Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
On Tuesday, January 27th between 4:00-6:00 pm EST, Jim Hogue will interview Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth on the subject of his new DVD, Blueprint for Truth on www.WGDR.org, streamed live from Plainfield, VT.
Jim has interviewed and written articles about Sibel Edmonds, Barbara Honegger, David Ray Griffin, Kevin Ryan, Kevin Barrett, Daniel Ellsberg, and many other scholars, engineers, researchers and whistleblowers.
His articles can be found at www.baltimorechronicle.com and www.vtcommons.org.

While the US mainstream media continue to draw the usual facile and simplistic conclusions re:the Mumbai tragedy - India's 9/11, etc. - the Centre for Global Research provides a more nuanced and complex analysis of the events in India over the past few days.

Read Michel Chossudovsky's conclusions here.

It is that time of year.
The evidence mounts, and is confirmed by more inside sources that the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by 19 Arabs. We don’t need any new evidence, but it mounts all the same, and is still ignored.
Recently the FBI confirmed that there were no cell phone calls above 5000 ft. Please think back on how the government/press used the cell phone calls to play on your heart strings. Think how important a step those non-existent calls were in the manufacturing of consent to attack Afghanistan.

Anyone interested in 9/11 truth should be keenly watching Kevin Barrett's bid for a spot in the upcoming Wisconsin congressional race. He has been running on the real anti-war platform and has the backing of former Minnesota Governer Jesse Ventura. He sent out 30,000 robo-calls to residents stating his views on 9/11 and the war. If chosen it would be a slap in the face to the current administration. If anyone has read Kevin's newsletter or book " The Truth Jihad" you know he's a funny guy and pulls no punches.

Mr. Bush extended the 9/11 National Emergency legislation again for another year.

I feel better already.

Long-time readers of Vermont Commons know that many of us find Michael Ruppert's seminal book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, to be of utmost importance in terms of "dot connectng."

"No war for oil" is a common chant among demonstrators against the US war in Iraq. In the March 10 issue of The American Conservative, Robert Bryce turns the phrase around, illuminating how much oil is used for war. It turns out that to the extent that the US invaded Iraq to secure oil supplies, it was an ultimately self-defeating proposition. The military uses so much oil in fighting the war, and the war costs so much, that the US is squandering opportunities secure oil supplies through economic means or to reduce our dependence on oil.

In his article in The American Conservative, Bryce points out,

the average American G.I. in Iraq uses about 20.5 gallons of fuel every day, more than double the daily volume consumed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2004... And nearly every drop of that fuel is imported into Iraq. These massive fuel requirements--just over 3 million gallons per day ...--are a key reason for the soaring cost of the war effort.

The logistics of importing all this fuel into a war zone are staggering. Bryce reports that "about 5,500 tanker trucks" are used to haul the fuel into Iraq, and the delivery costs for each gallon fuel for the US military in Iraq are $42--$42 per gallon!--and that is only delivery; it doesn't even include the cost of the fuel. Bryce calculates that fuel imports alone amount to one-third of all U.S. military expenditures in Iraq.

Outside of Iraq, what about the oil budget for the entire US military?

As we enter the sixth year of the war in Iraq, the longest war in the country's history next to Vietnam, neither George Bush nor any of the major presidential candidates has a plan to end the US presence there. It's worth considering what Vermont can do to bring the war to an end sooner than the Federal government seems likely to do.

By bringing these troops home, and refusing to send any further troops, we could trigger a reaction that could stop the flow of tens of thousands of Guard troops there from other states. Two bills in the legislature would do just that.