A new report from POLITICO corroborates a suspicion long held by critics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It affirms the former president and vice president not only had intelligence warning the terror attacks of 9/11 were imminent, but that they repeatedly ignored the CIA’s warnings. The most shocking assertion is that Bush and Cheney actively attempted to hide the paper trail documenting the fact that the evidence was presented to them.

The claim comes from none other than ex-CIA Chief George Tenet, who recounted with palpable frustration how Bush, Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice ignored multiple warnings from both him and then-counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, during the late spring and summer of 2001.

Source: www.collectivelyconscious.net | Original Post Date: November 19, 2015 –

There are those questions: “Who am I?” “What should I do with my life?” “How do I be happy?”

You feel a certain way about these questions, I’m sure. They feel heavy, obstructive. What’s to be done with them? Consciously or not, most of us figure it’s best just to ignore them, and hope they don’t really matter. That’s certainly how I lived, until one day I slowed down, stopped, and sat with them.

I was raised by an uber-practical, atheist mother and a father convinced that science was the be-all and end-all of human existence. I was encouraged to think for myself, and to challenge authority (a little), as long as I still got a good job that paid well. Like many American families today, words like “spiritual” never made an appearance over the dinner table, and we so rarely spoke of our love for each other. I remember having some faint inkling that there was something not being said, and that that “something” was everything.

Source: www.theantimedia.org | Original Post Date: November 17, 2015 –

A recent report by journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out stock prices for weapons manufacturers sharply increased just after the terrorist attacks in Paris last week. Greenwald was following the tip of Brooklyn journalist Aaron Cantú, who posted screenshots for the  recent stock performances of major weapons contractors on his Twitter page early Monday morning:

We destroyed ourselves with our dumb 9/11 overreactions. It’s essential not to make the same mistake again.

What is terrorism? Many are convinced that the word is inherently so vague as to be meaningless. I have never understood this. To me the definition seems singular, and obvious, and it would appear that simply understanding it is the key to avoiding terrible missteps in the aftermath of an attack like the one in Paris.

Terrorism is a tactic in which the primary objective is to produce fear, rather than direct harm. Terrorist attacks are, first and foremost, psychological operations designed to alter behavior amongst the terrorized in a way that the actors believe will serve them.

The 9/11 perpetrators killed about 3,000 people, and did about $13 billion in physical damage to the United States. That’s a lot of harm in absolute terms, but not relative to a nation of 300 million people, with a GDP of almost $15 trillion. It was a massive blow to many families, and to New York City. But to the nation as a whole that level of damage was about as dangerous as a bee sting.