The White House has responded to two petitions asking the US government to formally acknowledge that aliens have visited Earth and to disclose to any intentional withholding of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings. “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” said Phil Larson from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, on the WhiteHouse.gov website. “In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”

5,387 people had signed the petition for immediately disclosing the government’s knowledge of and communications with extraterrestrial beings, and 12,078 signed the request for a formal acknowledgement from the White House that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race.

“Hundreds of military and government agency witnesses have come forward with testimony confirming this extraterrestrial presence,” the second petition states. “Opinion polls now indicate more than 50% of the American people believe there is an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80% believe the government is not telling the truth about this phenomenon. The people have a right to know. The people can handle the truth.”

More: Universe Today

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Read More: Reuters

The White House has joined the Foursquare location-based social networking service, a move that shows again the Obama administration’s support of a more transparent and tech-savvy federal government.

Users of the service–which allows people to virtually “check in” to various businesses, landmarks, and other locations around the globe–can now use the White House Foursquare page to follow President Obama as he travels and uses the service to let people know where he is, according to a White House blog post.

They also can themselves check in to the White House if they are visiting the presidential home or attending an Obama town hall event. The White House also has elected to use the tips feature, which can recommend places the president has visited and share what he did while he was there. It’s also sharing historical information about sites President Obama visits.

President Obama joined the service as he’s embarking on an “economic bus tour” of town hall meetings across the Midwest to find out how the economy is affecting people.

[Continues at Information Week]

Photo: UpstateNYer

From the Daily Mail:

The West Wing of the White House is all-but disappearing behind an $86 million building project that is going to last for years.

And a mysterious tunnel is being built, fuelling speculation that a secret underground lair is what’s really under construction.

In recent weeks, an expanding and sometimes ear-splitting zone of excavation has enveloped the mansion’s famous office wing.

Heavy equipment and metal-and-concrete superstructures are part of the vast construction project.

The front door and the Marine who guards it have disappeared behind a high green-and-white plywood fence. From Pennsylvania Avenue, all that’s visible is a sliver of second-floor roof line.

For years to come, the front yard at 1600 Pennsylvania will remain a noisy building site, say officials in charge of the White House’s ‘Big Dig’.

Officials describe the job as an overdue upgrade of underground utilities. That includes water and sewer lines, electrical conduits, pipes for chilled and hot water and steam heat systems, and storm sewers. Heating, air conditioning and fire alarm systems are being replaced. Some systems are getting backups.

[continues in the Daily Mail]

Dan Turton with President Obama.

Assassination attempts against congressional representatives, former officials dumped in landfills, and now Christopher Weber from Politics Daily at AOL says that the wife of a White House aide has been found dead in a burning car.  If this is frigid, sleepy January, I shudder to think what the crazy heat of July is going to bring:

Ashley Turton, wife of the Obama administration’s House of Representatives liaison, Dan Turton, was found dead in a burning car Monday morning, Roll Call and other news outlets are reporting.

Fire officials said it appeared the car crashed as it was pulling in or out of the garage behind a rowhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., at about 5 a.m. Neighbors dialed 911 after spotting the fire.

The body was discovered after fire crews doused the blaze. The fire also charred part of the garage. Nobody in the house was injured, fire officials said.

Ashley Turton worked as a lobbyist for the utility giant Progress Energy, according to Politico. She was a former staffer for U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn…

[continues at Politics Daily at AOL]

Gay rights activists briefly handcuffed themselves to the White House’s north gate on Monday, urging President Barack Obama to repeal a ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military.

Thirteen demonstrators organized by the GetEQUAL campaign for gay rights — including nine veterans, a Catholic priest and other advocates &mdash were arrested after shouting they were “proud to serve” and vowing: “We will not disappear.”

“Today, we have sent a loud and clear message to the US Senate and President Obama that we expect them to make good on their promises to end this inhumane law this year, during the lame-duck session of Congress,” GetEQUAL co-founder and director Robin McGehee said in a statement.

She was among those arrested.

The protest came ahead of the Pentagon’s Internal Review into the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, due on December 1.

According to The Washington Post, the long-awaited report, which included a survey of troops, found that the United States could lift the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces with little risk to current war efforts.

[story continues here]

The White House was facing allegations yesterday that it had muzzled its own scientists in the early days and weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill so that the public would be ignorant of the potential scale of the environmental disaster that was unfolding.

A paper written for the National Commission established by President Barack Obama to investigate what happened suggests that officials at the White House stood in the way of scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) when they were preparing to release details of a worst-case scenario for the blow-out including a top-end estimate of the rate of flow of oil into the sea.

In a second report also written for the Commission, investigators say that “for the first 10 days of the spill, it appears that a sense of over-optimism affected responders”.

As the spill worsened BP came under wide criticism for allegedly attempting to downplay the scale of the leak. The findings of the National Commission indicate that the government in Washington was playing a similar game.

In the days immediately after the explosion, both Washington and BP said they were assuming a leak rate of between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels a day. But in the weeks after the leak rate was revised upwards in several increments and by early August stood at 62,000 barrels a day.

The paper says that the “decision to withhold worst-case discharge figures” may have been made at a high level, suggesting that the President himself may have been involved.

Read more of the Independent’s report here.  The White House has denied the accusations, but keep in mind that Obama recieved more of BP’s campaign contributions than anyone else over the past 20 years.

WASHINGTON — The White House blocked efforts by federal scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could have been, according to a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission’s staff reveals that in late April or early May the White House budget office denied a request from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make public the worst-case discharge from the blown-out well. The Unified Command — the government team in charge of the spill response — also was discussing the possibility of making the numbers public, the report says, citing interviews with government officials.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Jerry Miller, head of the White House science office’s ocean subcommittee, told The Associated Press in an interview at a St. Petersburg, Fla., conference on the oil’s flow that he didn’t think the budget office censored NOAA. “I would very much doubt that anyone would put restrictions on NOAA’s ability to articulate factual information,” Miller said.

Read More: AP via Yahoo News

The White House announced plans to install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the roof of the White House Residence. These two solar installations will be part of a Department of Energy (DOE) demonstration project that shows that American solar technologies are available and reliable for installation in homes throughout the country, according to the DOE.

President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House’s West Wing 31 years ago but they were removed by his successor, Ronald Reagan, reports Bloomberg.

“President Obama has said the Federal Government has to lead by example in creating opportunity and jobs in clean energy,” said Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in a statement. ”By installing solar panels on arguably the most famous house in the country, his residence, the President is underscoring that commitment to lead and the promise and importance of renewable energy in the United States.”

Continues at The Environmental Leader …

Why this crew of losers wasn’t fired eludes me despite their claims of having prevented a worst collapse. No doubt, they know more than they are saying, and, perhaps, now that they are no longer selling, they may be willing to do some telling on just how bad it is and what went wrong.

Who’s next?  Could Ben Bernanke be leaving the Fed for Fed-Ex?

Economist Max Wolfe has none of the political restraints of power. At the news of another 131, 000 jobs gone, at all the talk of permanent unemployment as the “new normal,” he sighed with a tinge of optimism:

“We have been in the present labor market swoon since December 2007. We are 30 months into the process. Nearly everything is not getting worse fast. Most economic indicators have seen slow, uneven progress. We are a weary nation and hope, is running low. All lethality is dosage and we have received a massive dosage — an overdose — of bad economic news since the winter of 2007. Things are getting ever so slightly less bad in the aggregate.

“The sheriffs of this rough economic neighborhood are running low and out of ammunition. The populace is fed up. Our Sheriffs are The Treasury and The Fed and they have spent, cut taxes, slashed rates, bought securities and ballooned their balance sheets. They have made the bad less worse, but not appreciable better enough for many. All that economic toxin still pumps the blood of this economy. Now, the state is having a contractionary direct impact on employment.”

“Contractionary? I am a first-time contractionary word user so I will leave it to Stephen Colbert to take that term apart, but it can’t be a good thing.

The bigger surprise is being buried. The more serious problem is more systemic and rooted in the structure of our economy. These structural problems used to be referenced to show how deep the rot goes and why more fundamental reforms are needed, but now, as Paul Krugman has argued, this very idea is now being used to encourage acceptance of the problems because they are beyond repair, as in, “we can’t change that because it is, so, um,  “structural!”) Thus, the existing power relations can’t be questioned because they are the existing power relations

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Part of the problem is that while the livelihoods of workers and homeowners are sinking, the economic and political elite is doing just fine, as the Automatic Earth Website explains:

“Perhaps what we witness is an ongoing and deepening chasm that divides the world of finance and politics on the one hand and the world of everyday people on the other, as Rasmussen Reports indicates: 67% of Political Class Say U.S. Heading in Right Direction, 84% of Mainstream Disagrees. This chasm was greatly facilitated by governments relying on policies based on the notion that too-big-to-fail -financial- institutions needed to be bailed out at any cost. Later in the year, as a direct consequence of these policies, we will see another round of insane banker and trader bonuses, just as citizens’ sentiments and incomes fall, and unemployment and poverty keep rising.”

When you create and enable a casino economy, the public becomes a player too, taking risks they shouldn’t at the behest of bankers and finance companies who assure them all is fine.

Last week, Countrywide, the country’s mortgage fraud factory, reached a settlement with the SEC for more than Goldman Sachs settled its last complaint for a whopping $600 million. Their shark-in-chief, Anthony Mozillo, still facing a criminal investigation, later said he was pleased when the federal regulators admitted that the investors were not defrauded, because they knew what kind of projects they were funding. How reassuring!

So the circle of complicity widens. We now learn that the companies and individuals that invested in the subprime/subcrime mortgages KNEW people were being ripped off but did it anyway because there was so much money to be made.

And because security laws only protect investors, who were defrauded, many have no case. What about the borrowers, the homeowners now facing foreclosure? They are apparently not worthy of protection. This is comparable to the Madoff investors who profited in his illegal scheme and knew his returns were too good to be true but shoveled money to him anyway.  They became partners in the ponzi, not just “victims” trying to be made whole.

Is anything changing?  The banks say they will not change the way they finance mortgages so it is still buyer beware. The Wall Street Journal reports another instant crash of the markets is possible. And General Motors that was down and on the way out is back thanks to the government’s largesse  but sniping at its rescuers, insisting an end to government ownership would be good for their image and “employee morale.” Huh?

“We want the government out period,” blusters GM’s ungrateful CEO Edward E. Whitacre Jr. This same company recently spent $3.5 billion buying a new subprime lending company to replace GMAC, the GM lender whose bad loans sunk GM. On top of that, these geniuses just produced The Volt electric car that sells for $40,000, hardly a brilliant move in this economy. Of course they blame all their problems on the government, never themselves.

Like so many others, they seem to be banging on Obama, everyone’s target of choice. If that’s your inclination, let’s blame him also for what he has not done.

He hasn’t led a consistent push back against Wall Street, perhaps because he hopes in vain that big business will create private sector jobs and wants to show naysayers how pro-business he really is. This has turned him into an inversion of FDR.

As Ezra Klein of the Washington Post observed:

“The reality is that America’s supposedly anti-business president has led an extremely pro-business recovery.

Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Business spending jumped 20 percent last quarter, and is up by 13 percent against 2009. The Obama administration has dropped taxes for small businesses and big ones alike.”

So much for that canard.

Is there anything to be done?  There is no shortage of proposals for jobs programs and taxes on transactions, for tougher rules on derivatives, and imposed compensation limits.  In most cases the US, with pressure from Wall Street and its political allies, has opted for easily maneuvered around and malleable regulations.

One small reform has been proposed by the much-maligned Ralph Nader for those of us who live in the appropriately named “Empire State, ” one that currently shelters a Wall Street where hedge fund managers make billions.

Nader notes, “Low-moderate and middle-income New Yorkers already pay a higher percentage of family income in state and local taxes than do the richest one percent of New Yorkers!

Surprisingly, there is a simple way to eliminate the state deficit and

prevent tens of thousands of layoffs and large service cutbacks.

What most New Yorkers do not know is that for about a century there has been a state stock transfer tax on purchases of securities. This year, this tax, similar to ones imposed in 30 other countries, will amount to about $16 billion. Amazingly, since 1979, this tax has been instantly rebated by New York State back to the brokers or clearinghouses who paid it. A 100% rebate every year for the bailed out industry that caused the recession and its immense human damage.”

Putting a stop this sleazy practice could be as important in phasing out the Bush tax cuts but so far it’s not on anyone’s agenda, Dems, Repugs or Media.

Maybe because they think of it as “structural.”

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime of our Time, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush’s integrity. “All the evidence points to the conclusion,” Kennedy said, that the Bush administration “put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth.” Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed “to be forthcoming” about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.

The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, “It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth.” Mr. Edwards chimed in, “The administration has a problem with the truth.”

The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn’t keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

I’m VERY excited about my trip to Washington DC tomorrow to participate in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to fight childhood obesity. I’m attending this event through my role as Executive Producer for the Killer At Large film and as part of the advisory board for the Chef & Child Foundation of the American Culinary Foundation (ACF).

It will be a thrill to join more than 50 chefs for the kickoff of the “Chefs Move to Schools” on June 4. This new program is part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and will be led by White House assistant chef, Sam Kass as a way to take the message of healthy nutrition to schools across America.

For a long time, we have made the Killer At Large documentary about the American obesity epidemic available FREE to teachers and schools around the country – and I’m pleased that so many chefs have taken Killer into their own educational programs. After all, chefs have tremendous power as leaders on the issue of childhood obesity because of their deep knowledge of food and nutrition and their standing in the community.

In addition to Michelle Obama, Sam Kass, and the ACF, the program will be run out of the USDA and will involve both the National Restaurant Association and Share Our Strength.

I’ll post some more information after the event on Friday – and I’m optimistic that we are finally seeing some REAL movement toward stemming the tide of obesity in our nation!

For more information about the Let’s Move! campaign, visit www.letsmove.gov

For more information about the Chefs Move to Schools initiative, visit http://healthymeals.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?tax_level=1&info_center=14&tax_subject=225

For more information about the Chef & Child Foundation (founded in 1989 to promote proper nutrition in children and to combat childhood obesity), visit www.acfchefs.org

For more information about the award-winning Killer At Large documentary, visit www.killeratlarge.com

Wilbur “Will” Allen, a former White House employee and Air Force One engineer under U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, has stated that Everett Bellamy (Senior Assistant Dean of Georgetown Law Center), on behalf of John Podesta, who is a full-time faculty member at Georgetown Law Center, a former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton (1998-2001) and Co-chair of the Obama Transition Team (2008-9), told Mr. Allen that the frequent UFO and extraterrestrial over flights and landings on the U.S. Capitol that Mr. Allen is able to document photographically using state of the art high definition equipment could, if made widely public, “destabilize society,” and urged Mr. Allen to cease his activity documenting these UFO/ET over fights and landings.

Ironically, at a November 14, 2007 press conference at the National Press Club, John Podesta himself called for public examination of the UFO phenomenon, stating, “It was the law.”

Mr. Allen is a professional photographer who was trained in photography and photographic analysis at a CIA film laboratory and has produced photography for major motion picture companies such as Warner Brothers and record labels such as DefJam.

Mr. Allen’s declarations are made in a wide-ranging exclusive radio interview with reporter Alfred Lambremont Webre on ExopoliticsRadio.org…

[continues at the Examiner]

Today, President Obama announced that he will recess appoint Islam A. Siddiqui to the position of Chief Agricultural Negotiator, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Siddiqui is a pesticide lobbyist and Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, an agribusiness lobbying group that represents Monsanto.

Following is a letter sent by 98 organizations to U.S. Senators in opposition to Siddiqui’s appointment, and a fact sheet about him.

Dear Senator:

The following 98 organizations are writing you to express our opposition to the nomination of Islam Siddiqui as Chief Agriculture Negotiator at the office of the United States Trade Representative. Our organizations— representing family farmers, farmworkers, fishers and sustainable agriculture, environmental, consumer, anti-hunger and other advocacy groups—urge you to reject Dr. Siddiqui’s appointment when it comes up for a floor vote, despite the Senate Finance Committee’s favorable report of his nomination on December 23, 2009.

Siddiqui’s record at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and his role as a former registered lobbyist for CropLife America (whose members include Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and Dow), has revealed him to consistently favor agribusinesses’ interests over the interests of consumers, the environment and public health (see attached fact sheet). We believe Siddiqui’s nomination severely weakens the Obama Administration’s credibility in promoting healthier and more sustainable local food systems here at home. His appointment would also send an unfortunate signal to the rest of the world that the United States plans to continue down the failed path of high-input and energy-intensive industrial agriculture by promoting toxic pesticides, inappropriate seed biotechnologies and unfair trade agreements on nations that do not want and can least afford them.

The United States urgently needs a trade negotiator who understands that current trade agreements work neither for farmers nor the world’s hungry. With farmers here and abroad struggling to respond to water scarcity and increasingly volatile growing conditions, we need a resilient and restorative model of agriculture that adapts to and mitigates climate change and that moves us towards energy-efficient farming.

The most comprehensive analysis of global agriculture to date, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) states unequivocally that “business as usual is not an option.” We need a new, sustainable model of biodiverse, ecologically-based agriculture that regenerates soil health, sequesters carbon, feeds communities, protects farmworkers and puts profits back in the hands of family farmers and rural communities. Siddiqui’s track record shows that he favors none of these solutions.

We call on the Senate to reject Islam Siddiqui’s nomination and reorient trade policy to serve the interests of family farmers, farmworkers, consumers and the planet.

Sincerely,

[List of 98 organizations below.]

Siddiqui and CropLife: Statements and Positions

Islam Siddiqui was nominated by US President Barack Obama to the position of Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the office of the US Trade Representative. He is currently Vice President of Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America. CropLife is an agricultural industry trade group that lobbies on behalf of Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and other pesticide and agricultural biotech corporations…

[continues at the Centre for Research on Globalization]

The agreement—first reported by Mother Jones on Friday—is a major victory for the plaintiffs, some of the recovered messages could potentially shed light on controversies such as the lead-up to the Iraq war and the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity.

A Major Victory?

I can hardly stop laughing!

Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson’s criticism of the Administration’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.

According to George W. Bush, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was required because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and a connection to 9/11–and don’t forget Bush wanted to free the Iraqi people.

Recently, the Bush Administration has admitted there were no WMDs and Saddam Hussein had no ties to the attacks on 9/11.

Enter Valerie Plame, the Spy Who Got Shoved Out Into the Cold.

The Plame leak was a breach of national security and a violation of law under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

One could “predict that the investigation” of Bush and Cheney would die in the CIA as George J. Tenet would stay loyal to Bush.

But instead, in another one of those strange quirks of fate, Mr. Tenet decided to do “the right thing” and investigate the scandal – ad nauseaum.

The story was in the news until 2007 and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during the investigation commented, “As you sit back, you want to learn why was this information going out. Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters?”

Answer? Disinformation.  Instead of organizing an elaborate PR campaign to disparage Wilson, Cheney could have directed the CIA to hide a few WMDs prior to the invasion.

“We found them, he had them, look, here they are, Bush and Cheney were telling the truth.”   [1]

Next, consider CODEPINK

A group of women who want to end the war in Iraq.

It is now 2009, when will Jodie Evans, Diane Wilson and Medea Benjamin realize the obvious: We aren’t leaving Iraq for at least 100 years.

The House, Senate and the Bush Administration are gone but the troops are permanently deployed in the “Cradle of Civilization.”

Jodie, Diane and Medea: You can’t “bring the troops home” if you don’t know why the U.S. is building permanent headquarters, a $592 million “Embassy in Baghdad.”

We are not in Iraq because we are addicted to war, to liberate the people from the tyranny of Hussein’s version of Ba’athism or because Saddaam had WMDs or a connection to 9-11.

And you can forget about oil and geopolitics. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put that assertion to rest when he claimed, “The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

The intentional outing of Bush, Cheney and Valerie Plame is so absurd they expected you to believe the administration was acting on behalf of Bush’s buddies in the oil industry.

There is little or no evidence that Big Oil favored a war, particularly one carried out unilaterally that risked destabilizing the world’s most oil-rich region, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

Exopolitics is a study based on the belief there is an extraterrestrial (ET) presence on Earth and clandestine government organizations have intentionally withheld the information from the population.

The work of Dr.Michael E. Salla, PhD in government from the University of Queensland and William Henry conclude the U.S. and German governments believe there is a Stargate (portal to another world) in Iraq, a country also known as Ancient Mesopotamia, the land of Babylonia and the Cradle of Civilization. [2]

My goal in writing is to help wake up the huddled masses.

To that end, the “Most Important Issue in the History of the Universe” is:

The Story Behind the Story Behind the Story of The Iraq war and September 11, 2001.

Why?

Because if you don’t know Why we aren’t leaving Iraq for at least 100 years and how the twin towers collapsed, you can’t be sure you are waking up the masses from the right dream.

P.S. You can forget about Chris Bollyn’s recent discovery of Super-Termite (nanothermite) at “Israel’s Super-Thermite Lab”.

Bollyn’s thinking reflects the conventional wisdumb of the 9-11 Truthers:

“The main reason for 9-11 was to change the military equation in the Middle East and bring the United States and NATO into the region on a permanent basis to wage war against the foes of Israel.  But how could they possibly think they would get away with such an audacious and heinous crime of false-flag terrorism?”

He then goes on to make the ludicrous statement:

“What they didn’t expect is that a few Americans would dig into the evidence and uncover every stone to find the real culprits.  They certainly didn’t expect that a careful and independent scientific analysis of the dust would reveal that a nano-composite form of super-thermite was used to pulverize the World Trade Center.”

“What they didn’t expect is that a few Americans would dig…” I can hardly stop laughing!

But when I did stop (laughing) and contacted Andrew Johnson at Check The Evidence, he pointed out:

Q) What is thermite anyway? Answer: Aluminum powder and Iron Oxide (rust).

Fact: The exterior of WTC towers contains aluminum and there were some rusty beams inside the buildings. Therefore we can dismiss any smoking gun theory of super-thermite because you would expect to find Aluminum powder and Iron Oxide in the remains of the World Trade Centre.

Q) What does thermite do to metal? Answer: It melts through it.

Q) What happened to the towers? Answer: They turned largely to dust.

Thermite cannot have been responsible for turning towers to dust.  Let’s see this nanothermite in action please!

It’s an explosive but the towers didn’t explode -they turned into a fountain of dust. [3]

[1] 9/11, What’s Wrong With This Picture? http://dprogram.net/2009/03/26/911-whats-wrong-with-this-picture, makes a compelling argument the government wants you to believe “they” did it.

[2] CODEPINK: Between Iraq and a Hard Place

[3] The Most Important Issue in the History of the UniverseThe World Trade Center (WTC) towers did not “collapse” on 9/11/01, they were pulverized (Blown to Kingdom Come) before a gravity-driven collapse was even a possibility.  Pulverized to dust, a paucity of remaining material. Where are the concrete floors? Where is the office furniture? Where is the office machinery? Where are the filing cabinets? Where is the wall board? Where are the bookcases? They were not there, so most of it appears to have turned to dust, as illustrated in Figure 31. Pulverized to dust, http://www.drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/StarWarsBeam3.html

Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.

No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.

A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.

Here are seven storylines Obama needs to worry about… (Read More: Politico)

Dan Eggen writes in the Washington Post:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street’s influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy — issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel — may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don’t have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

Read More: Washington Post

As we previously noted, our colleague Weston Kosova gave the Obama administration some much-needed grief on Friday for refusing a federal judge’s recent order to turn over documents showing how big telecommunications firms lobbied to get immunity for their participation in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.

But that is actually only one of many examples of how Obama appointees are standing up for Bush-era secrecy.

In just the last few days, virtually unnoticed by most of the news media, administration officials have:

* Rejected a new Freedom of Information request for White House visitor logs (despite their announced intention to start making such documents public).
* Appealed, yet again, to invoke “state secrets” to block a lawsuit that might shed light on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to countries that practice torture.
* Gotten Congress to pass legislation that would prevent graphic photographs of detainee abuse by the U.S. government from ever becoming public. (Update: Obama on Thursday signed into law a homeland security bill that exempts from the photos from the Freedom of Information Act.)

And all of this is in spite of Obama’s vow—in a memo on the first full day of his presidency—to create “an unprecedented level of openness” in government.

We intend to keep track of these matters regularly on Declassified…