Judge Rules al-Qaeda and Iran Must Pay Billions to 9/11 Families

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
August 1, 2012

A federal judge in New York has ruled that al-Qaeda and Iran were responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks and has ordered them to pay victim families $6 billion in compensation.

On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Frank Maas imposed civil penalties and said the money would be paid to 110 survivors and the estates of 47 victims.

A plaintiff’s legal team said it may seek the seizure of Iranian assets in order to pay the families.

In December of 2011, a federal district court in Manhattan ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al-Qaeda in the attacks.

“The families have waited a very long time for this day and they have been through a lot. So I was greatly relieved that the families received an answer to the question that they asked me ten years ago: they asked who was the responsible party? How did this happen? Today a federal court judge has said that a principal responsible party is the Islamic Republic of Iran,” saidThomas E. Mellon, Jr. of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, law firm of Mellon Webster & Shelly, the lead attorney in the case.

Attorneys based their case on conclusions made by the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers, following the Commission’s own eleventh-hour discovery of significant National Security Agency intercepts,” according to the Havlish, et al vs. Osama Bin Laden, Iran, et al website.

Although the Commission claims al-Qaeda operatives passed through Iran and officials did not stamp their passports, it also admits (in Chapter 7) that Iran did not have knowledge of the supposed 9/11 plot. Moreover, the families of alleged hijackers Ahmed Alnami and Wail and Waleed Alshehri have denied they traveled to Iran on their way to training camps in Afghanistan.

In addition, although the establishment, including the Council on Foreign Relations, has claimed al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have worked together, there is no concrete evidence of this.

There is far more compelling evidence that the United States government and the CIA were responsible for training and assisting Afghan Arabs who would ultimately be designated as members of al-Qaeda.

Documented evidence reveals that Osama bin Laden worked directly with the CIA and Pakistani intelligence. It is said Bin Laden was personally recruited by the CIA in 1979 in Istanbul. He had the close support of Prince Turk bin Faisal, who was his friend and head of Saudi intelligence (see Andrew Gavin Marshall, The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”).

And yet to date there has not been a lawsuit launched against the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, or the Saudis.

Top Pakistani Politician Calls Drone Strikes “Insane, Immoral, War Crimes”

“All it does is it turns more people against the US”

Steve WatsonInfowars.comJuly 23, 2012

Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) has slammed the US policy of targeting militants in Pakistan and elsewhere with unmanned drone strikes, declaring that terrorists only benefit from such actions.

In an interview with the Pakistan Daily Times, Khan, a former high profile cricket champion, said that drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and any other part of the world are insane, immoral, illegal and counterproductive.

“Of drones I think two words” Khan said. “It’s immoral and it’s insane. Immoral because you cannot justify eliminating suspects and insane because it’s counterproductive. All it does is it turns more people against the US, hatred grows and the beneficiaries of this insanity are the militants.”

“It is too criminal to justify these acts, which are a violation of all humanitarian laws.” Khan added. “You can’t eliminate suspects, their families, their children and anyone else who is killed and pass it off as collateral damage. All it does is aid the militancy,” he added.

Khan noted that there was absolutely no evidence to show that drone strikes are effectively breaking up militant networks, and that US authorities never provide the names of the people killed in such strikes because to do so would highlight its engagement in war crimes.

“I don’t know how anyone presses buttons and eliminates human beings on information that might or might not be correct. How can this be civilised?” he said.

“Einstein defined madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Eight years we’ve been bombing them and what are the results? This is not the way. The way to do it is to win the people to your side,” Khan added.

Khan has vowed to take a convoy of journalists to Waziristan on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in September, along with thousands of his supporters.

“Things have gone from bad to worse. The only way to resolve the problem is to withdraw the drones, pull the Pakistani Army out of the Tribal Areas and let the people who live there weed out the alQaeda extremists and other foreign militants,” he added.

The PTI or “movement for Justice” leader hopes to shed more light on the issue by introducing the world’s media to some of the families of those who have been killed by drones over the past eight years.

Khan’s party has exploded in popularity over the past year and is expected to make significant gains in national elections against the two mainstream political parties in Pakistan later this year or early in 2013.

The Obama administration has been heavily criticized for moving to block the release of information relating to its overseas drone assassination programme, and will not even acknowledge that it exists, despite countless public references to the programme and the proven existence of an official “kill list”.

It is common knowledge that the Obama administration has exponentially increased the use of drone missile attacks in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

The president has referred to the programme several times in public, as have officials such as counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan.

Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a major piece on the programme, revealing that the White House has asserted the right to carry out state-sponsored assassination anywhere in the world without having to provide any evidence or go through any legal process.

Furthermore, the Times revealed that Obama adopted a policy that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

The administration merely has to state that the target is a terrorist and it doesn’t matter whether they are an American citizen or not, as we saw in the case of American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, who were both killed last year.

In December of last year, Obama administration lawyers reaffirmed their backingfor state sponsored assassination, claiming that “U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets” and do not have the right to any legal protection against being marked for summary execution.

During a CBS 60 Minutes interview in January, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed that Obama himself personally approves the policy to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial on a case by case basis.

Perhaps the real reason that the administration wants the details of the programme kept under wraps is that, as reported by Propublica recently, the programme is potentially much bigger in scope than anyone had previously thought.

The administration’s figures do not add up, they are chock full of contradictions and discrepancies, and there can be little doubt that there have been many many more civilian deaths as a result of drone attacks than have been publicly acknowledged.

Experts, including UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns, as well as Pakistan’s UN ambassador in Geneva, Zamir Akram, have described the drone assassination programme as a violation of the international legal system, saying that some attacks may constitute war crimes.

Akram, who noted that US drone strikes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Pakistan, also said “We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the ‘war against terror’. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them.

Many also contend that the attacks infringe the national sovereignty of Pakistan and constitute an act of war.

In 2010, a report by Washington think tank The New America Foundation found that 32% of the more than 1,200 people killed since 2004 in Pakistan, or around 1 in 3, were innocent bystanders rather than dangerous terrorists.

While the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has stated that the Pakistani government is actively facilitating the attacks by providing bases from which to launch the drones, Pakistani authorities have consistently voiced opposition to cross border missile strikes, which have been ongoing for years, but have accelerated since day one of Obama’s presidency. During Obama’s first year in office, there were 53 reported drone missile attacks; more than were carried out during the entirety of George W. Bush’s two four year terms in office.

Reports from 2009, drawn up by Pakistani authorities, indicated that close to 700 civilians had already perished, with just 14 wanted Al Qaeda leaders killed in the attacks.

The ACLU estimates that US drone strikes have killed as many as 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians.

Last week it was revealed that the families of three US citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year – including al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaqi – have filed a civil lawsuit against top US officials.

Pakistan Anti-Polio Campaign: WHO Doctor Shot In Karachi

ISLAMABAD — The head of the World Health Organization’s polio eradication program in Pakistan says one of its doctors and a driver were wounded when their vehicle came under fire in the port city of Karachi.

Dr. Elias Durry says the doctor is an international volunteer helping supervise the polio eradication program. He says the doctor was wounded Tuesday in the abdomen and is undergoing surgery.

Pakistan is in the second day of a three-day campaign to vaccinate children under five. Taliban militants in northern Pakistan have banned the vaccination, saying it can’t go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in Pakistan.

Durry says it was not known whether the doctor was targeted or was accidentally caught in the crossfire.

He says WHO remains committed to polio eradication in Pakistan.

Qadeer Khan says Pakistani missiles can shoot down U.S. drones

One of the world’s most dangerous men has said Pakistan has the technology to down the U.S. drones but accused the government of being nincompoops and doing nothing.

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is also called father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, told a gathering of lawyers at the Lahore Bar Association that Pakistan has Hamza missiles that can shoot down the C.I.A. drones that the U.S. is using to target the al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan.

Lahore is the capital of Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province, from which most of the soldiers of Pakistan army are drawn.

Pakistan has the world’s fourth largest military and the fastest growing nuclear weapons arsenal.

Khan, under whose leadership Pakistan successfully tested its nuclear bomb in May 1998 in Balochistan, is regarded as one the world’s dirtiest nuclear traffickers and is believed to have supplied the technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

However, he is a hero in Pakistan.

8 Killed in Drone Strike in Pakistan’s Tribal Region

Nasir Habib
CNN
May 24, 2012

A suspected U.S. drone fired two missiles at a militant hideout in Pakistan’s tribal region on Thursday, killing eight people, a senior local official said.

The attack took place in the area of Hesokhel in North Waziristan, one of the seven districts of Pakistan’s volatile tribal region bordering Afghanistan, said Muhammad Amin, the top government official in North Waziristan.

The drone strike was the second in Pakistan in 24 hours and follows the NATO conference in Chicago about Afghanistan’s future. At least four militants were killed Wednesday after a suspected U.S. drone strike on a compound in the Datakhel area of North Waziristan, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.

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