9/11 Speakers Corner: 9/11/01 People Get it!
9/11 Speakers Corner: 9/11/01 People Get it!
(Edmonton ) 9/11 Speakers Corner began as a community project in the city of Edmonton September 2008 and is now in its 11 month of publishing peoples thoughts, ideas and reactions to the questions surrounding the lies and crimes of 9/11.
I first got the idea of 9/11 speakers corner after viewing some of the thousands video accounts of 9/11 truth activism reported from various locations around the world showing how and what it is we do by way of actions and bringing the questions of 9/11 into our communities.
I though what if we turned our cameras onto the people to hear what they have to say about the lies and crimes of 9/11.
Another reason for this project may be to get some measured feed-back from what the 9/11 truth movement has accomplished in just 8 short years.
Richard Gage recently turned the cameras onto the people during a convention in California and received a lot of positive feed-back on the success of the 9/11 truth movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdePYUPqJP0&feature=related
Now its your turn to measure the success of the 9/11 truth movement in your community , town or city.
You-tube the people and their ideas and thoughts on such questions like what about a new criminal investigation into the crimes of 9/11, feed-back on how our politicians and the mainstream media has handled the lies and crimes of 9/11, and what does the future hold for truth be known and justice served for the crimes of 9/11/01.
In my city of Edmonton.
Edmonton is centered in the province Alberta known in western Canada as the heartland of right wing , corporate fuelled conservatism, and Stephan Harper country. Alberta is routinely compared to the TEXAS of the north. One of the very few places in the world where former Presidents like George W. Bush can still find a warm welcome and be treated as a hero by the establish wealthy.
One would think that this might be one of the toughest location in the world to bring the questions of 9/11 into public view , yet every time I turned on my camera, I'm hard pressed to find people who support the Bush - 9/11 Commission's answer to 9/11 and even harder to find citizens who are confident that our main stream media at telling us the truth about what happened on 9/11/01.
Speakers Corner (Edmonton) first review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXswnPeR7Hc
www.Edmonton911truth.com 9/11
News and Information
Serving Edmonton
and Surrounding Areas.
(Edmonton ) 9/11 Speakers Corner began as a community project in the city of Edmonton September 2008 and is now in its 11 month of publishing peoples thoughts, ideas and reactions to the questions surrounding the lies and crimes of 9/11.
I first got the idea of 9/11 speakers corner after viewing some of the thousands video accounts of 9/11 truth activism reported from various locations around the world showing how and what it is we do by way of actions and bringing the questions of 9/11 into our communities.
I though what if we turned our cameras onto the people to hear what they have to say about the lies and crimes of 9/11.
Another reason for this project may be to get some measured feed-back from what the 9/11 truth movement has accomplished in just 8 short years.
Richard Gage recently turned the cameras onto the people during a convention in California and received a lot of positive feed-back on the success of the 9/11 truth movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdePYUPqJP0&feature=related
Now its your turn to measure the success of the 9/11 truth movement in your community , town or city.
You-tube the people and their ideas and thoughts on such questions like what about a new criminal investigation into the crimes of 9/11, feed-back on how our politicians and the mainstream media has handled the lies and crimes of 9/11, and what does the future hold for truth be known and justice served for the crimes of 9/11/01.
In my city of Edmonton.
Edmonton is centered in the province Alberta known in western Canada as the heartland of right wing , corporate fuelled conservatism, and Stephan Harper country. Alberta is routinely compared to the TEXAS of the north. One of the very few places in the world where former Presidents like George W. Bush can still find a warm welcome and be treated as a hero by the establish wealthy.
One would think that this might be one of the toughest location in the world to bring the questions of 9/11 into public view , yet every time I turned on my camera, I'm hard pressed to find people who support the Bush - 9/11 Commission's answer to 9/11 and even harder to find citizens who are confident that our main stream media at telling us the truth about what happened on 9/11/01.
Speakers Corner (Edmonton) first review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXswnPeR7Hc
www.Edmonton911truth.com 9/11
News and Information
Serving Edmonton
and Surrounding Areas.
9/11 Retribution is Not the Reason...
Editorial: 9/11 Retribution is Not the Reason for
Continuing Canadian Military Involvement in Afghanistan.
By Anna Reitman: Thursday July 9, 2009
About Anna Reitman
On the Edmonton911truth.com website, the banner reads “Canada’s 9/11 Retribution Continues Today,” and goes on to list a casualty count. They also claim to have integrity, sincerity, and respect.
That the website is promoting counter-productive and misinformed anti-war rhetoric does not speak to integrity or respect, although I do believe that sincerity, however misguided it may be, happens to be on-board.
As evidence of “9/11 retribution continuing today”, the website provides a quote from Defense Minister Gordon O’Connor during a speech he made in Edmonton in 2007. O’Connor claims the quote was taken out of context, however the point may be moot since he is no longer in that position and has been replaced with Peter MacKay.
The official reason for continuing to be in Afghanistan, also in O’Connor’s speech on that day, is stated on the Foreign Affairs website,
“Canada is in Afghanistan at the request of the democratically elected government and as part of a UN-mandated, NATO-led effort of 37 NATO and non-NATO countries. Our goal is to protect Canadians by ensuring that Afghanistan never again falls into the hands of the Taliban and that Afghanistan becomes a stable, free and democratic society.”
Afghanistan is an international, UN sanctioned mission. For many years before 2001, the UN had been trying to assist the people of Afghanistan. If 9/11 has served as a catalyst for that intervention to move forward, then I am not going to tell people what opinion they should have of that. There are many moral and ethical pitfalls of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If, indeed, you believe that there is ever a justification for war.
Also, as in any strong democracy, the Canadian public must demand that the government is held accountable to the statements they make about why any military intervention continues. But this accountability needs to be focused on the on-going civilian deaths and other human rights violations and has nothing to do with 9/11 retribution.
Monitoring, investigating, protecting and promoting human rights throughout Afghanistan are the mandates of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHCR). This commission is mandated by the Afghan constitution and, among other things, places an emphasis on monitoring and investigating human rights complaints by tracking information and trends related to Government action, with a focus on detainees. Dr. Sima Samar, noted woman’s and human rights advocate, and recipient of various international awards, is the Chair of the AIHCR. This outspoken Afghan national and brave activist calls on Canada to continue contributing in enforcing the rule of law in Afghanistan.
In an Edmonton Journal article written by Andrea Sands and dated January 28, 2008, Dr. Sima Samar is quoted as saying, "On behalf of the Afghan people and especially on behalf of the Afghan women, I would like to thank Canada for its military support and financial support…and I insist the job is not complete, so please, complete the job and then leave us."
Making statements like “9/11 Retribution Continues Today,” is a shocking oversimplification of the situation, and shows a profound disrespect for the military and their families, both in Afghanistan and in Canada.
Whether you agree with the need for an independent and subpoena powered investigation into the events of 9/11 or not, I hope you can agree that those people affected by tragedies related to the Canadian intervention in Afghanistan deserve better than to have their deaths listed as a body count and used to further a political agenda they did not sign up for.
__________________________________________
ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7jAT0FAGBc&feature=channel_page
Anna: PLEASE WATCH THIS YOUTUBE:
THIS IS MY LAST RESPONSE TO ANNA REITMAN
RE: Her editorial criticizing me for high-lighting former defense minister
Gordon O' Connor's "retribution for 9/11 "as a reason to be in Afghanistan.
Sadly for Afghans and those lost in this war on terror
CANADA'S RETRIBUTION with out ever investigating the crimes of 9/11 before committing our troops in harms way in Afghanistan continues today. Shame on us!
Regretfully Anna has asked to be removed from my mailing list.
Respectfully I'll take her off...
Richard D. Brinkman
An open letter to a member of the Canadian Action Party
PUTTING 9/11 FIRST, ALL OTHERS AS SECONDARY
Tim's letter first:
Tim's letter first:
Mr. Brinkman,
I could not agree with you more when you say we must investigate 9/11. There are too many unanswered questions leading many people, including me, to believe it was a false flag operation. With that said, our country is falling apart and there are more pressing needs at this time. Trade deals such as NAFTA act as a bill of rights for corporations while our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms gets stepped all over. Our children and their children are being born into indebted servitude to the banking elites. We are a country lucky enough to have our own central bank, but continue to borrow our money from private sources. I would love to see a new investigation into 9/11, but as a member of CAP I believe that taking back control of printing money, ending unfair trade deals, restoring our lost liberties and changing the way government works are the main issues that must be dealt with. You may discover that the easiest way to punish those responsible for 9/11 is to adopt CAP's monetary policy. I hope you are a member of CAP Mr. Brinkman, and if not I strongly encourage you to do so. All our members are respected and have a voice in this party. Please feel free to contact me at any time.
Regards, Tim Mc.
Dear Tim Mc.
I agree there are more important pressing issues and needs facing Canada besides 9/11 and as a Canadian I do my best to manage my time and set my priorities confronting these issues. Let me explain more...
I became involved with the residential school issues over the winter when I took a break from 9/11 and this past Canada Day I joined forces with a local group exposing the SPP during a information event here in Edmonton, They too helped our efforts exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11 during this information event.
In the past I fought the NAFTA agreement dedicating my time and energy at becoming a campaign manager for a Edmonton candidate (Janet Blond) for the now defunct National Party of Canada led by the great Canadian Mel Hurtig.
We lost that battle as you well know, We too also tried to preserve our sovereignty that was eventually taken from us when Brian Mulroney sold Canada out to the corporate boardroom, rich elite by implementing the NAFTA agreement and initiating the beginning to the end of Canadian sovereignty.
We lost that battle then and what sovereignty is left today is in my opinion just like our democracy is now just a token of what we once had back then as a nation.
I once fought city Hall in another chosen battle with a group of condo owners against an unfair tax levy that was forced on us by a unelected city manager.
The city manager of Edmonton said we should shut up and pay our taxes like everyone else when we cried foul to this unfair tax levy...We lost the first, second and third reading in city Hall and all seemed hopeless, but we did not give up...Council members had one last meeting while we applied more pressure from out side the city chambers...They decided to rescind the tax levy deeming it unfair to the condo owners and we walked away victorious that day... Who said the term “You Can’t Fight City Hall”!
Today the 9/11 truth movement is the place activist will want to be because the perpetrators of 9/11 got caught from the sloppy covert operation that buggered up severely - BIG TIME, and they know it!
I knew that back in 2007 just before the Vancouver 9/11 truth conference that the official story of 9/11 was bogus and that our perseverance for truth and justice going to prove this one day. This was re-affirmed to me when Professor Anthony J. Hall laid it all out to us at our Edmonton Questions 9/11 conference that main stream media “ will indeed begin to do some back peddling to try and save face on the big 9/11 lie in the near future. I agree completely!
Recently Main Stream Media threw a bone out to the caring in this world, and those who were once committed to exposing 9/11 lies and took the bone and abandoned the 9/11 truth cause ,or at least put the lies and crimes of 9/11 on the back burner to follow the torture spot-light .
Exposing the torture crimes of the Bush Administration seemed right at the time and looked like a sure bet on winning by joining other already established anti torture groups that were attempting to bar Bush and friends entrance into our country. Good-luck to them I thought as some have express adieu to 9/11 truth question to continue to fight this worthy battle.
But I digress that battle of torture would be easier won if the lies and crimes of 9/11 were exposed to the world first.
Ron Paul threw out a bone to 9/11 truthers, some took it and ran with it, others saw this as an opportunist move on Pauls part and wanted nothing to do with it by remaining rectangular for the cause of choice “ truth and justice of 9/11“.
Celebrity radio hosts and former wrestlers threw out a few bones here and there and convinced us they too expose the lies and crimes of 9/11 but the real battle was to fight the new world order... It was like a recruitment opportunity to fight THE NEW WORLD ORDER and BANKING SYSTEM instead of focusing on the lies and crimes of 9/11 first.
Many of us who take the 9/11 truth cause seriously are going to be exploited by political interest groups, hate groups, other interest groups to play out there own agenda‘s, and sadly it has worked in their favour.
Here in Edmonton I was invited to sit during a meeting with an anti war/ racism group. Three of our members showed up to this meeting but they would not allow us to speak. In the end we received insults from some of this membership of peace-niks and were told how wasteful it was for us to focus on 9/11...
I found out later that night this group was infiltrated and run my members of a communist political movement. They were trying to recruit us 9/11 truth activist to follow there agenda.
But for most 9/11 truthers who are not willing to put 9/11 truth on the back burner just so some hate group can blame the Jews or some politician can get elected I commend them for keeping the focus for 9/11 truth and Justice because in the end, we will win the day by our commitment and perseverance for 9/11 truth and justice.
Bottom line ...The CAP party threw us 9/11 truthers a bone in Canada...
But when the last federal election came and went, most candidates of the CAP were unwilling to talk about the lies and crimes of 9/11. CAP does not care about 9/11 like it cares about the banking system and fighting the NEW WORLD ORDER. They used us just like Ron Paul used us by taking us away from what matters the most for us as 9/11 truth activist “exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11“.
Exposing it because when 9/11 truth becomes exposed , then the question of Torture, New World Order, NAU, SPP, Banking System corruption, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq all fall or are weakened by the fact that this whole mess got initiated when a lie was born on 9/11/01...
I encourage members of CAP to pick there fight and go with it! I’ll support you because I believe your cause is one worth the fight. I bid much success to former 9/11 truthers jumping on the torture spot-light and fighting the NEW WORLD ORDER much success...You have chosen your fight as we all must choose our battles. I remain committed exposing the 9/11 lie and seeking justice for the crimes of 9/11. Win or Lose that’s where I belong in a world that needs all of us to choose our sides and take up the cause for a better planet tomorrow.
Respectfully Yours for 9/11 Truth and Justice
Richard D. Brinkman
I could not agree with you more when you say we must investigate 9/11. There are too many unanswered questions leading many people, including me, to believe it was a false flag operation. With that said, our country is falling apart and there are more pressing needs at this time. Trade deals such as NAFTA act as a bill of rights for corporations while our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms gets stepped all over. Our children and their children are being born into indebted servitude to the banking elites. We are a country lucky enough to have our own central bank, but continue to borrow our money from private sources. I would love to see a new investigation into 9/11, but as a member of CAP I believe that taking back control of printing money, ending unfair trade deals, restoring our lost liberties and changing the way government works are the main issues that must be dealt with. You may discover that the easiest way to punish those responsible for 9/11 is to adopt CAP's monetary policy. I hope you are a member of CAP Mr. Brinkman, and if not I strongly encourage you to do so. All our members are respected and have a voice in this party. Please feel free to contact me at any time.
Regards, Tim Mc.
Dear Tim Mc.
I agree there are more important pressing issues and needs facing Canada besides 9/11 and as a Canadian I do my best to manage my time and set my priorities confronting these issues. Let me explain more...
I became involved with the residential school issues over the winter when I took a break from 9/11 and this past Canada Day I joined forces with a local group exposing the SPP during a information event here in Edmonton, They too helped our efforts exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11 during this information event.
In the past I fought the NAFTA agreement dedicating my time and energy at becoming a campaign manager for a Edmonton candidate (Janet Blond) for the now defunct National Party of Canada led by the great Canadian Mel Hurtig.
We lost that battle as you well know, We too also tried to preserve our sovereignty that was eventually taken from us when Brian Mulroney sold Canada out to the corporate boardroom, rich elite by implementing the NAFTA agreement and initiating the beginning to the end of Canadian sovereignty.
We lost that battle then and what sovereignty is left today is in my opinion just like our democracy is now just a token of what we once had back then as a nation.
I once fought city Hall in another chosen battle with a group of condo owners against an unfair tax levy that was forced on us by a unelected city manager.
The city manager of Edmonton said we should shut up and pay our taxes like everyone else when we cried foul to this unfair tax levy...We lost the first, second and third reading in city Hall and all seemed hopeless, but we did not give up...Council members had one last meeting while we applied more pressure from out side the city chambers...They decided to rescind the tax levy deeming it unfair to the condo owners and we walked away victorious that day... Who said the term “You Can’t Fight City Hall”!
Today the 9/11 truth movement is the place activist will want to be because the perpetrators of 9/11 got caught from the sloppy covert operation that buggered up severely - BIG TIME, and they know it!
I knew that back in 2007 just before the Vancouver 9/11 truth conference that the official story of 9/11 was bogus and that our perseverance for truth and justice going to prove this one day. This was re-affirmed to me when Professor Anthony J. Hall laid it all out to us at our Edmonton Questions 9/11 conference that main stream media “ will indeed begin to do some back peddling to try and save face on the big 9/11 lie in the near future. I agree completely!
Recently Main Stream Media threw a bone out to the caring in this world, and those who were once committed to exposing 9/11 lies and took the bone and abandoned the 9/11 truth cause ,or at least put the lies and crimes of 9/11 on the back burner to follow the torture spot-light .
Exposing the torture crimes of the Bush Administration seemed right at the time and looked like a sure bet on winning by joining other already established anti torture groups that were attempting to bar Bush and friends entrance into our country. Good-luck to them I thought as some have express adieu to 9/11 truth question to continue to fight this worthy battle.
But I digress that battle of torture would be easier won if the lies and crimes of 9/11 were exposed to the world first.
Ron Paul threw out a bone to 9/11 truthers, some took it and ran with it, others saw this as an opportunist move on Pauls part and wanted nothing to do with it by remaining rectangular for the cause of choice “ truth and justice of 9/11“.
Celebrity radio hosts and former wrestlers threw out a few bones here and there and convinced us they too expose the lies and crimes of 9/11 but the real battle was to fight the new world order... It was like a recruitment opportunity to fight THE NEW WORLD ORDER and BANKING SYSTEM instead of focusing on the lies and crimes of 9/11 first.
Many of us who take the 9/11 truth cause seriously are going to be exploited by political interest groups, hate groups, other interest groups to play out there own agenda‘s, and sadly it has worked in their favour.
Here in Edmonton I was invited to sit during a meeting with an anti war/ racism group. Three of our members showed up to this meeting but they would not allow us to speak. In the end we received insults from some of this membership of peace-niks and were told how wasteful it was for us to focus on 9/11...
I found out later that night this group was infiltrated and run my members of a communist political movement. They were trying to recruit us 9/11 truth activist to follow there agenda.
But for most 9/11 truthers who are not willing to put 9/11 truth on the back burner just so some hate group can blame the Jews or some politician can get elected I commend them for keeping the focus for 9/11 truth and Justice because in the end, we will win the day by our commitment and perseverance for 9/11 truth and justice.
Bottom line ...The CAP party threw us 9/11 truthers a bone in Canada...
But when the last federal election came and went, most candidates of the CAP were unwilling to talk about the lies and crimes of 9/11. CAP does not care about 9/11 like it cares about the banking system and fighting the NEW WORLD ORDER. They used us just like Ron Paul used us by taking us away from what matters the most for us as 9/11 truth activist “exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11“.
Exposing it because when 9/11 truth becomes exposed , then the question of Torture, New World Order, NAU, SPP, Banking System corruption, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq all fall or are weakened by the fact that this whole mess got initiated when a lie was born on 9/11/01...
I encourage members of CAP to pick there fight and go with it! I’ll support you because I believe your cause is one worth the fight. I bid much success to former 9/11 truthers jumping on the torture spot-light and fighting the NEW WORLD ORDER much success...You have chosen your fight as we all must choose our battles. I remain committed exposing the 9/11 lie and seeking justice for the crimes of 9/11. Win or Lose that’s where I belong in a world that needs all of us to choose our sides and take up the cause for a better planet tomorrow.
Respectfully Yours for 9/11 Truth and Justice
Richard D. Brinkman
Canada Day Actions, Canadian's combine efforts for change.
Activists combined efforts for change on Canada Day, sharing literature,
DVDs and friendly conversation on the important issues facing Canada today.
Topics covered: SPP "Security Prosperity Partnership", The New World Order, and the lies and crimes of 9/11/01. Edmontonians were greeted with friendly encounters and informational packages that included: 9/11 public newsletters, Richard Gage's 9/11 Blueprint for truth DVDs, INFOWAR's The Obama Deception and New World Order DVDs , buttons and information packages regarding SPP and NAU.
Press For Truth (Canada): http://pressfortruth.ca/
INFOWARS: http://www.infowars.com/
Edmonton 9/11 Civil Information Activism:
http://www.edmonton911.com/ED911Archives.html
The comments on this 9/11 feature dose not necessarily reflect the opinions of the 9/11 truth movement as a whole.
Anthony J. Hall on 9/11: with host Lesley Primeau of Corus Radio 630 CHED
Featuring...
Anthony J. Hall on 9/11: with host Lesley Primeau of Corus Radio 6/30 CHED
This is a sample from that broadcast that took place on the afternoon of September 4, 2008 on 630 CHED radio Edmonton's News and Information Station days prior to Edmonton's first " Edmonton Questions 9/11" Convention and Film .
Complete radio interview can be found close to the bottom of the web site: http://www.edmonton911.com/index.html
Under the Heading: 9/11 Truth? - Critics Corner.
You-Tube Video's from this convention featuring Anthony J. Hall's completed released paper can be found at http://www.edmonton911.com/mission.html
www.Edmonton911truth.com
9/11 News and Information
Serving Edmonton and Surrounding Areas.
NYC CAN Submits Petition for a New Investigation
NYC CAN Submits Petition for a New Investigation
By Anna Reitman Sunday June 28, 2009
The New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN) has submitted a petition with 52,000 signatures to New York City Council on June 24, 2009. The petition calls for the creation of an independent and impartial subpoena powered investigation into the September 11th attacks. If City Council approves the petition, New Yorkers will be able to vote on this initiative on November 3, 2009.
Ted Walter, Executive Director of NYC CAN, explained that City Council has 60 days from the submission of the petition to review it, decide whether or not to put it on the ballot, or to reject it.
"I think that the overall attitude is one of uncertainty as to how City Council will respond…but we have had some heartfelt support from members of the City Council and that gives us reason to be optimistic," says Walter.
If City Council rejects the petition, NYC CAN, by law, is able to come back with 15000 more valid signatures to force the issue onto the ballot. Citizens that want to get involved can help collect signatures, donate money, or sign up to make phone calls urging New Yorkers to vote on the issue as the November 3, 2009 referendum approaches.
"We are lucky to have a professional staff that collects one signature for every dollar donated...the best things any individual can do to help are to spread the word and donate," says Walter.
A recent addition to their website is a separate and symbolic petition to gather statements of support from 9/11 Families, First Responders, and Survivors. This initiative was started on June 20 and has yielded 70 signatures. Walter expects to have 1000 signatures by the end of the summer.
New Yorkers are identifying with NYC CAN's demand for answers as to why New York was left unprotected on that fateful day. "Those planes not being intercepted raises questions, we want answers so that it does not happen again," says Walter.
Donna Marsh O’Connor, a 9/11 Family Member that is on the NYC CAN Executive Council, thinks that American citizens are entitled to those answers given the scope of what happened. “We have never had a real investigation…it is past time.”
If the ballot is voted through, an independent investigation will be conducted by a commission comprised of civic leaders with diverse backgrounds. Those backgrounds include human rights law, politics, research, Family Members affected by the tragedy, among others. Future members can be nominated by the public and voted on by the core members.
"It is our best opportunity to finally establish an investigation that is completely unbiased and impartial, one that will follow wherever the evidence leads. Citizens have a truly unprecedented opportunity to make the investigation happen in New York, which has been so heavily affected by this tragedy, and a new investigation has the support of hundreds of families," says Walter.
He also points out that NYC CAN is not the commission that will be conducting the new investigation and should not have any influence on its findings.
Walter adds that the success of the petition to this point can be credited to the hard work of everybody that has been involved, including dozens of volunteers, administrative staff willing to work for small salaries, and the rigorous research done by independent citizens trying to understand exactly what happened on 9/11.
"There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in those signatures and the petition itself is a reflection of the fine job that people all over the world have done to bring greater awareness to the inaccuracy of the 9/11 Commission’s account."
Read more about nyccan.org (link here)
Anna Reitman for Edmonton 9/11 Civil Information
By Anna Reitman Sunday June 28, 2009
The New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN) has submitted a petition with 52,000 signatures to New York City Council on June 24, 2009. The petition calls for the creation of an independent and impartial subpoena powered investigation into the September 11th attacks. If City Council approves the petition, New Yorkers will be able to vote on this initiative on November 3, 2009.
Ted Walter, Executive Director of NYC CAN, explained that City Council has 60 days from the submission of the petition to review it, decide whether or not to put it on the ballot, or to reject it.
"I think that the overall attitude is one of uncertainty as to how City Council will respond…but we have had some heartfelt support from members of the City Council and that gives us reason to be optimistic," says Walter.
If City Council rejects the petition, NYC CAN, by law, is able to come back with 15000 more valid signatures to force the issue onto the ballot. Citizens that want to get involved can help collect signatures, donate money, or sign up to make phone calls urging New Yorkers to vote on the issue as the November 3, 2009 referendum approaches.
"We are lucky to have a professional staff that collects one signature for every dollar donated...the best things any individual can do to help are to spread the word and donate," says Walter.
A recent addition to their website is a separate and symbolic petition to gather statements of support from 9/11 Families, First Responders, and Survivors. This initiative was started on June 20 and has yielded 70 signatures. Walter expects to have 1000 signatures by the end of the summer.
New Yorkers are identifying with NYC CAN's demand for answers as to why New York was left unprotected on that fateful day. "Those planes not being intercepted raises questions, we want answers so that it does not happen again," says Walter.
Donna Marsh O’Connor, a 9/11 Family Member that is on the NYC CAN Executive Council, thinks that American citizens are entitled to those answers given the scope of what happened. “We have never had a real investigation…it is past time.”
If the ballot is voted through, an independent investigation will be conducted by a commission comprised of civic leaders with diverse backgrounds. Those backgrounds include human rights law, politics, research, Family Members affected by the tragedy, among others. Future members can be nominated by the public and voted on by the core members.
"It is our best opportunity to finally establish an investigation that is completely unbiased and impartial, one that will follow wherever the evidence leads. Citizens have a truly unprecedented opportunity to make the investigation happen in New York, which has been so heavily affected by this tragedy, and a new investigation has the support of hundreds of families," says Walter.
He also points out that NYC CAN is not the commission that will be conducting the new investigation and should not have any influence on its findings.
Walter adds that the success of the petition to this point can be credited to the hard work of everybody that has been involved, including dozens of volunteers, administrative staff willing to work for small salaries, and the rigorous research done by independent citizens trying to understand exactly what happened on 9/11.
"There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in those signatures and the petition itself is a reflection of the fine job that people all over the world have done to bring greater awareness to the inaccuracy of the 9/11 Commission’s account."
Read more about nyccan.org (link here)
Anna Reitman for Edmonton 9/11 Civil Information
9/11 Truth and the Media
Has the main stream Media been good t covering the outstanding questions
and issues that surround the crimes of 9/11?
9/11 Speakers Corner, Main Stream Media and 9/11
and issues that surround the crimes of 9/11?
9/11 Speakers Corner, Main Stream Media and 9/11
June 11, 2009 Actions
The TEE Doug's wearing says Conservatives for 9/11 Truth,
A brain storm idea from JD of Calgary 9/11 Truth.
He had TEEs made for special for all 3 major political parties
in Canada.
George Bush and Bill Clinton Do Toronto
Pepsi versus Coke meets Republican versus Democrat
by Anthony J. Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge
Paper prepared for a town hall meeting entitled,
“The Public Mythology of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror,”
Jubilee Hall, Walkerton Ontario.
Meeting hosted by Dr. Paul McArthur and the White Rose Café
28 May, 2009
From Calgary to Toronto
Just as fresh revelations keep oozing out about the broad extent of the international criminality perpetrated by the regime of the former US president, Canada is becoming the main site of a corporate-driven effort to re-brand George W. Bush as a legitimate political pundit. On May 29 Mr. Bush joins Bill Clinton on the stage of the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre in an event hosted by the TD Financial Group and several other sponsors. The hosts include the Calgary-based Bennett Jones law firm, the global accounting giant Ernst and Young, the Toronto Board of Trade as well as the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.
The Clinton-Bush gig in Canada’s biggest metropolis is happening about a month after the former president “tested the waters” as a public speaker by addressing an audience of 1,400 executives of mostly Texas-based oil conglomerates in an event hosted by Calgary’s Chamber of Commerce. Bush’s luncheon address was accompanied by the protests of several hundred demonstrators who advanced the case that there is a huge body of evidence already in the public domain that should be sufficient to prohibit Bush from entering Canada or, failing that, to necessitate his arrest on Canadian soil. In a widely published article, which I introduced in early March at an invited lecture at the University of Winnipeg, I outlined the legal and political terrain underlying Bush’s first major public foray outside the United States. That paper, which has proliferated widely on many Internet sites, is entitled “Bush League Justice: Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta and Tried for International Crimes.”[i]
My academic intervention was one part of a larger collective effort aimed at advancing the case that the international crimes of George W. Bush and many of his ministers and advisers have been so obvious and gigantic that citizens must mobilize globally to insist that the rule of international criminal law should be made to prevail over the rule of force and political expediency.[ii] Many of the core legal principles awaiting enforcement are those that coalesced in the course of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Its chief prosecutor, the renowned US jurist Robert Jackson, initiated the proceedings in 1945 by insisting that humanity’s future depended on removing “immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind.” No longer could “so vast an area of legal irresponsibility” be “tolerated” because “because modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men.”[iii]
In advancing the legal conception of universal jurisdiction the Canadian government, like that of many other countries, has internalized many elements of international criminal law into domestic legislation. Invoking key provisions of both the Immigration Act and Canada’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act, Gail Davidson of Lawyers Against War informed Crown Ministers and law enforcement officials prior to the Calgary event that “the former President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, is a person credibly accused of torture and other gross human rights violations, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” A number of other prominent jurists, including Ramsay Clark, former Attorney General of the United States, backed and extended Davidson’s legal intervention.[iv]
Clark’s friend and client, Splitting The Sky, was handed the responsibility of representing the legendary US jurist’s position in the Calgary protests. This prominent Mohawk veteran of the American Indian Movement, the Attica prison debacle of 1971 and British Columbia’s Battle of Gustafsen Lake was charged and briefly jailed in Calgary as a result of his concerted effort to conduct a citizen’s arrest.[v] As Clark’s controversial client will argue in an important trial that has been set to take place in Calgary in March of 2010, citizens have a responsibility to intervene proactively when law enforcement officials refuse to do their duty and thereby end up aiding and abetting criminality.[vi] As the Nuremberg rulings make clear, law enforcement officials cannot evade their own responsibility for aiding and abetting international crimes by claiming that they are simply following orders.
Only days after Bush was in Calgary the very same law laws that were overtly violated in permitting the credibly accused war criminal to enter the country were invoked in barring from entry George Galloway, a long-serving British parliamentarian, an untiring peace activist and one of the world’s most eloquent champions of Palestinian rights. This decision serves to highlight the propensity of Bush’s friend and ally, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to replicate his role model’s zeal in placing himself as well as his Office on the wrong side of the rule of law when it comes to the pursuit of of political objectives.
Left versus Right as a Substitute for
Law versus Criminality, Peace with Justice versus War Without End
The so-called “conversation” between former presidents comes at a time when hundreds of millions of global citizens have developed the view of George W. Bush as the very embodiment of the rampant criminality that has been spewing unchecked and without accountability from the highest echelons of political, military and financial power especially since the explosive events of September 11, 2001. Al Capone’s Chicago was a mere kindergarten of lawlessness compared to the amount of corruption and violence generated on a daily basis primarily by those states and corporations that have become chief protagonists in building up and exploiting the lethal yet lucrative terror economy.
In the eyes of the huge and growing constituency who can no longer stomach the maelstroms of murder and mayhem wrought in our name, the lecture circuit is not the appropriate place for George Bush to tell his side of the story about his actions while controlling the world’s most formidable arsenals of military and psychological warfare. Along with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice, Bush should be presenting his self-justifications as the principle defendant in a properly constituted war crimes tribunal.
The role of Bill Clinton in the Toronto event raises a host of significant issues that should not be evaded. While the former Democratic president enjoys a far rosier public image than that of the discredited Republican president, the reality is that Clinton too is a fugitive from the decrepit and ineffective agencies of international law enforcement. Clinton’s most serious infractions involve his leading role in 1999 in NATO’s illegal bombing of Serbian Yugoslavia, his tightening of the financial and trade embargo on Iraq resulting in the preventable deaths of over half a million children, and his genocidal decisions concerning how and when to intervene or not intervene in the bloody clashes of ethnically-based proxy armies and militias in Central Africa. Now a decade after Clinton helped sabotage the legitimacy of the United Nations by ignoring the Security Council’s jurisdiction in the US-led military dismemberment of multinational Yugoslavia, Hilary Clinton’s husband is lending the cache of his family dynasty to efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of the former Republican president who has made himself one of the most reviled individuals on the planet.
There is something fundamentally perverse in presenting Bush and Clinton on the same Toronto stage as if the main options facing humanity are available within the narrow and flawed framework of the two main political parties in the United States. In trying to come to terms with the largely unbroken legacies of the war crimes and crimes against humanity that will forever remain the main hallmark especially of Bush the Younger, we find ourselves poised between alternatives whose divergence far transcends the manufactured mythology of Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal.
The two-dimensional flatness inherent in this way of viewing a world composed of three or more dimensions results in the trivialization of democracy as a mere extension of the kind of marketing competition that pits Pepsi against Coke.[vii] The managed and constrained competition in the political arena disguises the vast entitlements of a tiny minority that exercises near monopolistic control over the world’s largest concentrations of wealth as well as over the huge political power that accompanies the concentrated ownership of propertied capital. The impoverishment of genuine pluralism to feed to monopolistic dichotomies of left versus right props up a rigged system that corruptly rewards the masters of spin and deceit even as it tends to discredit those seeking to point humanity towards pathways of justice, equity and self-determination. These high roads of justice and law offer the only reliable routes in the journey towards collective security through shared adherence to a genuine rule of international law enforced uniformly even on those at the very pinnacle of political, military and financial power.
The consequences of not following this high road of justice-- of allowing instead the rule of political expediency to trump the rule of law by failing to identify, arrest, try and punish those most responsible for perpetrating the highest order of international crime—is to continue our descent into an increasingly pervasive state of warfare, chaos and kleptocracy. Those currently overseeing this descent may misrepresent what is really going on with the rhetoric of hope, change and collective empowerment. But without a genuine determination to make law rule prevail over the rule of force we shall continue see our individual and collective rights and freedoms subjected to unbridled militarism, intimidation and gross exploitation of fear’s political economy. Nowhere does the convergence of threats with the tyranny of unregulated violence find fuller expression than in the proliferation of state-sanctioned torture.
Torture, Ethics, Law and the Future of Human Civilization
From the criminal justice system of Spain to the talk show circuit in the United States, the Toronto event is taking place just as the abomination of torture is emerging as an issue of central importance on many juridical and political fronts. The growing chorus of voices insisting on some sort of public reckoning with the horrors inflicted by agents of the US executive branch in the torture chambers of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and a host of other secret dark sites has been long gathering force. As evidenced by the Geneva Conventions and the detailed UN laws devoted to the subject, the crime of torture has engendered an especially old and elaborate body of international jurisprudence as well as a significant political constituency whose members are prone to press hard for its enforcement.
Those who insist on extending the instruments of legal accountability to the commanders and operatives of state-inflicted torture well understand that the descent into this hell of violated human dignity animates whole systems for the institutionalized imposition of abusive and illegitimate power. The proliferation of torture generally signals the sharp deterioration in the quality of the perpetrators’ moral universe. A dereliction of law to pursue the travesty of torture must be understood for all that this consequential shift has to do with the further empowerment of the most powerful at the primary expense of the most disempowered and dispossessed.
The understanding that state-inflicted torture is the persistent hallmark of the most ruthless forms of tyranny has coalesced again and again in the genesis of the international law for the prevention and punishment of torture. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, the civil harmony of France was obliterated as the likes of Henri Alleg, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus helped report and interpret the depravity of officialdom in their resort to torture as an expedient to maintain French imperial rule in Algeria.
In recent weeks the many interventions of Dick Cheney have helped to inflame the debate as the former US Vice-President has commandeered great quantities of air time in his zeal to prevent the type of probing investigations that might very well land him and his cronies in jail. Cheney’s campaign to justify state-inflicted torture as a necessary and evil expedient of the post-9/11 world constitutes a classic case of a former public official protesting too loudly and too belligerently. There is ample reason to suspect that the bravado of this former CEO of Halliburton Corporation is meant to cloak Cheney’s appreciation of his own vulnerability as the official who best epitomizes the unchecked gangersterism that thrived in the dark shadows of George Bush’s White House. The depth of Cheney’s thinly disguised desperation is suggested by his willingness to put his own daughter Liz in harm’s way. The former vice-president has effectively deputized her as his advocate in his dubious campaign to prevent the rule of law from being enforced on his own his actions and those of cronies. The lawlessness of their conduct took place over a eight-year period when Cheney and company were extended virtually unlimited latitude to act in their own self-interest in the name of the US Commander-In-Chief.
The Cheney family’s efforts have probably been a factor in the decision of President Barack Obama to invoke his own executive power to slow the flood of new information coming to light about the scope and extent of US torture perpetrated in the name of the Global War on Terror. Obama’s decision to favour cover up over transparency was underlined in his recent determination to prevent the open dissemination of a number of still-unreleased photos and videos documenting the precise nature of the human rights violations that have taken place in the United States’ own torture chambers and as well as in those of the failing superpower’s well armed puppet regimes. While the current US president has suggested there is nothing new or remarkable in the suppressed images, his reassurances have not put a lid on continuing allegations that the US executive branch is hiding the pictoral record of children in US custody being brutally sodomized in front of their parents.[viii]
The growing controversy over the law and politics surrounding the international crime of torture adds acid to the steady corrosion of the official narrative underlying the so-called Global War on Terror. This process finds especially clear expression in the revelations surrounding the case of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi. As revealed by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief staff of the US State Department under Colin Powell, al-Libi was tortured in Egypt in April and May of 2002, “well before” the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion” on the character and content of torture. The objective of this resort to torture was not to gain information about another terrorist attack on the United States but rather to force the victim to declare a connection between the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and those already blamed for the 9/11 attacks.[ix]
After being constrained in a coffin for seventeen hours and subjected to a “mock burial,” al-Libi finally put a stop to his suffering by uttering the falsehoods that his torturers were sadistically empowered by the White House to extract. Al-Libi told them that the Iraqi government had trained al-Qaeda operatives in biological and chemical warfare. This falsehood emanating from al-Libi’s bloodied and quivering lips provided the basis for the dishonest international representations made by the Bush White House at the United Nations and elsewhere during the winter of 2003 in the run up to the Bush-led invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi has recently turned up dead in a Libyan prison. The Libyan government has made the claim, questioned by many, that the prisoner took his own life.[x]
This episode puts yet another nail in the coffin of the argument that the US government’s resort to illegal torture was all about saving civilians from catastrophe. The al-Libi case demonstrates that torture was embraced by the Bush White House not to save the innocent but rather to produce the fraudulent propaganda deployed to justify military invasions abroad and police-state incursions at home. The failure to identify torture as integral aspect of the lies and crimes entailed in Iraq’s invasion adds to the complicity of the media conglomerates in reporting as truth the Bush government’s lies that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The role of corporate media as enablers and sugar coaters of the highest order of international crime could not be made clearer than in the sponsorship by the Globe and Mail of the Toronto encounter between Clinton and Bush. What credibility does the Globe and Mail retain after the Toronto event in its coverage of the fast breaking story of the global movement to enforce the rule of law on credibly accused war criminal George W. Bush? How likely is it that the journalists at the Globe and Mail will report fairly and objectively on the intervention of Lawyers Against War.
On May 26 LAW responded to news of the Bush-Clinton event by forwarding evidence of Bush’s authorization of torture to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Justice Minister Rob Nicolson, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan and the chief officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In that letter Canada’s top law enforcement officials are informed that the failure to enforce the domestic War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act “violates Canada’s international law obligations.” The lawyers continue, “Such inaction denies remedies to victims, ensures impunity for perpetrators, and encourages other instances of torture.”
The zeal of those at the top echelons of power in the Bush White House to deploy the coercive crime of torture in order fabricate the story of a connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein finds a further possible extension in contested reports about the existence of an executive assassination squad said to have been answerable directly to Dick Cheney. These contested reports point to the possibility that one of the reasons that the Pakistani presidential candidate, Benazir Bhutto, was murdered had to do with her blunt public statement to British broadcaster Sir David Frost that Osama bin Laden has been killed by the double agent Omar Saeed Sheikh.
Regardless of how and why Bhutto was assassinated, her bold and unequivocal assertion in November of 2007 that bin Laden is definitely dead would, if it had been properly reported rather than censored at the source by the BBC, have severely undermined the dark psyops which remain, with the involvement and complicity of the mainstream media, the primary stock in trade of the so-called War on Terror’s main promoters and protagonists. News of bin Laden’s death at the hands of a notorious double agent would not have served the interests of those seeking to build up the US military presence in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Accordingly, regardless of whether or not Bhutto’s elimination was engineered by Cheney’s hit squad or some other covert branch or contractor of the US government, her assassination helped ease the way for the new rounds of aggressive warfare being mounted in the Pakistan’s Swat Valley under the leadership of President Barack Obama.[xi]
Wallowing in an Era of Elite Gangsterism
The organizers and sponsors of the talk given by George W. Bush in Calgary advertised the supposed achievements of their invited guest in a colourful pamphlet distributed to those who had paid the $400 entry fee to hear the former US president. In this document the claim is advanced that Bush built “global coalitions to remove violent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that threatened America—liberating more than 50 million people from tyranny.” This characterization of history, whose sponsors include the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, the Bennet Jones law firm, Ernst and Young as well as the Frank McKenna, the Deputy Chair of the TD Bank, stands as blasphemy especially to the families of the 1.5 million killed in Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 6,000,000 internally or externally displaced Iraqis, and the many millions more who have been maimed, tortured and forever damaged by the violence committed in the name of an implausible and specious official interpretation of what transpired in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
No amount of corporate fluff and propaganda can change the reality that both George Bush and Bill Clinton are both guilty of leading aggressive wars. Their wars were clearly not expressions of self-defense nor were they authorized by the Security Council of the United Nations, the sole agency with the capacity to sanction legal warfare. As belligerents both Clinton and Bush have wallowed in the shame and depravity of the supreme international crime. I draw the language of this accusation from the most important war crimes tribunal ever assembled. In sentencing some of the convicted Nazis the judges at Nuremberg established the principle that “to initiate a war of aggression…. is not only an international crime. It is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”[xii] [my emphasis]
The Nuremberg rulings were refined and distilled in 1950 at the United Nations into principles that point with precision to exactly the kinds of illegal acts that have proliferated in the name of the Global War on Terror. One of the Nuremberg Principles stipulates, “The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as a Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.”
The many international crimes that are already known to have taken place at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay under George W. Bush’s signing authority stand at the proverbial tip of an as-yet-largely-uninvestigated iceberg. Images of the cruel lawlessness that thrived in these violent sites of attempted empire building do not conform well with the wall-to-wall spin doctoring producing the massively replicated lies, distortions and strategic omissions that constitute the mental staple of the media conglomerates at the core of the global infoentertainment industry.
The lawlessness being confronted by Lawyers Against War and many hundreds of other organizations in civil society have nothing to do with the doctrinaire marketing of so-called law and order as regularly glorified in the gutter media by fear’s political merchants. The crimes being addressed, rather, are part of a global epidemic of elite gangersterism that has been allowed to go unchecked in the bombing missions, torture chambers and concentration camps whose governance often leads back to the corporate board rooms where many of the core decisions of the military-industrial complex and the national security state are made.
[i] http://911blogger.com/node/19540
[ii] http://www.peoplevbush.ca/
[iii] Robert Jackson, Nuremberg Trials, Opening Arguments for the United States at
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/Resource/DOCUMENT/DocJac15.htm
[iv] http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/424240.html
[v] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62a53enMtA0
[vi] http://www.splittingthesky.net/
[vii] http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1367260784754864363&ei=lEAcSrGgOIn-qAPzipS5Ag&q=Pepsi+Coke+Pilger&hl=en
[viii] http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/07/15/hersh/index.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/media-ignores-real-controversy-behind-torture-photos-they-show-prison-guards-raping-children.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22684.htm
[ix] Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, “The Ruth About Richard Cheney,” 13 May, 2009, The Washinton Note, at
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/
[x] Peter Finn, “Detainee Who Gave False Iraq Data Dies in Prison in Libya,” The Washington Post, 12 May, 2009 at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html
[xi] http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/digst-fin-and-state-terrorism-may2009.html
[xii] Cited in Toram Dinstein, War, Aggression, and Self-Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 120. The judges were quoting the British jurists Lord Wright [of Dursley], “War Crimes Under International Law,” The Law Review Quarterly, Vol. 62, January, 1946
May 28 National Day of Resistance to U.S. Torture
RELEASE THE PHOTOS TO PREVENT MORE MURDER , RAPE, AND TORTURE of the people of IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN Mr President OBAMA. JAIL THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR TARNISHING THE IMAGE OF YOUR U.S. ARMY. STOP THE MURDER, RAPE and TORTURE NOW! ( P.S. Send Omar Khadr Home to Canada , Mr. President)
by Anthony J. Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge
Paper prepared for a town hall meeting entitled,
“The Public Mythology of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror,”
Jubilee Hall, Walkerton Ontario.
Meeting hosted by Dr. Paul McArthur and the White Rose Café
28 May, 2009
From Calgary to Toronto
Just as fresh revelations keep oozing out about the broad extent of the international criminality perpetrated by the regime of the former US president, Canada is becoming the main site of a corporate-driven effort to re-brand George W. Bush as a legitimate political pundit. On May 29 Mr. Bush joins Bill Clinton on the stage of the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre in an event hosted by the TD Financial Group and several other sponsors. The hosts include the Calgary-based Bennett Jones law firm, the global accounting giant Ernst and Young, the Toronto Board of Trade as well as the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.
The Clinton-Bush gig in Canada’s biggest metropolis is happening about a month after the former president “tested the waters” as a public speaker by addressing an audience of 1,400 executives of mostly Texas-based oil conglomerates in an event hosted by Calgary’s Chamber of Commerce. Bush’s luncheon address was accompanied by the protests of several hundred demonstrators who advanced the case that there is a huge body of evidence already in the public domain that should be sufficient to prohibit Bush from entering Canada or, failing that, to necessitate his arrest on Canadian soil. In a widely published article, which I introduced in early March at an invited lecture at the University of Winnipeg, I outlined the legal and political terrain underlying Bush’s first major public foray outside the United States. That paper, which has proliferated widely on many Internet sites, is entitled “Bush League Justice: Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta and Tried for International Crimes.”[i]
My academic intervention was one part of a larger collective effort aimed at advancing the case that the international crimes of George W. Bush and many of his ministers and advisers have been so obvious and gigantic that citizens must mobilize globally to insist that the rule of international criminal law should be made to prevail over the rule of force and political expediency.[ii] Many of the core legal principles awaiting enforcement are those that coalesced in the course of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Its chief prosecutor, the renowned US jurist Robert Jackson, initiated the proceedings in 1945 by insisting that humanity’s future depended on removing “immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind.” No longer could “so vast an area of legal irresponsibility” be “tolerated” because “because modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men.”[iii]
In advancing the legal conception of universal jurisdiction the Canadian government, like that of many other countries, has internalized many elements of international criminal law into domestic legislation. Invoking key provisions of both the Immigration Act and Canada’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act, Gail Davidson of Lawyers Against War informed Crown Ministers and law enforcement officials prior to the Calgary event that “the former President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, is a person credibly accused of torture and other gross human rights violations, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” A number of other prominent jurists, including Ramsay Clark, former Attorney General of the United States, backed and extended Davidson’s legal intervention.[iv]
Clark’s friend and client, Splitting The Sky, was handed the responsibility of representing the legendary US jurist’s position in the Calgary protests. This prominent Mohawk veteran of the American Indian Movement, the Attica prison debacle of 1971 and British Columbia’s Battle of Gustafsen Lake was charged and briefly jailed in Calgary as a result of his concerted effort to conduct a citizen’s arrest.[v] As Clark’s controversial client will argue in an important trial that has been set to take place in Calgary in March of 2010, citizens have a responsibility to intervene proactively when law enforcement officials refuse to do their duty and thereby end up aiding and abetting criminality.[vi] As the Nuremberg rulings make clear, law enforcement officials cannot evade their own responsibility for aiding and abetting international crimes by claiming that they are simply following orders.
Only days after Bush was in Calgary the very same law laws that were overtly violated in permitting the credibly accused war criminal to enter the country were invoked in barring from entry George Galloway, a long-serving British parliamentarian, an untiring peace activist and one of the world’s most eloquent champions of Palestinian rights. This decision serves to highlight the propensity of Bush’s friend and ally, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to replicate his role model’s zeal in placing himself as well as his Office on the wrong side of the rule of law when it comes to the pursuit of of political objectives.
Left versus Right as a Substitute for
Law versus Criminality, Peace with Justice versus War Without End
The so-called “conversation” between former presidents comes at a time when hundreds of millions of global citizens have developed the view of George W. Bush as the very embodiment of the rampant criminality that has been spewing unchecked and without accountability from the highest echelons of political, military and financial power especially since the explosive events of September 11, 2001. Al Capone’s Chicago was a mere kindergarten of lawlessness compared to the amount of corruption and violence generated on a daily basis primarily by those states and corporations that have become chief protagonists in building up and exploiting the lethal yet lucrative terror economy.
In the eyes of the huge and growing constituency who can no longer stomach the maelstroms of murder and mayhem wrought in our name, the lecture circuit is not the appropriate place for George Bush to tell his side of the story about his actions while controlling the world’s most formidable arsenals of military and psychological warfare. Along with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice, Bush should be presenting his self-justifications as the principle defendant in a properly constituted war crimes tribunal.
The role of Bill Clinton in the Toronto event raises a host of significant issues that should not be evaded. While the former Democratic president enjoys a far rosier public image than that of the discredited Republican president, the reality is that Clinton too is a fugitive from the decrepit and ineffective agencies of international law enforcement. Clinton’s most serious infractions involve his leading role in 1999 in NATO’s illegal bombing of Serbian Yugoslavia, his tightening of the financial and trade embargo on Iraq resulting in the preventable deaths of over half a million children, and his genocidal decisions concerning how and when to intervene or not intervene in the bloody clashes of ethnically-based proxy armies and militias in Central Africa. Now a decade after Clinton helped sabotage the legitimacy of the United Nations by ignoring the Security Council’s jurisdiction in the US-led military dismemberment of multinational Yugoslavia, Hilary Clinton’s husband is lending the cache of his family dynasty to efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of the former Republican president who has made himself one of the most reviled individuals on the planet.
There is something fundamentally perverse in presenting Bush and Clinton on the same Toronto stage as if the main options facing humanity are available within the narrow and flawed framework of the two main political parties in the United States. In trying to come to terms with the largely unbroken legacies of the war crimes and crimes against humanity that will forever remain the main hallmark especially of Bush the Younger, we find ourselves poised between alternatives whose divergence far transcends the manufactured mythology of Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal.
The two-dimensional flatness inherent in this way of viewing a world composed of three or more dimensions results in the trivialization of democracy as a mere extension of the kind of marketing competition that pits Pepsi against Coke.[vii] The managed and constrained competition in the political arena disguises the vast entitlements of a tiny minority that exercises near monopolistic control over the world’s largest concentrations of wealth as well as over the huge political power that accompanies the concentrated ownership of propertied capital. The impoverishment of genuine pluralism to feed to monopolistic dichotomies of left versus right props up a rigged system that corruptly rewards the masters of spin and deceit even as it tends to discredit those seeking to point humanity towards pathways of justice, equity and self-determination. These high roads of justice and law offer the only reliable routes in the journey towards collective security through shared adherence to a genuine rule of international law enforced uniformly even on those at the very pinnacle of political, military and financial power.
The consequences of not following this high road of justice-- of allowing instead the rule of political expediency to trump the rule of law by failing to identify, arrest, try and punish those most responsible for perpetrating the highest order of international crime—is to continue our descent into an increasingly pervasive state of warfare, chaos and kleptocracy. Those currently overseeing this descent may misrepresent what is really going on with the rhetoric of hope, change and collective empowerment. But without a genuine determination to make law rule prevail over the rule of force we shall continue see our individual and collective rights and freedoms subjected to unbridled militarism, intimidation and gross exploitation of fear’s political economy. Nowhere does the convergence of threats with the tyranny of unregulated violence find fuller expression than in the proliferation of state-sanctioned torture.
Torture, Ethics, Law and the Future of Human Civilization
From the criminal justice system of Spain to the talk show circuit in the United States, the Toronto event is taking place just as the abomination of torture is emerging as an issue of central importance on many juridical and political fronts. The growing chorus of voices insisting on some sort of public reckoning with the horrors inflicted by agents of the US executive branch in the torture chambers of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and a host of other secret dark sites has been long gathering force. As evidenced by the Geneva Conventions and the detailed UN laws devoted to the subject, the crime of torture has engendered an especially old and elaborate body of international jurisprudence as well as a significant political constituency whose members are prone to press hard for its enforcement.
Those who insist on extending the instruments of legal accountability to the commanders and operatives of state-inflicted torture well understand that the descent into this hell of violated human dignity animates whole systems for the institutionalized imposition of abusive and illegitimate power. The proliferation of torture generally signals the sharp deterioration in the quality of the perpetrators’ moral universe. A dereliction of law to pursue the travesty of torture must be understood for all that this consequential shift has to do with the further empowerment of the most powerful at the primary expense of the most disempowered and dispossessed.
The understanding that state-inflicted torture is the persistent hallmark of the most ruthless forms of tyranny has coalesced again and again in the genesis of the international law for the prevention and punishment of torture. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, the civil harmony of France was obliterated as the likes of Henri Alleg, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus helped report and interpret the depravity of officialdom in their resort to torture as an expedient to maintain French imperial rule in Algeria.
In recent weeks the many interventions of Dick Cheney have helped to inflame the debate as the former US Vice-President has commandeered great quantities of air time in his zeal to prevent the type of probing investigations that might very well land him and his cronies in jail. Cheney’s campaign to justify state-inflicted torture as a necessary and evil expedient of the post-9/11 world constitutes a classic case of a former public official protesting too loudly and too belligerently. There is ample reason to suspect that the bravado of this former CEO of Halliburton Corporation is meant to cloak Cheney’s appreciation of his own vulnerability as the official who best epitomizes the unchecked gangersterism that thrived in the dark shadows of George Bush’s White House. The depth of Cheney’s thinly disguised desperation is suggested by his willingness to put his own daughter Liz in harm’s way. The former vice-president has effectively deputized her as his advocate in his dubious campaign to prevent the rule of law from being enforced on his own his actions and those of cronies. The lawlessness of their conduct took place over a eight-year period when Cheney and company were extended virtually unlimited latitude to act in their own self-interest in the name of the US Commander-In-Chief.
The Cheney family’s efforts have probably been a factor in the decision of President Barack Obama to invoke his own executive power to slow the flood of new information coming to light about the scope and extent of US torture perpetrated in the name of the Global War on Terror. Obama’s decision to favour cover up over transparency was underlined in his recent determination to prevent the open dissemination of a number of still-unreleased photos and videos documenting the precise nature of the human rights violations that have taken place in the United States’ own torture chambers and as well as in those of the failing superpower’s well armed puppet regimes. While the current US president has suggested there is nothing new or remarkable in the suppressed images, his reassurances have not put a lid on continuing allegations that the US executive branch is hiding the pictoral record of children in US custody being brutally sodomized in front of their parents.[viii]
The growing controversy over the law and politics surrounding the international crime of torture adds acid to the steady corrosion of the official narrative underlying the so-called Global War on Terror. This process finds especially clear expression in the revelations surrounding the case of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi. As revealed by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief staff of the US State Department under Colin Powell, al-Libi was tortured in Egypt in April and May of 2002, “well before” the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion” on the character and content of torture. The objective of this resort to torture was not to gain information about another terrorist attack on the United States but rather to force the victim to declare a connection between the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and those already blamed for the 9/11 attacks.[ix]
After being constrained in a coffin for seventeen hours and subjected to a “mock burial,” al-Libi finally put a stop to his suffering by uttering the falsehoods that his torturers were sadistically empowered by the White House to extract. Al-Libi told them that the Iraqi government had trained al-Qaeda operatives in biological and chemical warfare. This falsehood emanating from al-Libi’s bloodied and quivering lips provided the basis for the dishonest international representations made by the Bush White House at the United Nations and elsewhere during the winter of 2003 in the run up to the Bush-led invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi has recently turned up dead in a Libyan prison. The Libyan government has made the claim, questioned by many, that the prisoner took his own life.[x]
This episode puts yet another nail in the coffin of the argument that the US government’s resort to illegal torture was all about saving civilians from catastrophe. The al-Libi case demonstrates that torture was embraced by the Bush White House not to save the innocent but rather to produce the fraudulent propaganda deployed to justify military invasions abroad and police-state incursions at home. The failure to identify torture as integral aspect of the lies and crimes entailed in Iraq’s invasion adds to the complicity of the media conglomerates in reporting as truth the Bush government’s lies that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The role of corporate media as enablers and sugar coaters of the highest order of international crime could not be made clearer than in the sponsorship by the Globe and Mail of the Toronto encounter between Clinton and Bush. What credibility does the Globe and Mail retain after the Toronto event in its coverage of the fast breaking story of the global movement to enforce the rule of law on credibly accused war criminal George W. Bush? How likely is it that the journalists at the Globe and Mail will report fairly and objectively on the intervention of Lawyers Against War.
On May 26 LAW responded to news of the Bush-Clinton event by forwarding evidence of Bush’s authorization of torture to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Justice Minister Rob Nicolson, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan and the chief officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In that letter Canada’s top law enforcement officials are informed that the failure to enforce the domestic War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act “violates Canada’s international law obligations.” The lawyers continue, “Such inaction denies remedies to victims, ensures impunity for perpetrators, and encourages other instances of torture.”
The zeal of those at the top echelons of power in the Bush White House to deploy the coercive crime of torture in order fabricate the story of a connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein finds a further possible extension in contested reports about the existence of an executive assassination squad said to have been answerable directly to Dick Cheney. These contested reports point to the possibility that one of the reasons that the Pakistani presidential candidate, Benazir Bhutto, was murdered had to do with her blunt public statement to British broadcaster Sir David Frost that Osama bin Laden has been killed by the double agent Omar Saeed Sheikh.
Regardless of how and why Bhutto was assassinated, her bold and unequivocal assertion in November of 2007 that bin Laden is definitely dead would, if it had been properly reported rather than censored at the source by the BBC, have severely undermined the dark psyops which remain, with the involvement and complicity of the mainstream media, the primary stock in trade of the so-called War on Terror’s main promoters and protagonists. News of bin Laden’s death at the hands of a notorious double agent would not have served the interests of those seeking to build up the US military presence in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Accordingly, regardless of whether or not Bhutto’s elimination was engineered by Cheney’s hit squad or some other covert branch or contractor of the US government, her assassination helped ease the way for the new rounds of aggressive warfare being mounted in the Pakistan’s Swat Valley under the leadership of President Barack Obama.[xi]
Wallowing in an Era of Elite Gangsterism
The organizers and sponsors of the talk given by George W. Bush in Calgary advertised the supposed achievements of their invited guest in a colourful pamphlet distributed to those who had paid the $400 entry fee to hear the former US president. In this document the claim is advanced that Bush built “global coalitions to remove violent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that threatened America—liberating more than 50 million people from tyranny.” This characterization of history, whose sponsors include the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, the Bennet Jones law firm, Ernst and Young as well as the Frank McKenna, the Deputy Chair of the TD Bank, stands as blasphemy especially to the families of the 1.5 million killed in Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 6,000,000 internally or externally displaced Iraqis, and the many millions more who have been maimed, tortured and forever damaged by the violence committed in the name of an implausible and specious official interpretation of what transpired in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
No amount of corporate fluff and propaganda can change the reality that both George Bush and Bill Clinton are both guilty of leading aggressive wars. Their wars were clearly not expressions of self-defense nor were they authorized by the Security Council of the United Nations, the sole agency with the capacity to sanction legal warfare. As belligerents both Clinton and Bush have wallowed in the shame and depravity of the supreme international crime. I draw the language of this accusation from the most important war crimes tribunal ever assembled. In sentencing some of the convicted Nazis the judges at Nuremberg established the principle that “to initiate a war of aggression…. is not only an international crime. It is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”[xii] [my emphasis]
The Nuremberg rulings were refined and distilled in 1950 at the United Nations into principles that point with precision to exactly the kinds of illegal acts that have proliferated in the name of the Global War on Terror. One of the Nuremberg Principles stipulates, “The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as a Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.”
The many international crimes that are already known to have taken place at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay under George W. Bush’s signing authority stand at the proverbial tip of an as-yet-largely-uninvestigated iceberg. Images of the cruel lawlessness that thrived in these violent sites of attempted empire building do not conform well with the wall-to-wall spin doctoring producing the massively replicated lies, distortions and strategic omissions that constitute the mental staple of the media conglomerates at the core of the global infoentertainment industry.
The lawlessness being confronted by Lawyers Against War and many hundreds of other organizations in civil society have nothing to do with the doctrinaire marketing of so-called law and order as regularly glorified in the gutter media by fear’s political merchants. The crimes being addressed, rather, are part of a global epidemic of elite gangersterism that has been allowed to go unchecked in the bombing missions, torture chambers and concentration camps whose governance often leads back to the corporate board rooms where many of the core decisions of the military-industrial complex and the national security state are made.
[i] http://911blogger.com/node/19540
[ii] http://www.peoplevbush.ca/
[iii] Robert Jackson, Nuremberg Trials, Opening Arguments for the United States at
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/Resource/DOCUMENT/DocJac15.htm
[iv] http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/424240.html
[v] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62a53enMtA0
[vi] http://www.splittingthesky.net/
[vii] http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1367260784754864363&ei=lEAcSrGgOIn-qAPzipS5Ag&q=Pepsi+Coke+Pilger&hl=en
[viii] http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/07/15/hersh/index.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/media-ignores-real-controversy-behind-torture-photos-they-show-prison-guards-raping-children.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22684.htm
[ix] Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, “The Ruth About Richard Cheney,” 13 May, 2009, The Washinton Note, at
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/
[x] Peter Finn, “Detainee Who Gave False Iraq Data Dies in Prison in Libya,” The Washington Post, 12 May, 2009 at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html
[xi] http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/digst-fin-and-state-terrorism-may2009.html
[xii] Cited in Toram Dinstein, War, Aggression, and Self-Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 120. The judges were quoting the British jurists Lord Wright [of Dursley], “War Crimes Under International Law,” The Law Review Quarterly, Vol. 62, January, 1946
May 28 National Day of Resistance to U.S. Torture
RELEASE THE PHOTOS TO PREVENT MORE MURDER , RAPE, AND TORTURE of the people of IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN Mr President OBAMA. JAIL THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR TARNISHING THE IMAGE OF YOUR U.S. ARMY. STOP THE MURDER, RAPE and TORTURE NOW! ( P.S. Send Omar Khadr Home to Canada , Mr. President)
9/11 Truth Movement Continues to Ask Questions: By Anna Reitman
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Barrie Zwicker (Left) and Captain Bruce Sinclair of Pilots for 9/11 Truth,
Key speakers at the Edmonton Questions 9/11 Coference that was held May 2, 2009 . Picture: Richard D. Brinkman
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9/11 Truth Movement Continues to Ask Questions
Conference Informs Public About Inconsistencies
of Official Stories
By Anna Reitman May 22, 2009
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has made numerous appearances publicly justifying approved policies of torture and other human rights violations. Speaking on May 21, 2009 at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization, Cheney was quoted by McClatchy Newspapers as stating that, in assessing the security environment after 9/11, the Bush team had to take into account "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists."
That is where the 9/11 Truth Movement comes in.
Complete Story: http://war-crimes.suite101.com/article.cfm/911_truth_movement_continues_to_ask_questions © Anna
Complete details of the " Edmonton Questions 9/11" Conference http://www.edmonton911.com/index.html
You-tube's covering this conference soon to be released.
Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World
Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World
Blog: Peacealliancewinnipeg
Panelists
Lesley Hughes, Moderator: Lesley is a well-known journalist and broadcaster with a long history of community activism in Winnipeg. A recipient of the YMCA-YWCA Woman of Distinction award, Leslie is author of We Chose Canada, a columnist for Canadian Dimension magazine and host of Alert Radio.
Colleen Simard: Colleen is a filmmaker, a columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and founder and publisher of Urban NDN – a newspaper she founded in 2008 that offers a fresh journalistic voice from, for and about Aboriginal people in Winnipeg.
Michael Welch: Michael is a peace activist who has shown leadership in organizing support in Winnipeg for American war resisters who are fighting deportation to the United States. He is active in Citizens Concerned About Deep Integration and Peace Alliance Winnipeg and is the local chapter contact for the Council of Canadians.
Shahina Siddiqui: Shahina is Executive Director of the Islamic Social Services Association - Canada, and a frequent commentator on Islamic and human rights issues in Canada and the United States. She sits on the Advisory Board of CAIR-CAN, the Canadian branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and principal author of Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage.
Anthony J. Hall: Anthony is founding co-ordinator and professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge and author of The American Empire and the Fourth World, which Naomi Klein has described as “an overflowing tool box, filled with little-known stories, legal arguments, and fresh ideas that, if used properly, could change the world.”
YOU TUBE Presentations:
(Introductions)Defending Human Rights in a Post 9/11 World Part 01/12
(Michael Welch)Defending Human Rights in a Post 9/11 World Part 02/12
(Lesley Hughes)Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World Part 03/12
(Colleen Simard)Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World Part 04/12
(Shahina Siddiqui)Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World Part 05/12
(Anthony J. Hall)Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World Part 06/12
OPEN DISCUSION 7-12
Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World Part 07/12
Defending Human Rights in a Post 9/11 World Part 08/12
Defending Human Rights in a Post-9/11 World Part 09/12
Defending Human Rights in a post 9/11 World Part 10/12
BUSH LEAGUE JUSTICE
BUSH LEAGUE JUSTICE:
Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta
To Be Tried For International Crimes?
by
Anthony J. Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge
For presentation as the annual distinguished lecture sponsored by the Sociology Department of the University of Winnipeg, 6 March, 2009
George W. Bush and Omar al-Bashir
Serious allegations of criminality are swirling around ex-US President George W. Bush and current Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. In late February of 2009 it was reported that the Hague-based International Criminal Court was preparing to issue a warrant for al-Bashir alleging his culpability for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. As the documents were being prepared against Sudan’s head of state, ex-President Bush was preparing to initiate a series of high-paying speaking engagements beginning in Calgary Alberta on March 17. Bush’s visit to Alberta’s oil capital tests the consistency and authenticity of the Canadian government’s "unequivocal" position that "Canada is not and will not become a safe haven for persons involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity or other reprehensible acts."acts.”1
The contrast between the treatment afforded Bush and al-Bashir was inadvertently highlighted by Geoffrey York, a colleague with whom I conferred frequently when we were both reporting regularly in The Globe and Mail about two decades ago on the surprising twists that repeatedly made Aboriginal Affairs in Manitoba a major source of national news. York introduced his story on the charges against al-Bashir by writing, “For the first time in history, an international criminal court is set to issue an arrest warrant for the leader of a country, accusing him of orchestrating a campaign of murder, torture and rape.” The reporter anticipated that the ICC’s initiative “will be hailed by many as a sign that nobody is above the law.”2
The striking contrast between the treatment of al-Bashir and Bush serves to clarify the division of the world’s criminals and suspected criminals into two major categories, one inhabited by a small elite that is essentially above the law and the other populated by figures not rich or influential enough to gain exemptions from the law’s coercive force. It is not without a sense of irony that I arrive at this conclusion. On the one hand the ICC’s decision to press charges against al-Bashir, as well as to initiate in January of 2009 a full-fledged trial against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, signals a major transformation in the career of the ICC.3 It indicates that the court is no longer a mere vehicle for the empty expression of lofty idealism but rather a site of real engagement aimed at subjugating the rule of murder, mayhem and intimidation to the higher authority of law.
On the other hand by pointing its initial surge of juridical activism at the local criminality of individuals in those afflicted regions of Africa where resource cartels and their client regimes often dominate, the ICC has called attention to the West’s hypocrisy in shielding its own war lords and war profiteers in the military-industrial complex from any legal accountability for the violent acts its operatives, many of them in the so-called private sector, regularly plan, instigate, finance, arm, facilitate, commit and exploit.4 Indeed, the double standard promoted by the ICC in the choice of its targets for prosecution replicates in the international arena much of the duplicity of the criminal justice system in the United States.
As starkly demonstrated by the scandalously high and inequitable proportion of Blacks warehoused in the failing superpower’s privatized jails, law-enforcement officials there obviously shower a disproportionately high amount of their energy on criminalizing poor African-Americans leaving those predominately fair-skinned inhabitants of suburbia and the more rarified enclaves of extreme wealth outside the orbit of their most concerted attention. Will the new global enforcers of international law limit themselves to prosecuting gang leaders in the continental ghetto of Africa while conveniently looking the other way when it comes to more comprehensive global networks of cartelized criminality headquartered in North America, Europe, Israel, and, increasingly, China, India and Russia as well.5
While Omar al-Bashir is far from a household name, George Bush is one of the most well known people in the world. Indeed, throughout the eight years of his disastrous presidency, Bush managed to make himself into one of the most reviled individuals on the planet. He is widely disliked for his policies as well as for the assorted war hawks, corporate privateers, lying propagandists, evangelical zealots, loan sharks, torture freaks, and psycho cops and generals who formed the ex-president’s inner circle. A significant component of global public opinion sees this discredited man as the embodiment of something far worse than terrible leadership. They see the forty-third US head of state as an abusive lawbreaker. Indeed, many rightfully see Bush as a pathological deviant who harboured the delusional fantasy that the power of his office gave him unlimited global power to authorize his national forces, proxy armies and mercenary operatives to commit the most grave onslaughts of mass murder, disappearances and torture on a genocidal scale.
This widespread belief is informed by the large and growing body of legal scholarship using evidence already on the public sphere to make the case that George Bush and his underlings have violated many domestic and international laws, including the Geneva Conventions and UN instruments prohibiting torture. Philippe Sands, Francis Boyle and Osgood Hall Law School Professor Michael Mandel have been prominent among the international jurists who have developed the legal case that George Bush and his war cabinet have transgressed the law of nations on many, many counts.6 Indeed, the line up is long of jurists seeking to bring the ex-US president to justice. With his recent book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vincent Bugliosi, the former prosecutor of Charles Manson, adds his voice to a crowded field.7
Given the depth and extent of the documentation already assembled to indict Bush and many of his top lieutenants for domestic and international crimes, the ex-president’s ability to cross international borders and address audiences in places like Calgary stands as an indicator of the juridical malaise of our law-enforcement agencies. Is the role of these agencies primarily to protect the property and prestige of the rich from the incursions of the marginalized and dispossessed? Isn’t law a mere fiction if it can’t restrain the exploitative application of violence to entrench privilege and intimidate dissent? Will officials of the Crown in Canada or public prosecutors in other countries rise to a higher standard in order to demonstrate their respect for the power of law as a force of equalization applying uniformly to president and pauper, native and settler, white and black? How can we transcend the mean and frequently racist codes contained in the rhetoric of law and order in order to rise to the high standards required by adherence to the rule of law?
Will truth ever be given its day in court in trials calling not only Bush, but also Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condollezza Rice and others to account for their decisions and actions in supervising aggressive wars. As key strategists, lobbyists, and propagandists for the oil, armaments and mercenary industries, most of these figures helped to plan through the Project for the New American Century the our current privatized terror economy and the pseudo-justifications for so-called “preemptive wars.”8 It was PNAC that announced a year before 9/11 the need for “a new Pearl Harbor” in order to produce the necessary climate of public hysteria to achieve its sponsors’ objectives. The most ambitious of these was to create a pretext in order to seize control of oil resources in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.9
Imagining the Rule of Law Internationally and Globally
For several generations the principle has been developing that all the world’s peoples and governments must recognize our shared interest in expressing forms of universal jurisdiction when it comes to dealing with the highest order of criminality. On his return from Africa in 1890 George Washington Williams, a Black missionary from the United States, helped point subsequent legal thought in this direction. As Williams reached for words evocative enough to describe the appalling scope of the violations of human rights he had just witnessed in King Leopold’s so-called Congo Free State, the commentator came up with the expression “crimes against humanity.”10 In 1944 a Polish Jew who had escaped the Nazi horror in Europe drew on his experience and scholarship to enhance the vocabulary of international crime. Raphael Lemkin invented the word, “genocide,” to advance the project of trying to deal with crimes so severe that they undermine the wellbeing of the entire human family.11 In the world Lemkin sought to bring about there could be no immunity, no safe refuge, for those involved in the elimination of religious, ethnic and racial groups through industrialized murder and also through the assimilative machinery of cultural genocide. Lemkin was instrumental in helping the delegations at the United Nations to entrench in 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Prohibition of the Crime of Genocide. This basic pillar of international law was not adopted by the United States until 1989.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the US government emerged briefly as the world’s foremost champion of the principle that those who commit the highest order of international crime must be held accountable as individuals. This brief convergence of pragmatism and idealism was channeled into the juridical processes at Nuremberg and Tokyo where some of the leadership of the defeated Axis powers were judged before international military tribunals. In outlining his objectives to US President Harry Truman, Robert Jackson, the US government’s chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, explained that the time had come to remove any doubt “that aggressive war making is illegal and criminal.” In his view such activity, including campaigns to “exterminate, enslave and deport civilians,” constituted “international crimes” for which “individuals are responsible.”12 In introducing his case before the judges Jackson returned to the importance of moving beyond all the old lines of argument that have provided “immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind.” No longer could “so vast an area of legal irresponsibility” be “tolerated” because “because modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men.”13
Some of the strongest language used by the Nuremberg judges in the sentencing of the convicted Nazis stipulated that “to initiate a war of aggression…. is not only an international crime. It is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”14 [my emphasis] The Nuremberg rulings were refined and distilled in 1950 at the United Nations into principles that point with precision at exactly the kinds of illegal acts known to have taken place at, for instance, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay under George W. Bush’s watch as US president. The Nuremberg Principles divide international criminality into three categories, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. One of the Nuremberg Principles stipulates, “The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as a Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.”
Although the International Criminal Court is a brand new addition to the juridical infrastructure of international criminal law, its draws on hopes, ideals and traditions that have deep roots in many societies’ quest for justice. With all its problems and shortcomings the ICC at it best embodies an attempt to put into action many of humanity’s most stirring proclamations announcing the equal dignity of every human life as articulated in the inspirational language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The ICC worked its way from a UN study to a full-fledged treaty transacted in Rome in 1998.15 The court acquired institutional form in 2002.16 Currently there are 108 state members of the court, including Canada, with 40 states moving towards full ratification of the Rome Statute.
The governments of Russia, India and China oppose the court. President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Treaty on behalf of his government but President Bush nullified his predecessor’s signature in 2002 as part of his sweeping and many-faceted efforts to withdraw the United States from many multilateral agreements. Is the ICC the best hope for the future or has the abject failure of states so far to uphold and enforce the rule of law internationally taken us to the stage where humanity must try something else. Are we reaching the point in the evolution of the global community where it is becoming thinkable, or maybe even necessary, to begin putting in place the structures of a truly global court whose officials would draw their jurisdiction to arbitrate and enforce international criminal law from some form of globalized expression of shared human citizenship?
Calgary and Congo
There is much more than immediately meets the eye in the George Bush’s decision to accept an invitation to address an audience of business executives assembled by Calgary’s Chamber of Commerce. According to David Taras, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, there is considerable behind-the-scenes strategy in the decision to have the former US president begin the process of attempting to rehabilitate his public image in this “very conservative and pro-American” urban centre.17 Some have dubbed Calgary Houston North, a nickname that does suggest much about the town’s real character. Calgary is indeed a virtual colony of Houston and Dallas economically, and, to some extent, politically and culturally as well. A high pro portion of its inhabitants have either immigrated from Texas or they have relatives who made the northward trek from Governor Bush’s old stomping grounds. Calgary forms the political base and home constituency of Canada’s current minority government leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In 2001 Harper and some of his closest advisors put their provincialist biases on full display when they advocated the raising of a “firewall” around Alberta to isolate Oil Patch and its agencies from the constitutional authority of the Canada’s national government.18
Over the last eight years Harper has acted more or less like the main franchise holder of the Bush brand of governance in Canada. As leader of the opposition Harper actually chastised Prime Minister Jean Chretien for not committing Canadian troops to take part in the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Harper worked closely with the former premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein, in opposing the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. Both delivered the political talking points developed by the global PR firm, Burson-Marsteller. Burson-Marsteller’s Calgarian arm is National Public Relations whose “green PR” has included the creation of front organizations such as the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions.19
David Frum has been one of the most striking operatives and embodiments of the axis of ideology that linked Alberta to the ideas and personnel of the Bush White House. Before Frum became one of the chief propagandists for George Bush’s War on Terror, this icon of neoconservatism helped earn his spurs by contributing to Ted Byfield’s evangelical-libertarian magazine, Alberta Report.20 Frum is widely lionized on the right for having helped to renew Ronald Reagan’s condemnation of the “evil empire” by coming up with the phrase, “axis of evil.” George Bush famously included Frum’s contribution to the propaganda of aggressive warfare in the president’s State of the Union address in January of 2002.
Many forces of history, therefore, converge in how Bush is received by immigration and justice department officials when he touches down at Calgary’s International Airport. On February 23, 2009 an organization entitled Lawyers Against War served notice to the relevant officials, including Prime Minister Harper and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, that “George W. Bush, former President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, is a person credibly accused of torture and other gross human rights violations, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” With reference to very specific sections of Canada’s Immigration Act and its Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, the jurists spelt out why Bush should not be allowed to enter the country. They continue by explaining that if Bush is allowed to enter the country then he should be arrested by Canadian police officers. In support of these contentions the jurists cite many evidentiary sources including an internal report of the U.S. Army completed in June of 2008 by Major General Antonio Taguba. They also cite some of the conclusions reached in February of 2009 by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak. This UN official writes,
We possess all the evidence which proves that the torture methods used in interrogation by the U.S. government were specifically ordered by former U.S. Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld…. Obviously these orders were given with the highest U.S. authorities’ knowledge.21
There are many Canadian facets to the global proliferation of torture, illegal renditions, wrongful incarcerations, denials of due process and other gross human rights violations that in most cases involve George Bush’s White House in one way or another. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service are all implicated along with branches of the US government in the events that led to the jailing and torture in Syria of Canadian citizens Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmed El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.22 The state terror heaped on these individuals forms one small part of the transnational regime of lawlessness resulting from the US president’s illegal assertion of worldwide jurisdiction over anyone, anywhere branded by the US executive branch as an unlawful enemy combatants. The term, “unlawful enemy combatant,” is a phrase of obfuscation invented by George Bush’s advisers as a linguistic device to help facilitate the US government’s rogue attempt to evade the jurisdiction of international law or even its own prior laws.
Michael Keefer at the University of Guelph has carefully investigated the Harper government’s zeal to replicate George W. Bush’s strategy for inflating the national security state’s role by trumping up Canadian public hysteria about the supposed existence of a home-grown Islamic terror cell in the Greater Toronto Area. Keefer has documented how the RCMP used paid “moles” who received many millions of dollars to manufacture a fiasco of “evaporating charges.” The case basically “imploded” after the RCMP created the political conditions for Prime Minister Harper’s sound bite in 2006 giving the Canadian version of George Bush’s hallucinatory theories on Islam’s imagined “hatred” of the West’s freedoms.23 The debacle was severe enough probably to destroy many of the life chances of several traumatized young people in spite of the fact that they walked away from court with their charges stayed. In Keefer’s view the whole sorry episode was essentially “a propaganda operation concocted to shore up the fraudulent post-911 psyop of the War on Terror.”24
The role of the Canadian and US governments as partners in gross violations of human rights and international law meets most seamlessly in the case of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr. Khadr was a fifteen year old child soldier in Afghanistan when US forces picked up him up after a violent incident during which the boy was wounded twice. Soon after that contested episode Khadr was moved to the notorious Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has used the case to advertise his willingness to subordinate Canadian sovereignty to the culture of military rule in George Bush’s America. Unlike the leaders of other Western countries who intervened successfully to remove their citizens from Guantanamo, Harper has made a point of not asking US authorities to return Khadr to his country of birth.
The Canadian General and UN peacekeeper Romeo Dallaire has commented on the significance of the Khadr case as a precedent-setting display of both the Canadian and US governments’ decisions not to adhere to international laws prohibiting the prosecution of child soldiers. Dallaire has written, “We are permitting the United States to try a Canadian child soldier using a military tribunal whose procedures violate basic principles of justice.” The General pointed to “incontrovertible evidence of US malfeasance,” of officials’ “alteration” of documentary evidence in the case, and of various forms of abuse heaped on Khadr including threats of “rape and death.” In the Khadr case, Dallaire charges, the Canadian government is “abetting an affront to human rights and international law.”25
The contempt shown for all recognized principles of US and international law at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib will almost certainly be seen for generations to come as defining markers of the infamy of George W. Bush’s two-term presidency. A number of military jurists have resigned from Guantanamo’s staff in disgust, including chief prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis. A more recent whistler blower is ex-prosecutor Lieutenant-Colonel Darrel Vandeveld. As reported in The Globe and Mail on March 2 of 2009, Vandeveld has condemned the “sadistic mistreatment,” the “gross abuse,” and “sham” justice extended to Khadr and the other inmates in the “cluttered mess” of Guantanamo. It is the “the gulag of our time” declared Amnesty International.26 “I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Americans could do this,” said Vandeveld in anticipation of testimony he may very well be called upon to give in a domestic or international court of law.27
The ongoing persecution in a US gulag of a young man first apprehended when he was a child soldier casts a weird and telling shadow over the ICC’s concurrent prosecution at the Hague of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. Lubanga has been accused of recruiting and deploying child soldiers in the eastern Congo. Many US and Canadian mining companies are prominent among the corporate entities from North America, Europe, and South Africa that are helping to fuel the conflicts where child soldiers are regularly deployed. Child soldiers continue to be included among those on the delivering and receiving end of the mass slaughter and mayhem in a zone that has given rise to by far the biggest genocide since the Second World War.28
Through their joint position on the Omar Khadr case George Bush and Stephen Harper have transgressed the same complex of international law that Lubanga now stands accused of violating? As we approach the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade what more telling proof could there be of the lawlessness cultivated at the highest levels of our governments? What is to be said when an ex-US president, a current Canadian Prime Minister and a Congolese warlord can all be accused of similar contempt for the international laws prohibiting the recruitment and prosecution of child soldiers?
Taking on the 9/11 Cover Up
It is not hard to imagine the main arguments for the defense, if and when George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others of their ilk face their accusers in a proper court of law. At its base their defense would almost certainly lie in their contention that their country had been attacked in 2001 by an external enemy using tactics were so audacious and unexpected that the Islamic terrorists were able to penetrate the entire military-industrial complex as well as the huge national security apparatus. From this basis of interpretation the defense lawyers would argue that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as all attending actions including those that have taken place in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, are not be understood as elements of aggressive war. They should not be seen as part of a coordinated plan of military aggression that the Nuremberg judges decided long ago constitutes “the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Following from this line of argument the defense lawyers would assert that everything done on the righteous and civilized side of the War on Terror should not be interpreted as aggressive war. Rather these actions should be viewed as necessary self-defense, or, perhaps as preemptive precautionary actions undertaken with the hope of saving innocent civilians from the violent threat of Islamic extremists. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are all bombarded with the signal that we have good reason to fear the savage terrorists, a message carefully crafted by practitioners of so-called perceptions management to cast constant suspicion on the entire Muslim and Arab worlds. Indeed, the War on Terror’s public mythology forms the most essential element of the terror economy that has fuelled the tremendous growth of the military-industrial complex during George W. Bush’s time as US president. The old enemy in the Cold War was no more, so a new enemy was required. Enterprises such as Eric Prince’s Blackwater mercenary soldier corporation have been able to prosper in even a more privatized mould than was the case during the capitalist jihad on the Soviet evil empire.29
In cross-examining the line of testimony citing 9/11 as the major justification for actions that have been done in the War on Terror’s name, a prosecutor might challenge Bush and the others in the following manner. She or he might ask about specific US officials whose negligence and/or incompetence supposedly led to the breakdowns that allowed the terrorists to hit their well protected targets on 9/11. The prosecutor might seek clarification about what happened to those officials whose malfeasance and mistakes caused such unprecedented failures of, for instance, intelligence, counterintelligence, airport security, air defense and the enforcement of immigration law. Had any incompetent officials been fired? Had any been reprimanded? Had anyone resigned? The accused answers “no.” The prosecutor responds, “Why not?”
If the mass murder and mayhem of 9/11 is attributed to a massive failure of national security, why hasn’t anyone taken or been given specific responsibility for precise elements of the supposed breakdown? And what of George W. Bush’s own responsibility for the debacle? Why did the President himself not take immediate charge of the crisis by going to Washington instead of fleeing in Air Force One into the American Mid-West leaving Richard Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, in charge in the bunker under the White House during the fateful morning of September 11, 2001?
The most serious failures connected to the events of 9/11 are not those of US intelligence agencies, airport security services, NORAD and the like. Rather the deepest and darkest of the failures to protect us for those enemies that menace us most lie with journalists, mainstream media outlets, professors and the universities that employ us. It is we who have in the vast majority of cases chosen to abandon our skepticism and with it our professional ethics and responsibilities. By and large our professional class and caste continue to respond to the events of 9/11 in ways that are expedient rather than wise. As I see it, therefore, it is a mass treason of the intellectuals that constitutes the most significant underlying condition resulting in the continuing fraud known as the War on Terror. The War on Terror continues to be packaged, promoted and sold to the public in the most aggressive campaign of psychological warfare ever mounted. How many of us are complicit with our silence in this black psyop, the key enabling factor in the ongoing aggressive wars justified in the name of an unfounded and unproven official conspiracy theory of 9/11?
It is not my intention here and now to deconstruct the lies and crimes of Bush’s White House and, more recently, President Obama’s White House in the covering up key elements of the truth of what happened on the morning of September 11, 2001. I have attempted such a deconstruction elsewhere, but not nearly as exhaustively, comprehensibly and expertly as others have done.30 I could mention many dozens, if not hundreds, of solid scholarly contributions putting together from partial evidence the minute specifics detailing what probably and certainly happened, as well as what absolutely didn’t happen, on that bright, late summer morning in 2001.31 Those many contributions are by and large in the public domain and can easily be accessed in this era of Google and You Tube.
While many have moved the markers in the understanding of those engaged in the quest for 9/11 truth, the contributions of one particular scholar stand out for their remarkable combination of scope, precision and detail. I believe I speak for many colleagues who share a broad consensus that the theological professor, David Ray Griffin, has more than earned the title of the Dean of the so-called 9/11 truth movement. I defy anyone to read even a portion of Griffin’s small library of books and articles written on various aspects of 9/11 and not develop utter contempt for the official conspiracy theory. Given what Griffin and others have already publish there is no remaining shred of credibility left to the notion that the hit on the Pentagon together with the pulverization of three steel-frame World Trade Center towers was caused simply by a handful of Saudis armed only with box cutters, a smattering of flight training and intense jihadist zeal.32
A more recent entry into the most professionalized branch of 9/11 Studies is the indefatigable Richard Gage, the founder and guiding light of the 600 member strong Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.33 Gage has assembled and popularized a great mass of technical study that has removed all basis for reasonable doubt that it was controlled demolitions rather than jet crashes, kerosene fires and the force of gravity that brought down all three of the mighty steel-frame towers. All of them hurtled into their footprint at the speed of free fall.
Recently I have explored carefully the deep scholarship on abundant display in Canadian Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11: Wealth Empire and the Future of America. This peer-reviewed book is published at Berkeley by the University of California Press. In it Scott draws on decades of investigation into the intertwined workings of oil companies, drug cartels, counterintelligence operations, banking regimes and politics in an account that exposes the decades of close collaboration between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld culminating in their strange appearances and disappearances on and around 9/11. Like the work of Nafeez Mossaddeq Ahmed, Scott’s text presents much evidence to demonstrate that the boogey man of al-Qaeda has since its inception in the CIA-ISI-sponsored mujahadeen been internally involved in the workings of the national security state.34 Starting as key players in the financial transactions of the now-defunct Lahore-based Bank of Credit and Commerce, the cast of characters assigned to perform roles in al Qaeda’s career have helped advance the process of transforming terrorism into a business and political opportunity for the many merchandisers of fear. I particularly recommend chapter 10 of Scott’s book. It is entitled “al Qaeda and the U.S. Establishment.” The chapter’s subheadings include phrases like “U.S. Operatives, Oil Companies and al Qaeda,” “U.S. Operatives and al Qaeda in Azerbaijan,” “Unocal, the Taliban, and bin Laden in Afghanistan,” “al Qaeda, the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Trans-Balkan Pipeline,” “al Qaeda and the Petroleum-Military-Financial Complex.”
I could end by making a plea for a parliamentary investigation in Canada into the veracity of the interpretation of 9/11 that continues to put our soldiers in Afghanistan in harms way. I could end by pointing to the journalistic failures of our own CBC or to the propaganda for aggressive war that has proliferated especially in the commercial media.35 As revealed in the post-Watergate investigations into the CIA, hired “assets” in the mainstream media have long been used by the national security state to propagate spin and disinformation campaigns whose real agenda is to improve the business opportunities for the likes of the Bush family dynasty of war profiteers.36 I could illustrate some of my contentions by pointing to the ridiculous histrionics particularly of all the Can West Global venues, but especially The National Post. I’ll quote the headline of a piece where anonymous bloggers are given a large amount of space in the newspaper to attack my work. What else are the NP’s headline writers doing by “Taking on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists” other than fending off challenges to the War on Terror’s public mythology?37
There are many ways I could conclude but I choose actually to bring this essay to a close with a few thoughts on George Bush, international law, and Naomi Klein’s remarkably well received book entitled, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Through the lens of her Keynesian interpretations, Klein surveys many of the world’s countries over the last several decades. In doing so she presents a very compelling case that the modest redistributive programs that were once incorporated into national economies and the global economy have by and large not survived the incursions of “disaster capitalism.” Our material relations have been subjected to repeated shocks of hyperprivatization during periods when we have been most vulnerable to the disorienting effects of manufactured or naturally induced trauma.
As the author acknowledges in her text, the events of 9/11 form the classic example for the central thesis of her work. The shocking imagery of the collapsing towers created the pretext for the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent rush by the Bush regime to exploit what Klein call the “market for terrorism.” Iraq was to be remade as a prototype to demonstrate that “the job of the state [is] not to provide security but to purchase it at market prices.” Moreover the violence in Iraq helped stimulate the culture of fear and loathing in North America supporting the rise of what Klein dubs “the homeland security industry.38
Like most authors who write about the War on Terror, Klein tip toes around the actual events of 9/11 so she can arrive unscathed at safer professional ground. For her this safer zone of more camera-ready interpretation involve documenting how Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and the other architect and engineers of the privatized terror economy exploited 9/11 to advance their agenda. As she whizzes by the subject of what actually happened on the day of the Great Shock, Klein bows to the mantra of “the security failures of 9/11.”39 Klein then takes her readers with her on her highly original and important economic analysis of the War on Terror’s ground zero of Iraq.
I think I understand the basis of Naomi’s journalistic decision. I see it as a necessary tradeoff if she wanted to have a hope of expanding the tremendously useful work she does on mainstream media in Canada and the United States as well as with budding young activists around the world. But my best guess is that Klein is too well informed not to be suspicious of the Bush regime’s “security failure” meme on 9/11. If my hunch is true, what does it say about how bad the climate of paranoia has become when even Naomi Klein is self-censoring rather than taking the risk of joining the marginalized “conspiracy theorists” whose local ranks in Winnipeg include a disqualified Liberal candidate here with us today? Is Klein’s adherence to the taboos of 9/11 similar to that of Noam Chomsky and the producers of otherwise progressive media at, for instance, ZMag, the Nation, and Democracy Now? Or is Barrie Zwicker right when he argues there are more malevolent forces involved that repeat in the context of the so-called War on Terror the Cold War techniques of disinformation and psyops?40
President Obama’s rhetoric of hope and change will not transcend the hate talk and hate crimes that will continue to proliferate as long as the public’s gaze is averted from the truth of the event whose content has been misrepresented to justify the international crimes that continue to be perpetrated in the War on Terror’s name. Until that fraud is exposed the obscenity will likely continue of George Bush moving across international borders to give highly-paid motivational speeches. Nevertheless we shall endeavour to do what we can on March 17 to draw the line by making the former US president’s visit to Calgary the test case on whether we are governed by the rule of law or the rule of disinformation, cronyism and military muscle.
Open letter to all registered Canadian federal politicians and candidates, and the Canadian media,
This letter is a bit lengthy, but I feel it necessary to include as much of a base of sources as possible to show these matters are not “conspiracy theories,” but facts. Hard and tender truths that all citizens have a right to know.If these are “conspiracy theories,” I challenge those who refute the evidence I present here to provide their own evidence ((without (fear—psyops) propaganda and spin)) that the evidence from the sources I give is wrong. Just the legitimate well-researched, unbiased facts, please!
There are two very crucial issues that I have not heard being put forth as election issues. The overarching items—that encompass most other issues that are important to Canadian citizens who care about a “life economy” rather than the “market economy”—to be dealt with here in Canada are an independent Canadian investigation into September 11, 2001, and the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership/NAU, and by extension TILMA, and a trade deal with the EU—that won’t be discussed until “after the election.”) I have not seen them listed with the other election items for any of the “recognized” political parties here in Canada, or heard about them in the media election coverage, and wasn't sure if they were simply forgotten or they are something that's not on the election table.
In October 2007, Stephane Dion said, at a town hall meeting here in Edmonton, Alberta that we were not in Afghanistan in retribution for the attacks of 9/11, and that somehow we are peacekeeping in this war of aggression, which conflicts with the official government account of why we are there. The “official” account of why we are there, according to then-Defense Minister Gordon O’Connor in an interview in Edmonton in January 2007, is that Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan is in "retribution" for the Canadian lives lost on 9/11. Yet there has been no investigation by the Canadian government to show why our troops, their families with their losses of husbands, brothers, fathers and sons, wives, sisters, mothers and daughters, the Afghani and Iraqi civilians, as well as our civil liberties and human rights are being sacrificed in the lie of “The War On Terror.” SEE VIDEO: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ29MwQk_gU
Unfortunately, Mr. Dion failed to address the issue further.
I am very concerned regarding 9/11, and the anomalies that occurred that day, and Canada's involvement in Afghanistan in "retribution" for the Canadian lives lost on September 11, 2001.
Why has Canada not investigated the Canadian's deaths from that day? In 7 years??!!!!
It took the US 441 days before they started their investigation, only because the Jersey Girls made them—with their relentless pursuit of the truth—and then the US Administration tried to appoint a questionable rogue (Kissinger-to loud outcry) to head the 9/11 Commission. (Reminiscent of the Warren Commission?) When the report came out it simply did not answer many questions and distorted many others. Where were our politicians then? It was after all the "official report," and did our parliamentarians not read this report? Did they have "no comment?" There were 24 Canadian deaths after all.
Why haven't any of our big party (the ones that make the news) politicians asked for an investigation?
Why have our politicians turned a blind eye to this matter and went along with George Bush, Dick Cheney et al. and an illegal invasion and occupation? Not only in one, but in TWO countries. (Yes, we are in Iraq in a big way (see this link: http://coat.ncf.ca/articles/Canada_Iraq.htm ) and not necessarily with only troops (special) on the ground. Canada is supplying a lot to the war in Iraq, even though we've been told we are not in Iraq, as quoted by Paul Martin--he also said we're not participating in BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense), even though Canada's been involved for quite a few years and the major parties are not saying anything about these issues either.
See these enlightening links:
http://coat.ncf.ca/Slides/3in1/001.htm
and
http://coat.ncf.ca/BMD/SlideShow/bmd1.html )
There is a lot of evidence that has been omitted and distorted, to hide government knowledge of what happened that day. If there were an independent investigation to show that the terrorists did not come from the Middle East, but came from much closer to home, there are experts and scientists and scholars supporting THE TRUTH, whose voices have been suppressed, that would expose the omissions and distortions put forth by The 9/11 Commission Report.
For example:
Steven E. Jones, a Brigham Young University physics professor, presents evidence that three WTC skyscrapers completely collapsed on 9/11 and that the "Twin Towers and Building 7 (WTC 7) were brought down, not just by impact damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned cutter-charges." Larry Silverstein even admitted as much on national television, that WTC 7 (which was not hit by a plane and was reported as having collapsed 20 minutes before it actually did on BBC TV) should be "pulled".
"Pulled" is a demolition term. And in order to be pulled, there would have to have been explosives placed before hand very precisely to have the building completely collapse neatly into its own footprint in 6.5 seconds. Employees that worked in some of the offices in WTC1, WTC2, and WTC 7 said there had been quite a bit of strange activity in the buildings in the few weeks and days before the tragedy. Power downs (in a highly computerized environment) and such, with no explanation of the activities. Many eyewitnesses stated that they heard many explosions at Ground Zero that day, yet this avenue of investigation has never been pursued by those other than citizens who want the truth, not the lies.
David Ray Griffin, a Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Emeritus, at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, has written several books calling for further investigation of the Bush administration's relationship to 9/11. Theses books include “The new Pearl Harbor: disturbing questions about the Bush administration and 9/11,” “The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions" (2005) gives evidence that the report is "a 571-page lie," and his latest book “9/11 Contradictions.”
Former German Minister said WTC 7 was used as a Command Center to run 9/11.
A Japanese minister has questioned 9/11 in their parliament.
On August 12th, 2005, following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the New York Times and some family members of victims, the New York Fire Department was forced to release the transcripts of 'fresh' oral evidence captured on tape shortly after 9/11 from reporters, fire fighters, police officers, and people who worked in the towers.
Barrie Zwicker, a journalist who deeply questioned the official story of the event, documents eyewitness testimony that was suppressed and presents "26 Exhibits " that "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that the official story of 9/11 to be a terror fraud, in his book "Towers of Deception". There are others producing evidence to contradict the "official" story, yet that evidence is either suppressed or dismissed as a "conspiracy theory." The fact is there IS a conspiracy and we're letting it develop into fruition (and fascism--right here in Canada). Very few in the media and in politics have failed to ask even elementary questions about the actual evidence that has been presented by independent researchers, architects, engineers, scholars, pilots, retired military officials, and scientists, to refute the official story.
I would like to point you to some websites, among many others, that are questioning the official story:
http://www.globaloutlook.ca/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.911truth.org/
http://coat.ncf.ca/
http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCIEJ/2008/00000002/00000001/35TOCIEJ.SGM
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f67q6272583h86n4/fulltext.html
http://stj911.org/blog/?p=42
And this from the Council on Foreign Relations (Specifically the plan for the SPP and the NAU):
http://www.cfr.org/
and an article tying in PNAC (PROJECT FOR a NEW AMERICAN CENTURY) to 911:
http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/stop_ignoring_9_11___pnac.html
These are only a very few examples of people and evidence. There are many of us who are concerned and we want questions answered by our "leaders,” as actions for "retribution" are made in our names.
Using 9/11 as the pretext for the "WAR ON TERROR" will continue to erode our freedoms, security, and prosperity. The only ones benefiting from this illegal war (and all the other illegal activities the Canadian military and RCMP is conducting on our behalf--e.g. Haiti: http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/60/60.htm; http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/61/61-TOC.htm; http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/62/62.htm;) are the war-mongers and profiteers.
The rest of us lose everything we value: freedom, democracy, our constitutional rights and our sovereignty. 9/11 is a "useful crisis" to help bring in the SPP and the NAU, among other agreements that are detrimental to all Canadian citizens as well as citizens in the US and Mexico. Not to mention the fact that Alberta Tar Sands are helping to "fuel" the US military's illegal war and occupation, while causing degradation of our planetary environment at the same time.
There are several issues I do not see being addressed by the major political parties here in Canada, but at the moment, for me as well as a growing number of citizens, these are critical issues. Because 9/11 was a "USEFUL CRISIS... Another Pearl Harbour," the citizens are bearing the consequences. We are being swallowed up by stealth, right in front of our eyes. The public is held away from "secret" meetings by closed doors, fortified barricades, and tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot police (tasers in the future?). Meetings where the public's future is determined. There are too damn many secrets that are hidden from the public.
The issue is not if you're left-wing, right-wing, centre-right, center-left, far-left, and far-right, centrist or wherever a citizen’s political/social sensibility has been slotted. Those labels are irrelevant when a country's sovereignty is at stake and in peril, as Canada's is now, with a media and our politicians so HUSH HUSH about these very important matters before us. Why the deafening silence? I did hear a very slight bit of talk about the SPP from the federal NDP when the SPP was held earlier this year in New Orleans, and I appreciate that. Even so, that is not enough. The citizens MUST be involved in debate and discussions of these matters, and MUST be in on the decision-making process if we truly are a democracy. The Provincial NDP here in Alberta say the SPP (and by extension NAFTA and the NAU) is a federal matter. It also it appears they will not support an investigation into 9/11. Does the federal government think TILMA is strictly a provincial matter? On the provincial level, during our recent provincial election campaign, I did ask Brian Mason (NDP) about TILMA on a phone-in radio show on CBC, and I felt both the host and Brian blew me off. Nothing beyond, "We'll look at it," in a disinterested fashion.
Many of our "elected leaders," provincially and federally have attended the highly secret, in plain view, Bilderberg meetings. Stephen Harper, Stephane Dion, Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, and others. They cannot have positions in government when they attend, and the attendee list shows the political, media, and financial elite of the world deciding, once again, our very lives and futures.
In secret!! What gives?? Is it coincidence that several of our "democratically elected" have made it to high political positions after attendance at these "secret, private" meetings?
I have heard only of one party (Canada Action Party; thanks to a friend who sent me information) in Canada talk about events and activities that are taking place, and providing evidence to back up its claims, including calling for a complete stop to the SPP/NAU; getting people into government who look after their citizens (who pay with their taxes, labour and resources) and not support the interests of corporations and the corporate/police state; and having an independent investigation into the Canadian deaths on 9/11. Oddly enough, but not surprisingly, the Canadian citizens NEVER hear about views that these "fringe" parties have to offer in "the news." About our reality and our future. (Never mind hearing of other countries in the world that are being exploited on a grander scale by us and our allies. Their futures are infinitely more compromised now than before 9/11. Do we think our human rights are superior here in the West? We are building arms and munitions here in Canada, and supplying police and troops to protect corporate interests in several countries in the world under the guise of our previous reputation as "peacekeepers.")
In the US, there needs to be a truly independent investigation reopened on what really happened September 11, 2001. The 9/11 Commission Report has omitted and distorted much of what really happened that day. This investigation was conducted without citizen scrutiny or dialogue and then presented as fact to the citizens. The Patriot Act 1&2 were enacted eroding civil liberties and rights of the citizens while the corporate world moved in to profit from these wars and enact their very Orwellian mass surveillance on the public, with official blessing.
So we can be "safe" from the "terrorists." We are far less safe than ever in this "War on Terrorism" 'that will not end in our lifetime.' People who are asking questions about that day and the attendant anomalies are thought of, in US administration, as terrorists and the "enemy within." Check this out: http://coat.ncf.ca/ARMX/SecureCanada.htm
9/11 must also be investigated, without bias, by Canada because of the Canadian deaths. When people get killed in our cities, there are always investigations. Here in Alberta, we have recently had investigations into 500 dead ducks in the tar “ponds,” dead sting rays at the Calgary Zoo, and investigations into many other issues.
Why is 9/11 different? Since 9/11, the noose is tightening on the public (more poverty, homelessness, despair and the many others just getting by) while the corporate profits soar, from our resources, labour and rights as citizens. Not to mention the degradation to the environment the taxpayers are left to finance and clean up, and the ultimate... loss of our sovereignty.
Since 9/11, corporations have made record profits, while the rest of us are incrementally sinking in that pot of boiling water—like the frog. Who will speak up for the voices that are being drowned out and/or dealt with accordingly by the "authority" (by being put on "lists," dismissed, portrayed as “conspiracy theorists,” and such)? There is a lot of evidence that is being withheld from the public that affects the citizens deeply. Will your party step up and represent the people? Will your party put the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership) on the election platform? Will you ask for an investigation into the Canadian deaths on 9/11 and bring the troops home NOW?
These are extremely critical issues for all Canadian citizens, as well as the citizens of the planet and they should be election issues, right along with the other issues being presented, when our “elected officials” are not busy throwing dirt in each others’ faces.
I am waiting for your reply
Yours Sincerely
Emily Vokes
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