We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.

Is it true?

Let’s look:

• The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)

• The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office

• Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11

• The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11

• Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11

• Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this

• Cheney and the rest of the neocons lamented – before 9/11 – that America could not truly project its power globally without the justification of a “new Pearl Harbor”

• The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)

• The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11

• The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons — and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes — all before 9/11

• The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouths before 9/11

• Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism programs for the United States before (and on) 9/11. See this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay

• It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence, but is an effective way to terrorize people

So did 9/11 really “change everything”? Or was it simply an excuse to implement existing plans?

SEE ALSO: 5 Facts You Don’t Know About Spying

Isn’t it interesting though that they didn’t think it was such a waste of time when, a few years earlier, Chris Farley made an appearance there?

(Chris Farley rules.)

The tightness of their schedule and the importance of the upcoming debates are actually mentioned during the video, and yet the entire room rises for a standing ovation as soon as Chris Farley enters the rooms (which is, of course, the only reaction possible when he walked into a room).

Stephen Colbert’s presence was declared a “waste of time” because he was speaking up for the rights of immigrants, something very few politicians have been willing to do.

Click here for coverage of Stephen Colbert’s testimony before congress at The Huffington Post.

via Drug WarRant

Death Comes to Town is not the first reunion of The Kids in The Hall to happen over the years. In addition to their live tours, the Kids have worked together in various combinations on a few projects that some might not be aware of.

Mark, Bruce, and Kevin reunited in the movie Unaccompanied Minors, playing security guards together.

Dave and Kevin also starred in the movie Sky High together as part of the supporting cast, who’s subplot involved the two of them (along with Bruce Campbell) as teachers at a superhero high school.

And all five members actually reunited for an episode of Lilo and Stich: The Series, playing the extended family of Kevin McDonald’s alien character Pleakley.

In celebration of their new series, I have obsessively collected every piece of Kids in the Hall info available online and listed them below, including such solo projects as Dave Foley’s Christmas Special and the digital archeological remains of Scottland.com.

Click here to read the full story!

California police department on alert for deadly traps.

Police in this picturesque city in rural Riverside County have been on edge in recent weeks. Someone is trying to kill them.

First, a natural gas pipe was shoved through a hole drilled into the roof of the gang enforcement unit’s headquarters. The building filled with flammable vapor but an officer smelled the danger before anyone was hurt.

“It would have taken out half a city block,” Capt. Tony Marghis said.

Then, a ballistic contraption was attached to a sliding security fence around the building. An officer opening the black steel gate triggered the mechanism, which sent a bullet within eight inches of his face.

In another attempted booby trap attack, some kind of explosive device was attached to a police officer’s unmarked car while he went into a convenience store.

Read More on Salon

For those interested in helping immediately, simply text “HAITI” to “90999″ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.

“Not pagan Samhain celebrations or the like,” to quote Chiropteran, “but bright-orange, screaming-pumpkin, Trick-or-Treating Halloween.” It’s all about doing magic with the wild, pop mystery explosion that Halloween has become. The Universal Monsters (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, Mummy) as the spirits of the North, South, East, and West; invocations of Jack Skellington; Jack-o-lanterns as the undead spirit servants we all carve every year to protect our homes from evil.

Halloween and Black (and Orange) Magick

Chiropteran – Well, yesterday was October 1st, the official opening day (by my reckoning) of the Halloween season.

This year, as part of my overarching goal to get my magickal butt in gear, I’ve decided to do a nightly meditation/devotion/working to hammer my Halloween Magick system into shape.

(I don’t know if anyone’s interested in the particulars, but here goes anyway, for any of you who are…)

I started last night by turning the lights down and reading some H. P. Lovecraft (”The Moon-bog”). Cheesy, maybe, but it set the mood nicely. I’ll probably do this with a different horror short story or novel excerpt every night.

Then I got things rolling with the quasi-improvised Four Monsters Banishing. Basically “calling the quarters,” with Dracula to the North (air), The Mummy to the South (earth), The Wolfman to the East (water) and Frankenstein’s Monster to the West (fire). (I’ve spent a while trying out different combinations of associations, and this seems to work out best, for now.) Then I read aloud a short passage from Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (the bit about the Autumn People).

As silly as it might sound, I have never had a more powerful opening to a ritual, whether solo or group. As I finished the final “call,” the air in the room charged up with an almost audible *thunk*, and my hands positively swarmed with gathered energy.

The feeling was so powerful that I almost considered charging a spontaneous working, but I decided to stick with the original plan, which was the “skull mask” meditation, the first step toward a full-blown Pumpkin King invokation.

Sobek – Yes, I think of the trick-or-treating as being the “Rade” of the fey. So I load the candy up with lots of goblin energy.

Original article. . .

The Gumball 3000 is a semi-legal international street race that has been happening every year since 1999. It’s wikipedia page goes out of it’s way to make the race sound legal, and if one were to only see their start and finish lines that would certainly appear to be true. Watch the videos though, and you’ll see things getting fantastically criminal in-between.

This is amazing.

(Even KITT from Knight Rider has participated in the rally.)

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*I rather imagine this kind of spearphishing works pretty well. “Hey! Drone from the Commerce Department! Turn over your password right now, or we put you on the Watch List! You’ll never fly domestic without relentless harassment again. What? ‘Demand your civil rights?’ With us, you don’t have any!”

–DHS Warns of Malicious Spoofed eMail

(August 24, 2009)

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned of malicious

email messages that appear to be from the DHS Division of Intelligence.

The emails actually come from addresses in Latvia and Russia and contain

links to malware designed to steal passwords. The messages were sent

to US Defense Department officials and state and local government

officials starting in June.

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Do you want me to be a bit more specific? My pleasure.

Since I recently posted excerpts from Representative Ron Paul’s speech titled ‘Is America a Police State?’ let’s start with him. During his Presidential candidacy he was consistently, and falsely, marginalized as Anti-Semite, racist, extremist, radical, and many other pejorative adjectives. Who did that? Not only the mainstream media, but also those pseudo alternatives who happen to be the extension of the same establishment media only with a different front/mask. These adjectives and intentional marginalization were used for other candidates as well. Whether it was Representative Kucinich being depicted as a wacky nutcase chasing UFOs, or others with similar non-establishment platforms.

. . .

Let me give you another specific example. People have been forwarding to me communications they have received via popular pseudo progressive online outlets who have been trying very hard to depict my recent sworn testimony as ‘mere allegations,’ and simply lies. I know some of these individuals’ past work and relations. For the last 8 years I have ignored them, and I will continue to do so. Some of these phoney cowards who have been posing as ‘alternative’ are fairly well-known in Washington DC circles and intelligence-related gatherings.

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During the deposition — which we are still going through ourselves — Edmonds discusses covert “activities” by Turkish entities “that would involve trying to obtain very sensitive, classified, highly classified U.S. intelligence information, weapons technology information, classified Congressional records … recruiting key U.S. individuals with access to highly sensitive information, blackmailing, bribery.”

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This description, from the fifteenth century, of spells to transform oneself into a werewolf reminded me of a modern version of such a satanic ritual from The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey, in the chapter entitled How to Become a Werewolf…

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“(Werewolves) are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, does not only unto the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they wear the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in worrying and killing, and most of humane creatures.”

This description, from the fifteenth century, of spells to transform oneself into a werewolf reminded me of a modern version of such a satanic ritual from The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey, in the chapter entitled How to Become a Werewolf. . .

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“[I]t has just now come to my attention that a ‘journalist’ who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI’s payroll?”

“Hate blogger” Hal Turner’s lawyer said last week, and prosecutors agreed, that Turner was “trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative” and “worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an ‘agent provocateur’ and was taught by the agency ‘what he could say that wouldn’t be crossing the line.’”

. . .

John Judge, who worked for McKinney, writes of Turner:

“This is the guy who announced a program topic suggesting that Cynthia McKinney be lynched on her way to the polls to vote in 2006 and published her campaign office address on the website. He asked how she would look swinging at the end of a rope and what message it would send to other ‘uppity’ Blacks. I called NJ Homeland Security and FBI at the time …. The FBI agent I spoke to said, ‘We know all about Mr. Turner.’ Looks like they did.”

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Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an email around on Sunday in which she wrote:

“[I]t has just now come to my attention that a ‘journalist’ who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI’s payroll?”

“Hate blogger” Hal Turner’s lawyer said last week, and prosecutors agreed, that Turner was “trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative” and “worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an ‘agent provocateur’ and was taught by the agency ‘what he could say that wouldn’t be crossing the line.’”

. . .

John Judge, who worked for McKinney, writes of Turner:

“This is the guy who announced a program topic suggesting that Cynthia McKinney be lynched on her way to the polls to vote in 2006 and published her campaign office address on the website. He asked how she would look swinging at the end of a rope and what message it would send to other ‘uppity’ Blacks. I called NJ Homeland Security and FBI at the time …. The FBI agent I spoke to said, ‘We know all about Mr. Turner.’ Looks like they did.”

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He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. [BBC, 11/6/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 11/25/2001] In one case, two Pakistanis apply for visas to attend a trade show in the US, but they are unable to name the trade show or city in which it will be held.

When Springmann denies them a visa, he gets “an almost immediate call from a CIA case officer, hidden in the commercial section [of the consulate], that I should reverse myself and grant these guys a visa.”

Springmann refuses, but the decision is reversed by the chief of the consular section. Springmann realizes that even the ambassador, Walter Cutler, is aware of the situation, which becomes “more brazen and blatant” as time goes on. On one occasion Springmann is even told, “If you want a job in the State Department in future, you will change your mind.” [CBC Radio One, 7/3/2002; Trento, 2005, pp. 344-6] Springmann loudly complains to numerous government offices, but no action is taken.

He is fired and his files on these applicants are destroyed. He later learns that recruits from many countries fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan were funneled through the Jeddah office to get visas to come to the US, where the recruits would travel to train for the Afghan war. According to Springmann, the Jeddah consulate was run by the CIA and staffed almost entirely by intelligence agents. This visa system may have continued at least through 9/11, and 11 of the 19 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah (see November 2, 1997-June 20, 2001), possibly as part of this program (see October 9, 2002 and October 21, 2002). [BBC, 11/6/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 11/25/2001; CBC Radio One, 7/3/2002; Associated Press, 7/17/2002 pdf file; Fox News, 7/18/2002]

(via Jon Gold)

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Michael Springmann, head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that during this period he is “repeatedly ordered… to issue [more than 100] visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. [BBC, 11/6/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 11/25/2001] In one case, two Pakistanis apply for visas to attend a trade show in the US, but they are unable to name the trade show or city in which it will be held. When Springmann denies them a visa, he gets “an almost immediate call from a CIA case officer, hidden in the commercial section [of the consulate], that I should reverse myself and grant these guys a visa.” Springmann refuses, but the decision is reversed by the chief of the consular section. Springmann realizes that even the ambassador, Walter Cutler, is aware of the situation, which becomes “more brazen and blatant” as time goes on. On one occasion Springmann is even told, “If you want a job in the State Department in future, you will change your mind.” [CBC Radio One, 7/3/2002; Trento, 2005, pp. 344-6] Springmann loudly complains to numerous government offices, but no action is taken. He is fired and his files on these applicants are destroyed. He later learns that recruits from many countries fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan were funneled through the Jeddah office to get visas to come to the US, where the recruits would travel to train for the Afghan war. According to Springmann, the Jeddah consulate was run by the CIA and staffed almost entirely by intelligence agents. This visa system may have continued at least through 9/11, and 11 of the 19 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah (see November 2, 1997-June 20, 2001), possibly as part of this program (see October 9, 2002 and October 21, 2002). [BBC, 11/6/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 11/25/2001; CBC Radio One, 7/3/2002; Associated Press, 7/17/2002 pdf file; Fox News, 7/18/2002]

(via Jon Gold)

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(via Jon Gold)

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Well, here is a chance to turn the tables.

At my new blog, 123 Real Change, I’m happy to present an experimental project, Project Expose MSM, to provide readers with specific mainstream media blackout and/or misinformation cases based on documented and credible first-hand experiences of legitimate and credible sources and whistleblowers.123 Real Change is inviting all members of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, other active (covert or overt) government whistleblowers, and reporters, to publish their experiences in regard to their own first-hand dealings with the media, where their legit disclosures were either intentionally censored/blacked out or tainted.

Yes, we will be naming names. Myself included.

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A microsphere can only be produced by first melting iron, then dispersing the melted iron by some energetic means (like explosion) into an aerosol whose particles, influenced by the surface tension of the molten metal, form spheres as the smallest surface area required to contain any specified volume of matter.

Once again, as with the NASA thermal survey, an intense source of energy other than the WTC fires is required to melt iron or steel, as even the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) admitted in its reports.

The science is pretty simple; only its political consequences are complicated, and troubling.

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And so now Republicans are blackmailing Holder, saying they will focus the spotlight on his role in approving renditions if Holder pulls back the cover too far on torture under the Bush administration.

This ties into Sibel Edmonds’ allegations that virtually everyone in Washington is being blackmailed not to rock some boat or another.

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“The Explorers program,” as it’s called, “a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.”

This training, we read courtesy of The New York Times, “can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out ‘active shooters,’ like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses.” The kids, toting compressed air guns styled to look like heavy weaponry, even once “raided” a simulated marijuana-growing operation.

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Ahmed Wali Karzai is feared by many in southern Afghanistan, and being threatened by him, in his home, isn’t something to be taken lightly.

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During the early 1930’s, a family living in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man claimed multiple encounters with an elusive 79-yr-old talking mongoose named Gef.

Gef was investigated by the two leading psychic researchers of the era — Harry Price and Nandor Fodor — neither of whom were able to draw any definitive conclusions about the case.

Whether cryptid or poltergeist, tulpa or hoax, Gef was undeniably one thing — utterly unique. Let us join together to celebrate the wit and wisdom of this archetypal trickster!

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“I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you’d faint, you’d be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt.” (Gef the talking Mongoose)

During the early 1930’s, a family living in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man claimed multiple encounters with an elusive 79-yr-old talking mongoose named Gef.

Gef was investigated by the two leading psychic researchers of the era – Harry Price and Nandor Fodor – neither of whom were able to draw any definitive conclusions about the case.

Whether cryptid or poltergeist, tulpa or hoax, Gef was undeniably one thing – utterly unique. Let us join together to celebrate the wit and wisdom of this archetypal trickster!

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On 9/11/2001, Indira worked for JP Morgan in a field called Risk Management, involving computer systems and programs designed to keep JP Morgan’s entire information and financial structure safe. She had also worked with a Defense Advanced Research Project – DARPA-funded technology group, with close ties to the CIA. This provided her with contacts deep within the government and corporate America. She was working on a program for JP Morgan – the next generation of risk software – whose function was to think about all the information going on throughout the enterprise as bank business was being conducted worldwide.

It would detect money laundering and other crimes in real time and then do something about it; perhaps alert an “intelligent” software agent or a person, or shutdown the transaction immediately. This capability could be accomplished by using an evolution of PROMIS software. FTW has extensively covered the PROMIS software controversy, the software stolen by the Justice Department from Inslaw which over the past two decades has evolved and merged with artificial intelligence.

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But this spring Obama issued a bold call for a world free of nuclear weapons, and part of that vision entails leading by example. That means halting programs that expand the American nuclear stockpile. For the past two budget years the Democratic Congress has refused to fund the Bush-era program. But Obama’s budget kills the National Nuclear Security Administration program once and for all.

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A few Congress members have tried to get us this power from Congress since 1907, without success. Gravel discovered the Founders had the same problem: the existing 13 Legislatures refused to share their power with the USA. The Founders found a way: The People ratified the Constitution at the Constitutional Conventions. James Madison said “The people were in fact, the fountain of all power, and by resorting to them, all difficulties were got over.”(His 2nd response in the 1787 Debate)

Now we resort to you to read and vote to ratify the National Initiative, to make real the promise of “government by the people.” The National Initiative consists of the brief Democracy Amendment and the more detailed Democracy Act.

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Nancy Pelosi is not only the Torture Mama, but she is the insistent “Impeachment off the Table” Speaker of the House that did everything in her power to insure that George and Dick were not held accountable for their crimes.

Why? Because in true gangster fashion, the Bush Crime Cabal brought the Democrats in on their mess: It’s called Robber Class Protectionism.

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