• 5-foot piece of landing gear from one of the planes from 9/11 was discovered just blocks from Ground Zero
• Found near 51 Park Place, the site of the Islamic center Park51
• Lawyer for mosque developer calls the part discovery a 'gimmick'
• Police probing whether the piece was intentionally planted by opponents to the Islamic community center
• Area is being treated like a crime scene as investigators search for human remains

New York City police are looking into the extraordinary claims that the landing gear from a 9/11 plane, found this week in downtown Manhattan, could have been planted by opponents to the proposed Ground Zero mosque.

The airplane part was discovered wedged between 51 Park Place, the site of the proposed 13-story Islamic cultural center Park51, and 50 Murray Street, a luxury apartment building in TriBeCa.

Now a lawyer for the proposed religious site has suggested to the New York Post that the piece was intentionally placed near the center as part of a 'gimmick.'

In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.

Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.

"Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father about Misha's influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.

Tamerlan's relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself. Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups.

Throughout his religious makeover, Tamerlan maintained a strong influence over his siblings, including Dzhokhar, who investigators say carried out the deadly attack by his older brother's side, killing three and injuring 264 people.

© AP Photo / Inset via TwitterThe Richards family home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston where 8-year-old Martin Richards (inset) lived.

Killing Americans at play resonates differently than attacks on economic and military targets.

Call it "terrorism" if a label helps you make sense of this madness. Find who did it and squash him - or them - with what President Obama called "the full weight of justice." But in the broad scheme of things, such loose ends matter less than this: Life in America changed with the Boston Marathon bombings - again, and as with past attacks, for the much worse.

The Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were knee-buckling blows that led to an obsession over domestic security and foreign wars that will mark - and mar - our generation. The last mass terrorist assault on U.S. soil was carried out by Maj. Nidal M. Hassan, an Army psychiatrist with loose connections to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

There were attacks thwarted by the swelling ranks of federal police: The so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid; an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009; and an unexploded car bomb in Times Square in 2010.

Boston is another bridge too far. The Boston Marathon and its competitors reflect the best of America - always striving, forever resilient, and, as measured by population and cultural significance, enormous.

You might say it's unfair to compare Boston's relatively low death toll to 9/11 and Oklahoma City, much less to the thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the daily total of gun deaths on U.S. streets.

But the Boston attack is notable not for the number of deaths, but for its social significance. It's one thing - a dastardly, evil thing - to strike symbols of economic and military power. It's another to hit the heart of America. Death at the finish line in Boston makes every place (and everybody) less secure.

A letter addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss, tested positive for ricin poison, says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

The envelope, which was intercepted at an off-site Capitol mail facility, tested positive three times, according to the Associated Press.

Senators were briefed on the threat in a closed-door meeting Tuesday night. Coming a day after two blasts killed three and wounded 176 people at the Boston Marathon, the ricin-tainted letter spurred renewed fears about terrorism.

Senator Claire McCaskill said authorities have a suspect, but she did not say if an arrest had been made. Terrance Gainer, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, said in an emailed message to Senate offices that the envelope had no obvious suspicious outside markings, bore a Memphis, TN., postmark and had no return address.

I've been an enthusiastic student of 9/11 Truth for several years now. The evidence that no Boeing airliners crashed at any of the four sites is very compelling. One of the big questions that arises when you suggest this idea to someone is "What happened to the passengers?"

The facts suggest that there were far fewer passengers than even the surprisingly short and unrealistic passenger manifests presented. Flights are not usually carried out with such low load factors.

Many of the names don't seem to correspond to positively identifiable people. Additionally, at least seven of the alleged hijackers were seen alive after 9/11. Sadly, we may not ever know exactly who was on the planes.

Two "passengers" that we know for sure were real people and did die on 9/11 were David Angell along with his wife Lynn. David Angell was a writer for the sitcom Cheers and the co-creator of the hit shows Frasier and Wings. All three happen to be favorites of mine, especially Wings (coincidentally named, tragically).I watch Wings nightly on Netflix and as I viewed David Angell's name on the credits, an idea came to me.

New York City asks: What happened to the 1,116 missing 9/11 victims?

More than 11 years after the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City's government is finally asking: What in the world could have happened to the missing 1,116 victims?

In every building collapse in history, all of the victims' bodies have been recovered more or less intact. That is because falling buildings crush human bodies. They do not shred them into tiny pieces, or cause them to vanish into thin air.

Yet on September 11th, 2001, the most famous "building collapses" in history somehow caused the bodies of more than 1,000 victims to magically disappear. Not even a shred of skin, a fragment of fingernail, or a shard of bone from any of these bodies was ever recovered, despite meticulous "sifting and bucketing" efforts.

But that's not the only mystery. Hardly anything was left of the 1,634 WTC occupants who did not completely vanish. Most of the human remains discovered and DNA-identified were in the form of tiny, shredded pieces, not intact bodies.

After 42 days on hunger strike, though acknowledged by the US military, the protest by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has so far been largely unacknowledged by international humanitarian organizations.

In a comment to RT the United Nations rights body said it is investigating allegations of mistreatment at America's detention facility in Cuba.

"While aware of some of the allegations of mistreatment of inmates said to have provoked the hunger strike - which include undue interference with the inmates' personal effects -- we are still trying to confirm the details," the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navy Pillay said.

The Red Cross, which visited the island prison from February 18 to 23, was one of the few international organizations to comment on the situation at the Guantanamo detention camp. It acknowledged that a hunger strike was actually taking place, but so far the organization has only released a statement, stating "The ICRC believes past and current tensions at Guantanamo to be the direct result of the uncertainty faced by detainees."

Military censorship makes it quite difficult to access any information about Gitmo prisoners. It was the attorneys for the detainees that first expressed urgency and grave concern over the life-threatening mass hunger strike that reportedly started in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on February 6.

What Else Did He Lie About?

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd writes today:

In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, "The World According to Dick Cheney," [Cheney said] "I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out." Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.

"I gave the instructions that we'd authorize our pilots to take it out," he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: "After I'd given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment."

***

When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Mr. Cheney kept up a pretense that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found "no documentary evidence for this call."

In other words, Cheney pretended that Bush had authorized a shoot-down order, but Cheney now admits that he never did. In fact, Cheney acted as if he was the president on 9/11. *

Retired four-star general and former Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark criticizes the course of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of September 11, 2001.


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Wesley Clark discusses "A Time to Lead."

Wesley Clark sought the presidency during the 2004 elections, seeking to bring a less hawkish perspective to the White House. After the campaign, Clark did not end his crusade for what he sees as a better America, one that supports his vision of a responsible foreign policy. He believes that hard work, leadership and determination will ultimately turn the country around. - The Commonwealth Club

Wesley Clark is a retired four-star general of the United States Army. Clark was valedictorian of his class at West Point, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford where he earned a master's degree in economics, and later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master's degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the Army and the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Everyone knows that AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is the most powerful lobby in Washington.

But starting next September 11th, a new group called AMPAC, the American Muslim Political Action Committee, will challenge AIPAC's stranglehold on American political life.

AMPAC will be forcefully announcing its presence with a "Million Muslim March" on the White House on September 11, 2013. The goal, announced at AMPAC's press conference in New York:

"We at AMPAC (American Muslim Political Action Committee) are planning a historic event for 9/11/13. One million Muslims will march to Washington D.C. and demand that our civil rights be protected by our government. We are demanding that laws be enacted protecting our First Amendment rights. We are asking President Obama to fulfill his promise from his first campaign for the Presidency of a transparent government. Lastly we are asking for the establishment of a real 9/11 Commission to reveal the truth to the American people."