U.N. chief condemns rights expert's 9/11 comments

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned "preposterous" comments by a U.N.-appointed expert on Palestinian rights that there was a cover-up over the September 11 attacks, Ban's chief of staff said on Monday.

The official, Vijay Nambiar, said however that it was not up to Ban to fire the expert, U.S. academic Richard Falk, as demanded by UN Watch, a Geneva-based advocacy group.

Falk wrote in a blog this month that there had been an "apparent cover-up" by U.S. authorities over the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington.

He said mainstream media had been "unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials."

In a letter to Ban last Thursday, UN Watch director Hillel Neuer called on the U.N. chief to "strongly condemn Mr. Falk's offensive remarks -- and ... immediately remove him from his post."

A letter of reply from Nambiar said Ban "condemns (Falk's) remarks. He has repeatedly stated his view that any such suggestion is preposterous -- and an affront to the memory of the more than 3,000 people who died in the attack."

Nambiar said Falk and other rights experts were not appointed by Ban but by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, a 47-nation body created by the U.N. General Assembly in 2006. "Their continuance in their jobs is thus for the Council to decide," he added.

UN Watch says on its website it is a non-governmental organization, accredited with the United Nations and affiliated with the American Jewish Committee, that aims to monitor U.N. performance against the yardstick of the U.N. Charter.

It supports U.N. goals but frequently criticizes the Human Rights Council, saying it constantly berates Israel but ignores many rights violations by developing countries. It has often targeted Falk, the council's special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, for anti-Israeli comments.

In a statement, Neuer welcomed Nambiar's letter but said the Human Rights Council could not be trusted to fire Falk. He said Ban and U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay had "the power and responsibility to play an influential and decisive role."

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70O05O20110125?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

UN Secretary General may well

UN Secretary General may well fear for his well being if he spoke up. Our present government is more of a mafia now.

Who gives a damn

what the Jewish lobby thinks. I'm sick and tired of these people and their tentacles. They are hurting Jewish interests in any way possible.

I think it's telling that every time 9/11 Truth gathers momentum in important places, some ADL-type pipes up. This type of interference with freedom of speech makes me think Israel is much heavier involved in 9/11 than I've suspected thus far. And don't even get me started about the current Israeli government, which is so outrageously fascist, I'm surprised they're not all walking around in uniforms with logos yet.

Take action

my english is not the best, but that's my part in this shit game:

Office of the President of the General Assembly United Nations
New York, NY
Fax: (212) 963-3301

Mail: pga65 @ un.org (delete space tabs)

Dear Mr. Nambiar!
Dear Sirs and Madams!

I write to you in regard to the UN Watch comments on Richard Falk and the statement issued by Mr. Nambiar on Monday.

The only preposterous comments are yours and the one from UN Watch, in creating an unquestionable myth embedded in emotional resistance, and a McCarthy era like witch hunt against the ones who are brave enough to question this, by debating job loss. In fact, many 9/11 victims family members question the official narrative, too. Please see http://buildingwhat.org for details. You simply can’t say that it’s an affront to the memory of the 3000 who died on the attack. It’s the other way around: Their loved ones deserved to know the truth, the full truth. As do we, the people, as 9/11 was instrumental as a new Pearl Harbor with worldwide implications in question of civil rights, freedom and war.

And there was a cover-up, at least, about the

-Saudi connections (28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report about Saudi connections were redacted, two of the alleged hijackers got help from Omar Ahmed Al-Bayoumi, most probably a Saudi agent with ties to the Saudi royal family, the 9/11 commission was denied access to this witness, something never ever happend before, according to Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane)

-the Pakistani ISI connections (100.000,- Dollars wired to Atta by General Mahmood Ahmed, foreknowledge of the WTC attack “Those towers are coming down”, said by ISI agent Rajaa Gulum Abbas, recorded by Randi Glass in his dismantled sting-op, the inside job narrative corroborated by Hamid Gul)

-the Mossad connection (Mossad Agents living door to door with Atta, as reported by Oliver Schröm, “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified”, as reported by Fox-News by Carl Cameron)

-the WTC demolitions, ignoring the fraudulent recycling of WTC steel, the NIST report is a farce and a fraud, left out the demolition sequence as a whole, manipulating computer input and tests results in an unscientific way, never open to a real examination, like the demolition hypothesis, which is strong and supported by evidence of nanothermite and iron rich spherules in the WTC dust only possible with super-hot reactions, as well as the near free fall acceleration of all three buildings collapses. Please see http://www.ae911truth.org and http://stj911.org for details!

So in light of these issues and the proof for a cover-up and indeed existing “well-evidenced doubts” you should not only apologize for your remarks to Richard Falk, you should condemn UN Watch’s falsehood, and call for and insist on a real UN investigation into the biggest and most influential incident of the modern history, like some UN members suggested already. Please watch “Zero- an investigation into 9/11” produced by Italian politician Giulietto Chiesa or “9/11 Press for Truth” and “In their own words” with 9/11 victims relatives for further information.

Regards

Please take action, too!

Ask President Obama and Panel a Question.

You can also ask Senior White House officials a question here. See for details.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sotu-questions

Similar to the situation of Kevin Bracken

Reminds me of the situation Kevin Bracken found himself in over in Australia. He came out stronger and in a better position after that as well. Hopefully the same works out here.

Richard Falk at 911blogger

Offensive? Offensive? I'll tell you what's offensive!

I am always amazed when people try to shut down real debate on the events of 911 2001 by claiming that any denial of the official version is somehow offensive. I expect that from authoritarian Fascist, Communist or Nazi states but not from a so called liberal democracy or from the President of the UN.
The simple fact is that the oficial 911 narrative is so full of holes as to beggar belief.
Only a genuine open legally empowered grand jury with full powers of subpoena wil do.
The NIST inquiry was flawed because any suggestion that some form of explosive demolition was a contributory factor was simply ruled out with prejudice. If fact there is independent evidence both by forensic examination of the dust and debris and witness statements that some form of explosive was involved.
The problem is even going that route admits the possibility that domestic and possibly government agencies might be involved and no government coordinated inquiry appears able to risk that course.
Even the President and Vice President were not prepared to give individual evidence under oath or for the public record. There is no excuse for this. These people are answerable to their fellow citizens. They are not above the law.
It is also a fact that no proper identification of any of the aircraft has ever been disclosed.
This means that it is not possible to verify the history of the aircraft. Witness reports of the recovery of the Flight Data Recorders suggest that these would have been available for examination but the only results ever disclosed were from the alleged Flt AA77 aircraft has no trackable serial number. There is no good reason to keep this information secret if all is as alleged by the official story.
Quite simply the official narrative of the events on 911 2001 does not stack up.
Making the claim that it is offensive to make that claim is at the least disingenuous and is certainly dishonest.
The real offence is that the victims in New York have yet to have even a hint of justice yet thousands of innocents have been killed as an indirect result in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The so called war on terror is in fact a tool of American military and foreign policy.
That really is offensive.

I also posted this to Reuters earlier although it's not up yet.

It is now and so far I think all comments dismiss the official narrative!

Some great points and I share your frustration.

This crap is so in your face isn't it? The illusion of any democracy or free world for that matter has faded entirely.

http://www.informationclearin

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27338.htm

9/11 And Faith-based Pre-Enlightenment ‘Knowledge.’
Interrogating the Arizona Killings from a Safe Distance

By Richard Falk

January 25, 2010 "Information Clearing House" January 11, 2011 -- -- I spent a year in Sweden a few years after the assassination of Olaf Palme in 1986, the controversial former prime minister of the country who at the time of his death was serving as a member of the Swedish cabinet. He was assassinated while walking with his wife back to his apartment in the historic part of the city after attending a nearby movie. It was a shocking event in a Sweden that had prided itself on moderateness in politics and the avoidance of involvement in the wars of the twentieth century. A local drifter, with a history of alcoholism, was charged and convicted of the crime, but many doubts persisted, including on the part of Ms. Palme who analogized her situation to that of Coretta King who never believed the official version of her martyred husband’s death.

I had a particular interest in this national traumatic event as my reason for being in Sweden was a result of an invitation to be the Olaf Palme Professor, a rotating academic post given each year to a foreign scholar, established by the Swedish Parliament as a memorial to their former leader. (after the Social Democratic Party lost political control in Sweden this professorship was promptly defunded, partly because Palme was unloved by conservatives and partly because of a neoliberal dislike for public support of such activities)

In the course of my year traveling around Sweden I often asked those whom I met what was their view of the assassination, and what I discovered was that the responses told me more about them than it did about the public event. Some thought it was a dissident faction in the Swedish security forces long angered by Palme’s neutralist policies, some believed it was resentment caused by Palme’s alleged engineering of Swedish arms sales to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, some believed it was the CIA in revenge for Palme’s neutralism during the Cold War, some believed it could have criminals in the pay of business tycoons tired of paying high taxes needed to maintain the Swedish maximalist version of a welfare state, and there were other theories as well. What was common to all of these explanations was the lack of evidence that might connect the dots. What people believed happened flowed from their worldview rather than the facts of the event—a distrust of the state, especially its secret operations, or a strong conviction that special interests hidden from view were behind prominent public events of this character.

In a way, this process of reflection is natural, even inevitable, but it leads to faulty conclusions. We tend to process information against the background of our general worldview and understanding, and we do this all the time as an efficient way of coping with the complexity of the world combined with our lack of time or inclination to reach conclusions by independent investigation. The problem arises when we confuse this means of interpreting our experience with an effort to provide an explanation of a contested public event. There are, to be sure, conspiracies that promote unacknowledged goals, and enjoy the benefit of government protection. We don’t require WikiLeaks to remind us not to trust governments, even our own, and others that seem in most respects to be democratic and law-abiding. And we also by now should know that governments (ab)use their authority to treat awkward knowledge as a matter of state secrets, and criminalize those who are brave enough to believe that the citizenry needs to know the crimes that their government is committing with their trust and their tax dollars.

The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin(and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since his authoritative The New Pearl Harbor in 2004 (updated in 2008). What may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or cooption, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government. The forms persist, but the content is missing.

This brings me to the Arizona shootings, victimizing both persons apparently targeted for their political views and random people who happened to be there for one reason or another, innocently paying their respects to a congresswoman meeting constituents outside a Tucson supermarket. As with the Palme assassination, the most insistent immediate responses come from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both proceeding on presuppositions rather than awaiting evidence.

On one side are those who say that right-wing hate speech and affection for guns were clearly responsible, while Tea Party ultra-conservatives and their friends reaffirm their rights of free speech, denying that there is any connection between denouncing their adversaries in the political process and the violent acts of a deranged individual seemingly acting on his own. If we want to be responsible in our assessments, we must restrain our political predispositions, and get the evidence. Let us remember that what seems most disturbing about the 9/11 controversy is the widespread aversion by government and media to the evidence that suggests, at the very least, the need for an independent investigation that proceeds with no holds barred.

Such an investigation would contrast with the official ‘9/11 Commission’ that proceeded with most holds barred. What has been already disturbing about the Arizona incident are these rival rushes to judgment without bothering with evidence. Such public irresponsibility polarizes political discourse, making conversation and serious debate irrelevant.

There is one more issue raised, with typical candor and innocence, by the filmmaker, Michael Moore. If a Muslim group has published a list of twenty political leaders in this country, and put crosshairs of a gun behind their pictures, is there any doubt that the Arizona events would be treated as the work of a terrorist,, and the group that had pre-identified such targets would be immediately outlawed as a terrorist organization. Many of us, myself included, fervently hoped, upon hearing the news of the shootings, that the perpetrator of this violence was neither a Muslim nor a Hispanic, especially an illegal immigrant. Why? Because we justly feared the kind of horrifying backlash that would have been probably generated by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and their legion of allies. Now that the apparent perpetrator is a young white American, the talk from the hate mongers, agains without bothering with evidence, is of mental disorder and sociopathology. This is faith-based pre-Enlightenment ‘knowledge.’

What must we learn from all of this? Don’t connect dots without evidence. Don’t turn away as soon as the words ‘conspiracy theory’ are uttered, especially if the evidence does point away from what the power-wielders want us to believe. Don’t link individual wrongdoing, however horrific, to wider religious and ethnic identities. We will perish as a species if we don’t learn soon to live together better on our beautiful, globalizing, and imperiled planet.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice calls Falk's statements "slanderous"

Rice claims Falk's latest commentary has "similarly slanderous remarks" to Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

To Ambassador Rice,

You describe Richard Falk's statements about 9/11 as slanderous. Care to describe how his statements are slanderous? Do you choose to ignore the solid science from over 1400 licensed and practicing architects and engineers who are demanding a new investigation into 9/11? You could find their work on the following site: www.ae911truth.org

Better yet, how about finding someone willing to sue Richard Falk for slander over his 9/11 statements? If you are so confident in your government's official conspiracy theory for 9/11, why not put it to the test and give Richard Falk subpoena power? That way you could prove that jets do demolish skyscrapers.

Oops, that's right. Truth is the ultimate defense against an accusation of slander.

Weigh in on the Ambassador's opinion line: 1-212-415-4062

Why not approach it like this

WILKERSON: In the same way my boss, Secretary Powell, was somewhat ambiguous and others were ambiguous. I helped build Condi Rice's testimony to the 9/11 Commission with her principal writer, John Bellinger, her lawyer at the time. And I will tell you that there were two occasions in my four years at the State Department that I felt so disgusted that I almost resigned, and I feel, when I think about them today, still disgusted with myself for not resigning. One of them was when I helped Powell prepare himself to testify before the 9/11 Commission and thus got insight into what the administration was doing with the information. And the other was when we presented, at the UN Security Council in February 2003, the Powell presentation that said Saddam Hussein had failed to disarm and still had WMD.

Source

Checkmate, Dr. Rice.

AE and family member campaign directed at the UN and ambassador?

This would be a perfect "action point" for the 1,400+ architects and engineers as well as for the family members who support a new investigation.

Ambassador my a**

the US hasn't had a real UN Ambassador like forever. They have been a bunch of bullies some who have sanctioned the starving of children and bombing of countries then only to claim they had no real choice. Maybe not if you want to keep your job! Well keep your job cause people with any real conscience couldn't do it.

Of course if someone did try to stop a war and tell the truth knowing you're between a rock and a hard place, then even surrender like Tariq Aziz the US will throw you under the bus anyway. The basta*ds. The english Ambassador who resigned from Uzbekistan has my respect.

Video of Ban Ki Moon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnOVwMKw_6Y

A letter campaign to the UN, with the help of BuildingWhat and AE911Truth would be great!

good

piece