UN Could Lead New 9/11 Investigation, Says Japanese MP

Japanese member of Parliament Yukihisa Fujita told the Alex Jones Show yesterday that a potential new investigation of the 9/11 cover-up could be led by global parliamentarians he has been in contact with, or even by the United Nations itself.

Fujita, an MP for the Japanese Democratic Party, and a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet (national legislature), presented evidence which contradicted the official 9/11 story during a widely publicized Japanese Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in January of this year.

Following Fujita’s presentation in the Japanese Diet, he also took part in a 9/11 truth conference at the EU Parliament in Brussels on February 26th which was hosted by Italian MEP Giullietto Chiesa (both presentations can be viewed at the end of this article).

“This is something Parliamentarians of various countries could ask - I was in Europe meeting with European MP’s and they are also thinking about asking the UN to investigate, so these kind of efforts need to be done internationally,” said Fujita, adding that he had visited eleven different European countries in an attempt to garner support for the move.

Fujita said the reaction to his presentation of the evidence during a session of the Japanese Parliament was encouraging, adding that several members of his party were already aware of some of the issues surrounding the incredulity of the official story.

The Japanese MP said that he first began researching 9/11 around two years ago after watching documentaries and looking at evidence online.

9/11 Truth Conference at EU Parliament in Brussels, February 26th, 2008.
Yukihisa Fujita’s 9/11 Presentation to the Japanese Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, January 11th, 2008.

“At the beginning I thought I couldn’t believe, this can’t be true, but then last year when I heard more about various facts and photos of the collapse of the seven building (WTC 7) and the put options conducted before 9/11 - I began to see that there was serious evidence that a cover-up might have been involved,” Fujita told the Alex Jones Show.

The MP personally visited the former President of Germany’s Bundesbank (presumably Ernst Welteke), who admitted that suspicious insider trading on American and United Airlines did take place immediately before 9/11.

Fujita said the deaths of 24 Japanese citizens during as a result of the attack in New York spurred him to ask why no cause of death had been properly ascertained by the Japanese government as would be routine, and why no DNA records had been recovered.

Fujita said he was currently engaged in a back and forth question and answer process with the Japanese Prime Minister in an attempt to get questions about 9/11 answered.

The MP said that people had warned him to be careful about asking questions about 9/11 because it could put his life in danger.

Fujita will today report back on his meetings in Europe and Sydney to fellow members of his party in an attempt to achieve further momentum in attaining consensus for a comprehensive investigation of 9/11 led by independent global Parliamentarians and not by Bush administration cronies, as was the case with the 9/11 Commission.

Prison Planet | Paul Joseph Watson | Monday, March 31, 2008

Al Qaeda recruiting “western” fighters: CIA boss

Al Qaeda is training fighters that “look western” and could easily cross U.S. borders without attracting attention, CIA Director Michael Hayden said on Sunday.

The militant Islamist group has turned Pakistan’s remote tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan into a safe haven, and is using it to plot further attacks against the United States, Hayden said.

“They are bringing operatives into that region for training — operatives that wouldn’t attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles (airport outside Washington) with you when you were coming back from overseas,” Hayden said during an interview on NBC’s television show Meet the Press.

“(They) look western (and) would be able to come into this country without attracting the kinds of attention that others might,” Hayden said, without offering further details.

The United States went to war in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities in order to crush al Qaeda and hunt down its chief, Osama bin Laden, who Hayden confirmed was still believed by the United States to be hiding in the rugged Afghan border area.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the United States had stepped up unilateral attacks on al Qaeda targets in Pakistan because it fears the country’s newly elected leaders will soon curb U.S. actions on their soil. Pakistan’s pro-U.S. president, Pervez Musharraf, has been weakened by the defeat of his allies in the country’s recent elections.

Hayden declined to comment directly on the Post article, but he stressed that the tribal regions were very sensitive.

“The situation along that Afghanistan/Pakistan border presents a clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to the West in general and the United States in particular,” Hayden said.

“It is very clear to us that al Qaeda has been able over the last 18 months or so to establish a safe haven along the Afghan/Pakistan border that they have not enjoyed before.”

Asked directly whether he feared Musharraf might not be around as president for much longer to support the United States, Hayden said he did not know, but praised what the country had already delivered.

“We have not had a better partner in the war against terrorism than the Pakistani government,” he said.

(Reporting by Alister Bull; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Reuters | Alister Bull | Sunday, March 30, 2008

Is Another 9/11 Inevitable?

It was shocking, hearing CIA director Michael Hayden tell Tim Russert on Sunday morning that we’re wide open to another 9/11-style terrorist attack. Al-Qaeda, he said, is turning to operatives who “look Western” and “wouldn’t attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles with you.” These new recruits, he averred, “would be able to come into this country … without attracting the kind of attention that others might.”

Let’s see if I understand this correctly: all one has to do in order to get into the U.S. is to “look Western” and not stand out too much in the line at Dulles.

Seven years after 9/11, we’re still just as vulnerable as ever to another devastating blow such as the one Osama bin Laden delivered on that fateful September morning. I’ve often joked that the sheer force of the explosions in New York and Washington tore a hole in the space-time continuum and hurtled us into a Bizarro World alternate universe, where up is down and the laws of reason and logic are similarly inverted. Nothing else explains our present course, our crazed foreign policy, and our utter helplessness in the face of a very real threat to the continental United States.

Four years after the 9/11 Commission issued its recommendations of preventive measures to be taken, the report molders on the shelf, its laundry list of urgent action items not even close to being implemented. One key passage from the report:

“The U.S. border security system should be integrated into a larger network of screening points that includes our transportation system and access to vital facilities, such as nuclear reactors. The president should direct the Department of Homeland Security to lead the effort to design a comprehensive screening system, addressing common problems and setting common standards with system-wide goals in mind. Extending those standards among other governments could dramatically strengthen America and the world’s collective ability to intercept individuals who pose catastrophic threats.”

Our borders are more porous than ever, and not the slightest effort has been made to repair this rather large chink in America’s armor. The commission’s recommendation that we institute “a biometric entry-exit screening system, including a single system for speeding qualified travelers,” has been completely ignored. As the commissioners pointed out,

“No one can hide his or her debt by acquiring a credit card with a slightly different name. Yet today, a terrorist can defeat the link to electronic records by tossing away an old passport and slightly altering the name in the new one.”

That hasn’t changed. Indeed, very little has changed. Instead of building a biometric barrier to terrorism, the Transportation Security Administration is busy strip-searching little old ladies from Kansas and devising new ways to deal with passengers who have body piercings. The Department of Homeland Security is a mess – instead of streamlining the bureaucracy it has merely added on another layer of inefficiency. Homeland Security has never passed a government audit. No, not even once.

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Homeland Security funding, instead of going to defend the most likely terrorist targets, is sent to states like Wyoming, which, as Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted, gets “5 to 10 times as many homeland security dollars per capita as many high-risk states.” It’s small wonder these funds are distributed according to a predictable political formula instead of addressing the real security needs of a nation at war with a deadly enemy. Yet such vindication of my libertarian views on the nature and purpose of government does nothing to reassure me – or to lessen the very real (and increasing) danger.

The United States has chosen to fight an offensive war, but this has boomeranged, and badly. The Iraq war not only diverts us from our task of rooting out al-Qaeda, it also empowers and enables the terrorists in their efforts to wreak havoc on the American mainland.

Bin Laden’s legions are more numerous and better strategically placed than they were before 9/11: they’re not only in Afghanistan, they’ve also infiltrated “liberated” Iraq and entered Pakistan. In the latter location they’ve carved out a safe haven, where they continue to plot their war against America – while Gen. Pervez Musharraf, our chosen strongman, and the recipient of billions in U.S. aid, gets weak in the knees in the face of bin Laden’s tribal protectors.

Furthermore – and more importantly – we’re losing the ideological battle against the jihadists, whose view of the U.S. as the main enemy of Islam is seemingly confirmed by U.S. government actions since 9/11. America’s standing across the Middle East has plummeted. Our Israeli-centric Middle Eastern policy continues to outrage even our allies in the region, making it harder to gain the cooperation of Arab governments and security services to pursue the task we should have accomplished – or, at least, attempted – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: rounding up the leadership of this terrorist cabal and eliminating them once and for all.

The Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was predicated on the principle that the best defense is a good offense – with the result that we are now bogged down in both Afghanistan and Iraq with our soft underbelly exposed to the enemy. They invaded Iraq because it was “doable,” as Paul Wolfowitz so memorably put it. Yet, as we spend $12 billion per month in Iraq, the biometric system the 9/11 Commission called for, and Congress agreed was necessary, is apparently not doable, at least by our government.

Also not doable: the traditional low-tech approach to border security. Two years ago, the GAO pointed out that investigators had “successfully entered the United States using fictitious driver’s licenses and other bogus documentation through nine land ports of entry on the northern and southern borders” between February and May 2005. Counterfeit identification? Our intrepid Customs and Border Patrol officers didn’t notice the fakes, and, in too many cases, didn’t even bother to check identification documents.

I wonder what happened to the border guards who messed up so badly. Ten to one they’re still working for the same government agencies, albeit with a stern wrist-slapping note appended to their official records.

The TSA makes us take off our shoes at every airport but doesn’t bother inspecting cargo in planes for explosives. Our president is telling us that the central theater of the war on terrorism is in Iraq – while, in America, our ports are wide open to a nuclear device masquerading as a shipment of coconuts.

We were attacked on 9/11, and the administration, instead of fighting back, essentially surrendered – or, at least, gave up entirely the concept of defending the continental United States from another horrific assault. Instead, they went charging around the world on a wild goose chase that has exhausted our resources and the patience of the American people.

What’s scary is that these are the folks charged with defending us – a realization that would imbue Pollyanna with a sense of impending doom.

Yes, we are at war with the network of groups and individuals who planned and executed the 9/11 terrorist attacks – not with the Mahdi Army, the Iranians, the Syrians, and/or anyone who looks cross-eyed at the Israelis. As we bray and posture, asserting our right to preemptively attack any nation on earth, glorying in our role as the global hegemon, the reality is that we are for all intents and purposes utterly defenseless.

What this means is that another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 – or worse – is practically inevitable. Which is what our very own government officials, both here and in Britain, have been telling us since 2001. It’s called covering your ass – and it’s the only job governments everywhere are very good at.

~ Justin Raimondo

Antiwar | Monday, March 31, 2008

Mobile phones ‘more dangerous than smoking’

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.

It draws on growing evidence - exclusively reported in the IoS in October - that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.

Professor Khurana - a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers - reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that “there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours”. He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade.

Noting that malignant brain tumours represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.

Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual”. It believes he “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews”.

The Independent | Geoffrey Lean | Sunday, March 30, 2008

Katrina victims may have to repay money

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle “approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort.”

The bid invitation said: “The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000.”

The biggest grant amount allowed by the Road Home program is $150,000, so ICF believes it paid some recipients the maximum when they should not have received a penny. If ICF’s highest estimate of 5,000 collection cases - overpaid by an average of $35,000 - proves to be true, that means applicants will have to pay back a total of $175 million.

One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, has $11 billion in federal funds.

ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said in an e-mail Friday that the overpayment recovery effort was made inevitable when insurance and other aid to Katrina victims was eventually measured against what an applicant received from the Road Home program.

Brann said there was a sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF knew applicants might eventually have to return some money.

“The choice was either to process grants immediately or wait until the March 2008 deadline (for submitting Road Home applications) before disbursing any funds,” Brann said in her e-mail.

Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is “quite good for large federal programs.”

Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen’s Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.

“They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments,” he said. “People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them.”

The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, helping it buy out four other companies and enter government contracting in sectors including national defense and the environment.

Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state body that asked for the Blanco-ICF investigations, acknowledged the collections could be painful for applicants, many of whom have used up their nest eggs to rebuild.

“The state must walk a fine line of treating homeowners who have been overpaid with fairness and compassion and ensuring that all federal funds are used for their intended purpose,” said Rainwater, an appointee of new Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Upon receiving money from Road Home, grantees sign forms that say they must refund any overpayments.

Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen’s Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.

“I think they are looking for ways to decrease awards and that’s part of dissuading people,” she said.

Brann said applicants are told an appeal could boost or diminish their award. She called Ehrlich’s charge “a totally unfounded assertion.”

AP | JOHN MORENO GONZALES | Saturday, Mar 29, 2008

John Cusack movie takes on war profiteers

Raw Story
March 30, 2008

John Cusack was on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and spoke about his upcoming film, War. Inc., which according to Cusack focuses on the military-industrial complex.

The film, says Cusack, differs from other films inspired by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because, it “has a much more absurdist take on [war].”

Cusack added, “some things are so vicious if you didn’t look at them through a different lens you couldn’t get out of bed. And certainly the war profiteering, immorality and illegality of this disastrous, free-market Utopian enterprise out there is certainly well-documented.”

While explaining that the film shares similar themes as those found in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine, Cusack said, “the very core things that make up our government like wars or interrogation or border patrol, jailing, any of those types of things that you would think would be sacred things that would happen with the state are now being turned into for-profit enterprises. And if you want all these things to be, if you want corporate ethics to be our national interest, then you have the situation we’re in now. But right now, when you think that we’ve out sourced everything to interrogation, which means torture is a cost-plus enterprise, I think you can see a complete spiritual bankruptcy to this whole neo-con movement. It’s a nightmare beyond anything you can really imagine.”

Maher asked if these issues were just a result of a neo-conservative movement and Bush administration or evidence of a “rot in America itself that is a lot deeper.”

Cusack responded, “Yeah, I do think the issue goes deeper, a lot deeper.”

Adding later, “Some of these truths are so horrible you don’t want to think about that, but it’s just — I mean the gig’s up. If guys who are statesmen on CNN are also sitting on the board and are shareholders in some of the most profitable defense contractors in the world and they publicly make the case to go to war, got to war, then create a new market with the war, come back and speak evangelically about free markets that aren’t free, these aren’t particularly subtle fact and the stock prices jump 145% and their companies are awarded $2.3 billion contract. After a while you have to expose and shame and indict and hopefully convict the participants in this illegal immoral ideology.”

The full interview can be seen in the video below.

FBI Focusing on ‘About Four’ Suspects in 2001 Anthrax Attacks

The FBI has narrowed its focus to “about four” suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Army’s bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.Among the pool of suspects are three scientists - a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist - linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.

The FBI has collected writing samples from the three scientists in an effort to match them to the writer of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to two U.S. senators and at least two news outlets in the fall of 2001, a law enforcement source confirmed.

The anthrax attacks began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, further alarming a nation already reeling from the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Five people were killed and more than a dozen others were infected by the deadly spores in the fall of 2001.

A leading theory is that the anthrax was stolen from Fort Detrick and then sealed inside the letters. A law enforcement source said the FBI is essentially engaged in a process of elimination.

Much of the early public focus fell on a Fort Detrick scientist named Steven Hatfill, who is suing federal authorities for identifying him as a person of interest. Now the FBI is focusing on other scientists at the facility.

“Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It’s the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States,” a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.

Asked to comment on the likelihood that the anthrax originated at the facility, the expert said:

“It’s not suprising, except that it would underscore that there was serious security deficiencies that existed at one time at Fort Detrick - the ability of researchers to smuggle out some type of very sophisticated anthrax weapon and in some quantity. And, nevertheless, it was possible.”

In December 2001, an Army commander tried to dispel the possibility of a connection to Fort Detrick by taking the media on a rare tour of the base. The commander said the Army used only liquid anthrax, not powder, for its experiments.

“I would say that it does not come from our stocks, because we do not use that dry material,” Maj. Gen. John Parker said. The letters that were mailed to the media and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy all contained powdered anthrax.

But in an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”

Asked for comment, an Army spokeswoman referred all calls to the FBI. The FBI would not comment about the pool of suspects, but a spokeswoman said the investigation clearly remains a priority.

FOX News | Catherine Herridge and Ian McCaleb | Friday, March 28, 2008

Call For New 9/11 Investigation Reaches Crescendo

Calls for a new 9/11 inquiry are reaching a crescendo, with well-respected authorities and celebrities alike adding their voices to the cause, as the official 9/11 story crumbles under the weight of revelations of White House ties to the 9/11 Commission, and other cover-ups on behalf of authorities staffed with investigating the attacks.

The corporate media’s insistence on ignoring hundreds of professional experts who are calling for a new 9/11 investigation has spurred many celebrities to use their public platforms to speak out, knowing that the press will at least have to address the issue.

The latest to do so is top comedian Margaret Cho, who told the Alex Jones Show yesterday that the public were going to become very angry when it was fully disclosed that the attacks were a conspiracy, concurring with fellow comedian George Carlin who also questioned the official story last year.

The path was trailblazed by Charlie Sheen in March 2006 when he spoke of his doubts about the official story and questioned the collapse of WTC Building 7. Sheen was endlessly smeared for weeks after but he prompted a national debate about 9/11 and the 9/11 Truth Movement enjoyed what many consider to be its most productive year.

In September 2006, former Governor, actor and wrestling star Jesse Ventura questioned 9/11 during an on-camera interview with Alex Jones and also cited Operation Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin as examples of how the government has planned and carried out staged war provocations in the past.

In July 2007, popular film maker Michael Moore told WeAreChange.org reporters that he had many more questions about 9/11 than at the time of making Fahrenheit 9/11 and did not believe the public had been told “half the truth” about what really happened.

Martin Sheen echoed his son’s comments in October 2007 along with rising actor Mark Ruffalo, following in the footsteps of Rosie O’Donnell, who caused shockwaves when she brought 9/11 truth to national prominence during her stint as The View host.

The View was also used as a platform for actor James Brolin to raise 9/11 truth, who questioned the official version of events in the same week that acclaimed director David Lynch spoke out.

Lynch told Dutch television he thought WTC Building 7 was brought down via controlled demolition and that the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crash sites were suspicious due to the absence of evidence that a plane crashed at either location.

Other notable public figures speaking out at the same time included Ed Asner, Matthew Bellemy of Muse and director Richard Linklater.

American icon Willie Nelson threw his hat in the ring last month, when he told The Alex Jones Show that he thought the twin towers were imploded like condemned Las Vegas casino buildings.

Nelson’s comments were almost universally blackballed by the corporate media, who had patently learned from the Sheen controversy that smear campaigns were only leading to more people being exposed to the information and beginning the wake-up process.

Of course, the really important advocates of 9/11 truth are the hundreds of architects, scholars, engineers and other expert professionals who are demanding a fresh inquiry, but they are habitually ignored by the media as the 9/11 Truth Movement is smeared as a fringe interest fad populated by kooks and imbeciles.

In reality, doubts about the official 9/11 story are shared by a myriad of well-respected figures.

The Japanese Parliament were recently a captive audience to a 9/11 truth presentation by Fujita Yukihisa - a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet.

Andreas von Buelow, the former German Defense Secretary, was perhaps the first most prominent individual to go on the record back in 2004, when he blamed the CIA for orchestrating the attacks.

He was followed by former environment minister in Tony Blair’s government Michael Meacher, who questioned the stand down of NORAD on 9/11 and dismissed the entire war on terror as a hoax.

Veteran CIA agent and respected geopolitical expert Robert Baer said that “all the evidence points to” 9/11 having had elements of an inside job during a radio apperance in June 2006.

Late last year, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga told Italy’s most respected newspaper that the attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad and that this was common knowledge amongst global intelligence agencies.

Former Wall Street Journal editor, U.S. Treasury Secretary and founder of Reaganomics Paul Craig Roberts questioned the susupicious collapse of the twin towers and Building 7 in February 2006.

Headed up by Richard Gage, the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization lists hundreds of experts in their field who all concur that the implosion of the buildings is not consistent with the official story and needs to be investigated.

Scholars For 9/11 Truth & Justice, headed by Professor Steven Jones, counts amongst its ranks hundreds of physicists, scientists and academic professionals who all share doubts about 9/11.

Another website, Patriots For 9/11 Truth, lists hundreds more former government, military, air force, and navy officials who have all spoken out about 9/11.

With the impartiality of the 9/11 Commission having been blown wide open by revelations of White House ties with Philip Zelikow, allied to the fact that the Pentagon knowingly lied to the Commission during testimony, the call for a new independent inquiry, armed with subpoena powers, is amplifying to a crescendo.

Allegations of a cover-up in regard to the organization responsible for investigating the collapse of the twin towers on behalf of FEMA this week also increased the pressure.

The more prominent figures that add their voice to that call, be they captains of culture or respected authorties in their discipline, can only increase the eventual likelihood of a new investigation.

Woman Says TSA Forced Piercings Removal

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.”I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The women then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.

Hamlin said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

“After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove,” Allred said in the letter.

Hamlin filed a complaint, but the TSA’s customer service manager at the Lubbock airport concluded the screening was handled properly, Allred said.

Allred said she might consider legal action if the TSA does not apologize.

On its Web site, the TSA warns that passengers “may be additionally screened because of hidden items such as body piercings, which alarmed the metal detector.”

“If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search,” the site says.

Hamlin would have accepted a “pat-down” had it been offered, Allred said.

Hamlin was publicly humiliated and has “undergone an enormous amount of physical pain to have the nipple rings reinserted” because of scar tissue, Allred said.

“The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary,” Allred wrote. “The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon.”

TSA spokesman Dwayne Baird said he was unaware of the incident. There is no specific TSA policy on dealing with body piercings, he said, “as long as it doesn’t sound the alarms.”

If an alarm does sound, “until that is resolved, we’re not going to let them go through the checkpoint, no matter what they’re wearing or where they’re wearing it.”

People routinely pass through security wearing wedding rings without problems, and it might take a larger bit of metal to trigger an alarm, Baird said.

AP | Greg Risling | Thursday, March 27, 2008

NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years

NEW YORK The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.

Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.

As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows.

The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.

That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.

“Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms,” John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.

Jennifer Saba (jsaba@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P’s associate editor.

E & P | Jennifer Saba | Friday, March 28, 2008

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