If It's Not Corporate TV, Then What Is It?

What is it, indeed? It's Not Corporate TV, a sharp new set of interlocking video blogs, with interesting entries in each of the following categories:

Project For The New American Century
911
Iran, Iraq, the Petrodollar
Bogus Terror Propaganda
John Pilger Documentaries
Mainstream Corporate Media and Propaganda
Electronic Voting

For instance, on the "Bogus Terror Propaganda" page, you can watch a piece called The Origin and Myth of 'Al Qaeda'. It's an excerpt from the BBC series The Power Of Nightmares, and it's well worth the ten minutes it will take you to watch it.

That's just one example, and there's much more, including links to some very fine blogs! It's nothing like the corporate TV you're used to, if you're used to corporate TV. And that's why it's Not Corporate TV -- bright, honest, and very well done!

Ha ha! One for the good guys!!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Pass The Cheese: Iraqi Soldier Kills Two American Soldiers

An Iraqi soldier shot and killed two American soldiers and wounded several others yesterday on the outskirts of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, according to various sources. Details are sketchy, except in Australia.

Reuters published a very mysterious report by Tim Cocks:

Iraqi soldier kills two U.S. soldiers

An Iraqi soldier went on the rampage at a joint security station in northern Iraq on Wednesday, shooting dead two U.S. soldiers and wounding six, the U.S. military said.

The U.S. military said the soldier opened fire on the Americans at the station -- one of many in which Iraqi and U.S. troops operate side by side -- in the city of Mosul.

"The soldiers were in the courtyard ... an Iraqi soldier entered and shot two soldiers, killing one, mortally wounding another, and then spraying the others," said U.S. army spokeswoman for northern Iraq Major Peggy Kageleiry.

"He was engaged by counter-fire and killed," she added. A local morgue said it had received the body of the Iraqi soldier, riddled with bullets.

Here's the mysterious part:

Two local police sources and an Iraqi army source, all of whom declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, said a quarrel had broken out between the Iraqi and U.S. soldiers at the joint station.

But Kageleiry denied there was any altercation between the soldiers before the shooting.

"The U.S. soldiers had no conversation with this soldier and there was no interaction of any kind before they were murdered," she said.

And that was that. Sources who declined to be named said a quarrel had broken out, but the Pentagon spokesman denied it.

So what caused the incident?

CNN gave some indication of what might have sparked it, but not until the fifth paragraph of this story:

Spokesman: Shooter in Iraqi uniform kills U.S. troops

A man in an Iraqi army uniform opened fire on U.S. troops in Nineveh province Wednesday, killing two soldiers and wounding six others, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The six soldiers were in stable condition as of Wednesday night, the U.S. military said.

The U.S. military has not confirmed the identity of the shooter, but initial reports indicate that he was an Iraqi soldier, the military said in a statement.

The gunman, identified as Barazan Mohammed of Mosul, was killed in the ensuing exchange of fire.

An Interior Ministry official said an Iraqi soldier in a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol opened fire on a group of U.S. soldiers in the same convoy after one of the American troops slapped an Iraqi soldier.

But the U.S. military disputed that, saying in a statement, "there was no altercation between the U.S. soldier and the Iraqi soldier."

Where is CNN journalistically on this one? Reuters hints at three sources but gives no details of the cause of the incident; CNN hints at one source and gives one sketchy detail, but isn't sure whether or not the killer was an Iraqi soldier. The US military line is prominent in both stories, and not much else ...

James Hider of The Australian takes a different approach, disregarding the Pentagon statement entirely:

Slapped Iraqi soldier shoots dead two US troops

AN Iraqi soldier on foot patrol with US forces in the northern city of Mosul shot and killed two American soldiers and wounded six more, the worst such case yet of US-trained local troops turning their guns on their allies.

The Iraqi soldier, identified as Barzan al-Hadidi, was part of a joint daytime patrol on the streets of the dangerous city, considered to be one of the last strongholds of Al-Qa'ida and its local allies in Iraq. He was quickly gunned down by other members of the patrol, officials said.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said the soldier opened fire after he had been publicly slapped by an American colleague. Many Iraqi men, especially in the military, are intensely proud and conscious of any perceived slight to their honour.

“Two soldiers were killed and six wounded in a small-arms fire attack in an Iraqi Army compound in Mosul today. Initial reports indicate the attacker was an Iraqi soldier,” the US military said.

“The situation is fluid and still under investigation, so the casualty figures may change,” it added. A local morgue which received the Iraqi soldier’s body said it had been riddled with bullets.

Hider even provides some historical context!

There have been instances of Iraqi soldiers opening fire on their US mentors and comrades in the past, but never to such a deadly extent. Insurgents have also used Iraqi army uniforms to infiltrate joint bases in the past. One of the worst cases was in Mosul in 2004, when a suicide bomber dressed as an Iraqi soldier blew himself up in an American army mess hall, killing more than dozen US soldiers.

Today’s severe breach of discipline highlights the dangers of joint patrols with an Iraqi army still being shaped by the US military, and on to which Washington hopes to shift the burden of security [sic] as it draws down its forces [sic] in Iraq under the future presidency of Barack Obama.

Those security challenges have loomed larger in recent days, with a spate of bombings and shooting recalling the dark years that Iraqis had hoped were finally behind them.

Two dozen people were killed in attacks across the country yesterday, 12 of them in a combined car bombing and roadside booby trap in eastern Baghdad. In what is becoming a familiar pattern, the first explosion targeted a police patrol and the second concealed device cut down those who ran to the aid of the stricken security forces.

Sixty people were wounded in the twin blasts.

And so on. It's a style of reporting you just don't see in the USA.

Clearly, James Hider or his editor or both have had enough of the Pentagon denying everything, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. To them, the US military spokesman's statement denying any quarrel was not even worth mentioning. And it's easy to see why. The US military has a long tradition of lying about "conditions on the ground", covering up evidence of atrocities, and attempting to control the public's perception of the world through pressure on (or ownership of) the people who report the news.

None of this is new; it's been going on for decades. The techniques may be more sophisticated now, but the goal is still the same, and the effort is larger than ever. So it's not hard to see it: it's hard not to see it. That's not the problem.

The problem is: if you mention it, you don't work anymore. And everybody knows it.

An unidentified Pentagon spokesman says the moon is made of Parmesan cheese. The Iraqi Minister of Science and Technology says no, it's made of rocks and dust. Who are you going to believe?

Look at it this way: The Iraqis are a primitive and spiteful people who barely know enough to wash themselves, who would never tell you the truth about anything, and who would be better off if we liberated them, even if it meant we had to destroy their country and give all their oil to the vice president.

And maybe we're not perfect, but we're damned close, and anybody who says different is a lousy terrorist.

So the moon is made of Parmesan cheese. And even if you can prove that it isn't; even if it's obvious that it isn't; so what? You'll never see anyone say that on TV. You'll never read it in a major newspaper. The best you can do is write a letter to the editor that will never get published, and if you're lucky you'll only wind up on the no-fly list.

Or else you can write it on a blog that only a handful of people will ever read. Go right ahead. Shout into the hurricane.

But in the meantime, your fellow Americans will be grating that cheese, eating it on spaghetti, putting it in their salads, and never even noticing that they're eating rocks and dust...

... because if they ever stopped and looked at what they were eating, they would begin to understand that they've been eating rocks and dust all their lives, thinking it was food -- just as their parents taught them. They'd have to come to grips with the fact that they've worked their entire lives to buy rocks and dust, and they'd realize that they've been feeding rocks and dust to their children, and their grandchildren ... and they can't do it. They just can't do it. They'd rather keep eating rocks and dust, pretending it's cheese, and talking about how good it tastes.

It takes courage to ignore the Pentagon line entirely. Three cheers for James Hider and The Australian. It's not exactly difficult to put American journalism to shame. But it's a good thing somebody's doing it.

On the other hand, Hider didn't remind his readers that the US invaded Iraq on false pretenses, in an act of war that is clearly a crime against humanity and punishable by death under the Geneva Conventions. He didn't even hint that American trooops in Iraq are a destabilizing force, or that the talk of a draw-down might simply be campaign rhetoric.

He didn't mention the pressure Iraqi collaborators are under, as their friends and neighbors see them as traitors. And he didn't ask any potentially damning questions, such as: If the American administration is so concerned about the security of Iraq, why did they invade in the first place?

Hider even managed to slip in a bit of thinly veiled racism, noting that

Many Iraqi men, especially in the military, are intensely proud and conscious of any perceived slight to their honour.

Of course, American men aren't intensely proud and conscious of any perceived slight to their honour. Especially in the military!

And being slapped in public by a soldier from the country that destroyed your country wouldn't be a real slight to your honour, would it? Only a perceived one, right?

Maybe it was enough to say the dead Iraqi soldier was slapped.

Pass me some of that cheese, will you?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Stack Of Reports Proves It: Office Furnishings Killed Building 7

In a press conference yesterday, Shyam Sunder, who represents the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] as Lead Investigator of the World Trade Center Disaster, introduced himself and said:

I am here to summarize the findings from our three-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.

The collapse of WTC 7 has been a source of extensive speculation. No planes hit the building. There was damage to the building from the collapse of World Trade Center Tower 1, which was about 370 feet to the south. [...] But despite damage that severed seven exterior columns, Building 7 remained standing.

I've snipped a reference to a map showing the location of WTC 1. I've also snipped other references to visual aids and some more-or-less tangential material, so we can concentrate on Shyam Sunder's explanation of what happened to WTC 7.

Here's how it happened, according to Shyam Sunder:

The debris from Tower 1 [...] started fires on at least 10 floors of the building. The fires burned out of control on six of these ten floors for about seven hours.

The city water main had been cut by the collapse of the two WTC Towers, so the sprinklers in Building 7 did not function for much of the bottom half of the building. Nevertheless, other tall office buildings have burned for as long or longer in similar fires without collapsing—when sprinklers either did not exist or were not functional.

So we knew from the beginning of our study that understanding what happened to Building 7 on 9-11 would be difficult.

It certainly would be. And the difficulty sprang from two sources.

First, NIST had to find a way to dismiss all the evidence that points to the deliberate destruction of the building.

As if that weren't difficult enough, they then had to follow up by "explaining" how the tower could have disintegrated due to "natural" causes.

Shyam Sunder attacks on the first point straight-away, saying:

It did not fit any textbook description that you could readily point to and say, yes, that’s why the building failed.

... except that it did. It fit a textbook description perfectly. But that description was not admissible.

The thing is: we know what happened. We've heard from people who were there that day who were warned in advance; we've seen video of police shooing people away from the building and saying "The building's gonna blow up."

But no...

In August of 2002—exactly six years ago today, with authority and funding from Congress, NIST started its building and fire safety investigation of all three World Trade Center building collapses. The study of Towers 1 and 2 was extremely complex, and as a result, we had to place our study of WTC 7 on hold. In September of 2005, with the study of the towers complete, we began the study of Building 7’s collapse in earnest.

We conducted our study with no preconceived notions about what happened.

That's probably true. But it's clear that they had some powerful preconceived notions about what didn't happen!

We gathered evidence, we analyzed that evidence, we constructed computer models grounded in principles of physics and using detailed data on every aspect of the building’s construction, detailed information on its contents, videos and photos of the event, and witness accounts.

All this evidence would have been carefully selected, to be sure.

Among other damning details, NIST had to ignore:

• witness accounts of bomb damage in the building before the planes hit the other towers,
• witness accounts of evacuation and a countdown before the building was demolished,
• a televised interview with the building's owner, in which he explained when and how and why the decision to destroy the building was made, and
  
• the fact that the demolition was announced to the world by an allegedly reputable international news agency, before it even happened!

In the clip above, the BBC reporter on the scene in Manhattan points to Building 7 while describing the hole in the skyline left by its collapse.

As tough as it may be to make all these anomalies go away, fabricating a counter-story seems to have been even more difficult. We'll get to that part of the task shortly.

First, Shyam Sunder gives an overview of the investigative team:

Our investigation team for this building consisted of about 50 people with expertise in structures, fire science and engineering, metallurgy, explosives, blast analysis, evacuation and emergency response, and other technical fields. Our own technical staff was complemented by world-class private sector experts on contract.

We conducted this study without bias, without interference from anyone and dedicated ourselves to do the very best job possible.

The team's lack of bias is readily apparent in the transcript of their leader's press conference. No doubt it will be equally visible in the final report, which is due to be released next month.

We have had only one single-minded goal during this entire effort. We wanted to determine the probable sequence of events that led to the collapse of Building 7 on 9-11, and then to share that information with the public in order to improve building and fire safety.

Before I tell you what we found, I’d like to tell you what we did not find.

This is Shyam Sunder's emphasis, by the way. And it's an important place to put it.

Watch carefully. Don't miss this next bit. Here comes the magic wand!

We did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down.

And now the next part is crucial, as we will see ...

We ran detailed computer simulations of blast scenarios. [We determined] the expected air pressures from the smallest possible blast capable of crippling a critical column. This size blast would have produced an incredibly loud sound that was not recorded on videos of the collapse nor reported by witnesses.

There are two problems with this "explanation" and they are very different. The first concerns the content of the argument. Nobody has claimed that WTC was demolished by a single bomb that went "BOOM". You don't need a shock wave that rocks the city to take down a building; you only need to cut some strategic steel in some strategic places. Thermite would do the job quite nicely, as would thermate, and neither would go "BOOM".

This video shows a pound of thermite burning on a frozen lake.

It melted three inches of ice but it didn't make much sound at all.

The second and more telling problem with the NIST explanation is revealed not in the content but in the style.

We can see quite clearly that they didn't "find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down" because they weren't looking for "any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down".

They were looking for a way to rule out any explanation involving the notion that "explosives were used to bring the building down", and this is the "way" that they found:

If the building had been demolished by explosives, the explosion would have made more noise than anybody reported hearing or any video recorded. Therefore the building wasn't demolished by explosives.

We've seen in the previous video how much noise thermite makes when it burns.

So we have no choice but to reject the NIST claim as false. Period.

After three years, this was the best they could come up with!

And sadly, it only "accomplished" half of their "mission".

On the other hand, with a single wave of the magic wand, NIST took us through the looking-glass. And none of the history matters anymore. But if it did, surely something or other in this video would be relevant:

Shyam Sunder continued:

The collapse was also not due to fires from the substantial amount of diesel fuel stored in the building. Such fires from ruptured fuel lines—or from fuel stored in day tanks on the lower floors—could not have been sustained long enough, would not have generated sufficient heat to weaken critical columns, and would have produced copious smoke that was not was not observed on 9-11.

This passage is crucial for two main reasons. First of all, it discredits the vicious serial liars who have claimed for years that WTC 7 collapsed because of "fires from the substantial amount of diesel fuel stored in the building".

Ha! Not even the government agrees with Joey Bananas anymore. Boo-Hoo for vicious idiots everywhere.

But secondly, if fires from the diesel fuel didn't cause the building to collapse, what could have done so?

What we found was that uncontrolled building fires—similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings—caused an extraordinary event, the collapse of World Trade Center 7.

This is the first time that we are aware of, that a building taller than about 15 stories has collapsed primarily due to fires.

Uncontrolled building fires! Very interesting!! What do you suppose fueled those fires? Here's a hint: it doesn't burn nearly as hot as diesel fuel, and it generates an awful lot of dark smoke ...

But nevertheless, NIST

reached [their] conclusion by reconstructing the entire building, beam by beam, column by column, connection by connection into a computer model, a virtual WTC 7 Building.

They "reconstructed" ... "the entire building" .. "into a computer model"! How extraordinary!

Then, they

filled that virtual building with as much detail as possible about exactly what types of furnishings were on each floor.

Yep. Furnishings! They had time and money to find out "what types of furnishings were on each floor", but they couldn't talk to any of the people who had been warned in advance that the building was going to blow up.

It's quite astonishing methodology, isn't it?

No! It's the normal way these sorts of things get covered up. I've been reading about these episodes -- events whose historical importance is routinely denied by people who are allegedly the nation's leading dissidents -- for most of my life.

The NIST approach is almost exactly the same as the approach used by the Warren Commission, which allegedly investigated the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Just like NIST, the Warren Commission prided itself on having produced a huge stack of documents [see photo above]. They were counting on us not reading any of them. But they still hedged their bets.

The Warren Commission never claimed there was no evidence of a conspiracy; instead, the Warren Report said that they had "found no evidence" of a conspiracy.

Former Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford, who became our first unelected president after the resignation of Richard Nixon, stressed the difference in later interviews. He were dumb, but he weren't that dumb!

Back at the computer model, NIST

set fire to those virtual offices on the floors where video and other visual evidence told us the fires burned.

We used a well-validated computer program developed at NIST, for studying the growth and spread of fires, to calculate temperatures throughout the building. [...]

And we used well-established data on the properties of structural steel, the sprayed fire resistive material or fireproofing, and other building materials to determine how those temperatures affected the structure.

This is all theoretical, remember. All they needed to do -- apparently, all they did do -- was to create an animated computer model that looks something like the video of the event itself.

And they spent an incredible amount of time and money trying to develop one. Thus their leader reported that a

typical fire simulation for a single floor of the building took up to two days with a state-of-the-art cluster of Linux computers. The structural model of the building components used to predict the subsequent fire-induced progressive collapse included more than 3 million separate elements and took about 7 to 8 months to complete a single run on some very powerful computers.

Note the wording:

"The ... model ... used to predict the ... collapse ... "

The towers fell in 2001. The NIST study on WTC 7 didn't even get started "in earnest" until 2005. Their final report still hasn't been released. And yet Shyam Sunder can tell a room full of living, breathing, and presumably thinking human beings that his study "predicted" the demise of the building. How astonishing!

As I have discussed in connection with the Keith Seffen hoax, one cannot predict an event which has already happened. The use of such language -- "See! We were able to predict the past!" -- is a sure sign of intellectual dishonesty.

It's an admission that the model was built to specifications -- specifications that must have read like this:

"Explain X without admitting Y or Z"

If there's one thing I agree with the NIST team about, it's their assessment of the difficulty of their task.

It wasn't just difficult; it was impossible!

And that's why it took 50 experts three years to fake it.

What do they say brought down the building? Are you ready?

A critical factor that led to the initiation of collapse was thermal expansion of long-span floor systems located in the east side of the building. [...]

Anyone who has run a tight jar lid under hot water to help loosen it up knows that metal expands when it gets hot. Beyond expansion, heat also causes steel to lose strength and stiffness. In our investigation of the collapse of Towers 1 and 2, loss of strength and stiffness was more important. For WTC 7, thermal expansion was a critical factor. These effects occur at temperatures much lower than those required to reduce steel strength and stiffness.

[...] on the east side of the building, these long beams are connected to a girder here and here, but there are no opposing support beams.

The exterior columns of the building were more closely spaced than the interior ones. When fires heated the floor system, thermal expansion of the floor beams caused damage to connections between the steel beams and concrete slab of the composite floor system. Some of the beams buckled. Others pushed the girders, causing some of them to buckle.

This is very interesting to me personally because I've seen steel columns that had buckled. Not pictures; actual steel. I've inspected it closely; I've held it in my hand. I know what it looks like.

And I've seen hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of pictures from the World Trade Center. Even though I haven't inspected the scene closely or held any of the steel in my hand, I have a good idea of what it looked like, too. And here's a very interesting coincidence:

I've seen many photographs of steel from the World Trade Center that looked as if it had been cut.

I've seen some photographs that showed steel which had obviously been bent.

But I've never seen a single photograph of a single piece of steel that looked as if it had buckled.

And this is a crucial distinction, because if there were photographs of buckled steel from the World Trade Center, you can bet the government and the very complicit media would show them night and day. These photographs would be "proof" that the "conspiracy theorists" are wrong.

But they don't show us anything like that. And do you want to know why? [Click the image to find out.]

Here's the "official" version; see how much sense it makes to you:

A few girders lost their connections to columns, triggering floor failures.

Fires on Floors 7 through 9 and 11 through 13 were particularly severe. Long-span steel beams on the lower floors of the east side of the building, expanded significantly due to these fires, damaging the floor framing on multiple floors. Eventually, a girder on Floor 13 lost its connection to a critical interior column that provided support for the long span floors on the east side of the building. The displaced girder, and other local fire-induced damage, caused Floor 13 to collapse. This began a cascading chain of failures of eight additional floors—many of which already had been at least partially weakened by the fires in the vicinity of the critical column. With the support of these floors gone, column 79 buckled, which initiated the fire-induced progressive collapse of the building.

It's quite something, isn't it?

From a few grainy videos of the demolition, and a made-to-match computer animation, NIST can "pinpoint" the exact floor that "fell" first, and the exact column that "buckled" first.

It's quite incredible, isn't it?

I mean that literally: it's absolutely unbelievable!

This in turn caused the failure of nearby columns 80 and 81 and floor failures up to the roof line. [...]

In quick succession, the remaining interior columns failed from east to west across WTC 7, until the entire core began moving downward. Finally, the remaining outer shell or façade of the building fell. [...]

In general, tall buildings are very safe. We have decades upon decades of real-life experience to prove this. This was a rare event.

Rare? It's unique!! It's an absolutely unprecedented event in the annals of structural failure, and a grotesque understatement to assert that such an event was "rare"!

But if you want to go beyond unique, wait for the explanation:

This study has identified thermal expansion as a new phenomenon that can cause structural collapse.

There's that magic wand again! Did you see it go by?

Now, thanks to 9/11 and the good folks at NIST, there's "a new phenomenon that can cause structural collapse"!

Nothing like this has ever happened before, and nothing like it has ever happened since, but a representative of NIST -- the leader of the NIST investigation -- can claim, with a straight face,

we have shown that fire can induce a progressive collapse.

Straight face or not, that's a dreadful lie. "Shown" is hardly the word for what NIST has done here.

For the first time ever, somebody has claimed that fire can induce a progressive collapse; but nobody -- not NIST, not anybody else, ever, anywhere -- nobody has shown anything of the sort.

Any clown can make a claim. But it takes real evidence to "show" something, especially in the strict engineering or mathematical sense of the term.

But Shyam Sunder doesn't pause to strengthen his very lame argument. Instead he goes on to the waving of the magic cloth: What can we learn from this?

In the building community the term “progressive collapse” means the spread of local damage from a single initiating event, from structural element to element, eventually resulting in the collapse of an entire structure or a disproportionately large part of it. [...]

WTC 7, which included floor spans as long as 54 feet, had a structural system design that is in widespread use in other tall buildings. The length of floor spans is important. Longer beams can be subject to proportionally greater thermal expansion effects, but such effects may also be present in buildings with shorter span lengths depending on the design of the structural system.

We strongly recommend that building owners, operators, and designers evaluate buildings to ensure the adequate fire performance of the structural system. [...]

So far, with all this talk [and much else that I've snipped], the big question has remained unanswered: What fueled the fires that allegedly caused the building to disintegrate?

Are you ready for this?

It was office furnishings.

Can you believe it?

I can't, either. Watch this short video and see what you think!

But ...

Our take-home message today is that the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from diesel fuel fires.

It collapsed because fires—similar to those experienced in other tall buildings—burned in the absence of water supply to operate the sprinklers, and burned beyond the ability of firefighters to control fires. It fell because thermal expansion, a phenomenon not considered in current building design practice, caused a fire-induced progressive collapse. [...]

We will be accepting public comments on our final report until September 15, 2008. Directions for submitting these comments are provided on our web site at wtc.nist.gov.

At this point, I’ll be happy to take your questions.

Thank you.

Oh yes ... I have a question for you, sir.

Instead of considering any of the eyewitness and video evidence which shows quite clearly that WTC 7 was deliberately demolished, on a pre-set schedule, and that people were warned and evacuated ahead of time, you and your team have spent three years building and running a computer model so complex that it takes seven to eight months for a single iteration.

You've done all this, knowing it could never prove what actually happened -- that the most it could show would be that one potential explanation for the disintegration of the building was plausible. And your study hasn't even done that.

The impact of your report couldn't possibly be greater. Millions of innocent lives are at stake; and at the same time, the world's most vicious and violent terrorists are still at large.

Instead of helping to rectify the situation, you have led your team to devote three years to building a model and pretending it's reality, while systematically shutting out every conflicting fragment of the real story. You weren't even sly enough to hide it in your press conference.

Your absurd explanation, with its talk of a "new phenomenon", is an insult to the intelligence of all thinking people. It's also a disgrace to the memories of the victims of 9/11, and a betrayal of their families, of all Americans, of all mankind.

So here's my question, sir:

How do you sleep? How can you possibly sleep?

Care to comment on this post? If so, click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

FBI Illegally Obtained Reporters' Phone Records

The FBI violated internal policies and federal law to obtain phone records of four reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post, according to an article published by the Times yesterday.

The reporters involved were all based in Indonesia: Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez of the NYT and Ellen Nakashima and Natasha Tampubolon of the WaPo.

FBI director Robert Mueller [photo] revealed the violations in private phone calls with the executive editors of the two papers.

Reports from Perlez and Nakashima have been highlighted on this blog in the past -- with Perlez reporting about Pakistan and Nakashima reporting about security checks at the border.

According to the NYT:

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

The WaPo editor can't figure it out for himself, either:

Mr. Downie said it was not clear to him why the F.B.I. was interested in his reporters’ records in the first place.

“I want to find more about what this is about,” he said. “We will be asking our general counsel to advise us on what more we should be doing about this.”

Perhaps in the mythical golden age of American journalism, when the press posed as an adversary to the government, the FBI would have had a reason for spying on reporters. But nowadays there's really no reason, is there?

Meanwhile the nation's top law enforcement agency continues to show its contempt for the law:

An initial report by the inspector general last year found that the F.B.I. had violated its own policies in tens of thousands of cases by obtaining phone records in terrorism investigations through what are known as national security letters, without first getting needed approval or meeting other standards. In some cases, the F.B.I. used a whole new class of demands — emergency or “exigent” letters — that are not authorized by law. The emergency records were used in the Indonesian episode.

And in this case we see the usual remedy -- an top-secret internal investigation which is said to put the matter right, but of which no details are ever released to the public.

As the NYT phrases it:

The inspector general’s findings have prompted outrage in Congress, with leading lawmakers calling for greater checks on the F.B.I.’s ability to gather private information in terrorism investigations. But bureau officials say they have instituted internal reforms to solve the problem.

This story was brought to my attention by Larisa Alexandrovna, who wrote:

And you wonder why people have stopped reporting the truth. At least some of them are unable to guarantee source protection. You want a free press? Really? Then scream long and loud about this!

I suppose her explanation cuts some ice. But not very much.

The mainstream press stopped reporting the truth decades ago -- as part of the program of psychological warfare against the thinking citizenry which began under Harry Truman.

And we only found out about the FBI spying on journalists yesterday.

Cause typically precedes effect, no?

~~~

Meanwhile ... is Brian Ross having any trouble protecting his sources?

Larisa's subsequent post (about the Bruce Ivins / anthrax story) does a much better job of showing us why we're not getting the truth -- in my cold and humble opinion.

Arizona Congressman Arraigned For Corruption; Party Affiliation A Secret

Arizona Congressman Rick Renzi [photo] pleaded not guilty Tuesday to federal charges including insurance fraud, extortion and money laundering.

Lupita Murillo reports for KVOA News 4 Tucson:

Congressman Renzi arraigned in federal court

On February 21, Renzi and his former business partners were indicted after a lengthy investigation.

It focused on the land development and insurance businesses owned by Renzi's family.

Renzi and his business partners James Sandlin and Andrew Beard are all accused of concealing at least $733,000 that Renzi allegedly took for helping seal the land deals.

Renzi and Beard are also accused of embezzling more than $400,000 in insurance premiums to fund Renzi's first congressional campaign.

Renzi says he's not resigning his position. That's the message congressman Rick Renzi sent to his constitutients from court.

Congressman Renzi sat stoically next to his attorneys as he entered his 'not guilty' plea.

The judge released Renzi on a promise to appear in court and didn't set bond.

Renzi was ordered by the judge to stop at the U.S. Marshall's office to be fingerprinted and photographed.

Outside the courthouse, Renzi and his team of attorneys were met by the media. Renzi's attorney did all the talking.

Reid Weingarten told the media, "There is a presumption of innocence in this country and it applies to congressmen. And Congressman Renzi is fully prepared to continue serving his constitutients [sic] while we fight for his rights in court. And there's plenty of rights to be fought for."

The FBI spent 26,000 man-hours on this case.

Prosecutors declined to comment.

I don't mind commenting.

How is it that I can read this whole article without once finding any allusion to the name of the political party to which Rick Renzi is attached?

Why can I go to his website, and read "About Rick", and still find no mention of his party affiliation?

Could it be because he's an elephant? YES.

Are the elephants so rotten that they no longer publicly identify themselves as such? YES.

Are the American "news" media sufficiently corrupt to go along with this distortion-by-omission? YES.

If the indicted congressman were a donkey, would the media be singing a different tune? OF COURSE.

Anybody who didn't get all these answers on the first try is welcome to stay late today for some review.

As for presumption of innocence, there are more than 350 people incarcerated at Gitmo who have never even been charged with any crime of any nature, let alone betrayal of the supposedly sacred trust of public service. Some of them were captured by lawless tribesmen when they tried to escape the American bombing of their homeland, then sold into eternal captivity. And they aren't entitled to any presumption of innocence. They aren't entitled to anything -- not even a hearing!

So why does "presumption of innocence" apply to a congressman who's been indicted after 26,000 man-hours of investigation, and against the prevailing political winds, when it doesn't apply to people who have never even been charged?

Because "presumption of innocence", like every other aspect of the rule of law, is now a political weapon, to be used against enemies of the regime, and on behalf of their friends. Pakistan is the model.