Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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A state lawmaker is calling on the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire a part-time instructor who has spoken out on his beliefs that figures in the U.S. government, not al-Qaida, were behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Kevin Barrett is scheduled to teach a class in the fall in the UW-Madison Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. During his appearance Wednesday night on Jessica McBride's show on WTMJ, Barrett disputed most of the widely accepted information about the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. Among other things, he claimed the group believed to have carried out the attacks was "a bunch of losers who couldn't even fly planes," and that evidence indicates the buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions. He acknowledged discussing Sept. 11 in teaching classes, but said it was only to give both sides of the issue, not to convert anyone to his point of view. State Rep. Stephen Nass...issued a statement demanding Barrett be fired immediately, calling him an embarrassment and accusing him of spewing "garbage." Barrett received his doctorate from UW-Madison in 2004 in African languages and literature and folklore
Note: Vote in a website poll on this issue at http://www.channel3000.com/news/9457154/detail.html. Kevin Barrett is the courageous director of a 9/11 website at http://www.mujca.com and a member of the influential group of professors and scholars who make up Scholars For 9/11 Truth: http://www.st911.org
To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota. The state uses electronic voting machines. The experts...concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome. The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting. The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits. Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines.
A year on from 7/7, wild rumours are circulating about who planted the bombs and why. On the morning of 7/7 a former Scotland Yard anti-terrorism branch official had been staging a training exercise based on bombs going off simultaneously at precisely the stations that had been targeted. [Bridget] Dunne was confused by the conflicting reports. "I have only one reason for starting this blog," she wrote. "It is to ascertain the facts behind the events in London on...July 7 2005. That the times of trains were totally absent from the public domain was one of the factors which led to my suspicions that what we were being told happened was not what actually happened." The Home Office [claimed] that on July 7 the quartet boarded a 7.40am Thameslink train to King's Cross. According to Dunne, when an independent researcher visited Luton and demanded a train schedule from Thameslink, he was told that the 7.40am had never run and that the next available train, the 7.48, had arrived at King's Cross at 8.42...too late for the bombers to have boarded the three tube trains. The next problem is the CCTV picture. If you look closely at the image...you will see that the railings behind Khan, the man in the white baseball cap, appear to run in front of his left arm while another rail appears to slice through his head. Some people believe the image was faked in Photoshop. This theory is bolstered by the fact that police have never released the further CCTV footage showing the four emerging on to the concourse at King's Cross where, according to the home office narrative, they are seen hugging and appear "euphoric".
Note: For more serious evidence of complicity in the London Bombings, click here. See also the excellent information on the July 7th Truth Campaign at http://www.julyseventh.co.uk.
A bill becomes the rule of the land when Congress passes it and the president signs it into law, right? Not necessarily, according to the White House. A law is not binding when a president issues a separate statement saying he reserves the right to revise, interpret or disregard it on national security and constitutional grounds. That's the argument a Bush administration official is expected to make Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who has demanded a hearing on a practice he considers an example of the administration's abuse of power. "It's a challenge to the plain language of the Constitution," Specter said in an interview. [Bush has] challenge[d] many more statutes passed by Congress than any other president. Specter's hearing is about more than the statements. He's been compiling a list of White House practices he bluntly says could amount to abuse of executive power from warrantless domestic wiretapping program to sending officials to hearings who refuse to answer lawmakers' questions. But Specter and his allies maintain that Bush is doing an end-run around the veto process. In his presidency's sixth year, Bush has yet to issue a single veto. Instead, he has issued hundreds of signing statements invoking his right to interpret or ignore laws on everything from whistleblower protections to how Congress oversees the Patriot Act.
The nation's top climate scientists are giving "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy. The former vice president's movie -- replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets -- mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.
A 15-month inquiry by a top House Democrat has found that enforcement of the nation's food and drug laws declined sharply during the first five years of the Bush administration. For instance, the investigation found, the number of warning letters that the Food and Drug Administration issued to drug companies, medical device makers and others dropped 54 percent, to 535 in 2005 from 1,154 in 2000. The seizure of mislabeled, defective or dangerous products dipped 44 percent. The research found no evidence that such declines could be attributed to increased compliance with regulations. Investigators at the F.D.A. continued to uncover about the same number of problems at drug and device companies as before...but top officials of the agency increasingly overruled the investigators' enforcement recommendations. The investigation found that by almost every measure, enforcement actions had significantly declined from 2000 to 2005. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at the watchdog organization Public Citizen, noted that the agency now received about $380 million a year in fees from drug makers. "The public," Dr. Wolfe said, "is getting the kind of F.D.A. that the industry is paying for them to get."
Note: For lots more on collusion between government and the medical industry, see our Health Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthinformation
Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report out Tuesday concludes. There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities. Together, the three systems account for 80% of the voting machines that will be used in this November's election. Lawsuits have been filed in at least six states to block the purchase or use of computerized machines. Election officials in California and Pennsylvania recently issued urgent warnings to local polling supervisors about potential software problems in touch-screen voting machines. Among the findings: Using corrupt software to switch votes from one candidate to another is the easiest way to attack all three systems; the most vulnerable voting machines use wireless components open to attack by "virtually any member of the public with some knowledge and a personal digital assistant;" even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records are subject to attack unless they are regularly audited; most states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks.
Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on elections manipulations:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation
Nov. 2, 2004...the exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. The discrepancy [was] beyond the statistical margin of error. The media largely ignored this exit poll discrepancy. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign...used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been documented. In the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience." 64 percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained flaws that "could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to...the integrity of the voting process." The report also indicated that for rural and small-town precincts...the difference between the exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in precincts using paper ballots alone.
About 1,200 people gathered over the weekend for what organizers billed as the largest conference on the conspiracy theories that consider the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to be a result of official negligence or a U.S. attempt to incite world war. "There are so many prominent people . . . who have stated that the evidence is overwhelming that 9/11 was an inside job," syndicated radio talk show host Alex Jones said at a news conference. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the U.S. military command "stood down" on the day of the attacks, that the hijackers were trained at U.S. military bases and that the World Trade Center towers collapsed because of a series of controlled explosions set before they were hit by two hijacked planes. Suggested motives include expected benefits for U.S. arms and oil conglomerates, and revolutionary plans for a new world order headed by the United States.
Note: We are grateful that the media is actually paying some attention to the 9/11 movement these days. With over 1,000 people attending 9/11 conferences, it is getting harder to justify not covering the movement.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration on Sunday to seek criminal charges against newspapers that reported on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists. Rep. Peter King cited The New York Times in particular for publishing a story last week that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records. "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," King told The Associated Press. When the paper chose to publish the story, it quoted the executive editor, Bill Keller, as saying editors had listened closely to the government's arguments for withholding the information, but "remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data...is a matter of public interest." After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Treasury officials obtained access to a vast database [which] handles financial message traffic from thousands of financial institutions in more than 200 countries. Gonzales said last month that he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security. He also said the government would not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation. He said the First Amendment right of a free press should not be absolute when it comes to national security.
Note: The top secret Pentagon Papers released by the New York Times in 1971 were pivotal in exposing the manipulations of the military-industrial complex with regards to the Vietnam War. National security was invoked to try to stop their publication. National security is being used and abused now to keep these same manipulations from being exposed. For a powerful two-page summary written by a highly decorated U.S. general on abuse of national security, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup
Four media organizations asked a judge on Monday to hear arguments on overturning a media blackout in the cases of the suspects charged with plotting to bomb buildings in southern Ontario. The Associated Press, the New York Times, the Toronto Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are challenging a publication ban a judge has imposed on courtroom proceedings for the 17 suspects arrested in the alleged plot. Police announced June 2 that authorities had foiled a terrorist plot, saying the men had obtained three tons of ammonium nitrate, three times what was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. Officials have alleged that the suspects were inspired by al-Qaida, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, has named Canada as one of the top five countries to be attacked. Canada's Criminal Code allows judges to institute bans against publishing details from court hearings in an effort to protect the suspect's right to a fair trial.
Note: As with 9/11 and other recent terror acts, there are many problems with the official story here, yet the judge is trying to keep this information from the public supposedly "to protect the suspect's right to a fair trial."
South Africa's acclaimed Truth and Reconciliation Commission...was an ambitious effort to provide a forum to uncover the truth about apartheid-era abuses -- as well as to promote reconciliation between opposing factions in the fight to end racial rule. Its terms were simple: Tell the truth about political acts of violence you committed -- on either side of the struggle -- and you would receive amnesty. Tell only part of the truth -- or fail to testify altogether -- and you would be liable for criminal prosecution. The commission heard from 10,000 victims of apartheid rule, as well as victims of abuses by anti-apartheid forces. The Truth Commission, now widely viewed as a model for other countries attempting to transcend their divided pasts, granted amnesty to about 1,000 of the more than 7,000 perpetrators who applied for it. It recommended that 300 people face prosecution for failing to tell the complete truth, or failing to testify at all. Testimony at multiple, often searing, hearings provided an incontrovertible, although not necessarily complete, record of abuses committed in the name of apartheid. As a result, it will be difficult for anyone, both now and in future generations, to deny apartheid's brutality and the lengths agents of the white minority government went to perpetuate it. The commission...can certainly claim to have played a part in keeping the peace.
Note: This article is included as a growing number of people in the 9/11 movement feel that a truth and reconciliation commission is what is needed to bring out the truth of what happened on that fateful day.
Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States. The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department ... is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records. That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues. "The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous." The program is separate from the National Security Agency's efforts to eavesdrop without warrants and collect domestic phone records, operations that have provoked fierce public debate and spurred lawsuits against the government and telecommunications companies.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
For decades now, eyes and sky have met to witness the buzzing of our world by Unidentified Flying Objects, termed UFOs or simply flying saucers. Extraterrestrials have come a long way to purportedly share the friendly skies with us. UFOs remain a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Why so? For one, the field is fraught with hucksterism. It's also replete with blurry photos and awful video. But then there are also well-intentioned and puzzled witnesses. There have been advances in the field of UFO research, said Ted Roe, Executive Director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), based in Vallejo, California. "Physics is leading to new and potentially paradigm shifting understandings about the nature of our universe and its physical properties," Roe said. "These understandings may point the way towards an acceptance of the probability of interstellar travel and communication by spacefaring races." Why is there precious little to show the world of science that UFOs merit attention? "Obviously there is not a simple answer, but part of it is reluctance of the scientific community to support such research," explained Bruce Maccabee, regarded as a meticulous researcher and an optical physicist using those talents to study photographs and video of unexplained phenomena.
Note: This article also includes commentary from several skeptics. Yet for those who have an open mind, don't miss the amazingly solid UFO material available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/ufoinformation
AT&T Inc. said on Wednesday it was revising its privacy policy, explaining to customers that it owns their phone records and can hand them over to law enforcers if necessary. The changes...come at a time when AT&T and other phone companies face lawsuits claiming they aided a U.S. government domestic spying program by giving the National Security Agency call records of millions of customers without their permission. The new policy, unlike the old one, spells out the fact that AT&T...customer information constitutes "business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process." The earlier policy had simply said that...the company could share customer information to "respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process, to the extent required and/or permitted by law." Under the new policy...the company also said that it would track viewing information for customers of a television service it is developing in order to help it make recommendations to customers based on their viewing habits. It also said that before customers use its services they must agree to the policy, an element that was not in its previous guidelines.
Alongside the submarines, ships and airplanes participating in large-scale military exercises in the Pacific this month, a team of sea lions and dolphins are expected to patrol the sea. These marine animals will be flown in from San Diego for simulated mine recovery and mine detection during the biennial RIMPAC war games. Six bottle-nosed dolphins would find the mines, while four California sea lions would help recover them. High-tech gadgets deployed by the military can't match the natural skills of the dolphins and sea lions. Sea lions have "incredibly good underwater hearing" and can dive to 1,000 feet to attach a recovery line to a simulated mine, he said. Dolphins use their sonar to find the mines. Marine mammals have been used by the Navy since the early 1960s. The animals save the Navy an estimated $1 million a year. The $15 million Marine Mammal Program has 75 dolphins and 30 sea lions at its San Diego facility. Opponents of the program say the military should not train animals for use in warfare.
The search for proof of the existence of UFOs landed Gary McKinnon in a world of trouble. After allegedly hacking into NASA websites - where he says he found images of what looked like extraterrestrial spaceships - the 40-year-old Briton ... could receive a 70-year prison term. "A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging," [said McKinnon]. "I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files. My dialup 56K connection was very slow trying to download one of these picture files. I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side. There were no visible seams or riveting. There was no reference to the size of the object and the picture was taken presumably by a satellite looking down on it. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created. I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else."
Note: See pg. 293 of the Disclosure Project to read the fascinating testimony of NASA photographic expert Donna Hare. Going further, NASA reportedly erased the original tapes of the first lunar landing. Was there something on those tapes that they didn't want the public to see? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.
Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005. In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The typical worker's compensation averaged just under $42,000 for the year, while the average CEO brought home almost $11 million. In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies earned 24 times a worker's pay. In recent years, compensation has been a hot issue with shareholders who have been bombarded with news stories about chief executives who are given multimillion dollar bonus and pay packages even if shares have declined. The chief executives of 11 of the largest companies were awarded a total of $865 million in pay in the last two years, even as they presided over a total loss of $640 billion in shareholder value, a recent study from governance firm the Corporate Library, found.
Amid daily revelations about prewar intelligence and a growing scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation's history. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side." In The Dark Side, airing June 20, 2006, at 9 P.M. on PBS...FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war. After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies, and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet.
A team of engineering students from The University of British Columbia has built a vehicle so efficient that it could travel from Vancouver to Halifax on a gallon of gasoline. The futuristic-looking, single-occupancy vehicle won top prize at a recent international competition, marking the UBC team's fourth win in as many years. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Supermileage Competition took place June 9 in Marshall, Michigan. Forty teams from Canada, the U.S. and India competed in designing and building the most fuel-efficient vehicle. 'We achieved this level of efficiency by optimizing many aspects of the vehicle design, including: aerodynamics, light-weight construction, a small displacement engine (54 cc), and conservative driving habits,' says Team Captain Kevin Li. The UBC design...achieved 3,145 miles per US gallon. Supermileage...is an annual student competition that challenges students to design, build, and drive a single person vehicle (powered solely by a gasoline engine) to achieve the best fuel mileage possible. The vehicle must be powered by only an internal combustion engine, with no assistance from electric motors or human propulsion.
Note: Why don't we see articles like this in the mainstream media? Even if this vehicle is ultra lightweight and has a top speed of only 30 mph, why can't we design heavier, faster cars which get just 10% of what this car got? For answers to this question, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.