Mood swings at Downing Street?

The Downing Street web site seems to be having mood swings. Yes you can comment on the PM's question time. No you can't. It's an on again-off again thing.

Sometimes Blair's web site directs one to the They Work for You transcript which offers a comment option. Then again, sometimes it directs one to the Parliament's official transcript service, which offers no such option.

A look at some recent links shows the comment option restored (see previous posts) but then dropped again for the most recent question time.

Not sure what's going on. One can imagine all sorts of political pressures, especially in that Blair is getting ready to step aside.

Well, in lieu of posting something on They Work for You, I'll just mention here that I have improved my argument on 9/11 collapse times

http://kryptograff.blogspot.com

whereby I clarify the physical model.

Whitewater rafting

The ethics of Whitewater are back, it seems, with Billary scooping up millions from special interest groups for Bill's essentially worthless speeches.
Oil interests, communists, sleazy operators... doesn't matter. You pay, he'll gab.
It's just good old fashioned Whitewater enterprise...
It's also the ethical base which allows The Great Feminist to send Americans to war based on false pretenses.
See John Solomon's Washington Post report and Cal Thomas's column.

Why did Bush let Miller rot?

Let's take Bush and Cheney at their word, and accept that Bush secretly declassified Valery Plame's CIA status during a White House huddle with Cheney.

Some questions come to mind:

When there were calls for a special prosecutor to investigate the apparent breach of national security, why didn't Bush or Cheney step forward and spare everyone the bother of a major investigation by simply saying that Bush had declassified Plame's status? Rather, we discover that the White House decided to keep the declassification order secret from the CIA, as well as everyone else. (See Jim Rutenberg's New York Times story of Feb. 20.)

BUT, the White House was putting out statements that the leak investigation was a very, very serious matter -- while Bush and Cheney all the while knew that no crime had been committed. It seems pretty obvious that they were thinking about their political position, and not about the truth.

So Patrick Fitzgerald turns out to be a tougher nut than they perhaps expected and reporters are grilled about the "leak."

Judith Miller of the Times spent three months in jail before finally caving. Yet, Bush and Cheney kept silent, even though they knew that no crime had been committed.
Was it too much to expect that Bush would step up to the plate and admit to declassifying Plame's status BEFORE Miller went to jail?

Even had Fitzgerald tried to keep her locked up anyway, Times lawyers would have been in federal court urging her release based on the point that if no crime had been committed, then Fitzgerald had no need to know the names of sources.

But instead, Bush and Cheney let Miller rot. And, for good measure, her career was terminated based in large part on the turmoil that stemmed from an unseemly conspiracy of silence by Bush, Cheney, Libby and others.

HOWEVER, as soon as it appeared that Fitzgerald might have enough to draw the vice president into the legal wringer, blam: oh, no crime was committed. Let's drop the whole thing.

But by then it was too late in the game and Fitzgerald had enough on Libby to indict him for perjury.

Now, again, assuming that Bush and Cheney did not commit perjury at the last minute, one must wonder about the character of men who ask Americans to brave battle peril but who themselves haven't the courage to right a grievous injustice when it was clearly in their power to do so.

Curiously, the media haven't made much of this point or of the fact that reporters and news organizations were unnecessarily put through the wringer over a crime that Bush secretly knew never occurred.

Also, when Libby or somebody "leaked" this data about Plame to a reporter, that reporter had to sweat whether he should risk charges about breaking the story --which Miller didn't -- even though no crime had been committed. Even by Washington standards, what we have here is unparalleled cynicism.

Congress has been pretty lame about these issues also. But these are serious issues. Are these the type of people entrusted with a global struggle against terrorism?

This little White House tale has a credibility quotient on a par with White House claims about WMDs and about who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Postscript A: Oh yes, what does this attitude have to say about fair play for the Guantanamo detainees? Clearly, if the Bush bunch has no qualms about an American suffering unjustly when their political needs come first, what kind of chances would they give to foreigners? Habeas corpus may be a technical term, but that term embodies a principle: a person should not be jailed without good faith protections of basic rights.

Postscript B: Plainly, we have a very strong case for the impeachment and removal of both Cheney and Bush. Provably, both severely abused, for mere personal gain, the national security authority entrusted to them during a period of national crisis. However, some Democrats don't want this scenario to play out as it should -- because their personal ambitions would be thwarted. If Bush and Cheney were removed, that would leave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as interim president and a likely Democratic presidential nominee for the full term. Hillary would be beside herself, and John Edwards would be none too happy either. Yet, what these men did is so low that it is really impossible that they should remain as leaders of a respected nation.

A call for airtime to rebut BBC

9/11 truth groups in England and in America should be pressing the BBC to permit a responsible rebuttal of the cheap-shot broadcast smearing 9/11 skeptics by associating them with the silliest theories.
That's about as logical as insisting that airplanes can't fly beceause a lot of people have weird theories about UFOs.
What is needed is equal air time in the same time slot and a professionally done documentary-style rebuttal.
If the BBC refuses to permit a rebuttal, then that point should be constantly mentioned.

Proud to be censored about 9/11 truth

I get, at a Yahoo email address, Google alerts of blog posts concerning 9/11.
Recently I got one posted by a New York cab driver, which is cool.
However, my blog posts concerning 9/11 never show up.
Guess someone doesn't want my observations getting around too much.
Must be that the 9/11 truth hurts.

That reminds me: Zero comments showed up on this blog for a long time. But when I was fiddling with the system, I suddenly discovered some comments that hadn't been visible to me. The control panel claimed that this had been a consequence of my decision. So anyway, those comments that I saw are now visible below.
However, the comments have gone back to zero. In other words, when I accidentally found some comments, they were permitted to remain. But no others show up. My conclusion is that comments are routinely barred by a clandestine force.

Anyway, Islamic scholar Kevin Barrett quotes Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's religious studies program and an expert on Bin Laden, as saying that the famous Bin Laden confession tape of 2001 is a fake.

http://911blogger.com/node/6317

Treason charge scalds Hillary

If sending America's young men and women to a war launched on false pretenses isn't treason, then I don't know what treason is.

Sure, the antiwar faction of the Democratic Party is too polite for that particular descriptive. Yet when the senator from New York faces continuous challenges about her pro-war vote in 2002, is she not forced to contend with the issue of treason?

As she campaigns for the party's presidential nomination, she has been cornered by the antiwar group which asks why she doesn't apologize for the vote and admit to a mistake.

Her response is that she was misled by faulty prewar intelligence on Saddam's alleged WMD stockpile. Funny that other attentive Americans were not misled. Also, she surely knew how baseless was the White House propaganda implying that Saddam was somehow linked to the attacks of 9/11.

But as neocon Paul Wolfowitz once effectively admitted, the WMD issue was a political ploy meant to get waverers on board the war wagon. Hillary knew the 9/11 link was phony, but she had political cover with the WMD link.

The point is that Hillary, along with numerous others, knew that Americans were being sent to war, in part, based on false claims about 9/11, claims hoked up by Murdoch's Fox News. I am quite sure she doesn't see her vote as an act of treason. Yet she surely knew that Americans, and Iraqis, would die based on hyped-up, phony claims.

On the other hand, her war vote stood her in good stead with her onetime nemisis, Rupert Murdoch, who started publicly making nicey with the Clintons. The naturalized media mogul, of course, has a cold-fish view of Americans, as is obvious from his soulless propaganda machines.

Now one may take the position that he or she is unsure about whether 9/11 was an inside job. But, can such a person easily dispute that the Bush bunch's cold-blooded misuse of that atrocity in order to send Americans to war is -- calling a spade a spade -- treason?

Recall that though it was Dick Cheney who specified unverifiable links between Saddam and 9/11, it was Bush who not only didn't repudiate Cheney's claims, but capitalized on them by repeatedly invoking 9/11 whenever beating the war tom-toms against Iraq.

We also know that Bush was not sincere about the reasons for the war because U.S. troops are still there. Yet, the publicly stated mission has been accomplished. Saddam was removed from power and Iraq poses no threat as to weapons of mass destruction.

So, clearly, Bush had and has a hidden agenda in Iraq.

So there it is: Hillary threw in with treason for political gain and is now trying to squirm out of that awful taint.

Obviously, she believed that the mass media would remain closely tethered, perhaps by her ally, the Israeli lobby. But, though the media remain constricted, there is still some fight left, unfortunately for her.

Postscript: Dick Morris says in a Feb. 23 column that Edwards dared to express the view that silence on Iraq was "betrayal" and that "Clinton gunslinger" Howard Wolfson then blasted Edwards for negative campaigning.

Libby's dirty little secret

"National security" was abused in a White House plot to discredit an effective critic, according to I. Lewis Libby's testimony.

Libby, former national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he, Cheney and President Bush had conspired to blacken the reputation of Joseph Wilson, a diplomat who blew the whistle on the fact that the White House was using a discredited claim about Iraqi attempts to go nuclear.

Libby, a longtime Washington insider and ally of the neocon contingent, was the lawyer who helped push through President Clinton's last-second pardon of Marc Rich, the influential Israeli-American wanted for illegaly trading with the enemy at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Libby seems to have thought that it was normal politics to conspire to misuse national security against critics. National security was misused in two ways: the identity of Valery Plame Wilson as a CIA operative was disclosed; and the White House was supposed to have been protected by a special national security understanding with representatives of the elite media.

Bush's probable involvement in this conspiracy to destroy a man and woman while hiding behind a national security screen is indicated by the fact that he somehow declassified Plame's identity without consulting anyone much. Certainly Plame didn't know her identity had been declassified. Now if Bush declassified Plame's identity, why did her identity have to be anonymously leaked? Clearly, we have political conspiracy cloaked behind national security.

So who else did the Gang of Three (make that Gang of N), using their national security advantage, conspire to politically neutralize?

Hard to say for sure. But, do we doubt that there have been many such nasty little plots?

In fact, yours truly is not quite a "public figure" but would not the White House perceive this experienced newsman's activities as threatening? It's true that the names of investigative reporters and columnists do not usually appear in the political debate (at least prior to the Plame matter) and so from that standpoint the fact that both politicians and media elite seem to ignore me is not terribly surprising.

Yet how does the White House's national security politics unit handle journalists that imperil the President's political well-being. Well, if need be Bush will call up the editor and push to have a story killed.

Suppose there is no editor to call up? In that case, such a journalist will have few friends in high places and all sorts of nasties may be OKd. And of course the Washington media will be expected to keep quiet ... in the name of national security.

'Real ID' backlash and 9/11 truth

A backlash is building against the federal law to require every state to adhere to the "real ID" form of driver license, which includes a chip that carries vital information.
Supposedly these cards can't be counterfeited. Of course, following the darwinian imperative, crooks and terrorists will find a way.
States say the new ID costs are prohibitive and there is fear of identity theft from people with electronic surveillence gear.
I like to think that a thus-far unspoken part of the backlash is the growing suspicion among all levels of society that 9/11 was an inside job and the new IDs are bringing America under some kind of 666 cult. Your driver license will be trackable at all times by federal authorities. If you give some powerful person some lip, you may find all kinds of bureaucratic or technical problem with your card, which will be under control of central computers, of course.
Honest dissidents will always be under thumb. No room to breathe in this kind of cult-ure.
Some call such fear paranoia. Too bad more Germans weren't paranoid back in the thirties.

NIST flipflops on trade center explosives

The NIST, no doubt stung by sharp criticism of its probe of the collapse of the twin towers, has decided to include controlled demolition in its models of WTC7's collapse.
The agency says that of course it found no evidence of explosives but that nevertheless it will try out several scenarios of a thermite explosion at a key column.
Well, I expect that they will then use their results to "prove" that explosives weren't used.
But hasn't the NIST really discredited its investigation of the twin towers' collapse, an investigation which did not model for explosives (though it did consider the possibility of a "small bomb" but not a large one or group of bombs).

See the NIST's most recent progress report by Googling
NIST, WTC7