Governor of Alabama 1999-2003
“America’s # 1 Political Prisoner”, The American Trial Lawyer Magazine
From: Don Siegelman
The U.S Department of Justice announced last month a new program to help poor people accused of crimes obtain a lawyer. Great Idea! But what difference will that make as long as the DOJ approves of their prosecutors framing innocent people?
In January, lawyers for President Obama argued before the U.S.Supreme Court that we don’t have a constitutional right not to be framed. Check it out : On January 5th, The LA Times reported in the case of Pottawattamie County v. McGhee and Harrington, “President Obama’s lawyers asserted there is no constitutional ‘right not to be framedŠ’” In this case two men spent more than 25 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
On my 62nd birthday, February 24th, 2008, while I was in federal prison in the swamps of Louisiana, for something that The New York Times and 91 former state Attorneys General say is not a crime, CBS’ 60 Minutes did a 12 minute piece showing how prosecutors bargained with a “crook” to get him to write and rewrite his testimony until he got it the way the government wanted. Then government prosecutors (Karl Rove’s best friend’s wife who was and still is the U.S. Attorney in my case) presented false evidence to get a conviction.”
Please watch this CBS 60 Minutes piece as a birthday present to me this year.Did Ex-Alabama Governor Get A Raw Deal? – 60 Minutes – CBS News
Today, two years later, even after John Conyers, Chairman of the U.S.House Judiciary Committee has written letters to three U.S. Attorneys General (Gonzales, Mukasey and Eric Holder), there still has been no investigation of the government’s misconduct in my case.
Please help me continue to fight this injustice.
Donate online or mail your contribution to:
3963 River View Drive
Birmingham, Al 35243
Thank you so much!
Don Siegelman
Governor of Alabama 1999-2003
“America’s # 1 Political Prisoner”, The American Trial Lawyer Magazine
From Justyn Winner:
Ambassador Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson have asked that I send you their official statement regarding Karl Rove’s new memoir Courage and Consequence:
Karl Rove’s book Courage and Consequence is less memoir than hoax. The chapters that relate to the CIA leak scandal are yet another attempt to deflect attention from his central role in the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA officer. His distortions and fabrications are consistent with his approach throughout this sordid and criminal affair. Wasting his opportunity to tell the truth, he offers absolutely nothing new, and his selective use of facts and quotes is a transparent effort to continue his long campaign to confuse people, unfortunately consistent with his past behavior. His book is a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.
Nothing in Karl Rove’s book refutes those facts. His book, however, is illuminating in further exposing his political methods, especially his reliance on personal insults, not simply towards Valerie and myself, but also towards all those who opposed his unprincipled behavior. If any additional proof to the irrefutable historical record were needed, Rove’s book demonstrates once again the actions of a vindictive, angry and petty man. Karl Rove betrayed his nation; now he has betrayed history.
If you have an inquiry, my contact information is:
JustynWinner
Executive Vice President & General Counsel
Winner & Associates, A Publicis Consultants Company
On March 8, the WashPost ran an editorial (see below) attacking Yukihisa Fujita, a
member of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), for his views on 9/11–views
“too half-baked, bizarre and intellectually bogus to merit serious discussion,” etc.
The piece casts Fujita as a member of “the lunatic fringe,” refers to him as “reckless
and fact-averse,” and hints strongly that Fujita’s party (which is currently in power)
ought to shut him up, or purge him, for the sake of “the U.S.-Japan alliance.”
That piece, it turns out, is a hatchet job. First of all, it radically misrepresents Fujita’s
views on 9/11: he has never called it a conspiracy, nor does he believe that controlled
demolition brought down the Twin Towers. All he’s said is that there ought to be a new
investigation of what happened on that day.
And, more shocking still, it turns out that Fujita was deliberately set up, as Lee Hockster,
editorial writer for the Post, arranged and carried out the interview under false pretenses.
Below is Fujita’s statement on the whole experience. It makes quite clear that the Post’s
editorial was not only a hatchet job, but a deliberate sting.
In short, this “editorial” was not a frank expression of legitimate opinion, but a stroke
of outright propaganda–one more volley in the vast campaign to shut down any
and all questions about 9/11 (and whatever other scandals we are not permitted even
to acknowledge, much less study honestly).
MCM
Comment on Circumstances of Washington Post Editorial Dated Mar 8, 2010
Yukihisa Fujita
Member of the House of Councillors
Office Tel: 3508-8205
At 10:30 am on March 3, 2010, Lee Hockstader, Editorial Writer for the Washington Post, visited myself (Yukihisa Fujita, member of the House of Councillors, and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) International Department Director General) having made an interview request on the subject of “Japan’s stance on and shifting attitudes toward immigration” via the Foreign Press Center, Japan. (original interview request and questions in Japanese available on request)
1. The requested interview time of one hour was spent discussing the current situation relating to Japan’s response to immigration and my opinions on this issue. During the interview Hockstader typed my comments into his laptop computer, as he had requested. However, once the one hour interview had ended and Hockstader had closed his laptop, he mentioned as an aside that he had noticed from my resume that I had raised the issue of the 9/11 terror attacks in a Diet committee,
and asked whether I had some doubts about this issue. In response, I explained the circumstances that led me to become involved in the 9/11 issue and pointed out a number of points that still remained unexplained about the events of that day.
2. In other words, after answering questions on the agreed upon theme for around one hour, I naturally responded to this question as being separate from the interview itself.
3. Ms. Fukasawa of the Foreign Press Center, Japan also attended the interview (DPJ International Department Manager Ms. Uchida and Deputy Manager Ms. Burnicle were also in attendance), and she confirmed that during his visit to Japan, Hockstader did not conduct interviews on any other subject than immigration. (following the interview, I received a letter of thanks from Foreign Press Center, Japan President Terusuke Terada). The entire interview was recorded and I intend to disclose the content of the entire interview in due course.
4. As stated in 1. above, this was an informal chat regarding 9/11 following the actual interview itself. At no point did I draw the conclusion that 9/11 was a conspiracy, and I clearly stated that the collapse of the Twin Towers could not be judged to be a result of a controlled demolition. Rather, I stated I had made my speech in the Diet from the stance that it was necessary to investigate the origins of the “War on Terror” from the perspective of assisting the relatives of the victims of 9/11, and in relation to the war in Afghanistan and the provision of humanitarian assistance.
5. Furthermore, I have many American friends from various walks of life, and have worked for many years to serve as a bridge between Japan and the United States, including by providing assistance to former US POWs held captive by Japan.
6. I currently serve as Director of the Research Committee on International Affairs and Global Warming Issues in the House of Councillors, but I was introduced in the article as “the head of the Research Committee on Foreign Affairs”. Moreover, the article describes me as “a Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment” of Japan, while in fact, as Director General of the Democratic Party of Japan’s International Department, I am not involved in policy matters. I find it totally regrettable that this kind of biased article should be published in the Washington Post.
A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/07/AR2010030702354.html
That makes one good reason to support it.
MCM
Rush Limbaugh: I’ll Leave Country Over Health Bill
Posted by Brian Montopoli
Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show that he will eventually leave the country
if the health care bill passes and its provisions are implemented.
From David Ray Griffin:
Mark,
It’s good to have the Huffington Post’s policy on “conspiracy theories” in black and white.
So now someone needs to inform them that they cannot accept any posts that state, or imply, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, for that is a conspiracy theory.
That has been acknowledged by Cass Sunstein, the Chicago-and-then-Harvard professor of law who was tapped by President Obama to direct OIRA, the executive branch’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (which is under the Office of Management and Budget).
In a 2009 article entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” he and his Harvard co-author wrote:
“The theory that Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 is . . . a . . . conspiracy theory.”
(The complete statement is: “The theory that Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 is thus a justified and true conspiracy theory.”) See Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 17/2 (June 2009), 202-27, at 208.
In pointing out that there are true as well as false conspiracy theories, Sunstein refers readers to philosopher Charles Pigden, who gave this definition: “”[A] conspiracy theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy – a secret plan on the part of some group to influence events by partly secret means.” (Charles Pigden, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom,” Episteme, 4 (2007), 219-32, Sect. 2.)
So, in telling us that the 9/11 attacks resulted from a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and 19 members of his al-Qaeda organization, Bush and Cheney clearly articulated a conspiracy theory. They and Sunstein, of course, call it a true theory; but all conspiracy theorists claim that their theories are true.
In any case, the HP did not say that it accepted true conspiracy theories and excluded only false ones (and to do this, they would need to do an enormous amount of research). They said they avoid “lending credibility to any conspiracy theories.”
This means, for example, that they cannot allow President Obama say that we are in Afghanistan to “get the people who attacked us on 9/11,” because he’s thereby endorsing the Bush-Cheney conspiracy theory about 9/11.
What the HP policy amounts to is excluding any allegations that our own government has orchestrated any conspiracy. So they would have had to exclude all allegations about Tonkin Gulf being a hoax; ditto about the Watergate break in; ditto for WMD in Iraq (recall “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”?); ditto for the claim that Saddam helped al-Qaeda with the 9/11 attacks; and so on.
One would hope that the people at HP, being reasonable people, will see that they need to rethink their policy. Reading Charles Pigden’s essay would be an excellent place to start.
David Ray Griffin
Santa Barbara, CA
As I noted in an item yesterday, Jesse Ventura has a new book out, co-authored with
Dick Russell, called American Conspiracies, which includes an excellent chapter on
election fraud and its connection to the likely murder of Mike Connell.
Well, this morning, Jesse had a front-page piece on 9/11 up at HuffPost: a front-page
piece that quickly slipped off that front page–and then completely disappeared.
Here’s what you’ll find there now (or will, until they take that down as well):
Jesse Ventura
Author, American Conspiracies
Posted: March 9, 2010 11:00 AM
Editor’s Note: The Huffington Post’s editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories — including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.
All that’s up there now are the comments left by 65 of HuffPost’s readers.
It’s worth noting that HuffPost already ran an excerpt from another chapter of American
Conspiracies, about the US “war on drugs,” and they had no problem with that subject.
But this one is, as we all know, taboo. Clearly, even to question the official story of 9/11
is to engage in “conspiracy theories” (as if the official story weren’t itself a “conspiracy
theory,” and a preposterous one at that). Such is always the response of the US mainstream
media (the foreign media tends to be more open-minded)–and it’s also the response
of our left/liberal media, as this amazing act of censorship makes clear.
So here is the offending piece. Please read it; and let’s all try to locate the particular points
that are so obviously wild and baseless that HuffPost had to kill the whole piece insantly.
MCM
Huffington Post/Jesse Ventura – Article #2 (“American Conspiracies”)
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON SEPTEMBER 11TH?
You didn’t see anything about it in the mainstream media, but two weeks ago at a conference in San Francisco, more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.
That’s right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy – because they don’t buy the government’s version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible – or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the Twin Towers and Building 7.
Richard Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, put it like this: “The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction.” He’s especially disturbed by Building 7, whose 47 stories came down in “pure free-fall acceleration” that afternoon – even though it was never hit by an aircraft.
This is a subject I take up in my new book, American Conspiracies, published this week by Skyhorse. An excerpt follows:
Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an hour.
Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there’s the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its investigation on August 21, 2002.
When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with Governor Pataki and my wife Terry. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures.
These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever. And this was all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal, in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech incendiary/explosive. Here’s what the paper’s lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen’s chemistry department, had to say about the explosive that he’s convinced brought down the Twin Towers and the nearby Building 7:
“Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly.
Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.”[i]
Richard Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building collapses. As he puts it bluntly: “Once you get to the science, it’s indisputable.”
Toyota workers raised safety concerns with bosses in 2006 memo
The notice told of worries about employees and vehicles over the automaker’s push to trim costs
and boost production.
By John M. Glionna
Reporting from Toyota City, Japan – All six Toyota
veterans around the table agreed: The memo they were
about to send to senior management could damage their
careers.
The workers had recognized a troubling trend. In recent
years, the automaker had kicked into high gear to fill
the booming U.S. demand for smaller, more gas-efficient
vehicles.
The union men had watched the company take what they
believed were dangerous safety and manpower shortcuts
to lower costs and boost production.
DOJ TO REQUIRE ES&S TO SELL OFF ASSETS FROM DIEBOLD MERGER
CITING ANTI-TRUST CONCERNS
By Brad Friedman
The Department of Justice’s Anti-trust division has determined that the purchase of Premier Election Solutions, Diebold Inc.’s recently renamed e-voting division, by Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) has resulted in a voting machine monopoly. The DoJ and nine states who have joined in a lawsuit, are suing to require ES&S to divest of the assets gained in the bargain-basement priced purchase of Diebold’s e-voting outfit last September.
The merger with their second largest competitor Diebold/Premier, had given ES&S, a private corporation which had already controlled some 50% of U.S. elections their electronic voting systems, a full 70% control of the votes cast in this country. The acquisition had been opposed by election integrity organizations, Hart Intercivic (a much smaller Austin-based competitor), the New York Times editorial board, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee and was being investigated by 14 different states along with the DoJ’s anti-trust division.
Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War
By GARETH PORTER
WASHINGTON, 8 Mar (IPS) – For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a “city of 80,000 people” as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.
It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.
Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care — admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada’s single-payer system.
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