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Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

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The government of the United States has announced it will seek the death penalty for alleged 9/11 hijackers due to be put on trial in New York city. Among the five Guantanamo detainees due to be transferred to the site of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre is the “self-confessed mastermind of the September 11th attacks”, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, according to The Guardian1.

President Obama affirmed that he is “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people insist on it, and my administration insists on it”.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been held in legal limbo at the United States’ Guantánamo Bay prison on the island of Cuba since his capture in March of 2003, has been subjected to indefinite detention without trial and prolonged periods in solitary confinement in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and internationally accepted standards covering imprisonment.

The New York Times reported in April 2009 that a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum revealed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been subjected to waterboarding 183 (one hundred and eighty three) times in just one month – March of 20032. The memorandum did not mention whether or not Mohammed had been subsequently subjected to additional waterboarding, although the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, a term favoured by key members of the Bush administration as an alternative to “torture”, is widely acknowledged to be prevalent at Guantánamo Bay.

The New York Times evidently does not see the irony in confirming that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed endured simulated drowning 183 times in one month – equating to more than five times each day – before referring to him as “the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks” in the very same paragraph.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who made the announcement that the death penalty would be sought in the civilian trial of Mohammed and four others, said of the decision to bring the suspects to New York to face trial, “Today’s announcement marks a significant step forward in our efforts to close Guantánamo and to bring to justice those individuals who have conspired to attack our nation and our interests abroad”3. The reference to U.S. “interests abroad” is an apparent reference to Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, due to be tried for the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen.

Al-Nashiri, however, will not stand trial with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and will instead be tried by military commission. This controversial practice, introduced by the Bush administration in November of 2001 before being reintroduced as the Military Commissions Act in 2006, allows for trial in complete secrecy by a panel of judges appointed by the executive branch, followed by execution if a guilty verdict is passed. Barack Obama provoked outrage in May of 2009 when he clarified that he “supports the idea of the military commissions but opposes the version of the law that had been governing such trials in recent years”4.

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Remarkably, The New York Times and other prominent newspapers have characterised the announcement that some of those to face trial would be tried in civilian courts as a “major policy shift from the Bush administration, which contended that suspected Al Qaeda members should not be treated like — nor given the rights of — ordinary criminals”6.

Such a statement by no means sets The New York Times apart from other mainstream media outlets and is extremely misleading, belying the fact that, as reported in the same article, the Obama administration is in reality preserving and endorsing the previous administration’s contentious policy of trying “terror suspects” in secret by military tribunal. Quite how such a blatant continuation of a policy widely derided as inhumane and in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution constitutes a “major shift” from the Bush doctrine on terrorism stretches the limits of credibility.

Geoffrey Robertson, writing in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian’s website under the heading “A nobler, trickier path to justice for 9/11”, states that “This is a trial that must be seen to be fair… Much will depend on the choice of judge, who must be conspicuously independent and of sufficient steel to reject evidence obtained by torture – there is no doubt that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been waterboarded”7.

Robertson goes on to remark that “Obama has taken the more difficult, but more principled, path”, before directly contradicting himself in the very next paragraph by stating that “It is regrettable that the non-9/11 defendants still in Guantánamo are to face military trial… If jury trials are appropriate for the 9/11 conspirators, then they should be afforded to all prisoners whom American prosecutors wish to execute or to incarcerate for the term of their natural life.”

What is truly regrettable is that such obvious double standards dominate the mainstream press’ coverage of last week’s announcements regarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow co-defendants. It is an astoundingly callous display of bravado on the part of an administration which consistently parades itself as an alternative to the human rights abuses and civil rights erosions perpetrated by its predecessor to pursue the death penalty for a man who has admittedly been repeatedly tortured in order to extract from him a confession of guilt.

Furthermore, Obama & Co.’s decision to preserve the abhorrent practice of trial by secret military tribunal is lamentable, and does little to assuage the concerns of those who see his administration as distinct from that of George W. Bush in terms of nothing but rhetoric. This trial will also bring us no closer to understanding who is really responsible for what happened on September 11th 2001; even if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all who stand charged alongside him are convicted and put to death it will be obvious to anyone who bothers to take more than a passing interest that justice has not been done and that Obama is merely carrying on where his predecessor left off.

19/11 accused Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be tried in New York court, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/911-accused-new-york-trial

2Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=2&hp

3Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y., http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/14terror.html

4Obama resurrects military trials for terror suspects, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/obama.military.tribunal/index.html

5Factsheet: Military Commissions, http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/factsheet:-military-commissions

6Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y., http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/14terror.html

7A nobler, trickier path to justice for 9/11, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/13/nobler-trickier-path-september11-justice

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Officials in Mumbai said that the two suspects, David Coleman Headley, an American with links of Pakistan, and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, who was born in Pakistan but is a Canadian citizen, both visited Mumbai and several other Indian cities in before the attacks, and may have visited some of the sites that were attacked.

“It seems like there is some connection” between the attacks and the two men’s repeated visits to India, Ashok Chavan, the chief minister of Maharashtra State, said in an interview. “But the link has to be established.”

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Mr Rasmussen said: “If we were to walk away and turn our backs on Afghanistan, al Qaida would be back in a flash. They would have a sanctuary from which to launch their strategy of global jihad, a strategy that is directed first and foremost against us.

Anyone who doubts the risk of a premature exit “is not living in the real world,” he told a Nato conference in Edinburgh.

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ABC News‘ Brian Ross has a breathtaking record of recklessly inaccurate, overhyped stories that don’t live up to the headline. His scoop yesterday about Nidal Malik Hasan’s “attempt to reach out to al Qaeda” was one of them.

Ross’ report yesterday that Hasan had attempted to “make contact with people associated with al Qaeda” took over the internet yesterday and sparked a furious round of speculation that Hasan’s attack was part of an Islamic terrorist plot. The headline, “Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan’s Contacts with al Qaeda,” said it all. The far more mundane truth emerged today in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post: Hasan had communicated via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric living in Yemen who formerly served as the imam of a mosque Hasan had attended in Virginia. What did they talk about? From the Washington Post:

The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan’s e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.

We were confused this morning, because Ross had clearly reported that Hasan had made contact with “people associated with Al Qaeda,” and the only contacts that other reporters were confirming were with al-Awlaki, who is, as far as we know, a single person. We called Ross and asked him if there were more “people.” No, he told us, his initial report was only in reference to al-Awlaki.

“That’s how it was initially described to me by my sources,” he says. “Given what they told me, that’s all I could say. It’s a strange use of the word ‘people.’ But when pinned down, my sources said it’s just al-Awlaki.”

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A strange use, indeed. How about false, too? Especially because Ross’ original story did, in fact, report that al-Awliki was among the “people” Hasan was suspected of having contacted. So he reported that Hasan contacted more than one person associated with al Qaeda, and then named one person that he was suspected of contacting. What he apparently didn’t bother to do was “pin his sources down” on exactly what they were saying. The result was a clear suggestion that Hasan had tried to communicate with the al Qaeda network on more than one occasion.

So did he? Al-Awlaki is routinely described by the FBI and others as an al Qaeda supporter, and a fiery inciter of violence against infidels. And he was the imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as Hasan. But while it’s clear that Al-Awlaki is a bad guy, what’s not clear is whether he’s simply a propagandist or someone who actually operates as a part of al Qaeda. It’s one thing for Hasan to have sent e-mails to someone who vocally supports al Qaeda, and quite another for him to have sent e-mails to al Qaeda itself, or to operatives actively involved in trying to kill people. Ross told us that, according to his sources, “Al-Awlaki is considered a recruiter,” which is how he justified invoking the name of the terrorist network. We’ll defer to him on that point.

But without knowing what the e-mails are about, can it really be known that Hasan’s communications were “attempts to reach out”? The FBI didn’t consider them as such. Ross didn’t know the contents of the e-mails when he described them that way, but felt perfectly justified in doing so based solely on the knowledge that Hasan had sent the e-mails.

We asked Ross if he had tried to contact Al-Awlaki in reporting the story:

“Yes.”

So you reached out to al Qaeda, then?

“To al Qaeda? No. I reached out to him. Oh. I see what you’re saying.”

What’s particularly maddening about Ross’ hype is that it had already been well established that Al-Awlaki was the imam at Hasan’s Virginia mosque in 2001. Hasan’s mother’s funeral services were held there at the time. While it hadn’t been definitively established that Hasan had ever met Al-Awlaki, it was abundantly clear that the two men were in one another’s orbits and that Hasan likely heard him preach. That wasn’t reported as a “contact with al Qaeda,” but once Ross got his hands on the fact that Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who had a web site with a comment form, he turned it into a blockbuster story.

Which wouldn’t be the first time. Ross reported—inaccurately—after the anthrax attacks in 2001 that the powder contained a “potent additive…known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons – Iraq.” He laundered CIA agent John Kiriakou’s lie that the agency only used waterboarding once, for 30 seconds, when in fact Kiriakou wasn’t even in the same country as the secret prison where his colleagues waterboarded two men a total of 266 times. He fell for the lies of Alexis Debat, a grifter and fraud who masqueraded as an intelligence expert. And he hyped his access to the phone records of DC madam Deborah Jean Palfrey for days, but only came up with the names of two low-level clients.

Ross’ stock response to these complaints is that he only reports what his sources tell him. “We reported what we knew, when we knew it,” he says. “I’m comfortable with the story.” His problem, as we’ve said before, is that he has shitty sources. And he just repeats what they tell him. Which is how you get from “Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who now preaches in support of Al Qaeda. We don’t know what the e-mails were about, but they didn’t raise alarms at the FBI” to “Hasan tried to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda” to the headline’s blunt, and thoroughly unsupported, reference to “Hasan’s Contacts with al Qaeda.” It would have been a good story if Ross had stuck to the first, accurate, formulation.

Major Hasan, the alleged sole gunman in the Fort Hood Massacre, is now being revealed as a frequant customer of a local Texas stripclub, where he somehow found time to visit in between work and his multiple visits to his local Mosque. This, after reports that Major Hasan worshipped at the same Virginia Mosque as some of the 9-11 terrorists, and was allegedly trying to contact Al Quida according to hearsay unnamed sources who are allegedly connected to the FBI. And despite how foolish it now looks, all the DHS and the Army seemed concerned with is diversity in wake of the shootings. Now, Hasan is alleged to have taken another page from the same playbook as the so-called 9-11 terrorists.  Fox News reported the following:

“The Army psychiatrist authorities say killed 13 people and wounded 29 others at the Fort Hood Army Base Thursday was a recent and frequent customer at a local strip club, employees of the club told FoxNews.com exclusively.” Note-this would normally be a non-story, because what someone does in their private time should be their own business.  But this is not the first time a so-called devout, religious Muslim that has been accused of mass murder by the mainstream media. Why Fox news would think that an employee reporting that Hasan preferred blondes is somehow newsworthy is beyond me, but this appears to be as much as an attempt to show hypocrisy or connect Hasan to the 9-11 terrorists by inference as it is a news story.

Where have we heard this all before? No, not Jimmy Swaggart (but close). The 9-11 highjackers, all supposed devout Muslims, were reported as visiting several strip clubs from California to Florida, and several places in between. The most infamous visit of all was the alleged Pink Pony Stripclub event by Mohammed Atta and others who are alleged to have been drunk and bragging about what they were about to do. And, of course, at least one account had them leaving a Koran behind in the club. But this was hardly the only case of Muslims terrorists being connected to strip clubs and pornography.

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The History Commons website reported that 9-11 Hijacker Jarrah stayed in Jacksonville, Florida for unknown reasons several times, and frequented a local stripclub there:

“After returning to the US for the fifth time, 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah flies immediately to Jacksonville, Florida, where he stays at the Ramada Inn for a week. He had previously visited Jacksonville (see January 22-26, 2001), as had Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi (see (October 2000)). While in Jacksonville, he frequents Wacko’s strip club. A worker there will later say that the FBI comes to the club after 9/11 to ask questions and show pictures “of the 9/11 terrorists,” and a dancer recognizes Jarrah from a photo line-up.”

History Commons also reproduced an FBI spreadsheet listing many of these activities, including a report that  on July 4th to the 27th, certain highjackers spent hundreds of dollars on pono movies and sex toys, and in the days leading up to the attacks on 9-11, that certain hijackers paid for sex with prostitutes,  In fact, the entire timeline and spreadsheet are replete with examples of alleged contact between 9-11 terrorists and strip clubs or strippers. View the entire timeline by clicking here.

In fact, investigative journalist Daniel Hopsickler did a detailed investigation of the activities of Atta and the other terrorists and they stays in Florida, and even produced a video and book on the subject.

The Muslim terrorist meets stripper theme is one that is hardly new, the thing that many Hollywood subplots and even a novel titled, “The Unknown Terrorist” by Tasmanian born Richard Flanagan, and a novel based on a terrorist conducting research in a stripclub called “The Garden of the Last Days” by Andre Dubus, III. Regardless, one thing is for sure, the story on Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre is cut from the same cloth as the story behind the 9-11 Muslim terrorists that was fed to the public following 9-11. Whether this is the result of the same flawed, hypocritical Jihadi activities, or the byproduct of a clandestine intelligence operation gone amuk, only time will tell. Having close connections to those that were in crypto- intelligence or Marine special forces, I know that life is rarely black and white, and is sometimes shades of gray. And sometimes an operation is so in-your-face that they will leave an obvious calling card for those who wish to connect the dots between different events. It’s too soon to tell, but things still do not add up.

And this 9-11 inference is so obvious that even some of the hard core conservative forums and blogs have put 2 and 2 together, however, it never occurs to these people that this could be simply the same card being played again by whoever wants to exploit this event and fear of muslim terrorists. At least they see what we all are seeing.

Now it appears that one arm of the federal government is not shaking hands with the other. Which creates even more confusion. Stay tuned. The more they try and paint this as lone gunman tragedy, the more it looks more and more clandestine.

Sean Smith spent a month embedded with the US Army’s 501st Parachute Regiment in June this year. With inadequate vehicles, relations with Afghan security forces at a standstill and the constant threat of IEDs, the soldiers are losing heart for a fight they feel their presence is only prolonging.

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In a statement, the FBI said it took notice of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as part of an unrelated investigation being carried out by a Joint Terrorism Task Force — an FBI-led team made up of FBI agents and investigators from other federal, state and local law enforement agencies.

“Investigators on the JTTF reviewed certain communications between Major Hasan and the subject of that investigation and assessed that the content of those communications was consistent with research being conducted by Major Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center,” the statement said. “Because the content of the communications was explainable by his research and nothing else derogatory was found, the JTTF concluded that Major Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning.”

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Monsters and Critics reports:

…footage broadcast Tuesday by the Al-Jazeera news channel showed Taliban insurgents handling weapons and ammunition, including mines with US markings on them.

The television channel reported that Taliban said they seized the weapons from two US outposts in the eastern province of Nuristan, where a battle on October 3 left eight US soldiers and three Afghan troops dead.

The Associated Press, however, is reporting that the Taliban has U.S. ammunition. “Television footage broadcast Tuesday showed insurgents handling what appears to be U.S. ammunition in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan that American forces left last month following a deadly firefight that killed eight troops.” The U.S. military said the forces that left the area said they removed and accounted for their equipment.

The ammunition could be used against U.S. and Afghan forces, although the amount shown was not extensive. However, the footage will no doubt be used by insurgent propagandists to promote their “victory” over the Americans and encourage their supporters.

The Taliban was created by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI in the early 1990s.

Phil Gasper writes (Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban):

The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul,” adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.” “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997.

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Last week it was reported that not only did the U.S. ferry Taliban “insurgents” around in its helicopters, but puppet Hamid Karzai’s brother is a paid CIA agent lording over the country’s lucrative opium cultivation. Now the U.S. is supplying the Taliban with ammunition that will be used to kill American soldiers.

The CIA and the government no longer seem to care if you know that it supplies and supports our supposed enemies. They take you for idiots.

Meanwhile, Obama has announced he will send an additional 40,000 troops into the Afghan meat grinder, although Obama and crew are playing footsie with the troop deployment. “Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false. He has not received final options for his consideration, he has not reviewed those options with his national security team, and he has not made any decisions about resources. Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources,” reports the premier Mockingbird asset, CBS News.

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While Washington has put modest funding into civilian projects in Afghanistan this year — ranging from small-scale power plants to “public latrines” to a meat market — the real construction boom is military in nature. The Pentagon has been funneling stimulus-sized sums of money to defense contractors to markedly boost its military infrastructure in that country.

In fiscal year 2009, for example, the civilian U.S. Agency for International Development awarded $20 million in contracts for work in Afghanistan, while the U.S. Army alone awarded $2.2 billion — $834 million of it for construction projects. In fact, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, the Pentagon has spent “roughly $2.7 billion on construction over the past three fiscal years” in that country and, “if its request is approved as part of the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill, it would spend another $1.3 billion on more than 100 projects at 40 sites across the country, according to a Senate report on the legislation.”

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