The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.”

“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”

Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

The Anti-Defamation League’s statement drew criticism almost immediately.

“The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.”

C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington group that emphasizes religious freedom, called the decision “disappointing,” and said he read about it “with a great deal of sorrow.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/nyregion/31mosque.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

From Robert fisk

The death of five Israeli servicemen in a helicopter crash in Romania this week raised scarcely a headline.

There was a Nato-Israeli exercise in progress. Well, that's OK then. Now imagine the death of five Hamas fighters in a helicopter crash in Romania this week. We'd still be investigating this extraordinary phenomenon. Now mark you, I'm not comparing Israel and Hamas. Israel is the country that justifiably slaughtered more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza 19 months ago – more than 300 of them children – while the vicious, blood-sucking and terrorist Hamas killed 13 Israelis (three of them soldiers who actually shot each other by mistake).

But there is one parallel. Judge Richard Goldstone, the eminent Jewish South African judge, decided in his 575-page UN inquiry into the Gaza bloodbath that both sides had committed war crimes – he was, of course, quite rightly called "evil" by all kinds of justifiably outraged supporters of Israel in the US, his excellent report rejected by seven EU governments – and so a question presents itself. What is Nato doing when it plays war games with an army accused of war crimes?

Or, more to the point, what on earth is the EU doing when it cosies up to the Israelis? In a remarkable, detailed – if slightly over-infuriated – book to be published in November, the indefatigable David Cronin is going to present a microscopic analysis of "our" relations with Israel. I have just finished reading the manuscript. It leaves me breathless. As he says in his preface, "Israel has developed such strong political and economic ties to the EU over the past decade that it has become a member state of the union in all but name." Indeed, it was Javier Solana, the grubby top dog of the EU's foreign policy (formerly Nato secretary general), who actually said last year that "Israel, allow me to say, is a member of the European Union without being a member of the institution".

Pardon me? Did we know this? Did we vote for this? Who allowed this to happen? Does David Cameron – now so forcefully marketing Turkish entry to the EU – agree with this? Probably yes, since he goes on calling himself a "friend of Israel" after that country produced an excellent set of forged British passports for its murderers in Dubai. As Cronin says, "the EU's cowardice towards Israel is in stark contrast to the robust position it has taken when major atrocities have occurred in other conflicts". After the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, for example, the EU tasked an independent mission to find out if international law had been flouted, and demanded an international inquiry into human rights abuses after Sri Lanka's war against the Tamil Tigers. Cronin does not duck Europe's responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust and agrees that there will always be a "moral duty" on our governments to ensure it never happens again – though I did notice that Cameron forgot to mention the 1915 Armenian Holocaust when he was sucking up to the Turks this week.

But that's not quite the point. In 1999, Britain's arms sales to Israel – a country occupying the West Bank (and Gaza, too) and building illegal colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land – were worth £11.5m; within two years, this had almost doubled to £22.5m. This included small arms, grenade-making kits and equipment for fighter jets and tanks. There were a few refusals after Israel used modified Centurion tanks against the Palestinians in 2002, but in 2006, the year in which Israel slaughtered another 1,300 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, in another crusade against Hizbollah's "world terror", Britain granted over 200 weapons licences.

----------

read more at the independent

While most Israeli leaders are resistant to fully lifting the blockade of Gaza, Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing foreign minister, is advocating that Israel abandon the Strip to international monitoring and economic rehabilitation.

The proposal, recently leaked to the Israeli press, does not amount to freeing Gaza but rather to placing it under European sea and land inspections and a reconstruction plan.

If implemented, it will permanently sever the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, transforming the Strip into an internationally supervised ghetto - with the dual purpose of ensuring Israeli security and reigning in the Palestinian population.

The isolation of Gaza would further undermine the vision of a contiguous Palestinian state or any form of equitable coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. It would also divide those families with members in the West Bank, creating a permanent schism in Palestinian society and deepening the sense of fragmentation.

Hamas would effectively be ruling a development project with no meaningful ties to the rest of the Palestinian people.

...

The proposal may serve Lieberman's right-wing, racist agenda, in which Palestinians are viewed not as people with human rights and national aspirations but as an obstacle to be either marginalised, or better still, removed. But it will permanently submit Palestinians to the mercy of others and irreversibly alter any vision for peace.

But the Palestinians are not guiltless or powerless in this - it is in their hands to achieve the Palestinian national reconciliation that would make such proposals meaningless.

As the Wikileaks document-dump week ends, perhaps the real significance of what happened lay not in the specific revelations in those 92,000 pieces of raw data from American frustration-ville in Afghanistan, 2004-2009 (much of which would have been no news to anyone reading TomDispatch all these years).  It may simply be that, for the second time in a month -- the first being theMcChrystal firing/Petraeus hiring -- the war that time forgot has burst onto the front pages of American newspapers and made it to the top of the TV news as a runaway story. 

Given an increasingly unpopular war, the headlines spell bad news for Washington. Pakistani double-crosses, Taliban surges, Afghan corruption, the woeful state of the American-trained Afghan army and police, and -- a subject far less emphasized in U.S. than British coverage -- the unreported killing or wounding of large numbers of civilians by U.S. forces (as well as cover-ups of the same) are not what the Obama administration would have chosen for the week’s war news.  The U.S. war effort was already visibly stumbling and desperately in need of continuing anonymity, so all-consuming news, including reports on spiking American and NATO deaths, certainly wasn’t on the Obama wish list.  And it’s not just the public either.  As reporter Jim Lobe notes, the Wikileaks story “can only add to the pessimism that has spread from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the heart of the foreign policy establishment, and even to a growing number of Republicans.”

....

MRAPs, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan 
By Ann Jones

In the eight years I’ve reported on Afghanistan, I’ve “embedded” regularly with Afghan civilians, especially women.  Recently, however, with American troops “surging” and journalists getting into the swing of the military’s counterinsurgency “strategy” (better known by its acronym, COIN), I decided to get with the program as well.  Last June, I filed a request to embed with the U.S. Army. 

----------------

remembering we're in Afghanistan because of the two towers shown at top...

A plan to build a mosque and a Muslim community centre within two blocks of Ground Zero cleared a major hurdle today amid an intensifying groundswell of opposition from rightwing pundits and politicians.

The $100m project would see a 13-storey centre, with prayer space, swimming pool and restaurant, rise in Park Place, just north of the World Trade Centre where al-Qaida terrorists struck on 11 September 2001.

Opponents turned to the Landmarks Commission of New York City, which has power to order the preservation of historic buildings, in the hope that it would put a stop to the plans by blocking the demolition of the existing building on the site.

Today the commission unanimously declined to preserve the building, an 1850s Italianate structure that was damaged on 9/11 and has been disused ever since. It said there was nothing sufficiently distinguished about its design that earned it landmark status.

from Eugene Robinson...

Republicans pander over 'Ground Zero mosque'

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, August 17, 2010; A15

Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia -- another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it's the so-called Ground Zero mosque, which is not at all what its opponents claim.

First, it's not at Ground Zero. The site in question is two blocks north of the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan; an existing mosque is just a few hundred feet more distant from the site of the collapsed towers. Second, while the planned building would indeed house a place of worship, it is designed to be more of a community center along the lines of a YMCA. Plans include a fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, bookstore, performing arts center and food court. Kebabs do not threaten our way of life.

Most important, organizers have made clear that the whole point of the project is to provide a high-profile platform for mainstream, moderate Islam -- and to stridently reject the warped, radical, jihadist worldview that produced the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

"It will have a real community feel, to celebrate the pluralism in the United States, as well as in the Islamic religion," Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said in May as she argued for permission to build the center. "It will also serve as a major platform for amplifying the silent voice of the majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist ideologies. It will counter the extremist momentum."

---------------------

In regard to "gun Laws", the republicans (ultra-conservatives in the USA) are defending an ambiguously written amendment, while the amendment re freedom of religion is as unambiguous as get out but the republicans want to bend it to fit their small minds...

I am perplexed as to why so many people are against a mosque being built near Ground Zero. I think it should be the goal of everyone to be more tolerant. The mosque should be allowed, in an effort to promote tolerance.

That  is why I propose, that two gay nightclubs be opened next door to the mosque thereby promoting tolerance within the  mosque. We could call the clubs "The Turban Cowboy" and "You  Mecca Me So Hot".

Next door should be a butcher shop that specializes in pork and have an open barbeque with spare ribs as its daily special.   Across the street a very daring lingerie store called "Victoria Keeps Nothing Secret" with sexy mannequins in the  window modelling the goods.

Next door to the lingerie shop, there would be room for an Adult Toy Shop (Koranal Knowledge?), its name in flashing neon lights, and on the other side a liquor store, maybe call it "Morehammered"?

-----------------

From an email doing the round... no link. See picture at top...

Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action

Inside the White House situation room on the morning terrorism transformed America, Franklin C. Miller, the director for defense policy, was suddenly gripped by a staggering fear: "The White House could be hit. We could be going down."

The reports and rumors came in a torrent: A car bomb had exploded at the State Department. The Mall was in flames. The Pentagon had been destroyed. Planes were bearing down on the capital.

The White House was evacuated, leaving the national security team alone, trying to control a nation suddenly under siege and wondering if they were next. Mr. Miller had an aide send out the names of those present by e-mail "so that when and if we died, someone would know who was in there."

Somewhere in the havoc of the moment, Richard A. Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism chief, recalled the long drumbeat of warnings about terrorists striking on American soil, many of them delivered and debated in that very room. After a third hijacked jet had sliced into the Pentagon, others heard Mr. Clarke say it first: "This is Al Qaeda."

An extensive review of the nation's antiterrorism efforts shows that for years before Sept. 11, terror experts throughout the government understood the apocalyptic designs of Osama bin Laden. But the top leaders never reacted as if they believed the country was as vulnerable as it proved to be that morning.

Dozens of interviews with current and former officials demonstrate that even as the threat of terrorism mounted through eight years of the Clinton administration and eight months of President Bush, the government did not marshal its full forces against it.

The defensive work of tightening the borders and airport security was studied but never quite completed. And though the White House undertook a covert campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden, the government never mustered the critical mass of political will and on-the-ground intelligence for the kind of offensive against Al Qaeda it unleashed this fall.

The rising threat of the Islamic jihad movement was first detected by United States investigators after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The inquiry into that attack revealed a weakness in the immigration system used by one of the terrorists, but that hole was never plugged, and it was exploited by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's own pollster told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was declared.

By 1997, the threat of an Islamic attack on America was so well recognized that an F.B.I. agent warned of it in a public speech. But that same year, a strategy for tightening airline security, proposed by a vice- presidential panel, was largely ignored.

In 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on "potential sleeper cells in the United States." That review warned that "the threat of attack remains high" and laid out a plan for fighting terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone.

Last spring, when new threats surfaced, the Bush administration devised a new strategy, which officials said included a striking departure from previous policy — an extensive C.I.A. program to arm the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That new proposal had wound its way to the desk of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and was ready to be delivered to the president for final approval on Monday, Sept. 10.

The government's fight against terrorism always seemed to fall short.

The Sept. 11 attack "was a systematic failure of the way this country protects itself," said James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence. "It's aviation security delegated to the airlines, who did a lousy job. It's a fighter aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a visa and immigration policy failure."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/national/30TERR.html?pagewanted=print

Pentagon Attack Exercise Before 9/11

Missing Link
Click Below to See Previously Downloaded Article

This is one of many documents on the 9/11 summary to have disappeared since the WantToKnow.info site was established. The link to this article became inactive sometime between March and June 2006. Because this information appears to have disappeared, we provide the text of the article below. To see the original webpage from our archive, click here.

You can also verify this text using the Internet archive. Go to http://www.archive.org. Copy and paste the original Internet address of the article (immediately below) into the "Wayback Machine." Then click on the "Take Me Back" button. Click on any date to see the original article as it was posted on the date listed.

http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Contingency_Planning.html



Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates
scenarios in preparing for emergencies
Story and Photos by Dennis Ryan
MDW News Service

Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 2000 — The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard. Defense Protective Services Police seal the crash sight. Army medics, nurses and doctors scramble to organize aid. An Arlington Fire Department chief dispatches his equipment to the affected areas.

Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the "plane crash" was a simulated one.

The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room.

On Oct. 24, there was a mock terrorist incident at the Pentagon Metro stop and a construction accident to name just some of the scenarios that were practiced to better prepare local agencies for real incidents.

http://www.wanttoknow.info/001103mdwpentagonattack

This transcript [BBC] is produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.

Has someone been sitting on the FBI? 6/11/01

GREG PALAST:
The CIA and Saudi Arabia, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. Did their connections cause America to turn a blind eye to terrorism?

UNNAMED MAN:
There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government.

JOE TRENTO, (AUTHOR, "SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"):
The sad thing is that thousands of Americans had to die needlessly.

PETER ELSNER:
How can it be that the former President of the US and the current President of the US have business dealings with characters that need to be investigated?

PALAST:
In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House.

Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the] Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th.

This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY.

This is the sleepy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia where almost every home displays the Stars and Stripes. On this unremarkable street, at 3411 Silver Maple Place, we located the former home of Abdullah and another brother, Omar, also an FBI suspect. It's conveniently close to WAMY. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth is in this building, in a little room in the basement at 5613 Leesburg Pike. And here, just a couple blocks down the road at 5913 Leesburg, is where four of the hijackers that attacked New York and Washington are listed as having lived.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stm

Security chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic repeatedly turned down the chance to acquire a vast intelligence database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 leading members of his al-Qaeda terrorist network in the years leading up to the 11 September attacks, an Observer investigation has revealed.
They were offered thick files, with photographs and detailed biographies of many of his principal cadres, and vital information about al-Qaeda's financial interests in many parts of the globe.

On two separate occasions, they were given an opportunity to extradite or interview key bin Laden operatives who had been arrested in Africa because they appeared to be planning terrorist atrocities.

None of the offers, made regularly from the start of 1995, was taken up. One senior CIA source admitted last night: 'This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.'

He said the blame for the failure lay in the 'irrational hatred' the Clinton administration felt for the source of the proffered intelligence - Sudan, where bin Laden and his leading followers were based from 1992-96. He added that after a slow thaw in relations which began last year, it was only now that the Sudanese information was being properly examined for the first time.

Last weekend, a key meeting took place in London between Walter Kansteiner, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, FBI and CIA representatives, and Yahia Hussien Baviker, the Sudanese intelligence deputy chief. However, although the intelligence channel between Sudan and the United States is now open, and the last UN sanctions against the African state have been removed, The Observer has evidence that a separate offer made by Sudanese agents in Britain to share intelligence with MI6 has been rejected. This follows four years of similar rebuffs.

'If someone from MI6 comes to us and declares himself, the next day he can be in Khartoum,' said a Sudanese government source. 'We have been saying this for years.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/30/terrorism.afghanistan2

May we remember all the people who died needlessly, on all fronts: from those who died in the Twin Towers attack to those who died in the US attack of Iraq, including US soldiers  "who died doing their duty"... See picture at top.

For the President Only

6 August 2011 (declassified 2004)

Clandestine, foreIgn government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin
since 1997' has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin
implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would
follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring
the fighting to America."
After us missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin
told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington...

read more: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf

(22/08/2002) Federal agency planned plane-crashing-into-building drill ... last Sept. 11 (2001)

Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-08-22-sept-11-plane-drill-_x.htm

A secret 9/11 history exists - one that the few who know it say names at least one foreign country that provided support to some of the 19 hijackers on their murderous mission 13-years ago on Thursday.

Twenty-eight pages from an official 2002 report detailing foreign-government assistance to the September 11 attackers remain classified. Determined 9/11 family members and sympathetic congressmen are pushing hard, however, for the long-awaited release of the missing history of one of the United States' greatest tragedies.

The controversial information is contained in the House-Senate Intelligence Committees' Joint Inquiry. The section on "specific sources of foreign support" was classified by former president George W Bush for national security reasons.

Bush received his share of flak for the move, but critics have also denounced President Barack Obama, who reportedly told several 9/11 family members he would declassify the 28 pages - but years later has still failed to do so.

Observers say the American public - and 9/11 family members in particular - deserve to know what the missing chapter reveals.

read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/09/911-secret-28-page-history-201499122529308836.html

see picture at top.