Ballot Initiative Success!

Calling all New York City residents and supporters of truth and justice!

Updated 9/9/08

Thanks to all the hard-working petitioners who have spent months on this historice effort, we have now gathered over 30,000 signatures of NYCregistered voters!

This is the minimum requirement to submit a ballot initiative to NY City Council. Now the foundation has been established. From here we will build and create a winning campaign that will result in placing the Initiative for a new, independent, comprehensive 9/11 investigation on the ballot in 2009. Read on...

Press Conference on
7th Anniversary of 9/11 for
NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative
St. Marks Church
2nd Avenue & 10th Street, Manhattan
Thurs. Sept. 11th, 2:00pm

NYC 911 Ballot Initiative Campaign
Announces Milestone of 30,000 Petition Signatures!

Speakers: William Pepper, Cynthia McKinney, William Rodriguez
(New York, NY, Sept. 8, 2008) --- On the 7th Anniversary of 9/11, the NYC 911 Ballot Initiative Campaign will announce it's historic achievement of having secured 30,000 signatures towards the creation of a new investigation of the crimes of 9/11/01! Members of the Campaign will be joined by speakers Dr. William Pepper, international human rights attorney, William Rodriguez, who saved many lives that day and was last man out of the World Trade Center, Cynthia McKinney, former Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, along with other surprise guests. Campaign representatives will inform the public of its achievement and lay out the path ahead towards a new investigation of 9/11. The gathering of 30,000 petition signatures of NYC voters is the minimum amount required for placement on the ballot. [my bold]
“Large parts of the official U.S. Government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 are almost certainly lies. Tragically, the entire course of U.S. foreign and domestic policies since that date has grown out of these falsehoods. These are my personal judgments, but they are the very questions on which members of the investigating commission now being organized by the New York City 9/11 Ballot Initiative must make their own judgments.”
William Christison, retired National Intelligence Officer, former Director of the Office of Political and Regional Affairs, Central IntelligenceAgency.
Though the need for a new investigation is paramount, it is unlikely (nor desirable for that matter) that Congress nor any other government body are likely to take action. But through the current NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative Campaign the voters of New York City can create the conditions that would lead to an authentic, comprehensive investigation, which according to CBS/NY Times polls indicate as many as 84 million Americans would support! [my bold]
It is important to recognize that this effort is supported by many of the families of victims of 9/11. Many prominent Americans have also voiced their support. These include former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Tony award winning actress Christine Ebersole, Dallas Cowboy football player Mark Stepnowski, AZ state senator Karen Johnson, former FBI field agent Colleen Rowley, retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern, retired NSA analyst Wayne Madsen, former senators Mike Gravel and Lincoln Chafee, Grammy award-winning hip hop artists Arrested Development, and more.
Unlike the woefully inadequate Kean/Hamilton Commission created by the Bush Administration, the citizen-based NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative Campaign will facilitate a genuine and impartial investigation, carried out by a lawfully recognized body, with subpoena authority, who will follow the evidence wherever it may lead. The Commission also intends to pursue remedies towards the alleviation of the hardships faced by many of those 9/11 first responders who have suffered terrible health effects and financial loss as a consequence of their heroic actions during that time.
In order to achieve the goal of placing the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative on the ballot This may be the only opportunity to obtain truth and justice for the victims of 9/11. People of conscience around the world are awaiting the outcome. Come hear why the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative is the campaign whose time has come.
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The NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative Campaign is a citizen-based effort to call attention to the fact that the U.S. government did not conduct a thorough investigation of 9/11. Through the creation of a public referendum, the most basic of democratic processes, the voters of NYC can now use their power of the petition to place a ballot initiative on the general election of 2009. This Initiative is designed to enable voters to create a new, independent, impartial Commission to conduct a thorough, fact-driven investigation of the most momentous event of our time.
Visit www.nyc911initiative.org for further details.

Preemptive Strike on the First Amendment

Sticks & stones may break my bones but urine is WAAAAAAAAAY over the line! It's all too ridiculously predictable, like a terrible movie. Don't you wish we change the ending?

Storm Troopers at the RNC

By Ray McGovern
September 8, 2008

[...] When I flew into St. Paul on the evening of Aug. 30, I encountered a din in local media about “preemptive strikes” on those already congregating there to demonstrate against the Iraq war and injustice against the poor in our country.

St. Paul’s Pioneer Press expressed surprise that “despite preemptive police searches” and arrests, a group calling itself “the RNC Welcoming Committee” was still intent on “disrupting the convention.”

[...] Ironically, it was FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley, living in the St. Paul area, who served warning of precisely that in her hard-hitting Feb. 26, 2003, letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, three weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. [NYT, March 6, 2003]

Confronting Mueller on a number of key issues (like “What is the FBI’s evidence with respect to the claimed connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq?”), Rowley warned of the trickle-down effect of “the administration’s new policy of ‘preemptive strikes’”:

“I believe it would be prudent to be on guard against the possibility that the looser ‘preemptive strike’ rationale being applied to situations abroad could migrate back home, fostering a more permissive attitude on the part of law enforcement officers in this country.”

Rowley called Mueller’s attention to the abuses of civil rights that had already occurred since 9/11, and pointedly warned “particular vigilance may be required to head off undue pressure (including subtle encouragement) to detain or ‘round up’ suspects.”

[...] The “preemption” began on Friday, Aug. 29, well before the RNC began on Monday, Sept. 1.

An academic doing research on social movement organizations, who for several months has been observing the main protesters — the RNC Welcoming Committee, the Coalition to March on the RNC and End the War, and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign — provided this account:

“On Friday evening the space in St. Paul that was being rented by the Welcoming Committee was raided by riot police, who knocked in the door with automatic weapons drawn, forced the 60-70 activists inside onto the floor, handcuffed them, then proceeded to confiscate all the banner-making supplies and movement literature. [Is this how a democratic country treats its citizens?]

“Over the course of several hours the cops interrogated, photographed, ran warrant checks, and eventually, released everyone one by one. Then they closed down the space for a code violation. The next morning a city code inspector arrived and found no basis for closing the space.

“Saturday morning was one of escalation and terror. The Ramsey County Sheriff Department, together with the St. Paul police, Homeland Security, and the FBI raided four private houses. At 8:00 AM, dozens of cops in SWAT gear broke down the door of one house where about a dozen activists were staying. They were awakened with rifle barrels in their faces and forced to lie face down for more than an hour. [my bold]

“The cops stole all the computers and other electronic devices in the house, and core members of the Welcoming Committee sleeping there were arrested. It being a holiday weekend, those arrested for alleged crimes could not arrive in court until Wednesday, at the earliest. Thus, those trying to organize demonstrations will be in jail for the entire time the RNC is going on. Four other houses were raided and dozens of activists were detained.”

The academic who wrote the report appealed to those concerned over “this enormous police over-kill” to contact the Twin Cities’ mayors and demand an end to the “witch hunt.”

He added, “The people who were arrested were some of the gentlest, most dedicated activists I’ve ever met.” A far cry from the “criminal enterprise” described by notorious Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher.[...]

[... St. Paul City Councilman Dave] Thune objected in particular to Fletcher’s deputies using battering rams to knock down doors, then entering with guns drawn, and forcing people to the ground, [my bold] as they did on Friday night.

[...] On the fringes there was some property damage and further arrests. What violence there was bore the earmarks of provocation by the likes of Sheriff Fletcher and his Homeland Security, FBI, and, according to one well-sourced report, Blackwater buddies.

That’s right. Agent provocateurs.

Primary targets of the repression were the alternative media, [my bold] including any and all those who might have a camera to record the brutality — as was successfully done at the RNC in New York four years ago.

The manner in which Amy Goodman and the two producers of “Democracy Now!” were deliberately mistreated was clearly to serve as a warning that the rules had gone up in smoke — the First Amendment be damned.

[...] I observed no violence at all; yet, the police/FBI/national guard/and who-knows-who-else decided they needed to clear the streets. My friends and I narrowly escaped being tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, or worse. It was an overwhelming show of force — not to protect, but to intimidate.

[...] After the widespread kidnapping, torture, indefinite imprisonment, and our cowardly Congress’ empowerment of the president to imprison sine die anyone he might designate an “enemy combatant” — after all that...well, it seems to me that reading a person his/her rights takes on more, not less, importance.

Not to mention the massive repression then under way right outside the convention hall.

[...] The young protesters had some success in exposing infiltrators in their ranks. During confrontations, members of the Welcoming Committee, in particular, took copious photos of law enforcement officers and then memorized the faces. [my bold]

This tactic worked like a charm in one of the St. Paul parks, when a man who looked like a protester — dark clothes, backpack, a bit disheveled — walked by.

One of the protesters recognized the man’s face and searched through her camera until she found a photo of the man actually performing the raid on the Welcoming Committee’s headquarters on Friday night.

The young protesters asked the man, and two associates, to leave the park, at which point the three hustled into a nearby unmarked sedan.

The license plate, observed by a Pioneer Press reporter, traced back to the detective unit of the Hennepin County sheriff’s office, according to the county’s Central Mobile Equipment Division.

Protesters later picked two other men out of the day’s planned march — one because he was wearing brand-new tennis shoes. [Ah! The shoes always give cops away. Or jeans that look ironed.] The two left without indicating whether they were with the organs of public safety.[...]

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/090808a.html
Hey, kids, special treat! They took everything but the kitchen sink. Read it yourself and believe it or not.
Police document

Warrant for Minneapolis raid

Tonkin Gulf or Strait of Hormuz: SSDD

CIA, Iran & the Gulf of Tonkin
By Ray McGovern, January 12, 2008
When the Tonkin Gulf incident took place in early August 1964, I was a journeyman CIA analyst in what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “the bowels of the agency.”
Out of that experience I must say that, as much as one might be tempted to laugh at the bizarre theatrical accounts of Sunday’s incident involving small Iranian boats and U.S. naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, this is—as my old Russian professor used to insist—nothing to laugh.
The situation is so reminiscent of what happened—and didn’t happen—from Aug. 2-4, 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin and in Washington, it is in no way funny.
[...] What follows is written primarily for honest intelligence analysts and managers still on “active duty.”
[...] Given the confusion last Sunday in the Persian Gulf, you need to remember that a “known known” in the form of a non-event has already been used to sell a major war—Vietnam. It is not only in retrospect that we know that no attack occurred that night.
[...] As James Bamford describes it in “Body of Secrets:”
“The twin missions of the [USS] Maddox were in a sense symbiotic. The vessel’s primary purpose was to act as a seagoing provocateur—to poke its sharp gray bow and the American flag as close to the belly of North Vietnam as possible, in effect shoving its 5-inch cannons up the nose of the Communist navy. In turn, this provocation would give the shore batteries an excuse to turn on as many coastal defense radars, fire control systems, and communications channels as possible, which could then be captured by the men...at the radar screens. The more provocation, the more signals...
[...] We in the bowels knew there was no attack; and so did the Director of Current Intelligence as well as Cline, the Deputy Director for Intelligence. But all knew, as did McNamara, that President Johnson was lusting for a pretext to strike the North and escalate the war. And, like B’rer Rabbit, they didn’t say nothin’.
[...] “... the dilemma CIA directors and senior intelligence professionals face in cases when they know that unvarnished intelligence judgments will not be welcomed by the President, his policy managers, and his political advisers...[They] must decide whether to tell it like it is (and so risk losing their place at the President’s advisory table), or to go with the flow of existing policy by accentuating the positive (thus preserving their access and potential influence). In these episodes from the Vietnam era, we have seen that senior CIA officers more often than not tended toward the latter approach.”
[...] Back to Iran. This time, we all know what the president and vice president are lusting after—an excuse to attack Iran. But there is a big difference from the situation in the summer of 1964, when President Johnson had intimidated all his senior subordinates into using deceit to escalate the war.
[...] It is my view that the only thing that has prevented Bush and Cheney from attacking Iran so far has been the strong opposition of the uniformed military, including the Joint Chiefs.
As the misadventure last Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz shows, our senior military officers need all the help they can get from intelligence officers more concerned with the truth than with “keeping lines open to the White House” and doing its bidding.
[...] If you’re working in the bowels of the CIA and you find that your leaders are cooking the intelligence once again into a recipe for casus belli, think long and hard about your oath to protect the Constitution. Should that oath not transcend any secrecy promise you had to accept as a condition of employment?
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/011108a.html

Revolutionary 9/11 Event

Second Annual Boston Tea Party and
Conference for 9/11 Truth!

Scientists & Citizens Speak Out!
December 15 &16, 2007

Building on the success of last year’s inaugural event, Boston 9/11 Truth is proud to present two days of 911 truth activism at this year’s Boston Tea Party and Conference for 9/11 Truth, to be held Saturday and Sunday, December 15 and 16, 2007. This year’s theme, “Scientists and Citizens Speak Out,” reinforces our commitment to the broadest exposure possible of the scientific, criminal and political issues being covered-up and/or ignored by our government and the media concerning the events of September 11, 2001.

The Tea Party for 911 Truth
Sunday, December 16
Tea Party Rally on the
Boston Common Bandstand
Proclamation & Speakers addresses

The Tea Party events at on Sunday will begin at 11 am with a public rally, with a reading of the Boston Tea Party Proclamation and, "Dumping" of the "Documents of Tyranny", including the Patriot Acts, Military Commission Acts, PD51 and others at the Moakley Bridge at 3:00 pm, and concludes with a Celebration at Hennessy's pub beginning at 4:00 pm.

Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern, Donna Marsh O'Connor, Dr Bob Bowman, Barbara Honegger, Joel S. Hirshhorn, Ph.D., Richard Gage, AIA Architect, Kevin Ryan, Kevin Barrett, Justin Martel and Mike Jackman, Nick Shelton, Jim Hogue as Ethan Allen *** And more surprise guests...

NOON — Tea Party Rally on Boston Common
2:00 pm — March to Seaport Blvd
3:00 pm - 4:pm – Dumping of
9/11 Commission Report and documents of tyranny from Seaport Blvd
4:-00 - 7 pm — After Party
"A Brew and a Brainstorm" at Hennessy's (Upstairs) 25 Union St., Boston, MA
Food, Fun, Drink, Buffet provided - Cash Bar
Brainstorm in an activist strategy session with your fellow patriots. Open mic for the not so shy, aspiring Poets & Musicians. $10 contribution at the door - limited attendance! http://www.boston911truth.org/teaparty/

NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative

LEARN HOW DIRECT DEMOCRACY CAN DELIVER THE TRUTH OF 9/11!COME TO THE BENEFIT FOR THE NYC 9/11 BALLOT INITIATIVE

St. Marks Church

2nd Ave. & 10th Street, Manhattan

Sat. Nov. 24th, 7pm Admission: $15

Did you know New Yorker City voters can create a process for social and political progress based on principles of “Direct Democracy” to obtain a new, independent investigation of the most impactful event of our time, the attacks of 9/11?
Did you know New Yorker City voters can create a process for social and political progress based on principles of “Direct Democracy” to obtain a new, independent investigation of the most impactful event of our time, the attacks of 9/11?
Come and learn about the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative to create a new, independent, honest investigation of 9/11. See how in 2008 YOU can be a catalyst for truth in government and comprehensive, positive change leading to peace and progress.
Speakers include:
Dr. William Pepper – international attorney, author of "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr."
Ray McGovern – former CIA analyst, founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Lorie Van Auken – “Jersey widow”, driving force who pressured the Bush Administration into creating the 9/11 Commission
Christine Ebersole – Award-winning actress and advocate for truth on 9/11
Richard Greene – Host of "Clout" on Air America Radio
Kathy Davis – Public Affairs Director, WBAI and advocate for truth on 9/11
Frank Morales – Episcopal priest, recipient of “2007 Project Censored Award”
http://www.ny911truth.org/

Former CIA Analyst Expelled from the House

'Swear Him In' Provokes Expulsion

By Ray McGovern
September 10, 2007

If Petraeus is so honest and full of integrity, what possible objection could he have to being sworn in?

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/091007a.html#When:06:45PM