out of Adm.. Poindexter's Total Awareness Program, before it was supposedly scrapped. Did anyone really believe the unconstitutional program had really been scrapped? Of course not, it just morphed into the NSA domestic spying thingy (also data mining of all kinds of information belonging to the people of the USA) and, now, we hear about these fusion centers, encouraging anyone who sees something "suspicious," ( the meaning of which in no way clearly defined in national or state guidelenes, neither of which  serves any real practical purpose as a counterterrorism tool, at least not as it is being done.

My advice, for what it's worth to our readers; don't back down. Continue to speak the truth as you understand it, on you web site or blog and on others you visit. Do not be intimidated. 

Wasn't it Ben Franklin who said that the pen is more powerful than the sword? Could be wrong about who said it, but I'm sure it was one of our founder guys. 

Time to take a stand...."and we won't back down."....

Let The Sun Shine In......

Web pages mocking Bush rank higher than his library site in online search results.

Last December, the Bush Library foundation paid a cybersquatter $35,000 for the rights to the web domain name www.GeorgeWBushLibrary.com. A web development company originally paid less than $10 for the rights to the site. However, since the purchase, the library’s website is having trouble getting noticed on internet search engines:

The Web site for George W. Bush’s presidential library foundation – GeorgeWBushLibrary .com – is falling behind in online search results for “Bush library.”

The guy who’s beating him: his own dad. Even pages mocking the former president rank higher.

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, an industry blog said the site is “below average” for building web traffic and “probably failing” in efforts to raise money because of its low ranking.

Let The Sun Shine In......