August 20, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted a blog asking readers to recommend "a good factually-grounded narrative history of the [9/11] attacks, their background, execution and probably something on the aftermath as well." As TPM has done some decent muckraking and investigative reporting, has a progressive slant and has attracted a following of basically intelligent people concerned about political corruption and abuse of power, I was surprised to see that, according to Marshall, the majority of his readers recommended the limited hangouts/mis-disinfo The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright and the 9/11 Commission Report- but that's what he said. - loose nuke

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0821/grayson-slams-mosque-debate-talk-bush-letting-911-happen/

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, August 21st, 2010

The debate over a planned Islamic community center several blocks from New York City's World Trade Center site is a "distraction," according to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL).

Instead, the debate should shift in focus to an examination of the administration which "let it happen."

'It,' of course, being the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The remark was made during a Friday appearance on MSNBC's The Ed Show with former liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz.

“If we are going to talk about 9/11, why don’t we talk about how not so much the people who died on 9/11 were disgraced by the possibility of an Islamic athletic center several blocks away; how about the fact that they were disgraced by a president who let it happen?" he asked. "Who went on vacation for the entire month of August after he was warned in writing that Osama bin Laden was actually finding targets in NYC and learning how to take these planes and do terrible things with them? The thing itself said ‘hijacking’ and they did nothing about it."

"Wanted by the CIA: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange"
Belfast Telegraph, July 19, 2010

In this interview, Belfast Telegraph reporter Matthew Bell asks Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about "conspiracy theories". Assange subsequently explains his position.

His obsession with secrecy, both in others and maintaining his own, lends him the air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one? "I believe in facts about conspiracies," he says, choosing his words slowly. "Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there's enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news." What about 9/11? "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." What about the Bilderberg conference? "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes."

In case you missed it, here's a great quote from this week:

J. Cofer Black, the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, who was the former point man for the U.S. government's international counterterrorism policy in the first term of the Bush administration, says that "there were things the [9/11] commission wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

For a reminder of the 911 Commission's mandate, click here. And yet they have agreements to keep things confidential for 5 years? Thanks to Ron for sending this in...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2294509#2294550

Not many people noticed this during Mr. Ben Veniste's interview in the wake of the Clinton-Fox News Sunday interview:
"BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don't see anything and I don't remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.

BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had -- we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question.

BLITZER: Why?

BEN-VENISTE: I didn't have the votes.

BLITZER: Well, was -- were the Republican members trying to protect the president and the vice president? Is that what your suspicion is?

BEN-VENISTE: I think the question was that there was a degree of confidentiality associated with that and that we would take from that the output that is reflected in the report, but go no further. And that until some five years' time after our work, we would keep that confidential. I thought we would be better to make all of the information that we had available to the public and make our report as transparent as possible so that the American public could have that."

The 9/11 Commissioners have reacted to Bob Woodward's disclosure that CIA director George Tenet briefed Condie Rice about the imminent attack by saying "no one told us!"

Uh, turns out someone did, but they didn't mention it in the 9/11 Commission Report. As McClatchy Newspapers puts it:

"The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned "in very strong terms" that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn't provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

(This ironic look at Kean and Hamilton's tag-team book; "Without Precedent" is posted over at DemocraticUnderground.com. Maybe they should have called the book, "Without President".)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x120755

“Without Precedent – The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission”, written by the two co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, is in their words “the compelling inside story of how the … 9/11 Commission managed to succeed against all odds in producing a report that made clear what went wrong and why.”

In this post I describe the authors’ attempts to justify just one of their major findings – a finding that to many people, including me, is the most incredible of the whole incredible story of 9/11. That is the explanation of how the most expensive, powerful, and technologically advanced military that the world has ever known failed to prevent an attack on its capital city despite what appeared to be plenty of time to prevent it. For clarity, my editorial comments in response to various statements by the authors are in red.

Continued...

Dr. Griffin's radio interview concerning this article was posted in August. Here are links to the actual article.

Part 1 of Dr. Griffin's article is here, and Part 2 is here.

This article is too long to post here, but well worth the read. Check it out and then post your comments.

Thanks to 911Truth.org for hosting the article.

There is a difference between the 9/11 Commission's account of awareness of United 175's hijacking and the version used in the recent CBC documentary Secret History of 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission gives the following account of a conversion between New York ATC Centre and the FAA Command Centre in Herndon:
"NEW YORK COMMAND CENTRE: We have several situations going on here. It's escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us...
We're, we're involved with something else; we have other aircraft that may have a similar situation going on here." (p. 22, 9/11 CR)

However, CBC lays it out a little differently:
"NEW YORK COMMAND CENTRE: We have several situations going on here. It's escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us."
"NATIONAL COMMAND CENTER: We're, we're involved with something else; we have other aircraft that may have a similar situation going on here."
Link:
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/secrethistory/timeline7.html

The difference is that in the 9/11 CR version, the fourth sentence, "We're, we're involved with something else..." is said by New York Centre, but in the CBC version it's said by the National Command Centre. If the CBC version is true then this means that:

A new documentary focused on the 9/11 Commission Report will debut tomorrow night (8/21) on CourtTV at 10PM EST. You can find more about this film at 911report.com including the movie's trailer.

The documentary promises to show new footage of private interviews, and includes this rather interesting quote:

Demanding answers from your government is rarely easy. To accomplish this task, a loose collection of ordinary Americans - united by their single-minded passion for answers - challenged a vast and defensive bureaucracy and triumphed. As a result of their efforts, the tragedy that redefined a nation has been investigated and documented. The collective efforts of these heroes proved that democracy is more powerful than politics.

Seems kind of ironic to me that this film touts the work of victim's families who fought for a commission, but then suggests that the commission was a success. Perhaps they will play the other upcoming documentary on the 9/11 Commission to show both sides of the story? You can contact CourtTV here to ask.

So, check it out tomorrow night, and send your feedback in after the show.

thanks to RemoveBush for the heads up!