Like most of the country’s more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies, the Providence Police Department went to war against terror after Sept. 11, embracing a fundamental shift in its national security role.

Now, police officials here express doubts about whether the imperative to protect domestic security has blinded federal authorities to other priorities. The department is battling homicides, robberies and gang shootings that the police in a number of cities say are as serious a threat as terrorism.

The Providence police chief, Col. Dean M. Esserman, said the federal government seemed unable to balance antiterror efforts and crime fighting.

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Though the trial the man, dubbed “Osama bin Laden’s driver”, is primarily functioning as a show piece for the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, some interesting information emerged from the Guantanamo Bay naval base yesterday in the form of a direct admission from a US prosecutor that the fourth plane was “shot down”.

The revelation came during assertions from representatives for the prosecution that Salim Hamdan had detailed knowledge of the intended target of the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11.

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TVNL Comment: This corroborates the statement made by Donald Rumsfeld, who admitted that Flight 93 had been shot down! 

The terrorist watch list is downright unconstitutional.  Under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, no warrants shall be issued unless there is probable cause that a crime has been committed.  If the government has such probable cause that a passenger is conspiring to commit a terrorist act on an airplane, it should not hassle that person at the airport when trying to fly or ban him or her from flying; it should arrest them.  But of course the government does not have the evidence to do that for the vast majority of the 400,000 people on the watch list.  

And it’s apparently not easy to get yourself off the list once you are on it.

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The attacks on the US on September 11 2001 were part of a web of events that interconnect with oil, drugs, money, organised crime, imperialism, existing institutions and us. And religion, and a lot more money.

The most important conspiracy theory about 9/11 rarely gets mentioned by writers like Brooker and Phillips. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq the White House made every effort to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida. Far from being a production of what commentators like to call the tinfoil hat brigade, this particular paranoid fantasy emerged from the work of a highly focused and skilled group of people.

They worked in secret to manipulate the American and the global public and we can trace the impact of the efforts over time. So here is a (true) conspiracy to promote a (false) conspiracy theory. The White House's psy-war operatives were doubtless a professional and measured lot. I am sure that they knew how to behave in socially appropriate ways and enjoyed their work. They also helped pave the way for an illegal war in which more than half a million people have died. There's a 9/11 conspiracy theory hard at work, right there. It doesn't matter what sort of person you are, whether you are coolly rational or groping around for meaning in an indifferent world, America's spooks conspired to stampede the public into war on a false prospectus.

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