The "Risk" of Terrorism,,,

Don't know how this was calculated or if it's correct, but the point is the odds of being a victim of a terrorist are so ridiculous there shouldn't be so many resources  devoted to preventing terrorism. I'd rather be the victim of a terrorist attack than have my freedoms ignored and/or taken away...

Federal judge: Iran shares responsibility for 9/11 terror attacks

(hmmmmm...no agenda here...--jef)

By Kenneth Timmerman - the Daily Caller
December 27, 2011

NEW YORK — In an historic hearing in the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels said he planned to issue a ruling in the coming days declaring that Iran shares in the responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks.

“The extensive record submitted to this court, including fact witnesses and expert testimony, is satisfactory to this court,” Judge Daniels said. The court “accepts as true” the various allegations of the plaintiffs and their experts, he declared, and “will issue an order” in the coming days that Iran bears legal responsibility for providing “material support” to the 9/11 plotters and hijackers.

Family members of 9/11 victims who attended the open-court hearing broke into tears. They had nervously sat through a four-hour presentation by attorneys Thomas E. Mellon, Jr., and Timothy B. Fleming, consisting of evidence backing up their claims that Iran had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and actively assisted the hijackers in planning, preparing, and executing their plan.

“My husband’s name is on that lawsuit,” said Fiona Havlish, the lead plaintiff in the case against Iran. Her spouse, Donald G. Havlish, Jr, perished on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. “This is about my husband, all our husbands, our loved ones, our sons, our daughters.”

Ellen Saracini, whose husband, Victor Saracini, took off that morning at the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, called it “a historic day” because a U.S. court found that Iran was responsible for the attacks. “When I heard the verdict, I just smiled up to Victor and said, ‘we’re still thinking about you up there.’”

In presenting evidence gathered by the attorneys and their outside investigator, Timothy Fleming revealed tantalizing details of still-sealed videotaped depositions provided by three defectors from Iranian intelligence organizations.

One of those defectors was “physically present” when al-Qaida’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to Iran in January 2001 for four days of intense closed-door meetings with the top leadership in Iran to discuss the impending attacks.

Another took part in writing up the debriefing reports of Iran’s al-Qaida liaison, Imad Mugniyeh, once he returned to Iran from Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.

The most dramatic moment of the hearing came when Fleming unveiled the identity of a third defector and described in detail the information he had provided.

The defector, Abdolghassem Mesbahi, had been a confidant of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder, and headed up European operations for the new regime’s fledging intelligence service in the early 1980s.

Then, Mesbahi actively took part in developing a set of terrorist contingency plans, called “Shaitan der atash” — meaning “Satan in the Flames,” or “Satan on Fire” — to be used against the United States.

“This contingency plan for unconventional or asymmetrical warfare against the United States was the origin of subsequent terror attacks against the United States, up to and including the terrorist attacks of 9/11.” Fleming said. “Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda joined the Iranian operational planning in the early to mid-1990s.”

Those earlier “unconventional” attacks included the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

In 1996, Mesbahi learned hard-liners within the regime intended to kill him. He fled Iran for Europe, where he was granted political refugee status.

Mesbahi soon became a witness in German court proceedings stemming from the assassination of Kurdish dissidents in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, and went to ground in a witness protection program. Known only as “Witness C,” his testimony led the German court to name the top leadership of Iran as personally responsible for ordering the assassinations, and caused the European Union to withdraw their ambassadors from Iran for 18 months.

Ever since then, Mesbahi has been a marked man, hunted by the regime’s intelligence services.

Fleming described Mesbahi’s desperate attempts in the weeks before the 9/11 attacks to contact German and U.S. intelligence agencies, after he received a series of coded messages from one of his former intelligence colleagues in Iran.

The first message, which he received on July 23, 2001, told him that the “Shaitan der atash” contingency plan against the United States had been activated.

Mesbahi knew at that point that something awful was about to occur, but he didn’t know which of the many variants of the plan had been selected, Fleming said. In one version of the plan, Iranian-backed terrorists were supposed to attack gas stations around the United States, causing their underground fuel tanks to explode. In another, they were to attack oil refineries.

The second message, which he received on Aug. 13, 2001, told him which plan had been selected. “This was the plan to crash civilian jetliners into major U.S. cities, including New York and Washington,” Fleming said.

The third message, which Mesbahi received on Aug. 27, told him that “Germany was involved” in some way in the plans. As Fleming pointed out, several of the 9/11 hijackers, including the lead pilot, Mohammad Atta, were working out of Hamburg, Germany.

The 9/11 Commission report referred obliquely to Mesbahi and others who had “some fragmentary knowledge” of the impending attacks in its narrative of the events of the summer of 2001. The “system was blinking red” and U.S. intelligence agencies were receiving “frequent fragmentary reports from around the world,” Mellon, one of the 9/11 families’ attorneys, told the court.

Both Mellon and Fleming saluted the bravery of the three defectors who “risked their lives” to help bring out the truth of Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 plot.

In addition to the defectors, Mellon recruited three senior staff members from the 9/11 Commission to describe the importance of Iran’s efforts to facilitate the travel of the 9/11 hijackers to and from Afghanistan.

Janice Kephart, who authored a separate monograph on the terrorists’ travel for the Commission, told the court that travel facilitation was not just a coincidence. It was “like a military operation” and was “crucial military support” for the 9/11 plot, she said.

Fleming and Mellon explained that Iran sent its top terrorist operative, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh, to Saudi Arabia and Lebanon on several trips to accompany eight to ten of the “muscle” hijackers back to Iran.

This was critical, they said, because the hijackers needed to reach al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan for briefings on the 9/11 operation. But because they were traveling on new Saudi passports and either already had or intended to get U.S. visas, the U.S. might refuse them entry if they had Iranian or Afghan entry stamps.

So without Iran’s decision to allow the future hijackers invisible passage to and from Afghanistan — without stamping their passports — the 9/11 attacks might never have occurred.

As a result, Kephart testified, the U.S. State Department approved 22 of the 23 visa applications submitted by the future hijackers and their associates.

“Today, I feel a great sense of relief,” Mellon said after the judge declared his intention to rule in favor of the 9/11 families. “The families have waited a very long time for this day, so I was greatly relieved for the families. Ten years ago, one of the family members asked me, who was responsible?” for the 9/11 attacks.

“Well, today we have found — the judge has found — that the responsible party was Iran,” he added.

Judge Daniels said he expected to issue a final opinion in the case early next week, finding Iran responsible for the worst terror attacks ever perpetrated on U.S. soil.

Daniels is a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Did chemical reactions cause Twin Towers collapse?

(OK, but it doesn't explain the collapse of building 7.--jef)

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

PARIS — A mix of sprinkling system water and melted aluminium from aircraft hulls likely triggered the explosions that felled New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, a materials expert has told a technology conference.

"If my theory is correct, tonnes of aluminium ran down through the towers, where the smelt came into contact with a few hundred litres of water," Christian Simensen, a scientist at SINTEF, an independent technology research institute based in Norway, said in a statement released Wednesday.

"From other disasters and experiments carried out by the aluminium industry, we know that reactions of this sort lead to violent explosions."

The official report blames the collapse on the over-heating and failure of the structural steel beams at the core of the buildings, an explanation Simensen rejects.

Given the quantities of the molten metal involved, the blasts would have been powerful enough to blow out an entire section of each building, he said.

This, in turn, would lead to the top section of each tower to fall down on the sections below.

The sheer weight of the top floors would be enough to crush the lower part of the building like a house of card, he said.

The aluminium-water scenario would also account for explosions from within the buildings just prior to their collapse that have fuelled conspiracy theories suggesting that the structures had been booby-trapped.

Simensen presented his theory at an international materials technology conference in San Diego, California, and has detailed his calculations in an article published in the trade journal Aluminium International Today.

"The aluminium industry had reported more than 250 aluminium-water explosions since 1980," he said.

In a controlled experiment carried out by Alcoa Aluminium, 20 kilos (44 pounds) of molten aluminium was allowed to react with 20 litres of water, along with a small quantity of rust.

"The explosion destroyed the entire laboratory and left a crater 30 metres (100 feet) in diameter," Simensen said.

By comparison, the aircraft carried 30 tonnes of aluminium into each of the towers, according to his calculations.

Simensen speculates that the two commercial jets were immediately trapped inside an insulating layer of building debris within the skyscrapers.

The debris -- especially plaster, which blocks the transfer of heat -- would have formed a shield protecting the rest of the building.

At the same time, however, it would created a super-hot, oven-like zone around the aircraft, heated by burning fuel.

Aluminium alloy, which in jet hulls also contains magnesium, melts at 660 degrees Celsius (1,220 degrees Fahrenheit). If heated to 750 C (1382 F), the alloy "becomes as liquid as water," Simensen said.

This molten aluminium could then have flowed downward through staircases and gaps in the floor, causing a chemical reaction with water from sprinklers on the levels below.

The mix would immediately boost temperatures by several hundred degrees, releasing combustible hydrogen in the process. Such reactions are even more powerful in the presence of rust or other catalysts, which can boost temperatures to more than 1,500 C (2,700 F).

A meltdown period of 30 to 45 minutes would also be consistent with the timing of the explosions and subsequent collapse of both buildings in relation to the moment of impact.

Simensen said there are lessons to be learned, if his theory is correct, that could help avoid a similar disaster were another skyscraper to be hit by a big jet.

"We could develop means of rapidly emptying sprinkler systems in the floors beneath the point of impact," he said.

Firing a rocket with fire-retardant that could coat the aircraft body could also help prevent metal alloy from melting.

Nat Geo Infomercial: 'Why Didn't We Know This?' Wonders George Bush After 9/11

August 29, 2011 - By David @Video Cafe

DOWNLOADS: (5)

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In an interview that aired Sunday night, President Bush told National Geographic Channel's Peter Schnall that after 9/11, he didn't want to blame intelligence agencies for failing to predict the attacks.

"At some point in time in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, I thought about why didn't we know this?" Bush recalled.

"I knew we needed to figure out what went wrong to prevent other attacks but I didn't want to start the finger pointing and say to our intelligence communities, 'You fouled up. You should have caught this. Why didn't you know?'"

On Aug. 6, 2001 -- more than a month before the attacks -- Bush received a presidential daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US," the briefing said. "Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 'bring the fighting to America.'"

"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The day after receiving the report while vacationing on his ranch, "Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday," according to The Washington Post.

UPDATE: John Amato: Heather posted about Rupert Murdoch's infomercial for George Bush yesterday, but I didn't think there would be much news coming out of it. Guess I was mistaken. Who can forget Ben-Veniste's questioning of Condi Rice during the 9/11 Commission over the Bin Laden PDB?

RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Now, the...

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.

And in September of 2007, Bill Moyers covered this PDB quite thoroughly:

BILL MOYERS: The system was blinking red but the 9/11 Commission report says the American people were not warned. Where were the President's national security advisers?

RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste, you…

BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the…

RICE: I would like to finish my point here.

BEN-VENISTE: I didn't know there was a point.

RICE: Given that you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks…

BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.

RICE: What the August 6th PDB said, and perhaps I should read it to you…

BEN-VENISTE: We would be happy to have it declassified in full at this time, including its title.

MOYERS: Two days after Rice's testimony and after the Commission's most heated showdown with the Bush Administration over access to classified information — the PDB, heavily blacked out — is released on the Saturday night before Easter.

The President had been informed that, quote: "Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington."

The President had been informed that FBI information, quote, "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

And the President had been informed of reports that a group of bin Laden supporters are, quote, "in the U.S. planning attacks."

But the President stays at his Texas ranch for 23 more days. His National Security Adviser does not convene a Cabinet-level meeting to discuss the urgent warnings.

ROEMER: Not once do the principals ever sit down. You, in your job description as the national security adviser, the secretary of State, the secretary of Defense, the President of the United States and meet solely on terrorism to discuss, in the spring and the summer, when these threats are coming in; when you've known since the transition that al Qaeda cells are in the United States; when, as the PDB said on August 6th, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States."

RICE: The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States. I don't think you, frankly, had to have that report to know that bin Laden would like to attack the United States. The threat reporting… the threat reporting…

ROEMER: So why aren't you doing something about that earlier than August 6th, then?

MOYERS: The Commission never gets a satisfactory answer to that question.

The decade's biggest scam

Terrorism

By Glenn Greenwald

Monday, Aug 29, 2011- Salon

The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles.  All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism."

The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29."  That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.

Despite these increasing economic insecurities -- actually, precisely because of them -- the sprawling domestic Security State continues unabated.  The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market ‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns."  It details how budget cuts mean "homeland security" growth may not be as robust as once predicted, but "Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more contracts from DHS"; as a Boeing spokesman put it: "You’ll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs.”

Of course, the key to sustaining this Security State bonanza -- profit for private industry and power for Security State officials --  is keeping fear levels among the citizenry as high as possible, as National Defense expressly notes, and that is accomplished by fixating even on minor and failed attacks, each one of which is immediately seized upon to justify greater expenditures, expansion of security measures, and a further erosion of rights:

Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market, analysts say. . . .
Small-scale attacks, whether successful or not, will continue to prompt additional spending, the market analysts at Homeland Security Research Corp. say. They point to the failed 2009 Christmas plot of a man trying to blow up a flight to Detroit with explosives sewn into his underwear and the attempted car-bombing in Times Square early the next year. Though unsuccessful, these events led to immediate White House intervention, congressional hearings and an airport screening upgrade costing more than $1.6 billion.

The LA Times, while skillfully highlighting these wasteful programs, depicts them as some sort of unintended inefficiencies.  That is exactly what they are not.  None of this is unintended or inefficient but is achieving exactly the purposes for which it is designed.  That's true for two reasons.

First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist threats.  That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does.

As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress -- contrary to popular opinion -- is not "broken"; it is working perfectly for its actual owners.  Or, as he puts it, "Washington isn't broken -- it’s fixed":

Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more and nothing less than a handsome return -- deficits be darned -- in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government contracts.

The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting Terrorism isn't the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it.  For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.

Second, while the Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing wealth gap.  This Alternet article by Sarah Jafee, entitled "How the Surveillance State Protects the Interests Of the Ultra-Rich," compiles much evidence -- including what I offered two weeks ago -- demonstrating that the prime aim of the growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and anticipated unrest.

Pointing out disparities between surveillance programs and the Terrorist threat is futile because they're not aimed at that threat.  The British Government, for instance, is continuing its efforts to restrict social media in the wake of the poverty-fueled riots that plagued that country; as The New York Times reports today, it is secretly meeting with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and the company that owns Blackberry "to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest."  That revelation prompted taunting condemnations of British tyranny from China and Iran, both of which have been routinely excoriated for surveillance abuses and Internet suppression of the type increasingly common in the West.

Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic policing.  As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are "are now deployed by police across the country; the arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on insurgents in Baghdad."  Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border.  Surveillance measures originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA -- created with a taboo against domestic spying -- now does that regularly.

Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title.  Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering  So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.

FBI organizes most terror plots in the US

FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US

Published: 23 August, 2011

The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.

If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.

Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes.
The FBI has in recent years used trained informants not just to snitch on suspected terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go. A recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley analyses some striking statistics about the role of FBI informants in terrorism cases that the Bureau has targeted in the decade since the September 11 attacks.

The report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging with others. Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within the community, find suspects that could potentially carry out “lone wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By providing weaponry, funds and a plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only to bust them before any events fully materialize.

Additionally, one former high-level FBI officials speaking to Mother Jones says that, for every informant officially employed by the bureau, up to three unofficial agents are working undercover.

The FBI has used those informants to set-up and thus shut-down several of the more high profile would-be attacks in recent years. The report reveals that the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated by FBI-involved agents.

The report reveals that in many of the stings, important meetings between informants and the unknowing participants are left purposely unrecorded, as to avoid any entrapment charges that could cause the case to be dismissed. Perhaps the most high-profile of the FBI-proposed plots was the case of the Newburgh 4. Around an hour outside of New York City, an informant infiltrated a Muslim community and engaged four local men to carry out a series of attacks. Those men may have never actually carried out an attack, but once the informant offered them a plot and a pair of missiles, they agreed. Defense attorneys cried “entrapment,” but the men still were sentenced to 25 years apiece.

"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," Martin Stolar tells Mother Jones. Stolar represented the suspect involved in a New York City bombing plot that was set-up by FBI agents. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." For their part, the FBI says this method is a plan for "preemption," "prevention" and "disruption."

The report also reveals that, of the 500-plus prosecutions of terrorism-related cases they analyzed, nearly half of them involved the use of informants, many of whom worked for the FBI in exchange for money or to work off criminal charges. Of the 158 prosecutions carried out, 49 defendants participated in plots that agent provocateurs arranged on behalf of the FBI.

Experts note that the chance of winning a terrorism-related trial, entrapment or not, is near impossible. "The plots people are accused of being part of — attacking subway systems or trying to bomb a building — are so frightening that they can overwhelm a jury," David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, tells Mother Jones. Since 9/11, almost two-thirds of the cases linked to terrorism have ended with guilty pleas. “They don't say, 'I've been entrapped,' or, 'I was immature,’” a retired FBI official remarks.

All of this and those guilty pleas often stem for just being in the right place at the wrong time. Farhana Khera of the group Muslim Advocate notes that agents go into mosques on “fishing expeditions” just to see where they can get interest in the community. "The FBI is now telling agents they can go into houses of worship without probable cause," says Khera. "That raises serious constitutional issues."

From the set-up to the big finish, the whole sting operation is ripe with constitutional issues such as that. A decade since 9/11, however, the FBI is reaching through whatever means it can pull together to keep terrorists — or whom they think could someday become one — from ever hurting America.

Obama Declares Wrong Emergency

by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

It's often said by supporters of President Obama, with some justification, that too much has been expected of him. Sure he went in with high ideals about moving the country in a more progressive direction, but the reality of money and power in the nation's capital have rendered him unable-at least in the two years he's been in office-to achieve the objectives he so glowingly promised.

Contrary to this view of the president's predicament, we would direct our fellow citizens' attention to the action taken by the president on September 10. On that day, the White House released the text of a letter sent by Mr. Obama to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi entitled "Letter from the President on the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks".

The letter reads in major part:

Dear Madam Speaker:

Consistent with Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I have sent to the Federal Register the enclosed notice, stating that the emergency declared with respect to the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, is to continue in effect for an additional year.

The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2010, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.

Sincerely,
BARACK OBAMA

In extending the nation's State of Emergency for a ninth consecutive year, President Obama retains the power to declare and implement a series of executive orders which enable his government to "take over all modes of transportation and control of highways, airports, and seaports" (10990, 11004), "seize and control the communication media" (10995), "relocate communities and establish new locations for populations" (11004), "develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institutions" (11921) and much more.

The country does face an emergency brought on, at least in part, by the attacks of 9/11-a fiscal emergency! Since 9/11, the nation has gone on a frantic military spending spree financed by borrowing abroad. Trillions have gone into a preemptive war against Iraq and what is shaping up as a Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan. U.S. military budgets are at an all time high, with the United States spending more than the rest of the world combined. In fact, more money is spent on war-making than is spend by all fifty states together on health, education, welfare, and public safety. Eisenhower's worst fears have been realized.

The emergency we face is economic. As Joshua Holland wrote recently on AlterNet:

"The Great Recession that began in 2008 wiped out $13 trillion in Americans' household wealth-in home values and stocks and bonds-stoking the kind of anger we've seen from pissed off progressives and from the Tea Partiers who dominated the news in the summer of 2009."

In the latest twist on the old James Carville aphorism, "it's the mortgages, stupid." As Robert Scheer writes, "With 11 million homeowners underwater on their mortgages and 3 million more already foreclosed, we have to assume, given the average household size, that some 40 million Americans are feeling mighty strapped."

And now, in the fall of 2010, we face the very real possibility of a 1994 redux in the midterm elections, with the Republicans retaking the House and stymieing any meaningful reforms for the balance of Obama's term.

This is not about Democrats versus Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who pushed NAFTA, leading to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of high-wage jobs. And it was Barack Obama who continued to bail out bankers while ignoring the pain caused to practically everyone else by toxic mortgages. Regarding the $700 billion bailout accorded the largest financial institutions in the country, Scheer writes, "Not surprisingly the bankers pocketed the gift and did precious little in return."

We have heard ad nauseum from the beginning of Obama's presidency that "nothing can be done without sixty votes." This requirement for a senatorial supermajority in order to do the people's business is mostly a dodge by those who really don't want that business to be done in the first place. Many scholars have shown how a focused majority, currently the Democrats, could alter Senate procedures to restore majority rule. At the very least, the majority could require that filibusters actually be carried through rather than simply "declared."

Regardless of an inept Congress, the president does have the power to make massive changes; in fact, the State of Emergency affords him near-dictatorial powers. The president actually has the authority to take the actions necessary to provide for the national security by pursuing our enemies, whether they work from Afghan caves or K Street suites.

The president has the power to force the banks to halt foreclosures by reissuing mortgages at a lower rate. He has the power to put people to work rebuilding the infrastructure of the country. He has the power not just to ferret out terrorists, but to keep American citizens in their homes and in their jobs until the economic crisis abates.

In fact, unless he does so, the economic fortunes of the vast majority of the nation's citizens will continue to crater and the negative political consequences to the president and his party will be dwarfed by the consequences to society as a whole.