Stephen Lendman

[Illustration: Cracks are appearing in the wall. Yedioth Ahronoth, one of the most-read newspapers in Israel ran a piece on page 9 today, quoting Judith Miller’s article on the Kam-Blau affair. The article was of course censored by the government. In an unusual move Yedioth included the black blocks where the censor redacted text from the article. My colleagues in Bethlehem have seen the print edition of the paper and confirm that this picture is real, not photoshopped. (Jared Malsin)]

Since its 1948 establishment, IDF military censor authority banned or sanitized material potentially damaging to Israel's security. Thereafter, voluntary media/government agreements prevailed, all domestic and foreign news organizations abiding by censorship rulings.

Some are sensible like banning reports beneficial to adversaries. Others aren't by suppressing information the public has a right to know. For example, whatever affects their welfare and when officials commit crimes. In addition, various Supreme Court decisions limit content suppression to "tangible (or) near certain" instances of public endangerment. Of course, interpretations are crucial, authorities increasingly hardline to get their way.

It shows up in prohibited protests, free expression erosion against government policies, a booklet about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because freedom of religion and asylum-seeker protection is included, suppressing nonviolent resistance, promoting patriotism over truth, attacking academic freedom, and sanitizing history among other ways, the latter issue addressed in an August 31 Haaretz editorial headlined, "Educating toward indoctrination," saying:

Frequent Education Ministry school curricula changes "share one common denominator....the same kind of crass, shallow patriotism that glosses over any complicated issue, forcing students to swallow the same rote, sanitized version of the multifaceted, paradoxical Israeli story (while) silenc(ing) all critical thought."

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Washington's Blog

Another World Is Possible: As regards the Twin Towers, they may may be a case apart from the rest of the World Trade Center complex. They collapsed and came down because of explosions obviously, but the mid-air pulverization, the "ground-hugging" pyroclastic flows so evident in all the footage and, finally, the samples of the fallen dust confirming that widespread molecular dissociation had occurred at Ground Zero in New York City - all this would strongly suggest that thermonuclear detonations had been carried out. In other words, the Twin Towers would seem to have been nuked. They may have been nuked because of the unfavorable height/footprint ratio. They may have been too tall to be demolished in the same controlled manner as WTC7. Non-conventional methods would have had to be used on the Twin Towers. If this is the case, we would expect that radiation would emanate from the debris. This needs to be confirmed.

Now, what you see in this photo (left), from September 11, 2001, is a box girder that has been cut by an explosive charge at an angle of approx. 45 degrees. Thermite, (nano-thermite) a highly explosive material, was in fact found on the crime scene. Thermite is commonly being used in the demolition business and shaped charges are standard practice. These demolitions have to be prepared weeks in advance. It can take months to set the charges, and set them correctly. - This implies an inside job.

WTC7, in addition to housing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which kept all the records from the Enron and WorldCom scandals (the largest bankruptcies in history), also "housed high-level government offices including the FBI, CIA and the Secret Service. WTC 7 was also the storage facility for millions of files pertaining to active cases involving international drug dealing, organized crime, terrorism and money laundering" (Serendipity).

Does it then seem reasonable to assume that Osama bin Laden, allegedly operating out of a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, could have been preparing the demolition of the WTC buildings for, weeks on end, right under the noses of FBI, FEMA, Secret Service and the CIA? -We don't think so. And considering the millions of secret files, referring to cases where the Government itself was actively involved in criminal activity, doesn't it also seem likely that these government agencies at some point would have wanted to get rid of all these files?

Anyway, the WTC buildings were demolished. This is a fact. We now believe highly placed elements in the FBI, the CIA and FEMA must have been among the perpetrators of terror on 9/11. This horrendous crime could not have taken place unless these agencies had actively participated in committing it. But who wanted this mega crime to be committed? Essentially, who did 9/11? Everything points in the direction of Israel.

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Sampath Perera
WSWS

"The floodwaters that are ravaging the lives of millions of Pakistanis have also provided a searing exposure of the incompetence, indifference and corruption of the government and of the ruling elite as a whole, further stoking elite apprehension of a social upheaval. But just as the Pakistani elite, in pursuit of its mercenary alliance with US imperialism, has been ready to plunge much of the country into civil war, so it will buckle under to the pressure of the IMF and World Bank and implement socially incendiary economic reforms in the months ahead."

Callously exploiting the humanitarian disaster caused by six weeks of flooding, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is spurning Pakistan’s pleas for the release of funds under a 2008 loan agreement until Islamabad implements wrenching policy changes—changes that will further squeeze the incomes of the country’s impoverished toilers.

Earlier this summer Pakistan was due to receive a $1.3 billion tranche from an IMF loan of $11.3 billion. But the IMF delayed release of the funds after Islamabad failed to meet various IMF performance targets.

Since then, more than 20 million people and 79 of Pakistan’s 124 administrative districts have been affected by the Indus Valley floods.

The current government death toll of around 1,700 is low in comparison with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and last January’s Haitian earthquake. But millions of hungry, homeless people remain at risk from disease and in many other respects the catastrophe in Pakistan dwarfs these tragedies.

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Les Visible
Reflections in a Petri Dish

Who’s really behind the pending Koran burning? I don’t mean the stupid idea, which is only one of many floating around, looking for morons to express themselves through. I’m talking about who has made it a cause célèbre and brought it to the attention of the people it intends to arouse and make angry enough to react with explosive violence in many parts of the world? Well, who owns the media that is forcing the issue into the minds of those being stoked to rage?

One of the principal reasons for this is to take the attention away from the ever growing awareness that Israel was behind 9/11. This is surfacing all over the place and one 9/11 truth site is raising money to pay for television commercials, whose intent is to draw attention to what happened to WTC 7 and it’s controlled demolition. It’s not much of a step from the controlled demolition idea to who was involved in it. The fingerprints of powerful, dual national, neo-cons are all over the 9/11 gambit, from PNAC on into the present day and no one has benefited more from the deception than has Israel. These are the same people who lobbied for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and are presently seeking to engage the U.S. in attacking Iran. No Israeli is probably more involved in the matter than Ehud Barack and Nitwityahoo is right up alongside him, with Dov Zackheim and Larry Silverstein. On a supporting level you have Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, William Kristol and a handful of others.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

American policy, at the highest levels of state, is specifically and deliberately designed to kill, despoil, dispossess, insult and outrage Muslims, in operations all over the world. That's what the Terror War is all about. We have spent more than $3 trillion burning Korans -- and their readers -- in the last decade. This policy has been pushed, championed and cheered by virtually the entire bipartisan political and media establishments -- and by much of the religious establishment as well.

Yet this week we have been treated to the bleakly comic sight of the avatars of these very establishments expressing their deeply humanitarian concerns -- and their nostril-flaring moral outrage -- over the plans of a Florida religious crank to publicly burn a few Korans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. These societal leaders -- such as Gen. David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- sternly warn us that such an act will inevitably produce violent blowback, stoke Islamic extremism and exacerbate anti-American feeling in the Muslim world.

Gen. Petraeus was admirably forthright about the effects such actions produce:

“We’re concerned that the images from the burning of a Quran would be used in the same way that extremists used images from Abu Ghraib — that they would in a sense be indelible,” Petraeus told NBC’s Brian Williams. “They would be used by those who wish us ill, to incite violence and to enflame public opinion against us and against our mission here in Afghanistan, as well as our missions undoubtedly around the world.”

These concerns are, of course, pertinent, and it is good to see them aired so prominently. However, one wonders about the ultimate effectiveness of such messages, coming as they do from these particular messengers.

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