The Big Picture

Movement to Declassify 9/11 Information Gathers Momentum
Welcome to the Laniakea Supercluster
10 Wednesday PM Reads
Facebook Valuation Tops $200 Billion
RIP Paul Macrae Montgomery, originator of Magazine Cover Indicator
No Crimes? That’s The Biggest Lie of the New Century
10 Wednesday AM Reads
Dilbert: Beating Earnings Estimates
Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Videos

Movement to Declassify 9/11 Information Gathers Momentum

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 10:30 PM PDT

9/11 Commission Chairs, Congressmen and Intelligence Officers All Call for Declassification

The 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs – Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean – have called for the 28-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report which is classified to be declassified.

Kean said that 60-70% of what was classified shouldn't have been classified in the first place:

Congressman Thomas Massie read the 28 classified pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into 9/11 (the joint Senate and House investigation into 9/11) and immediately called for them to be released to the public:

A bipartisan bill – introduced by congressmen Walter B. Jones (Republican from North Carolina) and Stephen Lynch (Democrat from Massachusetts) – would declassify the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry which implicate the Saudi government.

Former Congressman Ron Paul is also demanding the 28 pages be declassified:

The Co-Chair of the congressional investigation into 9/11 – Bob Graham - and 9/11 Commissioner and former Senator Bob Kerrey are calling for either a "permanent 9/11 commission" or a new 9/11 investigation to get to the bottom of it.

Senator Graham has lobbied Obama for years to release the 28 pages and to reopen the investigation, but Obama has refused. The former Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and 9/11 investigator has even resorted to filing Freedom of Information requests to obtain information, but the Obama administration is still stonewalling:

Graham said that like the 28 pages in the 9/11 inquiry, the Sarasota case is being "covered up" by U.S. intelligence. Graham has been fighting to get the FBI to release the details of this investigation with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation. But so far the bureau has stalled and stonewalled, he said.

And high-level former NSA official Thomas Drake provided testimony to the 9/11 investigations documenting that the "official story" of 9/11 makes little sense, as the intelligence agencies had all of the information they needed to stop it. Drake's testimony has – for no real reason – been classified.

Drake is seeking to declassify his testimony to the 9/11 Commission:

I would argue for declassification and release because the 9/11 Commission asked for it in the public interest, my testimony was given to Congress via testimony (oral and written) to investigators as a material witness and whistleblower, because of NSA's coverup of its accountability for 9/11, and the coverup committed by NSA to obstruct official Congressional investigations, plus declassification is timely in terms of ongoing efforts to reform NSA by Congress and the President.

I do know that my testimony and evidence was fully suppressed and censored as a deep state secret – so secret that it was not included in the classified report of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry.

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission admits that it never got all of the facts … and many officials are eager to spill the beans about what they know.

Still Urgent Today

Ancient history, you say?

Graham notes:

Although it's been more than a decade ago when this horrific event occurred, I think [the questions of who supported the attacks] have real consequences to U.S. actions today.

As Graham told PBS:

We need to have this information now because it's relevant to the threat thatthe people of the United States are facing today.

Postscript: People may not remember now, but – at the time – the supposed Iraqi state sponsorship of 9/11 was at least as important a justification for the Iraq war as the alleged weapons of mass destruction. This claim that Iraq is linked to 9/11 has since been debunked by the 9/11 Commission, top government officials, and even – long after they alleged such a link – Bush and Cheney themselves.

But 70% of the American public believed it at the time, and 85% of U.S. troops believed the U.S. mission in Iraq was "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks."

Only last year, John Glaser noted:

Significant portions of Americans still believe that Saddam and al-Qaeda were in cahoots and cooperated in the 9/11 attacks. The reason is simple: the administration told them this lie.

An investigation by a committee in the House of Representatives in 2004 identified "237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq that were made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies." According to the committee, at least 61 separate statements "misrepresented Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda." A Senate investigation in 2006 also covered these lies.

Keeping this lie afloat took some work. The Bush administration, primarily Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, "applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime," McClatchy reported in 2009.

According to Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Bush's Secretary of State Powell, "the administration authorized harsh interrogation" in 2002, and "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."

Wilkerson is right.

In other words, the failure to conduct a real 9/11 investigation contributed to the Iraq war, torture, and the failure to fix fundamental weaknesses in – and threats to – America's national security.

Source: Washington’s Blog

Welcome to the Laniakea Supercluster

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 05:00 PM PDT

Superclusters – regions of space that are densely packed with galaxies – are the biggest structures in the Universe. But scientists have struggled to define exactly where one supercluster ends and another begins. Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space. Redrawing the boundaries of the cosmic map, they redefine our home supercluster and name it Laniakea, which means 'immeasurable heaven' in Hawaiian.

Earth’s new address: ‘Solar System, Milky Way, Laniakea’

Source: Nature

10 Wednesday PM Reads

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 01:30 PM PDT

My afternoon train reads:

• How and why to build a bond ladder (Fidelity) see also Fidelity Reviewed Which Accounts Did Best and What They Found Was Hilarious (Business Insider)
• Apple doesn’t need another charismatic leader. It needs Tim Cook. (The Guardian)
• America has 4.7 million job openings (CNN Money)
• Homeowners steamrolled as Florida courts clear foreclosure backlog (The Center for Public Integrity)
• Corporations Aren’t Recruiting Enough Weirdos (Businessweek)
• You really can get pulled over for driving while black, federal statistics show (WonkBlog)
• Don’t Let the Dark Ages Happen Here (Bloomberg View)
• Don’t Take Your Vitamins (FiveThirtyEight)
• Why America's love affair with the station wagon is over (Quartz)
• Goodbye and good luck to all of us (Columbia Journalism Review)

What are you reading?

Mortgage Lending Still on a Tight Leash

Source: WSJ

Facebook Valuation Tops $200 Billion

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 12:00 PM PDT

Source: Bloomberg Visual Data

RIP Paul Macrae Montgomery, originator of Magazine Cover Indicator

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 10:30 AM PDT

Paul Macrae Montgomery, best known as the originator of the Time Magazine Cover Indicator, and for popularizing the Hemline Indicator of the stock market, died this weekend. He was 72.

I was fortunate to have had several conversations with Mongomery over the years. He was humble and soft spoken but he took delight in puncturing the bad theories that pass for analysis on Wall Street.

Long before behavioral economics became popular, he argued that standard economic theories "overlooked the human factor in markets."

Continues here

No Crimes? That’s The Biggest Lie of the New Century

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 07:30 AM PDT

Yesterday, we looked at why bankers weren’t busted for crimes committed during the financial crisis. Political corruption, prosecutorial malfeasance, rewritten legislation and cowardice on the part of government officials were among the many reasons.

But I saved the biggest reason so many financial felons escaped justice for today: They dumped the cost of their criminal activities on you, the shareholder (never mind the taxpayer).

Corporate executives theoretically work for the owners of the company, namely, the shareholders. But there is an agency problem in that owners can’t closely manage and object to the actions of these executives. Collective owners, such as mutual funds, seem to have no interest in doing so. What we end up with is a management class that works for itself instead of on behalf of the owners of the publicly traded banks. Many of these executives committed crimes; got big bonuses for doing so; and paid huge fines using shareholder assets (i.e., company cash), helping them avoid prosecution.

As for claims, like those of white-collar crime defense attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, that "the executives running companies like Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan were not committing criminal acts," they simply implausible if not laughable. Consider a brief survey of some of the more egregious acts of wrongdoing:

Continues here

10 Wednesday AM Reads

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 04:30 AM PDT

This morning’s expertly curated reads, now with Apple Pay:(continues here):

• Apple Is Back, Better Than Ever (NYT) see also It's Tim Cook's Apple Now (Re/Code)
• Venture Firms Fret as Y Combinator Soars (Genius)
• American stock holdings at 18-year low (Yahoo) but see Wall Street Bear Changes Course (Moneybeat)
• A Look at the World’s First Water-focused Hedge Fund (Climateer Investing)

Continues here

Dilbert: Beating Earnings Estimates

Posted: 10 Sep 2014 04:00 AM PDT

Presented without comment:

Source: Dilbert