Welcome to 2008. Approaching the seventh anniversary of George W. Bush's self-proclaimed 'Global War on Terror' how much is known about the ostensible trigger to the multiple disasters today enveloping millions of lives?

 

Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper summed up his nation's involvement in the GWOT, and that country's six year garrison duty in occupied Afghanistan as entirely dependent upon the 9/11 attacks in the United States, yet Canada has never sent an investigative team to the U.S. to verify the official American version of the events of that day. As with his predecessors, prime ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, Harper is satisfied Osama bin Laden and al Qaida are solely and completely responsible for those attacks, and believes the refuge granted to that group by the then-ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan is sanction enough for Canada to continue in its role in the on-going occupation of that country.

 

But, what if the 9/11 story is just that - a fable spun from pure fancy, meant to accomplish the ulterior aims of George W. Bush and his benefactors?

Sander Hicks is a publisher, author, entrepeneur, and freelance journalist. His company, Soft Skull Press published the first unflattering biography of president George W. Bush, the late J. H. Hatfield's 'Fortunate Son,' and his own book, 'The Big Wedding: 9/11 The Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up' reveals many of the gaping holes left unattended by the Bush administration's 9/11 Commission. Sander Hicks and the disturbing inadequacy of the 9/11 narrative seven years on in the first half.

 

 

 

And; George W. Bush will travel to the Middle East later this week, his itinerary taking him first to Israel, ostensibly to discuss the 'Palestine File.'

 

It will be Mr. Bush's first visit to Israel since the Annapolis conference brought together Palestinian president, the opposition Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to discuss a peaceful solution to the sixty year-long struggle for justice in the region.

 

Since those meetings, the Israeli Defence Force has mounted daily attacks against the refugee settlements of Gaza and the West Bank, while Olmert's government moves to take over more of Palestinian East Jerusalem, both in defiance of international law. Meanwhile, Israel claims its actions are in response to a rain of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza.

Hanna Kawas is a long-time activist and host of Vancouver Co-Op Radio's Voice of Palestine program, heard Tuesday's at 8pm pacific time at 102.7 FM in Vancouver, and available on the internet at coopradio.org. Hanna Kawas and long journey to justice in Palestine in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week; but first, Sander Hicks and breaking up the 9/11 marriage of convenience.

 

 

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Scott Horton, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, David Robb, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., and many others.

Pacific Free Press is a new sister site to Atlantic Free Press (already a Google News Source). Like AFP, PFP is not a simple news aggregator. All of our writers have been contacted, have joined the site and said they will contribute their editorials that appear on their own blogs or are syndicated elsewhere - and - some have stated they will provide original work that will be initially exclusive to Pacific Free Press. The sheer amount of writers working with Atlantic Free Press has brought us to the point where we felt we need to divide some of the material by starting a new site.

Using our Open Source content management system (CMS), Joomla, our writers use a WYSIWYG editor to contribute their submissions and images and we publish upon review - it's cutting edge participatory journalism.

We have set up an Author's Guide which is used for training the writers on Joomla, podcasting (yes we podcast), and other emerging methods to communicate their media.

We don't comb the net, hunting down articles, that we would 'like' to appear in our publication and have been working for over a year to put together a core team of people to work with us.

The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press. We have over a dozen PHD's on our writer's list - from all parts of the globe.

Key writers who are onboard and will provide original work include:

Some of our other writers include Andrew Bard Schmookler, Anwaar Hussain, Chris Floyd, Craig Murray, Dave Lindorff, David Swanson, Doug Mitchell, Frank Pitz, Ingmar Lee, James Kunstler, James Petras, Jason Miller, Jennifer Matsui, Jeremy R. Hammond, Joel S. Hirschhorn, Joshua Frank, Katherine Hughes, Kevin Harris, Larry C. Johnson, Linda Milazzo, Manuel Valenzuela, Mark Crispin Miller, Mel Seesholtz, Michael Wills, Mickey Z, Mike Whitney, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Nicola Nasser, Norman Solomon, Paul J. Balles, Paul Lehto, Paul William Roberts, Phil Rockstroh, Ramzy Baroud, Richard Kastelein, Richard Marsden, Robert Jensen, Rod Amis, Rosemarie Jackowski, S. Artesian, Sam Welch, Seth Sandronsky, Shahid Alam, Shepherd Bliss, Stephen Lendman, Tom Chartier, Tom Engelhardt, Walter Brasch, Weldon Berger, Will Durst, William Bowles, William A. Cook, William Blum, Winter Patriot and many others found here.


Our strategy for Pacificfreepress.com is to provide pennings from dissident and alternative writers (Libertarian and Left) whose work does not appear in Google News due to the lack of solid, reputable sources for work of this kind. Google News is a rather fair and level playing field - with mathematical algorithms as it's objective editors rather then inherently subjective humans. Hence the importance of us being part of the roster at Google News.

We feel that creating another vehicle for the West Coast and East Asia Region (as opposed to Atlantic Free Press) will allow more direction towards producing works from a variety of Asian and Pacific West Coast voices which would be a great resource for Google News and an outlet for alternative and dissident journalists that don't normally get mainstream media coverage.