Why 9/11 Truth Is Vital For Democracy and Freedom

(In case you did not already figured this out by yourself, this is a mandatory reading):
From THE EXCAVATOR, SEPTEMBER 2, 2010:

9/11: State of Emergency - Win The War on Terror By Ending The "Strategy of Tension"
To learn about the "strategy of tension" read Norway's Le Monde Diplo's 2006 interview with Daniele Ganser, author of NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, read the article "N.A.T.O. Gladio, and the strategy of tension" by Three Monkeys Online, check out the Wikipedia entry, and visit the linked articles in this post. 
We are told by our Western political and military leaders that transnational terrorism poses the greatest security threat to our world in this century. But what if this is not true? What if we have been lied to for nine years about the origins of the War on Terror? What if our governments are the chief architects, and enablers of international terrorism? And if this is true, if the evidence points in that direction, then how do we address these truths, and bring them to public attention? What kind of leadership will emerge to tackle these truths - will they be extremist and violent, or peaceful and understanding? We must ask these questions because the answers will define whether this century will be a century of world peace, or a century of senseless terror, and long wars.
"Man," wrote Joseph Conrad, "is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations." Mankind's psychological shortcomings have persisted in the scientific age of Mankind. We may know the workings of other galaxies, but we are too afraid to look in our own backyard, in the secret corners of our governing systems, and political cultures, where we fear that evil is being done but don't bother asking the questions; to what extent, and for what purpose?

Any mind that briefly investigates the September 11 terrorist attacks will come to the painful, but logical conclusion that what the Bush administration told the American people and the world following the attacks was a complete lie. Islamic terrorism is an artificial threat. State-sponsored terrorism, on the other hand, presents a great and ever growing danger to the welfare of Western countries, the welfare of the people of the Middle East, and the overall welfare of the people of the planet. It is tough to accept that the authors of the most deadly terrorism in our world don't reside in the mountains and training camps of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in highly protected buildings in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv. But this must be accepted because it is not a wacky conspiracy theory.

The dangers of public denial, and official secrecy are greater than some realize. A lot of conspiracy theories can be misused by diabolical groups and leaders. History shows that if factual and logical truths about world events are not publicly defined and acknowledged, if they are shielded from popular discourse, then opportunist and maniacal leaders can misuse these truths to suit their own agendas. Hitler did exactly that as Weimar collapsed. By giving voice to the popular discontent, and the widespread anger against the German political parties, he was able to built his own system of destruction, and his own myth of bravery and heroism.

Such madness could reign supreme in our times if there is not a free, open, and civil debate about 9/11, the "strategy of tension," and state-terrorism, in which any kind of scapegoating would immediately be condemned as a hateful distraction. Currently, the flames of Islamophobia are being cultivated by high-powered political operatives, ignorant politicians, Christian fundamentalists, and slimy talk show hosts like the ones on Fox News. But there is also the possibility that Jewish people will be attacked, and scapegoated if honest and humane political leaders do not emerge in America. Alan Hart, a long-time journalist of the Middle East, wrote eloquently in this essay about making sure that the discovery of 9/11 truth does not trigger anti-Semitism.

The truth about 9/11, without going into detail, is that 9/11 is a state crime against democracy. No nation, race, or religion deserves to be persecuted, hated, and killed: not Islam, not Afghanistan, not Judaism, not Israel, not Christianity, not America. The criminals are a hardcore group of imperialist, and Zionist conspirators. Any suggestion that "Muslims did it" or "Jews did it" is hateful nonsense, and must be prevented from entering any discussion about the 9/11 cover-up, otherwise, racist fringe groups will be empowered to the detriment of a free, and civilized world.

A big part of the reason why a new 9/11 investigation is so necessary is that it will help us align all our lives with the real political, social, and historical truths of our age, and allow us to breathe, to not live with fear, anger, and depression.

People cannot direct history for the better if they are unaware of it's current course, how it's been manipulated, who manipulated it, and how we came to this moment in time. The history of the secret Gladio network, and the "strategy of tension" during the Cold War is relevant to the present discourse about Islamic terrorism, and the War on Terror. The same powers are in charge, and profiting from the ignorance of Western populations. The objective behind the "strategy of tension" was simple: discredit leftist leaders, maintain the power of the military and intelligence agencies in society, and create a culture of fear and paranoia about the "Communist" threat. Daniele Ganser:

"Eastern Europe had the Warsaw pact, and obviously if Moscow didn't want something to happen there, they just sent the tanks in. End of story. It was clear. In Western Europe it was more delicate. We were free countries, if you want. At the same time we had communist parties that were very strong in countries like France and Italy, less strong elsewhere but they existed. So NATO was scared to be weakened from within. If you take France or Italy, or Greece or Turkey, where a group of parliamentarians could say 'we wan't to leave NATO', for example the communists; or they could say, 'if we get in to Government, we might say something to our allies in Moscow, because we actually agree with them more than with Washington and London', such a situation, seen from a NATO perspective was of the greatest danger. You couldn't want earnestly to have a Greek socialist prime minister taking the country out of NATO. You lose a country. You couldn't want an Italian communist leader becoming so famous and so strong that they actually put him into government in the Defence Ministry. It was a nightmare for the military. Military intelligence officers have described it in those terms to me. So this is the strategic framework to handle the problem. The strategy of tension, (where you have to be really evil - Ganser underlines - because you kill civilians). You have to plant bombs in public places and kill civilians. This happened in a number of countries in Western Europe during the Cold War, but it's not clear who was behind these acts. From thereon we have to speculate. If these bombs were planted as part of the stay-behind framework, then it was deliberate. The killing was then attributed to the left wing, which became discredited. They lost strength. Secondly the State could call for more power for the security services and the Defence Ministry, with all these terrorists running around. So the strategy of tension can work, and it is possible that it was implemented. It's quite possibly the most sensitive topic from the Cold War in Europe".

Knowing that the "strategy of tension" was used by Western military agencies to solidify their power behind the scenes is crucial to our current understanding of the War on Terrorism, and allow us to frame the historical narrative so that the fear of Islamic terrorism in America and the West evaporates. Once there is no more fear, and hatred, any lingering support for the wars will also evaporate. And the clouds of "Islamic terror" that are said to be descending on the Western world will be viewed for what they are: state-manufactured clouds that are blown-up for evil purposes, and spread over the public mind by the corporate-state media in order to induce the fog of fear.

The fighters for liberty, peace, and justice are in a hard struggle, but the power of truth cannot be underestimated. We can recapture the Mind of the West, and resew the fabric of global society. After all, it must be us, the citizens of the West, to take this task on, because the authors of the War on Terror cannot also be the authors of peace, and friendship.

A major problem that is keeping us from challenging our governments with the questions of 9/11 is what can only be described as suicidal denial. Some societies, and individuals deny certain truths to the point of their own destruction. They put off the inevitable until they finally grasp that denial won't make it go away, but, by that point, they are unable to resolve their issues peacefully, and constructively. I believe, as do many others, that our civilization is nearing that point. For some societies and individuals the denial is so crippling that the only thing that saves them is an outside intervention. But we are not such a society. Our age is fortunate to have brave truth-tellers who have told it like it is. Truth-tellers like the late William Cooper, Alex Jones, David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, Peter Dale Scott, Steven Jones, Niels Harrit, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange/WikiLeaks, Lt. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, Sibel Edmonds, Ray McGovern, David MacMichael, Dan Hamburg, Coleen Rowley, Col. Ann Wright, everybody in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, everybody in the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, and many more whom I have failed to mention. Truth-telling is our only hope because finding, and telling the truth will lead to peace in the Middle East, and reverse the dictatorial direction of our governments in the West.

The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

WashingtonPost Sunday, September 5, 2010

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.



But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.


Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?


The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.


Afghanistan

The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked. In 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- the United States cut spending in Afghanistan to $14.7 billion (down from more than $20 billion in 2002), while we poured $53 billion into Iraq. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we spent at least four times as much money in Iraq as in Afghanistan.



It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010.


Oil

When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.


In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.


Federal debt

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.


As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.


The financial crisis

The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.


Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.


The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.


* * *
Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger. The question today is: Can we learn from this costly mistake?


Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, was chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. They are co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

MILIBAND AND A 'HUGE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY'

From aangirfan: 

David Miliband, who is the elder son of Marion Kozak and the late Marxist theoretician Adolphe Ralph Miliband, a Belgian-Jewish refugee during the Second World War. Adolphe had Polish Jewish parents. There is speculation that 'the bad guys' want David Miliband to be British prime minister, and so they will dump David Cameron.
In the UK, the Observer newspaper has decided to support David Miliband in the contest to become leader of the Labour Party (David Miliband is the right choice for Labour Observer leader.)

The following are some of the comments on the Observer website:

1. When in office, as the Foreign Secretary, David Milliband spent his time lying about government complicity in torture and defending the Iraq war... You, the Observer, are utterly contemptible.

2. The last Labour government was a huge criminal conspiracy hand in glove with some of the worst parasites on the surface of the planet.

They waged aggressive war in Iraq and colluded in the systematic asset stripping and looting of this country and the destabilisation of large parts of the world's economy

The sub prime mortgage scam was invented in the City of London ... and exported to the USA to trial...
The City has become the world’s central petrodollar recycling plant...
http://energybulletin.net/node/24675
The answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking - it is in large part an oil currency war...http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
Bit by bit, Britain's crown jewels are being snapped up. 
Every week, a bland announcement confirms the sale of another major British institution to a foreign predator...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/feb/09/comment.politics
3. After reading your endorsement of David Miliband for Labour Party Leader I am glad I made that decision not to buy your paper.


Separa

In March 2010, Gilad Atzmon wrote:

"Miliband is listed on an official Israeli Propaganda site as an Israeli Hasbara author.

"The same Miliband was until very recently investing an enormous effort into changing British Universal Jurisdiction just to make it easy for Israeli war criminals to make it to Oxford Street early on Boxing Day.

"Just a few weeks before the IDF launched its genocidal attempt against the people of Gaza, the same Miliband visited Sderot to ‘show solidarity’ with the Israeli people.

"Here is what he had to say 'It's very important that countries like mine and others show their solidarity with the people of Sderot.'

"This idiotic statement made by a senior loyal minister was obviously interpreted by the Israelis as a green light to reduce Gaza into a pile of rubble...

"Miliband is still loyal to the darkest ideology around namely Zionism.

"Britons better grasp that Israel was using no less than 15 forged British passports.

"The Israelis were obviously confident that they could get away with it. With a listed Hasbara author running the foreign office and half of the shadow ministers being members of the ‘Conservative Friends of Israel’, the Mossad had a good reason to believe that Britain’s politics is in its pockets..."

~~

David Miliband's grandfather was Samuel Miliband, who reportedly fought with the red Army. (Ralph Miliband : Biography)

One of Samuel's brothers is thought to have joined the Russian communists' Red Army, fighting the Western powers in the Russian civil war. (dailymail.2)
~~
The Milibands paid around £20,000 to adopt their eldest son. (dailymail.R)
Real story behind the Milibands' £20000 adoption of two sons in USA.

[weird] Canada involving Israel in the Americas, Despite Blatant Human Rights Violations

Now a regime born and grown out of massive terrorism, founded on a supremacist, racist, apocalyptic cult and run by genocydal nuts is called democracy and proposed as a model for the Americas. 
This is the bad joke of the day:


by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
Global Research, September 2, 2010

Despite Concerns, Canada is involving Israel in the Americas    The department of Foreign Affairs announced yesterday that the Minister of State of Foreign Affairs (Americas), Peter Kent, will be visiting Israel from August 31 to September 08 to launch Canada-Israel discussions on the Americas. Kent is set to meet with President Shimon Peres, Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Daniel Ayalon, during his trip. He will also visit the West Bank, where he will meet Riad Malki, the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Foreign Affairs. On the eve of discussions, Kent stated, "As vibrant democratic states, Canada and Israel are natural allies. This affinity, based on our shared values, such as respect for human rights and the rule of law, extends to our respective engagement in the Americas." The Minister's statement is puzzling given Israel's documented history of human rights violations and concomitant breach of international law. Under stated Canadian policy regarding the Middle East, Canada has officially recognized  many of Israel's violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Israel's military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, the ongoing expansion of colonies (a.k.a. settlements) in the occupied territories, and Israel's construction of a wall on Palestinian land. Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is concerned by the purpose of Minister of State Kent's trip to Israel and his statements on Canadian-Israeli relations. "Israel is not a good partner for Canada on the international stage, because Israel simply does not respect international law." said Thomas Woodley, president of CJPME.  "The Canadian government is acting inconsistently by seeking to actively engage Israel in the geo-politics of the Americas, considering Israel's role in the current instability of the Middle East." Israel has been a permanent observer to the Organization of American States (OAS), since 1972. Although countries, such as Argentina and Mexico, have maintained economic and military relationships with Israel over the decades, Israel's has seen an increase in criticism of its policies towards Palestinians by Latin American nations. During Israel's assault on Gaza in early 2009, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez expelled Israeli diplomats from the country as a sign of protest.  Since then, Israel's interests in Caracas have been represented by the Canadian Embassy. Canada also represents Israel's consular interests in Cuba through its embassy in Havana.  For more information, please contact: Patricia Jean, VP Communications  Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East Telephone 1: 450-812-7781 Telephone 2: 438-380-5410 CPME Email  - CJPME Website

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East __________-- Related: Israeli jets bomb Gaza cities